>It's cheaper to install and operate solar than it is just to operate a coal plant.
When you say this you need to also talk about how much it costs to build enough energy storage for solar to become some given percentage of grid power. There is probably some % where it stops being cheaper than coal
It's interesting how you could hand a solution out on a platter and all that will happen is that people will run around yelling 'it isn't perfect'. As if any powersource has a 100% uptime guarantee.
The problem isn't the uptime, it's that the downtime strongly correlates across all instances of wind power and across all instances of solar power in a country: https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
U.S. nuclear power plants typically refuel every 18 to 24 months. The average planned outage time is about a month. We never hear much about how nuclear power plants only have a ~95% planned uptime.
They have a paragraph addressing that point, if you read on:
> It'll be difficult to power a grid with 100% wind and solar so that's all you hear. But on the flip side, it'd be quite straightforward to power the grid using 90% renewables using the existing plants for the last hard 10%. It'd be both cheaper & cleaner! Why the heck aren't we celebrating that?
