There is a shocking amount of ignorance of the actual functioning of the electric grid and where costs actually come from for non demand resources like solar an

There is a shocking amount of ignorance of the actual functioning of the electric grid and where costs actually come from for non demand resources like solar and wind (and run of river hydro and a bunch of others) in this thread. Power grids require supply to equal demand at all times within a small margin of error or else the grid blacks out. Grid operators keep within the margin of error with ancillary services constantly ramping generators up and down by small amounts to keep supply equal to demand across the grid. The uncosted and huge cost of solar and wind is that they cannot provide ancillary services (until storage gets a lot better and cheaper, which is a long time away, likely decades) and they increase ancillary demand because enough ancillaries have to be available to cover wind cutouts or clouds rolling in. This cost increases exponentially as percent of power from non demand resources increases because you have to run the other generation increasingly at min gen just to be able to ramp them to Max gen if needed. This is no big deal when these resources are a couple percent of your grid but hugely costly as they stop being a rounding error in your generation profile. So yes, solar is way cheaper than most other gen to install right now but it causes an externality that isnt being priced correctly right now and that per unit externality increases as the grid gets more of these resources.