alt Hacker NewsThat's fine, but you need to include the cost of having barely-used gas peaker plants when calculating the cost of "renewables+storage". Laymen keep using arbitrary "marginal cost of solar with sun shining" to say "solar is cheaper than everything!". If it's true that capex of 80% gas peaker (and LNG storage and employees on standby and so on) + solar + wind + batteries is cheaper, then people should make that argument and provide the data.
The latest figures from ember etc are not only “sun shining”, they’re talking about 24hr firmed solar-storage costs, and they’re still mostly cheaper than fossil in most geos. It is true that we will have to pay for having gas fill the gaps - how much exactly is a very complicated function of market economics and real time power auctions. Depends on so many variables, how big is the shortfall, how long, what competition does the gas have locally and extra-geographically, many other things. For connected countries in Europe you are never going to get to a situation where you need an 80% sized backup to your production, there will always be varied other sources.
Though I confess predicting it is beyond me and I’m not sure how you would model it to achieve conclusions generally applicable to every country / market .