That's a nifty site. Thanks for the link. Eyeballing the graphs, looks like we need maybe an average of 25GW for the 16 hours of low solar output, for 400GWh.

That's a nifty site. Thanks for the link. Eyeballing the graphs, looks like we need maybe an average of 25GW for the 16 hours of low solar output, for 400GWh. If batteries don't increase in price and the grandparent's prices are right ($200M/GWh, ignoring the prediction of it halving), that's $80Bn of storage. The proposed mininuclear is a bit over £4Bn[0]/GW, so £100Bn to get 25GW. Seems like storage wins if you don't consider cloudy days (bad for solar), maintenance/operations cost (I assume much lower for batteries+solar than nuclear), or replacement times. (I'm guessing nuclear plants last longer than storage.) I'm a little surprised how little wind is being used in California. It's worth noting that wind actually picks up slightly when solar drops, but not as severely, judging from the graphs. [0] I hate that some of our units are £ and some $, but I'm going to pretend they're equal. That unfairly helps nuclear in the calculations.