Solar: what should we be shooting for is equilibrium

Here is a .pdf from the Adam Smith Institute called "Solar Power In Britain: the Impossible Dream"

As you can tell by the title, they aren't too bullish on solar power. And they do a pretty good job of explaining why they feel this way. And they back it up with evidence.

They even go into the oft-cited claim that wind or solar on their own is too intermittent to be of much use for a large grid. But if they are put together, the wind will usually blow at night and the sun will usually shine when the wind dies down, or enough to smooth out the output of these types of renewable energy.

As it turns out, this claim is not true. Both wind and solar will be too intermittent for a grid even if they are put together.

But we all know that batteries can smooth out the problem.

Well, the paper gets into that too, but not much:

Battery storage on this scale is likely to be even more expensive and batteries would require frequent replacement.

And that's all they have to say about that.

Now, I agree with them using current technology. So does the future bode well for batteries saving the day?

The Adam Smith Inst. made a follow-up blog post called "Batteries will not save solar... yet" And they get into what the cost of battery would be if we replaced all power generation with wind/solar/hydro. They come to the conclusion, as I just said, that batteries will have to be a great deal cheaper and perform better for the numbers they ran to work. And that's fair.

But do we ultimately want to replace all coal/NG/nuclear? That might be the goal of some, but reasonable limits are a much better idea. And it all has to do with costs. As the cost of coal/NG/nuclear go up, and the costs of solar/wind/hydro go down, they will be replaced.

And I can hear a lot of commenters saying that we are already doing that and solar/wind/hydro are far too costly so "end of discussion."

But that's only if we have not taken all the costs into consideration. As nuclear plants age, we find out what the clean-up costs are. And the next time we build a plant like that we need to factor those costs in. And natural gas will diminish to the point where its price will go up, and we can predict that to some degree. Same with coal. And coal also has other cleanup costs that we are just now realizing the costs on. These have to be included.

And batteries will go down in cost due to scale. We certainly hope they will also go down in cost due to all these shiny advances we keep hearing about in labs. But just like coal and NG, it can only go so far and costs will start to rise for batteries, too.

Equilibrium. That's exactly where we will end up. As costs rise for coal/NG/nuclear and lower for solar/wind/hydro with batteries they will start to approach a point where costs will optimise for each type of power generation.