[vilhelm_s]

Batteries are nowhere near that cheap.

Currently the cheapest non-intermittent energy source is gas; solar costs about half as much, and nuclear costs 50% more than gas [0]. Battery storage is currently competitive with gas for storing around 4 hours of electricity [1].

If we would want to replace the baseload with solar + batteries we would need to store 12 hours instead, during the dark half of the day, so it would cost 3x as much, 200% more than gas.

Maybe we can hope for battery prices to drop, but extrapolating from a Wright's law curve, for them to become cheaper by a factor of 3 we need to produce 32 times as many of them [1, again], it won't happen in the near future.

[0] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/electricity_generation/pdf/... [1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mnaEgW9JgiochnES2/2024-was-t...