Comment by mrjin
3 years ago
It's not surprising at all. Given the intermittent nature of wind/solar power, it would be a huge waste of transmission network capacity built to the maximum producing capacity.
So, unless a storage facility is available, you will continue to see lots of wind/solar power get discarded as it's the most economical way: it's much more expensive to shut down or reduce output of other type of power generation such as gas or coal plants.
For a given production of wind I would agree with you, but the installed capacity is only going to go up for the foreseeable, so the network needs to take that into account
Oh well, yes and no. Assuming the demand maintains the same, unless something can fill up the gap when wind/solar dropped quickly enough, the current capacity of coal/gas plant simply cannot be reduced or the whole power grid will for sure be brought down by such fluctuations. But if the current capacity of coal/gas plant cannot be reduced, then there isn't much point in increasing solar/wind generation capacity. It's an interlocked problem, cannot be solved by simply changing one parameter only IMO.