only natural gas plants can do this. a coal plant cannot spin up just for the night and turn back off when the sun comes up - it's incredibly inefficient and probably causes more premature wear/tear too.
The big issue is what's called "ramp rate" - how fast can output power be increased or decreased? This tends to be around 1% to 3% of capacity per minute. See Figure B-2 in [1], which is a detailed discussion of how to improve your coal-fired power plant's ramp rate.
Natural gas plants have much higher ramp rates, and for batteries, it's under a second. Nuclear plants can be ramped up and down, slowly, but since it's all capital cost, cutting output raises the price of the power.
"Increased rates of component life consumption due to thermal fatigue, mechanical fatigue and wear caused by differential thermal expansion comprise the bulking of cycling (costs)," according to the International Energy Agency's Coal Industry Advisory Board.
"Every time a power plant is turned on and off, the boiler, steam lines, turbine and auxiliary components go through unavoidably large thermal and pressure stresses," the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) wrote in a report on cycling costs published in April 2012.
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https://www.reuters.com/article/business/energy/to-survive-c...
Batteries are coming, and will solve it, but it will still take time for them to be come cheap enough.
Only once we have ~7 days of storage (~100 GWh of storage) will we be able to get rid of the last fossil plants.
Other countries are better positioned. e.g. UK has really spiky wind energy. Right this second more than half the grid is wind. Which is both cool and problematic for managing the grid.
Grid scale cheap storage would dramatic help manage that chaos
For Europe to get rid of more fossils without putting the grid at risk we will need more storage.
That and low energy density storage located at sea with the turbines.
Even if we handwave all the science needed to build batteries big enough to power cities for days, I don't think it's realistic to handwave the science needed to power a city for weeks. We don't even have enough oil for that.
"Power when it is inconvenient" is pretty much the basis for a modern society.
Heavy clouds and zero wind, for weeks? That's a once-a-century freak event. Just build gas peaker plants if you are worried about it. You could even add carbon capture, but constructing it might emit more than it will ever capture...
I assume you never tried measuring the output of a solar panel when it's cloudy. It's 10-15% of a sunny day. Closer to not working than working.
On a rainy day that drops closer to 20%.
As an aside - cloudy days avoid a problem I have with shade. In winter, at 3:30pm, the sun goes behind a tree and my production plummets to near zero. If there's cloud cover the sunlight is far more dispersed and there's no "shade".
And you’re still able to power your entire home? What if the rain lasts for a few days, which is pretty common in many places.
I did have one rainy day back in the middle of Winter that was 16% but that will end up being literally the worst day of the year.
Our energy grid can't currently handle the ability to charge electric haulers locally at any scale let alone to move an entire city's worth of energy, so the solution is not to 85x the national electric grid all at once.
But to give them due credit, they believed in this vision and put in the hard work to make sure it became true.
That's literally CCP state controlled communism !! More specifically, that's what the The Gansu–Zhejiang UHVDC project has as an overhead transmission line length (2,370 km in international units).
* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014206152...
* https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241113-will-chinas-ultr...
A common battery for grid level storage is pumped hydro - that is, use the peak power during the day(s) to push water from the bottom of an elevation to the top, and hold it there - bonus points if it captures water delivered from other solar processes (evaporation -> rain)
The overwhelming majority of generation and storage is best deployed at the point of use.
Grid scale anything, is a massive inefficiency.
The only reason grid and city scale is so prevalent in public discourse is because this is the only electricity the utility is paid for, and they are very actively impeding any other solution.
In the US, there is a very large inventory of flat roof industrial buildings, in the industrial parks that are using huge amounts of electricity. Covering all of those roofs with solar (especially here in the west US) would prevent a tremendous amount of grid scale generation, and implementing storage there would eliminate a large part of the transmission line upgrades the utilities are calling for.
The biggest problem in the US isn't technical, it's the governments desire to primarily support the solutions that are best at serving utility shareholder returns, instead of the technically superior solutions.
It's quite common in Australia for commercial and residential.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=45956
If you shut down by day, it can take multiple hours for it to be able to provide full load... and multiple hours for it to shut down cleanly. During this time it is producing power at less than optimal rates and/or using the fossil fuels to keep the wheels spinning and in sync with the grid so that they don't have to go through a phase matching period.
(aside for coal - note that it takes more than 12 hours for a coal plant to get running from a cold start)
Wind also helps since wind makes more power at night, as does demand which is dramatically lower at night.
For coal, Great. Making coal economical is excellent. We should have banned it worldwide 20 years ago.
There's a good number of 'em: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Pumped-storage_hydroe...
https://www.ferc.gov/media/licensed-pumped-storage-projects-...
You'll see that most of them are in the Appalachian mountains and in the Sierra mountain range.
The one in Missouri is one of the interesting ones that isn't in either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taum_Sauk_Hydroelectric_Power_...
> The Taum Sauk pumped storage plant is a power station in the St. Francois mountain region of Missouri, United States about 90 miles (140 km) south of St. Louis near Lesterville, Missouri, in Reynolds County.
It has a hydraulic head of 860 feet and that represents the challenge - you need to find places in the US where you can get several hundred feet of elevation in a short distance.
Hypothetically, lets build one in Minnesota... Taum Sauk Mountain is the highest point in Missouri. The highest point in Minnesota is Eagle Mountain (in the boundary waters - you can't build there, pretend we can) ... the elevation to the top os 550 feet (about half what Taum Sauk provides) over 3.5 miles (Taum Sauk is just over 1 mile). ( https://maps.app.goo.gl/vHfWarwubaLvsf5z7 )
Much of the US is too flat for it to be useful.
That makes 300B
Eu pricing