The final few percentage points of reserves are almost all that matters to reliable grid operation. This can mean many things including load shedding even. If

The final few percentage points of reserves are almost all that matters to reliable grid operation. This can mean many things including load shedding even. If you decided fuel costs were exactly zero for emergency reserves you would still have those being by far the largest cost contributor to the grid as a whole. Building plants that can basically cover your entire peak load and letting them sit idle is insanely expensive and would be the most subsidized form of generation on earth. Not building them would be horrifically irresponsible. I’ve always been talking about seasonal storage as the actual problem that matters with intermittent generation. A week long power outage for a region is a society killer if it happens with any regular frequency. The only time I’ve ever brought up nightly storage is in the context of upper middle class folks using the grid as a free nightly battery and outsourcing their costs onto poor people - then commonly bragging about it. I would love to see net metering killed once a local grid gets above a certain inflection point of solar generation, and then only hourly market based pricing offered to anyone who wants to remain grid-tied. The market dynamics would then sort themselves out. The rooftop solar subsidies only make sense to bootstrap an industry. We should have been building all forms of power generation and storage over the past few decades instead of relying on inertia from the responsible generations of people that came before us. That inertia is rapidly running out, and cheap tricks like efficiency gains are no longer low hanging fruit. As previously stated though - residential usage is not that interesting as a whole. Industrial usage is and commonly glossed over in these discussions. Grid-tied BEVs are a laughable solution. It ignores any sort of human agency. When the grid goes down, people are not going to keep their only form of transportation plugged in for the common good. If anything they will top it off and keep it so until grid stability returns further straining a creaky grid. Again, it only solves the relatively easy problem of residential reliability and only for relatively wealthy folks.