So how much can I buy solar power for at midnight? Because coal is the same price at noon and now.

That solar is cheaper at noon doesn't mean much. It's a bit like saying that coal is free underground.

The chart Figure 2-1 Comparison of current cost estimates with previous work also has wind power, which is also cheaper than coal, and has been for longer than solar has.

Plus, Australia has hydro, which can be varied to fill the gaps.

Those are different goalposts.

You're right. We can just turn off society between sunset and sunrise. Who needs things like refrigeration and life support on all the time anyway?

Let me translate my post: You changed the topic.

Let me explain my point: power is not energy and energy is not power.

Renewable power is cheap in the same way someone whose head is dipped in liquid nitrogen and whose feet are in molten lead in over all pretty comfortable.

> So how much can I buy solar power for at midnight?

That's a bit like saying that there is no point in growing crops in Europe, because of the winter.

We can store grain for a year. How long can we store electricity for 15 minutes in most grids with a dollars for every five minutes further.

It's simply not true we cannot store energy. We can produce hydrogen, methane, methanol, ethanol, biomass, steel, aluminum, cement, sillicon.. These are all energy intense processes that can help store energy.

In fact, when it comes to food production (which is really just a form of energy), there are 3 major strategies how we deal with winter: storage (e.g. granary), shifting production (e.g. eating a pig you raised during the year), and trade (e.g. buying oranges from a tropical country).

We can apply all these to electricity as well.

>It's simply not true we cannot store energy.

Which grid can store enough energy to run for a week if all renewables are offline?

Hint: there aren't any.

Show me a week in the last two years when California's renewables didn't produce any power

https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html

This is partly because massive energy storage (on the order of weeks) isn't really needed until you hit around 75% intermittent renewables (wind and solar), which is not yet the case anywhere in the world.

But the technology does exist, and it's gonna be deployed eventually.

>But the technology does exist, and it's gonna be deployed eventually.

[[citation needed]]

This is indeed the big issue we need to solve: how to store enough energy to make it through the night. Of course we can already store energy, but to do it at that scale, it needs to be a lot cheaper.

About $70/MWh and falling.

https://helioscsp.com/the-cost-of-concentrated-solar-power-f...

Solar has a much higher upfront cost than coal, so it's much easier to finance a coal plant than solar one. That said, this is a better excuse for poorer, developing countries than Australia.

Yes, the WACC (Weighted Average Cost of Capital) explains why it made financial sense to roll out solar PV in northern European countries before many sunnier areas.

But as you say, Australia has no such excuse, having both the geography and the cost of capital to be a world leader in this, way beyond what they are now, which is okay but could have been much, much better.

Also points to an easy way to provide assistance to any country that is trapped into this financial dead-end.