Solar is great but the bottleneck is on battery capacity to carry those noon hours into evening for peak usage. Last I checked we had plenty of lithium and are mostly held back on refinement.
Anger is incredibly viral. In a country on social media, that means cutting opposition spreads faster than support. (Most elements of support, for this reason, scaffold themselves along opposition to something else. Even if that something is a manufactured totem.)
All of the above has a slight advantage, policywise. But it has, by sharing all its components’ weaknesses, a larger cross section than any one alone. Thus you’ll see all-the-above picked apart by the anti-renewable lobby at the same time as the anti-nuke and anti-gas greenies.
(Comprehensive energy policy articles on HN typically have a top-voted commentating the stupidity of a random component.)
We will need to retire them in future where renewables are everywhere. Maybe wind is good enough to fill the hole at night. Maybe new battery chemistry is cheap. Maybe some other storage tech works out. Maybe they can be converted to hydrogen for long term storage.
Transition clients usage to variable and intermittent energy. Much of our current industrial stack assumes continuous energy. Like smelting. So develop techniques for quick starting and ramping up processes when energy is cheapest.
Time shift usage. Like HVAC pre-cooling buildings, pre-heat water, etc.
One benefit is increased resiliency.
Another is reducing peak usage.
Our current stack (generation, distribution, etc) is over built in order to accommodate the worst case scenario. IIRC, that's < 1% of the time. Adding batteries (strategically) to handle those peaks, instead of peaker gas generators, will be hugely impactful. And open up a lot of our currently built capacity to handle more demand.
I know you know these things. I'm just compelled to reiterate, for our viewing audience.
Maybe someone's gathering up identical packs, eg a specific generations of Tesla Model 3 packs, and turning just those into power walls or grid storage.
That said, methinks since battery recycling tech has scaled up ahead of demand, it's cheaper and faster to extract the misc minerals and make new, much much better, batteries (for grid storage).
I'm noob, so really wouldn't know. I guess we'll see.
Also, recent CATL PR releases about sodium ion only mention 'future cost savings' rather than anything about a 90% reduction in prices.