Innumeracy in this area drives me nuts. Case 17 in https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost... for instance specs out a solar installation that can store a bit more than an hour of its peak output energy in batteries and quotes $2,175 per kWh.
People are going to compare that to Case 9 and a $7,681 kWh for a dual installation of AP-1000s and declare it is game over but you're going to need a lot more than one hour of storage to get through the night and when you add that and consider the need that you'll either need storage or overcapacity to get through the winter the cost is going to closer to the AP-1000. Personally I am pretty irked that that paper gives a number for the capital cost of a PV system which is not dependent on the location because you could a difference by more than a factor of two in how much energy the same array could produce in different spots.
It's one of those things that adds to a culture of people just talking past each other.
I’m guessing they are talking about GW but that is such a frustrating unit to measure storage in. It’s like measuring your gas tank in gallons/minute.
Yes, power capacity matters, but energy is conserved and power is not.
If you have a bank of supercapacitors that can deliver a GW * femtosecond, you do not have significant storage capacity.
I still think journalists should use TJ instead of GWh in these articles in order to clear up this ambiguity.