alt Hacker News> 5x to 10x overprovisioning would turn solar from one of the cheaper into the by far most expensive power generation method out there.
This is trivially false if the cost of solar generation (and battery storage) further drops by 5x to 10x.
Additionally that implies the overprovisioned power is worthless in the summer, which does not have to be the case. It might make certain processes viable due to very low cost of energy during those months. Not trivial as those industries would have to leave the equipment using the power unused during winter months, but the economics could still work for certain cases.
Some of the cases might even specifically be those that store energy for use in winter (although then we're not looking at the 'pure' overprovisioning solution anymore).
> This is trivially false if the cost of solar generation (and battery storage) further drops by 5x to 10x.
That's a huge "if". The cost of PV panels has come down by a factor of 10 in the last 13 years or so, that's true. I doubt another 10x decrease is possible, because at some point you run into material costs.
But the real issue is that price of the panels themselves is already only about 35% of the total installation cost of utility-scale PV. This means that even if the panels were free, it would only reduce the cost by a factor of 1.5.