Please show a single publication that does what you claim it does. A single one. I don't think they exist, or if they do they will not be the prominent highly

Please show a single publication that does what you claim it does. A single one. I don't think they exist, or if they do they will not be the prominent highly cited ones. Yes, storage and methanation and electrolysis are expensive. These expenses are explicitly modeled in the energy system models. Modeling these expenses for a complete system that satisfies the security of supply constraints is the very essence of what these models do [1]. Criticism against them would be exactly that they don't assume some market/price dynamics but a perfect central planner. Flexible loads are a fundamentally different thing than brownouts. Electricity consumers opt in to being flexible, and this is about sophisticated industrial consumers, not private consumers anyway. The market mechanism you describe would only be true for energy-only markets anyway, and no one is proposing energy only markets for primary and secondary control energy that balances out short term variability. [1] E.g. Figure 7 in https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.05290.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.05290.pdf gives the cost breakdown for a 0-Carbon configuration of generation storage (and optionally transmission expansion) investment that can serve all loads for the entire year under different assumptions for other energy sectors participation in flexibility provision. While this modeling set up is a lower bound on the costs, a deeper analysis shows that this is actually pretty accurate especially when storage investment is reasonably high, as the overall storage cost is dominated by seasonal variability which is highly regular.