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A comment on The booming business of knitting together the world’s electricity grids. Parent comment

Re:The booming business of knitting together the world’s ele... by p_l on Sunday October 17, 2021 @05:44PM (#28900075)
I'd like to see a system that prioritised power purchasing depending on predictability, not instant price.

So first buy goes to power plants (including virtual power plants) that can provide stable power generation given a specific window of time - whether that that's nuclear, hydro, or solar+wind+battery+hydrogen - so long as it's close to zero emissions and will pump out required power no matter the weather over specified time.

Let wind/solar fight over peak power, or consolidate into virtual power plants with storage operators (it should also incentivize buildout of storage, so win-win in my book)

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Re:The booming business of knitting together the world’s ele... by pfdietz on Sunday October 17, 2021 @05:59PM (#28900189)
I would like to see uncertainty and intermittency exposed to consumers, with contracts that allow power to be curtailed in various ways. The less you value consistency, the less you would pay (up to a point.) Or, if you contract for a certain level of reliability, you could stipulate the payment you'd get if that were violated.
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Re:The booming business of knitting together the world’s ele... by p_l on Monday October 18, 2021 @01:53PM (#28908415)
This is already done for industrial consumers that have necessary infrastructure installed - there are also some projects to enable demand response for individual consumers.

The problem is you can't just expose the prices without appropriate infrastructure support on the consumer side.

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Re:The booming business of knitting together the world’s ele... by pfdietz on Monday October 18, 2021 @06:12PM (#28912481)
I was imagining consumers having contracts that stipulate how much the utility can turn their consumption on and off, and how often, and under what circumstances. This wouldn't necessarily require any real time decisions on the part of the consumers, although smart appliances that the utility could control would help. This is already available to a limited extent, with things like remotely controllable water heaters and AC compressors.
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