Things presumably look slightly different in Japan, but this is looking like political rather than an economic decision. Right this moment they have some cover to save the industry even if little is going to change any time soon.
5GW / year @ 90% capacity factor ~= 3 million 200W panels @ 30% capacity factor + 40-60GWh of batteries. It’s not completely equivalent, but they both need roughly the same amount of peaking power plants to make up the difference.
Plus Solar’s costs are front loaded, with China’s rapidly growing economy they can ignore decommissioning or even long term operating costs as largely irrelevant.
That's interesting. Two queries: Are they real world numbers or projections vs real numbers? And are they done in the sort of setup that we have in the UK, where renewable is soft-subsidised by always winning the bids for demand when it's available, and non-renewable gets what's left.
LCOE is unrelated to systems costs.
Yeah, imagine how great it will be when we can dimension the electricity grid for the average consumption rather than peak due to distributed generation and storage.