Too Cheap to Keep

Eric Wesoff recently wrote a great article arguing that the best path forward for the grid in North America is to over-install clean, cheap wind and solar and literally throw away excess energy. He wrote that there is a great deal of skepticism surrounding renewable energy’s ability to deliver reliable power all year around, because a grid dominated by these resources will develop a duck curve and won’t be able to stay balanced. Then, he says:

Fortunately it turns out the duck curve is largely a manifestation of conventional thinking.

I love this and highly recommend reading the article and following Eric. The idea is to build enough renewable energy to get us where we need to be most of the time, and expect that there is going to be upwards of 30% to 35% spill during peak production times. A lot of people are arguing for and building grid-scale batteries to store this excess energy. But Eric argues that we don’t need to store the spill - instead, we can figure out how to use it in real time. In my opinion, this is exactly where distributed energy resources (DERs) and smart software systems come in. We need price signals to orchestrate and engage DERs and demand response. We need local markets coupled with system-level markets to manage trading in real time. Eric points out that

The cheapest form of flexibility we have on the power system is price signals combined with demand response.

This is so true. I’m a big fan of batteries, and I believe we need an “all of the above” approach, but I do think many of us in this technology space, especially as engineers, tend to over-focus on solving problems with tech and hardware solutions. Engineering can’t fix this alone.

You can find more discussion about this on LinkedIn here.