▲ | PaulKeeble 7 hours ago | |
There are two aspects to this that are part of the way this will play out in the future. 1) More storage is required to spread the solar/wind power out over the day. Most countries are well behind on grid storage. Its more common in domestic solar installs and that depends significantly on policies on import/exports. 2) Green power will always require over provisioning. For example in Australia they get about 1.5x the Solar power daily in Summer compared to Winter and the system needs to be designed for the winter which involves more storage and more production. In the summer this means there is excess power. What I think will happen is that there will be periods of almost free power when there is excess and there will be periods of very expensive power where grids pay for people to reduce their usage, we are seeing this in the UK already at ~50% renewables. There will be businesses that will make sense to run when power is cheap in the near future, ideally I would hope maybe energy intensive hydrocarbon fuel creation from CO2 in the atmosphere and desalination but a lot of business will become competitive is power is nearly or actually free. The future looks very different and curtailment is a sign the market and systems haven't yet caught up to the reality of renewable energy. |