Batteries are not cost or resource efficient for winter where I live. Less than 8 hours of sunlight is not enough to heat a house during the day let alone night. There simply isn't enough solar generation even when overprovisioned to last.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/okotoks-drake-landing...
Also if we're talking about heating, there's also the possibility of geothermal heat pumps, which seem to work everywhere, and while they have a high one-time capital cost but I'm pretty sure can more or less keep trucking along providing unbelievably cheap heat pretty much forever - even if you have to replace components, you probably won't ever have to redig the shaft again, which is a huge factor in the cost.
How much is society willing to spend collectively to upgrade our housing stock for this? Not to mention triple-paned windows are not standard by any sufficiently large builder on new construction. Double-paned? Certainly.
Geothermal is great. But in an already built city, it's not feasible to install quickly. There is also a lack of legal framework or precedent in place to heat multiple properties from a single source. I tried very hard to obtain a quote for this and it was well over 50k for a single family home, and nobody would actually do it because of the big city I live in. Want a heat pump too? That's another 25k. Throwing down 100k up-front is not a reasonable request to a typical homeowner.
Geothermal is also a great shift for natural gas utilities. Delivery of weak heat sources to heat pumps is being explored in many areas.
Nuclear is the equivalent of throwing down 100k on a house for a massive custom-drilled ground-source heat pump solution. So in these difficult areas, we need to consider the alternatives.
I wonder how much upgraded insulation and geothermal heat pump(/district heating) could be paid for by the cost to build a new nuclear power plant - or even by the difference in cost to build that power plant versus to get sufficient solar and batteries to, in combination with the insulation, generate comparable temperature control.
If you read opinions from operators and incident reports you'll find that large power plants like nuclear are actually a much bigger problem for network management, because if you have to take down a nuclear plant for some reason, you suddenly have a huge issue providing that electricity with fast dispatchable generation.
