I strongly believe people and organizations would accommodate, just like during winter times in the north of Sweden one wears a different coat than in the south. But with the current system one isn’t incentivized to adapt power consumption to cost and hence more & more costs are made to build power lines from the north to feed the south of Sweden. And the same for standby fossil fuel plants.
Also prepaid electricity bills with automatic cutoff when exceeding, remaining 1 Ampere. Similar to the days when homes/tents would be heated by burning wood, during summertime one needs to collect enough firewood for the whole winter. Different times but in concept nothing new.
A bakery for example will produce bread at a loss if they have a contract and the value of the contract is higher than a temporary increase in electricity. If you allow market prices to rise unlimited, the price will increase to the point where breaking a contract is cheaper than not producing. Some companies in the last crisis did invoke force majeure when prices got too high, which as a society is a very poor way to incentivize behavior.
The result is that voters will elect a government that solves the problem, rather than change behavior. We have also seen that in eu for the last few elections. The Swedish elections in particular has been dominated around the topic of energy.
Hydro energy would help to keep the market stable in Sweden if the value of the natural resource would also stay in Sweden. Right now that resource is being primarily sold off by private actors through exports to countries like Germany and Denmark, thus doing little to keep the market stable for Swedish consumers. The government could nationalize that resource, deeming it as a natural resource owned by the Swedish citizens and thus any revenue gained from selling electricity would automatically go to Swedish citizens to pay their energy bills.
> Market prices in the electricity grid do not work to incentivized lower consumption, and the latest few energy crisis in EU has demonstrated that clearly.
The prices haven’t changed much, less than factor 2. Far too little to see any change in consumption indeed. If bread is too expensive to produce during some periods switch to Knäckebröd or Müsli products that, now I think of it, are Swedish probably for the reason that they can be stored for prolonged periods and replace bread when that is unavailable in harsh wintertimes.
> right now Hydro energy is being primarily sold off by private actors
It happens all over the world, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons is an alternative that historically has been successful.
If we imagine a society where production become based on the availability of energy through optimal weather, we would have to ask what the cost of that adaptation is and if alternative solutions, say nuclear energy, would be cheaper. The best adaption can simply be to use the correct tool for the job, a tool which may be more optimal in some climates but less so in others. If there is something humans excel at it is to adapt to nature and produce local solutions to local weather conditions.
First would be to be clear and unambiguous when it comes to building gas/oil thermal power plants in order to deal with the intermittence problem of solar and wind. Political strategies in wind and solar is built on trust, and people will quickly become unconvinced when politicians are dishonest/ambiguous about the requirements that is needed to support a grid with a high ratio of wind and solar.
Using fossil fuels as the reserve energy for when the weather is bad allows the producers of reserve energy to demand high market prices, to the point where a whole month in EU can cost as much as a full year. Even if solar and wind would put the grid costs to zero for 90% of the time, it doesn't make the cost for the consumer any lower if the fossil fueled "reserve energy" can increase their price by 10x. Selling solar and wind require some kind of solution here.
Reserve energy also want to be paid if they are expected to stand-by 365 days a week, which is a big reason why EU subsidizes to fossil fueled thermal power plants are not decreasing when the ratio of wind and solar goes up. That costs is then added as a grid fee/taxes, hiding the true cost. Paying first to keep the fossil fueled power plants warm and ready when solar and wind is producing, and then pay them a second time for whatever the market price is when they are producing is a very costly way to operate a grid.
And last is the transmission costs. Switching between multiple different energy sources depending on the weather has a high demand for a very flexible infrastructure in terms of transmitting energy from where it is being produced to where it is being consumed. In south of Sweden as an example, the cost of transmission infrastructure and the cost of reserve energy is now the majority of consumers electricity bill, with cost associated with production of energy being a small minority.
Solving those issues is what will convince people of the viability of wind and solar.