Nothing can do that. The amount of energy storage needed is in the Terawatt-Hours. Lithium Ion / Flow Batteries are in the hundreds-of-Megawatt-hours area.
Solar + Wind will get us pretty far however. Wind picks up at night, while Solar is best during the day. Natural Gas Peaker Plants seem to be required in any situation I foresee in the next 20 years, but minimizing the use of peaker plants should be the goal.
Alternatively, we build higher base-load plants like nuclear. That would help a lot.
If you over-build solar by a factor of 3 (above what you'd expect from an energy-only basis), then you can convert it into a 100% constant output baseload plant using about 50 hours of storage, based on a year of hourly sun data for a single site I found. You don't try to store seasonal energy, you over-size the solar panels so there's significant energy production even on cloudy winter days.
Costs less than you might think, considering the spot price for solar cells is like 10 cents per Watt right now (20 cents for panels).
Works in the continental US. Doesn't work in northern Europe because the winter days are too short (too high latitude).
For a SPV plant to be a base load plant, it would have to store just a days worth of energy.
Say we have a 100 MW plant.
Use 50 MW to charge batteries and 50 MW to supply power during the day. Having a battery capacity of 50 MW * 12 h = 600 MWh, will convert this plant to a 50 MW base load plant.
Tesla's recent 25/50 MWh battery cost 25 Million USD, so a 600 one would cost about $300 Million.
A Terawatt hour is about a years production from 30 Tesla gigafactories. We're going to have that amount of production within a few decades. Probably before small modular nuclear reactors have gotten their first production reactor off the line. Building new nuclear is riskier than other existing technologies, as evidenced in South Carolina, Georgia, Hinckley, and others. Therefore it currently seems that building nuclear is less plausible than building many terawatt hours of storage. SMR may change that, but I have a feeling that current companies are not planning for the grid of tomorrow, and are stuck in the last century when it comes to the grid's needs.
