Solar plus storage is included in all the major levelized cost reports, like from the NREL.
https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost...
just mashes together a PV array with about an hour of storage and quotes a price for that which is low and is certainly not going to get you through the night.
So many things drive me nuts about that report and the discourse around it that, I think, contribute to people talking past each other. For instance, quoting one price for solar energy is nonsensical when the same solar panel is going to give much more energy in Arizona than it is in upstate New York. The cost of a solar + battery system is going to be different in different places. In upstate NY we deal with a lot of retailers that are based in places like Bentonville, AK who just can't believe you might need an electric space heater in late April or otherwise your chickens might die. Since 95% of the world's population lives in a milder climate it's no wonder our needs don't get taken seriously.
The intermittency problem involves: (1) diurnal variation (overnight), (2) seasonal variation (do you overbuild solar panels 3x so you have enough generation in the winter or do you invest in very long term storage?) and (3) Dunkelflaute conditions when you are unlucky and get a few bad weeks of weather.
I've seen analyses of the cost of a grid that consider just smoothing out one day, but not one that covers seasonal variation. (So much of it comes down to: "how many days of blackout a year can people tolerate?")
With a significant overbuild or weeks worth of storage capacity costs are not going to be so favorable against nuclear energy. The overbuild offers the possibility that you could do something useful with the extra power but it is easier said than done because "free" power from renewables is like a free puppy. You have to build power lines to transmit it, or batteries to store it, or you have to feed it into some machine whose capital costs are low enough that you're not going to worry about the economics of only running it 20% of the time. (Go tell a Chemical Engineer about your plan to run a chemical factory 20% of the time and that's probably the last time you'll hear from them.)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...
Generally: Renewables and storage solve somewhere high in the 90s percent.
Then throw some gas turbines on it. Low CAPEX high OPEX. Just like we’ve done for the past decades with the previous ”base load and peaking” paradigm.
Those gas turbines will be a minuscule part of the total energy supply.
When it finally becomes the most pressing issue the gas turbines can trivially be fueled by green hydrogen, green hydrogen derivatives, biofuels or biogas from collecting food waste. If they are still needed.
Lets wait and see what aviation and shipping settles on before attempting to solve a future issue today.
Or that by far the easiest way to produce massive amounts hydrogen without emitting carbon into the atmosphere is… wait for it… nuclear power.
It's a bit of a weird measure anyway, since it's just the ratio of storage to inverter, so it's the time it could run for when working flat out.
For your wider point, if anyone, anywhere was really contemplating a near full nuclear grid they'd have the exact same issues. Do you overbuild and curtail? Export? Store in batteries? The problems and solutions are incredibly similar now batteries have basically solved the daily variation for solar.
The fact that no one is even bothering to think that far ahead for nuclear is a recognition of how totally out of the race it is.
