The US used 3,911 TWh in 2015, or 10.72 TWh per day. Base load is about 40% of daily average. Assume the worst case of only solar- that baseload also continue

The US used 3,911 TWh in 2015, or 10.72 TWh per day. Base load is about 40% of daily average. Assume the worst case of only solar- that baseload also continues during the day, so about 30% of it would be powered by solar. That leaves 28% of average load that would need to be supplied overnight, or 3 TWh for the entire US. The current installed cost for grid scale batteries is <$500[1]- $483/kWh for the 129 MWh battery in Australia. Batteries in cars are <$200 at the pack level. At $500/kWh that's 1.5 trillion for the entire US. Well within manageable for several years- far less than has been spent on Iraq, for example. There are many reasons to believe that batteries could easily last for tens of thousands of cycles if properly specified[2], but current batteries are specified to ~5000 cycles to 80% degradation. Adding 20% capacity every 5000 cycles would cost 6 cents per kWh of system throughput. By comparison, the EIA says that Nuclear costs 8 cents per kWh today[3]. By current measures battery storage is cheaper than nuclear (not counting initial generation), and that's not even counting the massive reductions in capacity that would be enabled by other generation and HVDC transmission. > As a couple examples.... The laegest solar plant in Arizona produces only 10% of its peak summer power in the winter. That's a lie. The lowest winter output is 37% of peak summer output[4]. The variation is HIGHER in the summer than the winter; +55% in summer and -45% in winter. Power consumption in Arizona also varies at the same time (because that's how the plant was designed to produce power) by 25-30%, so the majority of that variation is simply proportional to normal load. [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/25/18715585/tesla-australia-renewable-energy-houses-electrical-grid-battery-installation https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/25/18715585/tesla-australia-... [2]: http://jes.ecsdl.org/content/166/13/A3031 http://jes.ecsdl.org/content/166/13/A3031 [3]: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.... [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesquite_Solar_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesquite_Solar_project