| Right, this is new hype for an old concept. It's mostly load management, with some batteries. Calling this "virtual power plants" is deceptive. It doesn't generate power. It just moves the load around in time a bit. There are limits to how much benefit that can yield. At some point, customers will want to heat their water or charge their car. Much of this is a attempt to deal with the problem of intermittent wind power. Wind power varies about 4:1 over the course of a day. Here's today's graph for CAISO, for the West Coast.[1] And for PJM, for the East Coast[2]. Both had about a 4:1 range today, and for both, it bottomed out about now, in late morning. A huge tie line from California to Pennsylvania would not have helped. Peak wind output today was before dawn, which is the lowest period for load. At least with solar you know when there's going to be output. But even that can vary about 2:1 from day to day in PJM's area.[3] The important question to ask is, if the grid has N hours of storage, how often is there a power shortage? What should N be? A few hours? A few days? [1] https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html [2] https://dataviewer.pjm.com/dataviewer/pages/public/wind.jsf [3] https://dataviewer.pjm.com/dataviewer/pages/public/solar.jsf |
There is some amount of distributed generation out there as well, in the form of either oil or natural gas backup generators, which can be used similarly as batteries.
Edit to add: This wasn't meant as a disagreement with your point. I don't think the existence of a small amount of generation changes the fundamental equation you pointed out on this.