"which pushes up their "levelized" costs further."
To me that means that the "levelized cost" metric punishes controllable energy sources unfairly for the "issues" that are caused by volatile energy sources right?
To me that means that the "levelized cost" metric punishes controllable energy sources unfairly for the "issues" that are caused by volatile energy sources right?
Perhaps a better way to look at it is that there are two markets: one where providers compete to offer the cheapest power, and one where providers offer guaranteed amounts of power.
Once inter-day storage is deployed at scale, the providers in that second market might only be called upon 20% of the time (to pick an arbitrary number), but even if that means their costs are 5x higher than renewables, that might still be a price worth paying to ensure people continue to have electric heating during cold still winter nights.
I think the real outstanding questions are how far energy storage and over-provisioning of renewables can take us. For some people, charging a battery in their car or home during the day and half-draining it over night will mean they are self-sufficient in terms of storage for most of the year. On a wider scale, at certain prices it might even make sense to extract CO2 from the air and use renewable energy to make renewable natural gas.