Green Energy

A lot of people don’t realize that for the century + of history that we’ve had electricity, 99% of all electricity produced was consumed instantly on the grid. Essentially none of the electricity we’ve ever produced has been stored in batteries, until very recently.

When you further consider the fact that electricity usage varies throughout the day, you have a problem if the electricity produced doesn’t match the electricity consumed at every moment. Historically this meant actual facilities (at power plants and major substations) where the real time demand is monitored (by human workers) and the available power is continuously adjusted to match the demand.

This was usually not a problem because fuel-burning power plants can be throttled up and down (just like a giant car engine) to produce more or less power as needed. Think of it like pressing harder/softer on the accelerator pedal to deal with stronger/weaker headwinds holding back the car, all in order to maintain a constant speed.

For solar it’s more of an issue because you can’t increase or decrease the power you produce; that’s determined completely by the sun. What you can do is disconnect/reconnect solar panels from the grid, or you can find some way to redirect and use up their power (to charge batteries for example, or to store energy as heat somewhere).