Because storage is incredibly expensive and thus, for every GW of installed solar capacity you need and an exact another GW reserve capacity from other sources for the rare times when the sun doesn't shine (like, for example, during the night or during large spells of bad weather).

Besides being intermittent, solar and wind are not really dispatchable, that is, the grid operator doesn't have many levers to control the power output of a plan, and thus this imposes more stress on the other dispatchable power sources.

Some of those backup sources are not very flexible and take a long time to turn on and off, like coal based, and a lot of nuclear plants. Others, can be brought up online, ramped up and down faster, like gas turbines and hydro.

But other than gas turbine, most other firm sources economics are based on a predictable demand and a minimum duty cycle. A nuclear plant is very capital expensive, have an excellent capacity factor, but, it can't pay itself and its investor if it is not going to be run most of the time.

Base load is cheaper, because you dilute fixed costs, peak load is more expensive, because you sell less units to dilute your fixed costs.

Despite whatever the renewable lobby says, experience has shown over and over, that after a certain proportion of intermittent generation in a grid, large frequency excursions, deteriorated economics and frequent load shedding events are rather the norm than the exception.

AC grids are stupidly complex beasts. Most politicians, journalists and investors that drive our current discourse on the grid don't have even the most basic pre-requirements to understand it.

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gpm 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is all true except for the fact that storage is not incredibly expensive anymore, which invalidates every single conclusion you reach. Storage is now reasonably affordable, and the trend suggests it will soon be incredibly cheap.

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spwa4 an hour ago | parent [-]

Which will make the problems of the rich disappear and the problems of the poor and the state ... worse. (because the costs of the state are paying off loans for expensive generation, costs which they recover from the poor)

	▲	triceratops an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The state can default on the loans too. It sucks and it will make future financing more difficult. But it remains an option. No such thing as risk-free lending.

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londons_explore 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

All these problems become solved if you have realtime market pricing.

Nobody would bother to install rooftop solar if daytime power was super cheap on every sunny day, yet expensive at night when their solar isn't working.

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kryogen1c 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Wouldn't this model price out poor people? Doesn't that mean the most vulnerable people cant afford the services when they need them most, ie max hot/cold?

Changing the utility to a market sort of defeats the point of trying to optimize the utility.

	▲	londons_explore an hour ago \| parent [-]
		A typical user still pays the same on average in a market. Just they might pay more in some hours and less in others. Some market systems have gotten bad press over huge bills (eg. Texas), but that only happens when only a small chunk of users participate in the market, whilst others are on fixed pricing and therefore don't care about usage. When everyone participates, supply and demand make sure the price never goes super high, simply because there are enough people who will turn off stuff to save money.

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k1musab1 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This exact issue lead me to follow the grid orchestration research out of the Oak Ridge Laboratory. The building blocks already exist to enable this. An interconnected smart network of renewables can become a stabilizing force in the overall grid. Off-peak storage would still be required, but would no longer need to be "stabilizing" (turbine or other similar generator), and can be simple batteries.