Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not reasonably affordable by any real “middle class” metric and the impact a reliable grid has on the industrial and commercial base of an economy is being undervalued by an utterly laughable degree during these discussions. Westerners and rich folks take it for granted as a fact of life at this point. The duck curve is a rounding error when discussing energy storage.
The storage needed to turn solar into a reliable (as any comparable fossil fuel power plant) dispatchable source of power, plus the cost of the solar in the first place, costs less than other sources of dispatch-able power (like gas) in sunny places per kwh. It also scales down better (though not perfectly). Either you can afford it (both storage and solar), or you can't afford power at all, or you don't live in a su…
The math actually gets worse once you get into combined cycle natural gas at scale.
You I suppose could make an argument that load curtailment is cheaper than planning for the current grid reliability everyone has gotten used to over the past 50 years, but it would be a societal shift.
Seasonal energy storage is what is interesting to discuss, and of course is where that last 2% of grid reliability comes from. It’s also the most expensive part of running a grid. The first watts are basically free, the last are very expensive.
I’d love to be proven wrong within the next decade though! I just personally don’t see the battery storage price going down at the same rates it has been simply due to structural raw material input cost reasons - short of a breakthrough in chemistry. I think we are getting close to the maximum savings achieved by economies of scale with current technology.