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7-8pm according to that link is the net peak, after solar production has canceled out the original afternoon peak. The problem is that even though solar supply
by _delirium 9y ago
7-8pm according to that link is the net peak, after solar production has canceled out the original afternoon peak. The problem is that even though solar supply does roughly coincide with the peak of demand, solar production has increased enough that, since about 2013, it's gone past the point of offsetting peak afternoon A/C usage, to now producing an actual net trough in the afternoon hours (you can see the afternoon extremum flips from a local maximum to a local minimum from 2012 to 2014, and just keeps going further down every year since, as peak afternoon solar grows faster than peak afternoon A/C).
The new net peak around 7-8pm is because demand has a long tail into the early evening, while solar drops off sharply around 5-7pm. But yeah the end result is that it does cause a problem for grid management if you add more incremental solar, since the original afternoon peak it helped smooth out has long since been smoothed and then some.
- akira2501 9y agoIn California, the peak is actually at 6pm. At that time, Solar is generally producing 6.6 GW from around 9.6 GW at noon. http://www.caiso.com/Pages/TodaysOutlook.aspx http://www.caiso.com/Pages/TodaysOutlook.aspx
- Animats 9y agoWind is really variable, and often way out of sync with load. I just looked at PJM's dashboard, and peak wind in the last 24 hours was 4 gigawatts at 4 AM. Wind bottomed out at 0.65 GW at 8 PM. That's total output from wind farms from Illinois to New England. Averaging over a large area isn't that helpful. Piping energy in from the wind corridor that runs up from the Texas panhandle to Canada has promise. The wind is steadier there. It's quite possible to run megavolt DC power lines now; China has 16,000Km of them. California has had a half-megavolt DC link from Oregon to Southern California since the 1970s.