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Even in the southwest this is a problem - peak output from residential rooftop solar is mid-day but peak demand is early evening when people are getting home, c
by njovin 2y ago
Even in the southwest this is a problem - peak output from residential rooftop solar is mid-day but peak demand is early evening when people are getting home, cooking dinner, charging their EVs, etc. Without some major changes to residential storage or large grid-attached storage systems, solar alone isn't going to cut it.
- ZeroGravitas 2y agoDon't get confused by peak net-demand i.e. demand that is left after you subtract solar. The newly cheap midday power should be driving demand towards that time period but it won't show up on net demand charts, which will show the famous duck curve belly at that time. That doesn't mean people aren't using energy at that time. In fact the main way to detect this demand shift in a net demand graph is to see that the evening peaks are dropping year over year, even as they seem relatively larger compared with net demand when solar is working. But anyway, in California the massive deployment of batteries in the last few years has already solved this problem. Compared with peaking gas plants that only run once a day for a few hours batteries are both cheap and clean.