Nobody is seriously investing in storage, nobody is working on the problem of continental scale grid interconnection. And these are not problems that can be solved quickly as they come up, - Utility scale storage means rockworks!

Demand-side management can be rolled out faster than supply-side management, mostly because there's so much low-hanging fruit. Ammonia synthesis for fertiliser and synthetic fuels can be shuffled around without too much hassle, and to the extent electric cars achieve meaningful penetration in the transport infrastructure you'll have a few GWh of capacity at all points except the morning and evening commutes for the cost of hooking up your chargers to the internet and writing a bit of software. There's a ceiling to how much demand flexibility you can get, but it gives enough time to start with the rockwork.

That aside, nuclear suffers from precisely the same problem, unless you propose to load balance with spinning reserves. Which you can do, in the same way you can load balance a wind-only grid by detuning turbines to varying degrees. But that's a silly way to load-balance.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.