No, cost is cost. Solar plus storage at the lower latitudes is cheaper than gas, coal and nuclear, on a utility scale, and solar is getting cheaper by about 3% per year.
That 3% is like Moore’s law in computing, and means that in 20 years from now, solar will cost half as much as it does today. And today solar is being installed at utility scale for around 3 c/KWH in the desert southwest.
Higher latitudes mean less efficiency, and higher costs. Which is why the German solar push is so silly, and the Brits are farming out their solar to the desert in Morocco.
The storage question is interesting.
From the article:
“The technical issues resemble the ones plaguing several electric-car manufacturers, but the scale of grid-scale batteries adds to the challenge. The Moss Landing beast has an array of 100,000 lithium battery modules containing as much lithium as some 20,000 Teslas. “
If the “big battery” needs the batteries of 20,000 Tesla’s.....why don’t we just plug in 20,000 Tesla’s? The average battery car has enough power to run a house for a couple of days. In the not all too distant future there will be semi trucks with even larger reserves.
Which is exactly what Tesla is doing, as we speak. They have filed for a license to be a public utility in Texas. They plan to use their “auto bidder” software (
https://www.tesla.com/support/energy/tesla-software/autobidder) and become middlemen between small producers and consumers. Producers (including battery owners such as cars, power walls, etc) can enter their sale conditions (price, maximum draw, maximum quantity) into the software, which then “makes a market” with buyers. Sell when the supply is low and the price is high, buy when the supply is high and the price is low.
I don’t disagree with the stated premise that this whole thing, going from base load generation to local, distributed and intermittent generation, won’t be messy, but it will happen. Not because of the granola head cheerleaders, but because it’s cheaper.
