Itβs still not earning you money to spend electricity because you still have to pay the transfer fee which is around 6 cents / kWh but itβs pretty damn cheap nevertheless, mostly because of the excess in wind energy.
Last winter because of a mistake it dropped down to negative 50 cents / kWh for few hours, averaging negative 20 cents for the entire day. People were literally earning money by spending electricity. Some were running electric heaters outside in the middle of the winter.
You donβt need to install X-amount of global demand. Battery/hydrogen storage can solve the issue as has been demonstrated repeatedly in various research. And with home battery solutions you can even fully decentralise it.
I donβt understand your centralisation argument, nuclear is about the most centralised power source there is. And it can be threatened, as seen in the current Ukraine-Russia war.
Solar and wind can scale up to the demand. Nuclear actually has a much harder time doing that, as materials are far more rare and expensive, and it takes much longer to build. If anything, the time argument works against nuclear, not in favour of it.
Hydrogen storage, you have got to be kidding me. It is abysmally inefficient and the same kind of FUD spread by the fossile industry.
Batteries are so extremely expensive that also has to be a joke. How much does a battery for a single day cost? Say, relative to the GDP?
Nuclear is far more local than solar and wind transfer in-between continents, obviously.
Batteries are becoming less expensive every day. The market doubles almost every year, which is impressively high-paced.
You also donβt need battery storage to last a day. Most places only need approx. 6 hours, with particularly sunny countries being able to get away with having only 4 hours.
You maybe also be confusing local generation with centralised power generation. Nuclear is local, but also extremely centralised. Solar/wind transfer is very decentralised, same goes for battery storage.
Hydrogen is in its infancy. The tech is promising but whether or not it will prove its worth is still to be seen.
There are about 2 weeks without sun and wind in the whole EU every once in a while (donβt remember, like every 3 years?). How are 6 hours supposed to help? How much would these only 6 hours of storage capacity cost (pick some country, perhaps not Norway or Iceland).
