Solar may not have inertia, but wind turbines certainly do. It's hard to imagine one of those stopping on a dime. Smaller batter installations can also help wi

Solar may not have inertia, but wind turbines certainly do. It's hard to imagine one of those stopping on a dime. Smaller batter installations can also help with frequency stabilization. The Tesla installation in South Aus primarily serves the purpose of grid stabilization rather than bulk storage, for example. I think solar needs that stabilization and storage more than wind, it's probably important to have a diversity of sources and locations with renewables to keep any one source from having too large an immediate impact on the grid. You're absolutely right about baseload being a fallacy. I would argue that balancing the grid is probably an easier problem in the absence of big constant baseload generators like nuclear, than with them. With renewables providing baseload generation, there is more capacity for variable renewable sources; if these can be sufficiently decorrelated (by geography, type of source, even design of e.g. turbines) then they would have a high likelihood of averaging out to support baseload needs while having greater backbench dispatchable capacity at play. You might only need to overprovision by (making up numbers here) 1.5x rather than 4x to have sufficient dispatchable capacity than if you combined say, nuclear baseload with renewable peaking. The aggregate effect of this would be making the renewable sources cheaper per nameplate Wattage.