I think it would help to further divide cost in to capital cost and energy efficiency. The transition to renewables is going to require a lot of over provisioning.
For example, it would be madness to store excess solar power in the summer to be used to cover the winter shortfall. You just build enough panels to make it through the winter, and have excess energy in the summer. Much cheaper than building storage of any form that's only used for 30 cycles in its lifetime.
A solution that is capital efficient can sit around, waiting to be turned on when there's excess energy. When the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, it's basically free.
If you need to run the plant even 25% of the time for it to make sense, it's not going to be able to take advantage of these fluctuations and that's going to make it a much tougher sell.
This is why I'm hopeful for hydrogen for storage; over provisioning hydrolysis capacity is not intrinsically difficult, and low efficiency isn't a deal breaker when you don't have anything else to do with the excess.
For example, it would be madness to store excess solar power in the summer to be used to cover the winter shortfall. You just build enough panels to make it through the winter, and have excess energy in the summer. Much cheaper than building storage of any form that's only used for 30 cycles in its lifetime.
A solution that is capital efficient can sit around, waiting to be turned on when there's excess energy. When the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, it's basically free.
If you need to run the plant even 25% of the time for it to make sense, it's not going to be able to take advantage of these fluctuations and that's going to make it a much tougher sell.
This is why I'm hopeful for hydrogen for storage; over provisioning hydrolysis capacity is not intrinsically difficult, and low efficiency isn't a deal breaker when you don't have anything else to do with the excess.