But 98% renewable doesn't mean you can hit 100% by adding 2% more of something else, it means your something else has to supply ~100% of the power 2% of the time.
If China is aiming for that cost-optimal 90-98% renewables, that means they need to build a lot of coal.
Or you design the majority of loads so they can be turned off for 2% of the time.
Load shedding is a better solution than running peakers for [heated] towel rails.
It's not about lights, it's about electricity always being available. And well, always having power available (for domestic, but also for expensive production facilities that looses money while idle) using renewables is a lot more expensive than generating most of your power with renewables
Increased renewable generation is an important goal, but we need to let the facts guide the path, not the other way around.
That paper uses one renewable source, like only solar, and 2018-19 cost data for storage.
A real grid is made up of a mix of sources, which is why the research lately has focused on system costs.
All those analyses find that renewable grids are far cheaper than if involving new built nuclear power.
Here are two modern papers on the subject:
https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost-2025-26-Final/Ge...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
B) the post I am replying to is specifically calling for a 98% solar grid.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49477559#49481711
There's a big difference between "letting the facts guide the path" and tilting at strawmen built out of straw nobody else even brought into the discussion.
If you'd like to make the point that "cost of panels" can be misleading when supporting components and interconnects begin to take up the lion's share of costs then that sounds like a noble thing to remind folk of, but ideally not as a segway into shilling more fracking which includes untold environmental costs as externalities.