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WanderingEng · 2903 days ago · link · · parent · post: Coal is dead, because nobody wants to build coal-fired power plants.
It's definitely a Big Problem. The challenge with flexible load is finding load that's flexible and manipulating it to the advantage of the system. Some load can be shifted pretty simply. My refrigerator is currently running. If it had waited five more minutes to run, my food would still be cold and safe. But it will need to run eventually. Storage is the potential miracle here. Despite press to the contrary, batteries aren't economical today to store energy for any significant length of time. They've been deployed economically for extremely short duration energy shifting, seconds to maybe a minute. I think they need to come down in price by an order of magnitude to really change anything. Maybe they will; it'd be great if they did.