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Hence solar, which generates until sunset, paired with ~4 hours of storage, which carries the grid through peak evening load until most folks are off to bed and grid load declines rapidly.

https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/confronting-duck-curve-... (https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_artic... for this illustrated; batteries replace the natural gas ramp)

https://youtu.be/P_d0x8uG6kE



And then it's a rainy day and everybody stays home from work because there's no power? Or we spin up a bunch of dirty natural gas?

This also doesn't address the seasonal changes in supply. We're realistically talking about creating energy infrastructure (and then maintaining it) that ulaverages maybe 20% capacity.

I just feel like solar proponents like to completely ignore the very real unsolved issues because solar+batteries is tidy if you don't think too much about it.


Natural gas fired peaker plants will continue to be a crucial part of our electrical system indefinitely. They allow generation to be rapidly spun up and down to stabilize the grid; other generation sources can't react as quickly, or sometimes can't react at all. And natural gas isn't very dirty.




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