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The intermittent nature is going to be handled by large battery storage farms. Battery storage is already displacing peaker plants. I’m confused by what you m

• epistasis 5y ago
  Right now in certain seasons there's huge amounts of curtailed renewable power. For example in 2020 California threw away 1.5TWh of solar power that was in excess of what the grid needed. As renewables go to higher and higher percentages of generation, this amount of curtailment will increase dramatically. Battery farms won't solve this entirely, because regardless of the mix of batteries, we are going to be building a system that serves a seasonal minimum of energy production. During the seasonal maximum of energy production, probably in California alone, we will have dozens of TWh per year that can not be consumed on the grid, and may not even be able to be transmitted on the grid. There's even a good amount of slack in most current solar farm designs. Due to the cost balance between inverters and panels, it's quite common to have more DC power from panels than the inverters can convert to AC for the grid. As batteries get cheaper, batteries are taking some of that DC power right now. But there's still the seasonal effects of generation.
  • beerandt 5y ago
    Negative spot prices are not good for a market, and lead to overall higher prices, not lower ones. It's a mechanism of the market over correcting. Investors don't want to spend capital for a product that they might have to regularly pay someone to "buy".