But if you accept a bit of carbon emission from the peaker plants it can play reasonably well with solar in warm climates. You can also make some uses of renew

But if you accept a bit of carbon emission from the peaker plants it can play reasonably well with solar in warm climates. You can also make some uses of renewables demand-dependent. Consider desalinization--uses a lot of power. Let's redesign our desalinization plant a bit: Put in a big seawater holding pond, it must be several hundred feet above the actual plant. Now, make the pumps considerably bigger than you need. When the grid has extra energy you use that energy to run the pumps and fill up the pond. When the grid doesn't have extra energy the pumps turn off. The actual plant works on pressure, not power (it's a glorified version of the reverse osmosis system a lot of us have under our kitchen sink--and note that the kitchen sink systems don't even plug in at all.) So long as there's water in the pond it's happy, power use is low. Thus you can run your plant 24/7 off an intermittent supply of power. This isn't the only heavy use situation where intermittent supply isn't a big handicap. What you need is a power grid that broadcasts (probably down it's wires) realtime information as to what the electric rate is and the users set their machinery up to optimize for that.