This site is using a benchmark of 4 hours for storage. This is sufficient for California, but not really anywhere else. Here in Finland, it would be literally 3 orders of magnitude too low. This, er, has an impact on cost.
> This is sufficient for California, but not really anywhere else. Here in Finland, it would be literally 3 orders of magnitude too low.
Yes, but compared to California (and all the other very sunny parts of the US and the world where huge populations live), from an energy consumption perspective, tiny Finland doesn't really matter much. Or put another way, it matters far more to the future of the climate to decarbonize energy production in California than Finland.
That said, companies in Finland have been developing some neat grid scale heat storage batteries lately, so there is an opportunity for them to have a big technological impact that way.
Yep. SMR is a much better drop-in replacement for fossil sources than renewables (generally stable/controllable output, dense locating so no expansion/upgrading of grid required unlike solar and wind, and can provide large winter outputs in more northerly climes where solar efficiency fades in the winter).
