According to several studies you need up to 2 weeks of storage, not just 24hrs, because checking on the long term, every decade or 2 you get 2 weeks of clouds or 2 weeks of no wind, etc....
AND not OR. To actually need 2 weeks of storage you would need both 0 output in solar for 2 weeks and 0 wind for two weeks and 0 output from hydro. That doesn’t happen.
You still get solar power on cloudy days, it just takes more panels to generate some specific level of power.
The goal is to minimize X$ for generation + Y$ for storage while guaranteeing sufficient supply. Any study approaching things from any other set of assumptions is going to give you nonsensical answers.
Heavy industry will tend to migrate to sunnier areas.
A hypothetical estimate of 100% NYC’s electricity from Southern Arizona to NYC across HVDC adds up to ~1,300$/per person for infrastructure that lasts ~50 years.
East/west is even cheaper because people on both ends would want to move electricity. Florida solar kicks in early in the morning for California and California solar is still available late into the evening Florida time. You have some losses across HVDC, but you have losses and battery degradation with storage.
So, if by short distances you’re talking 1,000+km and 10GW then sure it’s billions. However, the US is only so big and Billion’s don’t actually mean much to move over 2% of the US’s total electricity.
Now my personal power output does tank during this period, but such extremes are local events. Further hydro, nuclear, and geothermal just don’t care about clouds.
Another point here is that demand shaping is an effective way to deal with fluctuating supply of power. By creating financial incentives, you can get energy consumers to scale up or down their consumption of power. Night tariffs are still common in places with a lot of static generation, for example. With solar generation now being so common, we even get occasional negative energy rates in some places where the static generation can't be scaled down.
Batteries and cables are a key enabler for demand shaping. Also, the time windows that energy gets sold for are getting shorter. It used to be that you'd buy x amounts of mwh for some price for hours. It's now getting down to minutes. That means grids can respond more rapidly to fluctuations in supply and demand. And of course it creates incentives for companies to invest in being able to scale up or down their energy consumption from the grid and benefit from these price fluctuations. For example by having batteries and using their roofs for solar generation.
Base load is of course a very flimsy concept and the discussions about it tend to be very hand wavy and rarely cite specific numbers in GW needed. Because as soon as you do that, you can talk solutions: cables, storage, more solar (it always generates some power), etc. And cost.
Hysterical assertions that we need to spend double digit percentages of GDP on things like nuclear or fusion kind of fall over when you apply some rationality to that. How much power for how much $? Maybe do something less mad and cheaper instead. Build some cables. Add some off shore wind. Much cheaper, faster, and way less risky.
Of course the reality is that we still have plenty of base load for the foreseeable future. That's why the vast increases in wind and solar generation, which are now the dominant source of power in a growing number of places, isn't really causing any outages or rolling blackouts. Whatever amount of base load we need, apparently it's way less than we currently have because we have been removing lots of it from the grid.
If someone was starting from scratch and looking at fossils, the arguments against would be so obvious and compelling that any arguments for would look insane. Nukes aren't much better.
The arguments against renewables are purely opportunistic and political.
We need clean energy now, not 10/20/50 years from now. We could have clean energy with some fairly cheap local build out - panels over carparks, for example - combined with regional power farms, and buffered with existing storage technologies and an improved grid.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nishandegnarain/2020/09/25/loud...
Further, the economics will dictate what happens not just our current predictions. It makes a real difference if solar panels are 25% or 30% efficient in 2035+ similarly how flexible demand for charging EV’s is and how expensive battery storage ends up being etc.