[beat]

Not forcing... just having market forces encourage good behavior, instead of hiding the underlying cost pressures from them.

Look at it this way. With enough variation over the day, you create a market for storage. Let's say stored electricity costs twice as much as direct, but the price of direct varies by 3x over the course of the day. You've now created an arbitrage market for buying cheap electricity during the day, and selling it at night.

Of course, the more storage gets built, the more the load (and thus cost) increases during the high-availability times, and the lower the selling price during demand spikes. And thus the market attains equilibrium.

The law of supply and demand is a marvelous thing sometimes.

[fromthestart]

I understand your point, but GP is talking about avoiding the need for batteries by pricing people out of the market instead. If you're not using batteries, supply during dark or windless hours is inelastic, because there's nothing being generated - in other words you're not solving the problem and you can't really charge anyone anyway because there's nothing to deliver.

[WalterBright]

> GP is talking about avoiding the need for batteries by pricing people out of the market instead.

Nope, I talked about incentivizing consumers to shift their demand based on a volatile price. I pointed out that much of this can be accomplished without need of batteries.

For example, have the hot water tank heat up water higher than normal when electricity is cheaper, and lower when electricity is more expensive. Hot water tanks lose heat very slowly, this could result in never needing to heat water during the expensive times.

It's a heluva lot cheaper than having a battery do it.

[perl4ever]

The water in the tank is functioning as a battery in that case.

[WalterBright]

Yes, of course.

[beat]

"Windless" is greatly overrated, for two reasons. First, utility-scale wind is built hundreds of feet in the air, not on the ground. Wind is much steadier there. And it's built in carefully selected locations for steady behavior.

Second, it's not a single location. Wind may be lower in one location, but strong in another location 50 miles away. The idea that wind goes completely dead all at once across statewide areas is not how wind actually works.

[perl4ever]

"The idea that wind goes completely dead all at once across statewide areas is not how wind actually works."

The idea that wind currents are uncorrelated across geographical areas, even on the scale of states, is not how wind actually works.