Fair, but it's literally free energy. The sun just gives it to us for free.

For real. The only maybe compelling arguments are the risk of reactor meltdown and nuclear waste, but modern reactor design and safety practices make that essentially a non-issue (indeed, nuclear power is safer even than wind power, statistically), and people typically vastly overestimate the amount of waste that is produced (all of the nuclear waste from power generation that humanity has ever produced could fit on just six cargo ships with some room left over, and that ignores the fact that not all waste is equally dangerous) and it’s not like other power generation methods don’t generate pollutants and waste either, it typically just gets vented into the atmosphere. Personally, I’d rather the waste be in a form we can contain.

The only actual problem with nuclear is that there isn’t enough nuclear material in the world for it to provide for all of our power generation needs, but that’s not even really a problem so much as it just means it can’t be our only solution to the problem, and nuclear is incredible for generating a stable baseline, an advantage that something like wind and solar lack. Until we crack profitable fusion, it is far and away one of our best options.

That sounds less like a problem with nuclear and more like a problem with authoritarianism. Throw it on the pile.

This, rather than building new fission reactors, we should fund research on fusion. It is really promising, and addresses all the biggest issues of fission.

A prerequisite has to be smart appliances, and not in the current sense of a great way to milk more money from a customer through advertising and lock-in.

My thermostat, dishwasher, washer, dryer, car charger have timers so I can schedule them overnight (typical for cheaper electricity in the past, before solar). But other appliances don’t, and none can respond to less predictable changes in rates.

Do standard solar installs have the smarts to trigger appliances based on what they’re generating? Most of them are “smart” but they’ll only talk about monitoring and bill paying. I’ve been trying to find that out all summer but solar providers don’t know or are otherwise unable to answer.

I’m all for dynamic pricing of electricity but we don’t have the appliance intelligence to support it. That can take decades to roll out so we need to nail this down NOW

The sole remaining factor is heating in winter. Which can not be solved by better battery storage

My parents house used to have thermal storage heating which seemed to work well. Each room had what looked like a standard sized radiator that stored heat, much more cheaply than a battery: nothing toxic, nothing expendable, nothing expensive. Overnight when rates were low, the unit heated up. During the day when rates were high, we just needed a small circulation fan to keep room temperature consistent with almost no power use.

I just had to get a new heat pump installed and looked for similar functionality but it doesn’t seem to exist.

Thermal storage heat would make a huge difference in shifting power usage from heating to account for factors like solar energy, and it would be much cheaper than batteries.