Idk. Solar cells have been around for a while, too. Wind turbines are kind of simple devices. I bet an engineer can predict their maintenance cost and lifespan fairly accurate. Hydroelectric power plants have been around for more than 100 years. Electric cars have been invented before the combustion engine took off. Nuclear power has been around for some time. But you can’t use that as an argument and simultaneously argue about using thorium which large scale deployments are still hypothetical.

And I don’t think those numbers are 500% off. You can double some cost and were only at 200%. And they’re not complete speculation. They took the actual numbers of the previous year. And the years before that. These numbers are the ‘actual history’.

No significant energy production was made with variable renewable

Pardon? Norway? New Zealand? Switzerland? Iceland? Sweden? Countless others I probably forgot because I’m bad at geography? The USA and China, Philippines, Indonesia all have major ‘variable renewable’. Thousands and thousands of megawatts of energy are generated this way as of today. Then there is biomass if you’re geologically not that favored by nature, but I barely know anything about that. And who says we can’t use the sun and wind? Of course we can also use those.

Sure. Just use molten salt energy storage, hydroelectric dams or whichever of the dozens of technologies makes most sense where you are.

Combine different kinds of renewables so you get power at night and when the wind isn’t blowing. Build more then enough and if you got excess energy, maybe make some hydrogen.

Have your devices and industry ‘smart’ so it draws less power when there’s less supply.

You really don’t need to do everything with ‘normal’ batteries like in a smartphone.

The ‘working’ thorium reactors are for research. They don’t generate energy. At least if we’re speaking about generating energy for a whole country. The planned thorium reactors of the next many years also don’t generate any significant amount of energy. With that argumentation we also (almost) have nuclear fusion power plants.

A thorium power plant that contributes to the power grid and shows up in the numbers is sci-fi. I mean, it’s not impossible. It’s just lots of very expensive work left to do.

cost per unit

We’re talking about effective cost of the resulting power, altogether. All things included. (Except for nuclear waste, which is a topic for a different discussion and difficult to quantify.) Just comparing one aspect wouldn’t be fair.

store energy on scale

Yeah, and science and investors are way ahead of politics. There are several concepts already available or already in place somewhere. Several promising ideas and projects that need funding. Storage facilities that aren’t able to store energy because Bavaria is not willing to run cables across the country. It is a complex topic that also needs individual solutions. For example depending on geography you could have dams and pump water. Or one of the concepts that work everywhere. Infrastructure and cunsumer get more advanced/intelligent. You could charge your car automatically during periods where renewable is abundant. You can fine-tune factories, maybe have the large heat pump of an office building vary temperature a bit when there is a Dunkelflaute. Some countries just get geothermal power for free because of their location… You can put those storage facilities close to energy generation or close to the consumer. And as supply and demand changes prices, it’s also well aligned with the way our economy (and capitalism) works.

We should really hurry up and put in the effort this needs. Because we really need those storage facilities. And I’d like energy costs to come down again, and CO2 emissions also.

And if I remember correctly, the current natural gas power plants are the ones that can react to supply and demand the most quickly. But this seems not to be a good idea anymore, now that we have enough problems with the natural gas in central europe. I (personally) would be happy if there was an alternative.

I haven’t heard any scientist in the last years tell something different from renewable plus storage is the way. Not unless some miracle happens and we get fusion reactors or something. But it’s still unclear it that’s going to happen.