Important Info
What really angers me is the cynical propaganda that has been spread by the fossil fuel proponents that the electrical grid can’t be stable without “base load” from thermal power plants. This lie must be buried as soon as possible by research studies and as much proof as possible by real world experience. As an alternative the base load can and should be hydroelectric power from dams.
This article says curtailment, but this word implies that as solar is curtailed, the power is forever lost and will cost companies by reducing the plant capacity factor. The plants are financed on the ability of the owner to have a capacity factor that will enable the plant to pay for itself. This curtailment discourages financing. In order to prevent curtailment the renewable power should be required to generate green hydrogen instead of curtailment. This can be stored and used to generate power at night, or sold.
<< …the researchers note that the PV plants should all be equipped with battery energy storage systems (BESS) and should be optimally oversized. They claim that their proposed baseline scenario would also bring down electricity costs without having any major environmental impact on agricultural land.
They said a storage/curtailment strategy could allow solar to “meet any load profiles as reliably as the thermoelectric plants used today,” with existing technologies (BESS, smart inverters, and remote control) and without a change in electrical grid architecture. The only condition would be that BESS/smart inverter-equipped PV plants should be centrally controlled by the country’s grid operator and managed by power distributors or aggregators. >>
<< Their 2060 scenario would require flexible PV plants to cover a maximum of 0.85% of Italy’s land surface. By 2060, they expect that utility-scale PV and batteries should cost no more than €350 per megawatt and €90 per kilowatt-hour. >>