Even with a few hours of storage, I doubt that solar/battery plant's combined capacity factor will exceed 50%. A well-managed nuclear plant can exceed 90% capacity factor and keeps working even when it is cloudy and raining for a week.
Anyway, nuclear mega projects are probably a thing of the past once mass produced small modular reactors come to market.
At the very least, it will make forecasting supply more difficult. At worst, what if there are major wind pattern shifts or catastrophic weather events that damage your dispersed energy harvesting machines? A nuclear plant is designed to survive a direct impact from an airliner but a hail storm can ruin a region's rooftop solar panels.
Also the 'cloudy day disaster of 2034' sounds a lot better than the 'spent fuel pool disaster of 2034'
https://www.science.org/content/article/spent-fuel-fire-us-s...
Maybe, it's literally impossible to say. That's terrible design for something as critical as the national grid. People die when the power goes out.
Utilities do that everyday. You should be careful saying something is ‘impossible’, more like you don’t understand.. that’s ok.
Has anyone tried to calculate how much more is "more" and whether it is really faster, simpler, safer, cheaper etc.? At least region by region.
One counterexample. At least here in Europe, all plans to build massive solar plants in the Sahara and transmit the energy to Europe are facing the problem that a) it is not exactly fast, given that the Saharan desert is extremely hostile to human life, including that of the necessary workers, and the industrial base is far away, b) it is not that simple, given that distances involved are huge and there is a deep sea in the way, c) it is probably not safe, given that the North African countries are politically unstable and no one wants to be held hostage to yet another dictator threatening your energy supply (one Putin was enough), d) as a result of the previous factors, not cheap either.