Cheapest source is accurate. It may not eliminate the need for expensive LPG, but reducing the amount needed is still a massive benefit to the economy.
Instead there would be electric relay connected to mains in your home and when there is less supply than demand you would get blackout. That would be similar comparison to this.
People would install a battery at home the way most of the world installs solar and they’d see massive reductions in electricity bills more than paying for the battery. The UK is absolutely terrible location for solar, and it’s still installed because UK’s electricity prices are so high.
That said, wind going to absolutely zero nationwide is extremely unlikely but the more people who signed up for such a system eventually just a little power wouldn’t be enough for all of them. So there’s be an economic feedback loop.
That said with a battery and dynamic prices, there are many days where you can charge a battery when the prices are low and use them battery when the prices are high.
Hedges like this are a useful risk mitigation strategy as going bankrupt is a much larger downside than making slightly more money.
So the consumer does not gain anything.
Wholesale prices are really just one aspect of grid manufacturing and paying them doesn’t mean you’re getting the equivalent of a percentage of wind farm productivity.
Tesco doesn't care if the freezers in store run at 04:00-04:15, or 04:30-04:45, and will pick whichever is cheaper.
Open cycles gas turbines are extremely cheap to build and expensive to run. For a green future these can be run on biofuels, hydrogen or hydrogen derivatives.
Therefore they perfectly complement renewables.
Nuclear power on the other hand is an awful companion due to having extremely large fixed costs and acceptable marginal running costs.
The coal or nuclear plant that commits to generating a set amount consistently but never even attempting to meet the actual demand is some kind of hoax?
In reality we're moving from baseload and peaker gas plants to follow demand to renewables and firming (the same gas plants just running at different times). It's a holistic system with parts working together.
The main difference is that renewables are cheaper and cleaner which gets them built faster and displaces more and more coal and gas from the market. With batteries eating the market from the other direction (starting with daily peaks and expanding out from there).
You can see this in carbon intensity of electricity production and the ever increasing share of renewables around the world.
Of course that plan falters a bit if you ban cheap onshore wind across an entire nation for a decade.
1. https://www.amazon.com/Price-Wrong-Capitalism-Wont-Planet/dp...
We get anything from storms to hail few times a year here. My patio roof got holes in it from the ice balls, but the panels are fine. Are you missing some qualifiers on that one?
> get dirty
You clean them every few months or monitor for issues per group of panels.
> require significant maintenance
Just like every other device out in the real world. Coal, gas, wind, solar, nuclear, thermal generators require maintenance.
> they get destroyed by weather
A few of them, every year. It makes a visible dent on their average longevity.
But I don't think distributing them has any impact on this. They just create a risk situation that nobody seems to be insuring and that large farms will self insure without problems. (Anyway, with the price going down the way it is, that will soon become irrelevant.)
> get dirty
Each person stopping to clean their own panels is much less efficient than professional cleaning centralized panels. It does increase your electricity costs.
> require significant maintenance
Home maintenance is an entire other level of inefficiency. That extends to any kind of equipment in your home.
But again, none of those is a big deal. Solar is mostly operation-free, so distribution mostly doesn't matter.
Oh no we have no single point of failure, empower people to invest into the grid and have huge redundancies in the grid... Batteries literally solve most of the problems
https://themarketbull.com.au/2025/02/07/lithium-remains-a-ke...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_United_Kingdom_miners%27_...
Nickel-Iron batteries are very good for this purpose: practically unlimited charge-discharge cycles and overcharging/overdischarging won't damage them. They should be dirt-cheap too, but almost there are very few manufacturers so there's not much competition.