[ben_w]

This already occurred back when renewables were nothing more than the fantasies of tree-hugging hippies like my mum.

Before I left the UK, the flat I lived in had two electricity rates, with the night rate being significantly cheaper then the day rate [0]. This meant the water heater and the (electric) storage heaters [1] were powered at night, when schools and offices used no power.

[0] I’m not certain, but I think it was: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_7

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_heater

[makomk]

That has the advantage that the drop in power demand during the night is extremely predictable, so everyone knew that they could reliably get cheap power for heating just by shifting their demand by half a day. (Also, the UK had and still has a fairly large nuclear power fleet which generally runs full-out 24/7, and this kind of demand shifting is a good match for that.) The trouble with renewables is that a lot of the drops in supply are both unpredictable and relatively long, which makes them hardre to deal with.

Also, storage heaters are a real pain to deal with. They're inefficient and not very controllable in terms of the amount of heat they produce.

[ben_w]

> The trouble with renewables is that a lot of the drops in supply are both unpredictable and relatively long, which makes them hardre to deal with.

Not so; when the problem is bad weather rather than the diurnal cycle, even weather forecasting gives more forewarning than emergency stop buttons in power stations, and (given the geographical distribution) the change itself is smoother. On the scale of a continental grid, do you even need to care about anything besides diurnal storage/demand-shifting (as preferred) and seasonal issues?