Re:Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil ...
by dv_dt on Friday July 12, 2019 @04:35PM
(#20424256)
Perhaps a better statement would be that the duck curve represents unmet need in the evening once solar is in the mix. Without storage, you can add more solar, but into the evening that can only help so much without also adding some amount of storage to offset that available power into a time it is still needed.
Re:Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil ...
by ZeroGravitas on Friday July 12, 2019 @04:46PM
(#20424347)
It's generally not even unmet need. Usually the duck curve hits at times well below the actual annual peak so there's enough generation capacity available.
But some of that capacity is slow to respond and need time to ramp up, which may be longer than the time taken for solar to ramp down.
The simple solution to this is to start those slow to ramp sources a little earlier and throw away their excess energy output.
Obviously that's wasteful, but as long as the generation mix is overall cheaper and less carbon intensive with solar added, which it is, then it's not a big deal. And obviously as soon as you add storage then they can help these sources ramp more efficently at first and expand to replace them entirely over time.
All in all it's one of the least problematic problems that ever got its own name.
The demand isn't greater in the evening, the relative demand, after you subtract all the energy provided by solar, is in the evening, during periods of the year when demand is low but solar supply is high.
It's like someone cured cancer and then someone came up with the llama curve, showing that some of the people who survived cancer got pushed off cliffs by llamas ten years later and everyone was like "Oh no, that cancer cure has caused the llama curve, what will we do?"