At an equivalent total cost of ownership most will prefer renewables to nuclear: no risk, no waste, no geopolitically touchy nuclear fuel, no adventurous decommission...
Solar could be free, and still the battery costs would be prohibitive.
In terms of "hard to believe", ask yourself why countries have not managed to roll out storage capacity to match the solar capacity? It's because solar is relying on fossil fuels or nuclear or hydro to be there when it's dark.
Indeed, because building wind/solar/biomass/... production units took most of the investment capacity, while coping for variability was cheap because we already had thermal (fossil fueled) powerplants. Those are aging up and more and more expensive to use due to carbon taxes, therefore storage-related projects get boosted. H2 (and fuel cells), thermal and kinetic storage... are getting traction.
The sheer amount of electricity produced by intermittent renewables (solar & wind) while nobody wants it grows. Many markets have more and more negative prices timeframes, where the producer is ready to pay in order to get rid of it (gridpower network stability implies "production == consumption", any over/under-load is dangerous for it). However electricity prices are way, way up during under-production periods. This creates an already huge and growing incentive for storage.
Also add electric vehicles batteries (and, maybe one day, home batteries) which will more and more be usable to store overproduction thanks to smartgrid and various tricks ( such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid).
The landscape is quickly (relatively to its huge inertia) changing.
All of the above facts are exactly correct. There is a huge financial incentive for storage. Right now.
And yet the storage is not being built in any meaningful sense. At best we have "ideas" but these have not been actually deployed at scale. People keep throwing out ideas, but when there is a crunch they fly in diesel generators or add gas peaker plants.
That alone should tell you how expensive the storage problem is to address. It's a very hard problem.
This just isn't correct. There are dozens of pilot projects for novel grid storage systems being built right now all around the world, and existing battery based grid storage like Tesla's megapack have multiple installations already in use, and dozens more planned this year. Pumped hydro alone is already in the hundreds of GW range.
The reason grid storage hasn't been built is because batteries were too expensive, but more importantly, grid storage was never needed. It takes 5-10 years for new tech to see widespread deployments, and it's only been a few years that grid storage had been getting this investment.
And as I said, we have hundreds of 100MWh+ battery plants, and hundreds of GWh of pumped hydro. The idea that they haven't been deployed at scale is just wrong.
