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In 2025, solar and wind produced more electricity than fossil fuels in the European Union (ourworldindata.org)
submitted 1 day ago by CAVOK@lemmy.world to c/europe@feddit.org
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[–] Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 1 points 11 hours ago

There is a giant hole in the middle where we don’t really have a good option yet, and yeah, it will take something shutting down factories for a few months, but I really don’t see that as remotely realistic until shit gets dire.

That hole is not nearly as big as it seems. Conventional baseload generators (Nuclear and coal) have a similar problem matching the daily demand curve. They can't ramp up and down very quickly to match the curve. Their production has to be matched to the trough, the lowest daily demand, and can't be raised much above that. Baseload generation is the most efficient conventional generation, so they want to push as much load to it as possible.

Grid operators have compensated for this limitation by incentivizing off-peak consumption. They are already using demand-shaping methods to fill the overnight "trough". By raising the trough, the baseload rises, and baseload generation produces a much larger percentage of total power production.

One major problem with these incentives is that they drive consumption overnight, where it can't possibly be met by anything except storage and baseload generation. These "perverse" incentives need to be rolled back a little faster. The cause of our summer overages is not excess solar capacity. Those overages are because of excess overnight demand, requiring excessive baseload generation. Allowing the trough to lower, we reduce 24/7 baseload production, which makes room for additional solar and wind.