The above tech also makes air district cooling cogen cheap you can suck the heat out of near by buildings to warm the liquid air up.
$19 a MWh using literally dirt cheap rocks as storage.
MIT is going the other way use the most abundant element on the earth’s crust to store heat.
https://www.solarpaces.org/mit-proposes-pv-to-discharge-energy-from-2400c-silicon-thermal-storage/
Even nukes know that storage is the future.
https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/storing-heat-nuclear-power-plants-could-improve
https://www.powermag.com/why-thermal-energy-storage-offers-hot-prospects-for-power/
It’s not if it’s when solar and wind are the dominate energy sources. Regardless of carbon in the air there simply is not enough fossil fuels for a population of 8 billion living at middle class standards of living and energy consumption. China added 500 MILLION to the middle class ,India is on track to add the same number, Africa and South America have large and growing middle classes. Humans need to move to solar and wind as fast as possible or the energy wars that are coming will be global. 4 billion in the middle class depletes conventional oil in 20 years or less add in heavy oil and tarsands only get you another 20. That’s only half the current world at a European Middle class energy consumption rate if they move up to American rates it goes faster. The other 4 billion also want and will fight to move up in energy consumption as well. Solar is the cheapest form of or primary power humans have EVER come up the IEA has the data proving this hundreds of pages of it Google it it will be the first result. Solar is also the only form of power distributed all over the planet that in a single hour of day light is more than a million times the yearly consumption of all humans on earth. The issue has never been supply it’s storage and transport to the not sunny areas. Less than 5% of the Sahara could power all of humanity’s energy usage at middle class levels all 8 billion of us not just the USA and EU. Again Google scholar has dozens of peer reviewed data sets to back those numbers take the time to read them.
The problem isn’t just supply, storage, or transport, it’s also collection. PV cells are generally maybe 20% efficient. Solar radiation averages 340W per sq meter, obviously higher on the tropics, maybe 1000W at most. Absolute best is what, 200W The average US nuke is around a GigaWatt. That’s a LOT of panels, that depend on seeing the sun every day all year. That’s a lot of backup power storage if this plan eliminates every nuke and hydrocarbon plant. What about places that have nonstop cloud cover? Transmission losses aren’t gonna let you just cart all the sun in the Sahara to Portland!
And it’s expensive to transport. Solar and wind need copper going from every unit to where the power goes. Hydrocarbons can be sent down cheap steel pipes or a truck to anywhere you need it.