How much do those batteries cost and can they supply power for multiple days or a season if your renewable sources aren't providing like normal?

Not to mention the environmental damage from producing and disposing of batteries.

The marginal cost of batteries grows more than linearly.

When batteries are covering 0% of the need, the marginally added battery cycles many times, so the cost is spread over many kwh produced.

When you add batteries to go from 99.98 to 99.99, the batteries cycle only for that 0.01, so the same cost to build them is spread over a much fewer kwh, making each kwh produced a lot more expensive.

Seasonal storage is madness: you charge once and discharge once per year. Pay 100$/kwh to install it, discharge 20 times (20 years, a 5% payback time, which is a bad investment), and you're paying those kwh a 5$/kwh premium on top of the cost of buying the discharged power. If the battery is instead installed to shift the production from 12.00 to 18.00, it cycles 365 times a year, so in 20 years the premium is 0.01$/kwh.

So nucleare doesn't compete with the first 40% of penetration of renewables and the first 30% of battery, it competes with the last 10%, which is still needed to get to 0.

"Why do you need both, it's possible with technologies we don't have at scales we don't control with predictions weeks ahead on a rapidly changing and unpredictable weather model"

Yeah, uh, I'm going to go with the "building a nuclear plant is the safest solution" answer, thanks. Technosolutionism is fun up to a certain point.

>It's possible to get 99.99% reliability [...] It's also virtually impossible to get more than 99.99% reliability out of any grid

Notwithstanding the fact that lol you're happily saying that you're perfectly fine you get 1 hour of complete downtime every year, which fucks over many industries and services, you're ignoring multiple facts: 1/ to ensure safety, that means rolling brownouts when you're at 95% capacity, great solution, 2/ 99.99% works exactly like it does in software: you don't get tiny seconds long drops, you get gigantic, energy grid collapsing catastrophic failures, that are impossible to restart, grid sync because every renewable island is isolated.

>It's also virtually impossible to get more than 99.99% reliability

What kind of incompetent country are you living in? I have had exactly ZERO minutes of power outages for the past 5 years. I'll be generous and include the 30 minutes of downtime for maintenance. The country wide average blackout time is 2m30s, .43 power cuts / person / year. That's 99.996% stability country wide, and that's heavily weighted down by the places that get fucked by a tree collapsing on a transformer station