There are no easy solutions or free lunch, only true costs. Nuclear has its benefits and drawbacks (most which don't need to be repeated). Hydro power is a great natural resource, except for that extinction aspect and flooding risks. Solar and wind is great for use cases where that production variation matches the consumption and human behavior. Natural gas and other fossil fuels should just not be used in the grid, and the arguments in favor of continued use are simply wishful thinking or malicious.

What is simple is that the energy bill is going up in a speed that is much faster than inflation, while the cost of production of energy is going down. As such, the production cost of energy is a poor indicator for the price that users of energy is paying. If we want cheap energy than what we need to care about is the true cost of energy delivering, since that is what the energy bill will reflect. That include the cost of production, the time and place of production, the cost of maintaining grid stability, transportation, and market inefficiencies.

Home storage works, but gatekeeps reliable power to the relatively wealthy. You need days of it at minimum for any reasonable long term plan. Seasonal storage is the problem, nightly storage is pointless to discuss.

Just dumping external costs onto the grid as a whole is not where I want to see society going - said as someone who could easily fill an entire shed full of whole home battery storage.

A reliable and cheap power grid is so much taken for granted in developed areas of the world it astounds me. Dismantling it in favor of everyone being their own little power generation and storage island is just going to continue to create have and have nots.

Of course no one really seems to bring forth the costs to industry when they talk about this stuff. Cheap power inputs are the wealth of a society. You don’t get to be rich without it. Asking every factory to co-locate generation to their metal stamping fab or whatever is ridiculous.

At this point I think many places have gone so many decades putting their head into the sand and making this an ideology that there is actually no solution. I fully expect to see wide scale rolling blackouts in many developed economies in the next 20 years.

When I see some actual numbers that are not just financial engineering or parasitism I will start to change my views on the subject. It’s fraud and grifters all the way down the stack.