I would also add a note on the bottom of the page to time-shift industrial electricity use to take advantage of new peak energy availability.
If you're going to use a great deal of electricity from the grid but don't particularly care about when, right now it makes sense to shift your use to the night-time, when electricity is cheaper. Solar power inverts this, and encourages more daytime use, and even waiting for sunny days if you have enough flexibility in your schedules. There is an inflection point in the difference between daytime and night-time cost (which we might not ever reach) where it stops being worthwhile to run a third shift at a factory, because the difference in energy costs is more than the cost of just building another factory, in the long term.
So if we rebuilt our civilization to take advantage of renewable energy and solar power in particular, we might find ourselves needing less base load power than we do now.
If you're going to use a great deal of electricity from the grid but don't particularly care about when, right now it makes sense to shift your use to the night-time, when electricity is cheaper. Solar power inverts this, and encourages more daytime use, and even waiting for sunny days if you have enough flexibility in your schedules. There is an inflection point in the difference between daytime and night-time cost (which we might not ever reach) where it stops being worthwhile to run a third shift at a factory, because the difference in energy costs is more than the cost of just building another factory, in the long term.
So if we rebuilt our civilization to take advantage of renewable energy and solar power in particular, we might find ourselves needing less base load power than we do now.