While that is more stable than i thought, i hadn’t realized that wind was that much more effective in winter, your still liable to be limited in how much wind you can build cheaply solely by rubi g out of favorable geometry. You can still build in less optimal areas of course, but it’s going to be more expensive.

Long term storage is still going to be limited by new hydro, which in turn is limited by geography and in my experience at least large environmental group pushback citing methane from decomposition and loss of fish habitat. Of course, the former is of questionable scale if biomass is removed ahead of time and the latter most effects fish were going to kill of anyway with temperature rise, but it still makes it far more expensive than it should be.

Also worth noting that even our grid as it currently exists, primary using local suppliers, we still lose a major portion of our electricity to transport. While building a lot more HV DC transmission lines might help, rebuilding nearly the entire core of the electrical grid still going to be a major expense on top of renewables nuclear isn’t facing.

Batteries are not practical at scales beyond a few days of production, and outside of maybe a few industrial customers who can pay people to sit around idle most talk of demand shaping is on the order of waiting a few hours not weeks or months.

Nuclear plants take ten to fifteen years to build, but even the most ‘aggressive’ plants politicians are pushing for don’t expect to phase out carbon within the next fifteen to twenty years, and most of them seem to think that thirty years is sane, somehow. If we had responded to the 1990 ippc report by mass building nuclear we would have carbon neutral power by 2005. Had we started to build in 2010 we would have been carbon neutral today. If we start today then they come online around 2035, the same target where California finally stops selling new gas only vehicles.

At the end of the day i’m not saying that solar and wind can’t work, mearly that thier liable to get more expensive once they really scale compared to the grid whicle nuclear gets cheaper. Are these sorts of costs enough to make nuclear competitive, i don’t know. but it is enough that i don’t think that it’s silly to consider. At the end of the day the only major nations to create a consistently net zero grid have done so with nuclear, France did it by accident in the seventies.

We are looking at a guaranteed option we know how to do and have done before and saying I don’t like only slightly making a profit, so let’s gamble hundreds of millions of human lives on a chance to make more profit for the shareholders of a few companies.