I’m not sure where you got the idea that I’m arguing for their ban.
What I’m arguing for is that we stop treating the atmosphere as a public sewer and put a durable price on carbon (one that’s reflective of the externalities it creates).
See for example page 5 for a comparison of LCOE [0].
For the issue of intermittency see page 11. Even after firming for intermittency (and without subsidizes or a price on carbon) solar and wind are cheaper than gas peaking plants, very competitive with coal, and competitive/more expensive than combined cycle gas. If you put a price on carbon (I.e. stop treating the atmosphere as a free sewer) the renewables become even cheaper.
This analysis considers a carbon price of 20-40USD/tonne CO2. (It’s unclear if they only consider that price on literally CO2 or on CO2e.) but that hypothetical 20-40$ is lower compared to what currently Canada is doing (48$ USD) and a lot lower than were the Canadian number is going (~112 USD). It’s somewhere in the middle for the Europe since there is a huge spread in price [1].
That’s simply not true. One option for firming is to overprovision to account for the capacity factor. The other kind of firming, talked about in the slide I mention, is about short term (hours) battery storage.
Taking California as an example, their solar causes negative electricity prices during the day meaning that fossil fuel/nuclear need to dump electricity on the market and pay people to take it since ramping down would be even more expensive. This in turn requires peaking plants on either side of that solar peak.
Introducing short term storage allows for that access electricity to be shifted a few hours to address that demand.
A complementary, and orthogonal, change is demand side management. People already voluntarily change their behaviour to take advantage of time of use pricing. With strong solar penetration mid day can become the cheap electricity price rather than night time.
No amount of overprovisioning is going to help you at 2am with solar (or during a really bad storm), and wind has similar but even less predictable issues.
Either way, overprovisioning, storage, etc. add significant costs and it isn't clear what those costs would actually need to be to avoid serious problems with high frequency if we actually take fossil fuels out of the equation.
We have experience with fossil fuels enough to say 'store x amount of diesel (or natural gas) onsite so you can handle a 100 year storm' or similar. We have no such experience with solar, battery storage, wind, etc.
Also keep in mind, California has pretty much the ideal climate for 'green' energy - almost all it's population is in temperate, sunny climates, and it has huge sunny deserts and wind generating mountains all nearby. Most electrical usage will be air conditioners, and in that climate those are near ideal solar loads.
And they're the ones that just pushed to keep their major nuke plant online they were shutting down.
It's going to be a lot harder for almost everyone else.
Demand side only goes so far - sometimes people do actually need that energy now, and it tends to be when there are real issues that need that energy to address. Like emergencies, storms, cold snaps in the winter, etc.
Yes, voting to keep operating your existing fleet in operation for an extra 5 years is one thing, paying up for a major refurbishment or a brand new plant is another thing.
But this is beside the point. If we still need use gas peaking plants for emergencies and outlier events and only that, then 99% of the energy decarbonization battle is won.
Before your comment the discussion was about comparing the price of renewables to that of fossil fuel plants, specifically it got onto the discussion of peaking power plants. If you wish to change the topic to base load, then you're going to have to make that clear.
As for night time, see my comment about storage; build out pumped hydro or dam-based hydro and use it as your battery. When you inevitably have excess solar/wind during the day pump water uphill, and/or decrease you hydro production rate, and then at night time use that pumped storage and/or increase the rate at which you run water through your turbines.
If a particular region doesn't believe that it's realistic for them to do this, or show that nuclear will be cheaper, then build that.
What I’m arguing for is that we stop treating the atmosphere as a public sewer and put a durable price on carbon (one that’s reflective of the externalities it creates).