You are mistaken. Grid level battery storage cannot provide baseline power for days, and until that's a reality we will need a baseline power source that can supply when there is no sun, wind (or hydro, wave etc where available). Fusion & fission plants are the sustainable alternatives for this sector.
> Developers have applied to build 139 GWac of large-scale solar projects in the territory of six grid operators – around five times what is currently online across the country – and that figure doesn’t even cover the entire United States. By any metric, we are looking at an unprecedented boom in solar development over the next five years.
> The six grid operator queues we investigated also showed more than 16 GW of battery projects which have filed for interconnection. And this number should not be too surprising to anyone who is watching the meteoric growth of energy storage.
> Per the US Energy Storage Monitor, from Wood Mackenzie Renewables & Power along with the Energy Storage Association (ESA), total energy storage deployed expanded by 60% in terms of energy and 300% on a power basis in the third quarter of 2018 versus the prior year. Going out mostly until 2023, the report noted that the front of the meter pipeline expanded to approximately 33 GW of power.
Natural gas picks up the slack until batteries (which everyone underestimates; we're going to have an enormous amount of energy storage cumulatively to go 100% low carbon) get a bit cheaper; wind, solar, hydro, and long distance transmission lines combined with utility scale storage is more than adequate to replace traditional base load (and all are possible today, not decades later if we started building fission/fusion commercial generators today).
Yeah, not gonna happen. Forget safety. It's just too expensive.
Batteries + large grids averaging out weather and load fluctuations, plus smart grids, plus electric car batteries as buffers when the car isn't needed, plus efficiency gains lowering demand, plus some gravity storage, plus some natural gas.
Nuclear power is actually quite useless, because it's not baseload that's needed when you want to quickly react to changing weather conditions or load, it's peakers (i. e. gas)
Grid level storage (with wind and solar) can, however, so destroy the market for baseload that nuclear (fission or fusion) become completely excluded.
There needs to be backup for the occasional times solar/wind/batteries are not enough, but hydrogen (made during the high solar/wind times) is likely cheaper for that than nuclear fission or fusion would be.
For domestic power requirements just change building regulations to require a Powerwall style battery and solar panels in every new house. That plus integrating all the electric cars that sit idle all day and the problem gets noticeably smaller. Add in all the old EV batteries and it gets better still <https://easyelectriclife.groupe.renault.com/en/outlook/energ....
Are there really any occasions when there is no sun, no wind, no hydro over the whole of Europe? Better east-west interconnects and use of Norwegian hydro as pumped storage should help too.
Not perfect but very scalable and can be implemented a little at a time as the baseload fossil fuel stations slowly go out.
This is incredibly out of touch. Ignoring the lack of available materials to put a huge battery in every home, the cost is currently about a quarter of the median yearly income across the EU. Adding that much cost to every home is a non-starter.
