Think of it this way: in a conventional fuel-driven grid, your generation (supply) is dispatchable. If you need more electrical generation, you can crank up your coal, oil, gas, or nuclear-fueled generators (or hydro capacity) to meet that demand. Since demand is largely predictable based on known parameters (weather, day of week, season), even slow-to-cycle generation (e.g., coal and nuclear) can offer pretty good demand-matching, with the difference made up by other options. Gas and hydro can respond to load shifts in seconds to minutes, vs. hours for the others.
Under a largely renewables scenario, your generation is not dispatchable. Your options are:
⚫ Retain some dispatchable capacity: hydro (conventional or pumped storage), biofuels, synfuels, geothermal, nuclear, conventional fossil fuels.
⚫ Utilize storage. Batteries, thermal energy storage, banked capacity (e.g., excess heating or cooling utilized later), pumped hydro, compressed air energy storage (CAES), flywheels, capacitors, electricity-to-fuel. All have limitations, most are cost-prohibitive.
⚫ Load shifting. This generally goes by the terms "demand response" or "demand side management". Effectively it's the inverse of the present model: rather than shift supply to meet demand, you're shifting demand to meet (an inelastic) supply. Typically this involves large industrial uses and customers.
Tino Andeson's reporting here is horrible. It's sadly all too commonplace in general coverage of energy issues.
Even in the quote, the author only talked about reselling and not releasing energy back into the grid - even though the whole rest of the article suggests otherwise. This looks to me as if he might not know himself but didn't want to let go of the catchy headline.
It's a demand-dispatch system.
Think of it this way: in a conventional fuel-driven grid, your generation (supply) is dispatchable. If you need more electrical generation, you can crank up your coal, oil, gas, or nuclear-fueled generators (or hydro capacity) to meet that demand. Since demand is largely predictable based on known parameters (weather, day of week, season), even slow-to-cycle generation (e.g., coal and nuclear) can offer pretty good demand-matching, with the difference made up by other options. Gas and hydro can respond to load shifts in seconds to minutes, vs. hours for the others.
Under a largely renewables scenario, your generation is not dispatchable. Your options are:
⚫ Retain some dispatchable capacity: hydro (conventional or pumped storage), biofuels, synfuels, geothermal, nuclear, conventional fossil fuels.
⚫ Utilize storage. Batteries, thermal energy storage, banked capacity (e.g., excess heating or cooling utilized later), pumped hydro, compressed air energy storage (CAES), flywheels, capacitors, electricity-to-fuel. All have limitations, most are cost-prohibitive.
⚫ Load shifting. This generally goes by the terms "demand response" or "demand side management". Effectively it's the inverse of the present model: rather than shift supply to meet demand, you're shifting demand to meet (an inelastic) supply. Typically this involves large industrial uses and customers.
Tino Andeson's reporting here is horrible. It's sadly all too commonplace in general coverage of energy issues.