> That is also included in the estimates of course and solar+storage is still cheaper.

I don't believe that it is.

> Solar is so cheap that individuals are themselves paying to get it on the roofs of their homes and get returns from the investments inside a quarter of the life expectancy of the panels despite being taxed on everything involved, sometimes even the production of electricity.

Because they have free land (existing empty roof) and are using grid power from nuclear and fossil fuels whenever the sun isn't shining. Everybody knows solar is cheaper during the day, the question is how do you heat your house at night.

> Small communities have made off-grid hydrogen fuel stations, including electrolyzers and storage. It's so cheap that basically anyone can do it.

It's cheap in the sense that you can build one at small scale. How much is it to build 500GW worth of capacity and then store enough hydrogen to run it for ten days straight?

> Any gas plant still being operational would be running all the time and be part of the base supply just like it is today.

Not if its purpose is to supply power during periods of low generation.

Suppose you have a bunch of wind turbines that on average generate 500 GW of power. Sometimes it's 950 GW, sometimes it's 50 GW. Then you have 500 GW of average demand.

When they generate in excess of demand you want to use the excess to produce hydrogen. Okay, fine, but that's about half the time, so already your combustion-based power plants are operating at most at half duty cycle.

But the renewable output is more of a bell curve. The midpoint is 500GW but 450GW or 550GW are way more common than 950GW or 50GW. The problem is you still need enough generating capacity for when it's 50GW. You have to maintain 450GW of alternate capacity even though you don't need the majority of it except for on rare occasions.

> You would mix hydrogen in with the natural gas gradually as production capacity is increased, so for the first 100s of TWh you wouldn't even need to invest in anything but hydrogen production.

Constructing the existing plants is a sunk cost but that doesn't mean it wasn't a cost. You still have to maintain them and build new ones as they age out, you can't recover the cost of the land by selling it. And you could get a similar efficiency by converting the existing sites to nuclear, reusing the land and steam-to-power generating equipment and grid connection. But then you get power ~100% of the time because the fuel cost is negligible.

> Ironically that's also the main problem I see with it - there are many large power plant investments already made that will become unprofitable if solar+storage starts dictating the price of electricity, not just nuclear. There are many laws in many countries that only exist to make it hard for private actors to produce their own electricity.

The real problem here is that if you did a straight free market design, the result would be that power is very cheap 95% of the time and then costs multiple dollars per kWh during extended periods of low generation. That would allow long-term storage technologies and reliable generation methods to recover their costs from the times they're most needed, and use pricing to suppress demand when supply is low.

But then instead of having a $100/month electric bill, people would pay $20/month eleven months out of the year and then the month when there isn't enough capacity it would be $1000, unless they can severely limit their use during that time, which generally means something like turning down their thermostat in the winter. Which, of course, people hate.

The alternative is to have the power company smooth it out, so you always pay $100/month and they take the extra $80 most months to build nuclear reactors that can supply reliable power. In the end it comes out about the same but then people don't get a huge surprise bill once in a while.