Comment by epistasis
12 hours ago
> Replacing base load with solar and batteries, especially for days when weather makes supply the lowest and demand the highest, is in general a non-trivial problem, but it is location dependent. Maybe California is one where it make sense.
Storage and gas capacity make this a fairly trivial problem, but it is somewhat location dependent.
The difficulties in deploying it are mostly political and regulatory, and not technical.
Places like Texas, with a fairly open market that allow new entrants to add assets on their own initiative, storage paired with wind and solar is dominating the market. In fact in most of the us, storage/solar/wind is mostly what's getting deployed no the grid, see the map at the bottom:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586#
However, you only see batteries getting added after there's already a fairly large chunk of renewables on the grid. Before then, there's not much need for the expense. Last stat I heard was that 60% of solar deployments in the US included storage, and that's only going to go up.
And you can see on EIA's map that the Intermountain gas plant under discussion is the largest gas addition this year. The only reason it's gas and not solar and storage is that in 2019 the union was anti-renewables for political reasons:
It would have been better to have solar plus storage. There's far more gas on the grid than is necessary to provide backup to California's current solar+storage capacity.
The point of doing simulations is that you will want to avoid to repeat that which happen in EU. During the worst month of the energy crisis, the price started circulating around 10x of the average month, or phrase it in a different way, a single month costed about the same as a usual whole year. Market prices can easily spike when demand start to exceed supply, even if it only occur for a few weeks.
Having a massive fleet of gas plants available do help with keeping the prices down, but it has it own problems. They need to be built, maintained and staffed, which is independent on how much energy they sell. Where I come that means government subsidizes, paid through taxes and grid fees. Those fees can quickly become bigger than the actually consumption cost for some households. Natural gas power plants also natural gas which contribute to global warming, and unless they use expensive filtering, they also contribute to pollution. When you see the pitch black smoke being released, you know they are burning up the build up of contaminants and imperfectly burned fuel, releasing it into the environment.