Comment by obviouslynotme
2 years ago
Power generation comes in two classes, baseline and peaker. Baseline units are on 24/7. They are typically very efficient, but can take days or weeks to start. Peakers can turn on in minutes of notice and are usually better at following demand.
Power demand follows daily sinusoidal cycles. By having an economical consumer of electricity that can choose operation times, you can have them use power at night in order to flatten your sinusoidal demand, thus allowing a higher percentage of efficient baseline units to run instead of peakers.
Why don't they just pump water up hill at night? That would be a much better use of the electricity.
There are already many energy storage systems in place and many more being installed even now. The problem is that energy storage and recovery is a hard problem. Anyone who solves it will be rich overnight.
Texas is like Germany. No hills (unless you count the waste disposal hills, where you cannot pump up water)
I live in the hill country in Texas, so I would disagree there.
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