Price is irrelevant when you need most of your electricity in a season when there's barely any sun.

Most of the European population leave on places that are more northern then Montreal, we have less than 8 hours of daylight per day, and a significant fraction of it is cloudy.

There's no storage solution that can store the excess summer solar exposure (when we get more than 16hours on sun per day) to reinject it into the grid in winter. That's literally science fiction tech, and that's what you'd need to make solar + storage a reliable source in Europe.

Solar in California, India or the middle east? Sure. Solar in Europe, Canada and even Japan, good luck (and yes, these countries constitute most of nuclear power plants operators).

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pfdietz 19 hours ago | parent [-]

Even taking into account intermittency and seasonality, nuclear would have a very hard time surviving in a $0.01/kWh PV world.

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littlestymaar 19 hours ago | parent [-]

Again, price is irrelevant if there's no electricity available at all when you need it.

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pfdietz 19 hours ago | parent [-]

The implication that the energy couldn't be available when you need it is utter codswallop.

At $0.01/kWh, PV electricity, if converted to resistive heat, would be below the cost of Henry Hub natural gas heat. And this heat would be very storable in artificial geothermal at maybe 600 C, where it would lose < 1% of stored energy per month.

Would this have low round trip efficiency if converted back to electricity? Sure. But if the PV electricity is that cheap, so what?

When levelized cost is low enough, there's plenty of room for engineering to work around intermittency and seasonality.

	▲	littlestymaar 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> At $0.01/kWh, PV electricity, if converted to resistive heat, would be below the cost of Henry Hub natural gas heat. And this heat would be very storable in artificial geothermal at maybe 600 C, where it would lose < 1% of stored energy per month. HN crank solves global warming with one weird trick.