[brucethemoose2]

I have been told that the big problem is actually transmission and load scaling.

Energy storage is a big part of that, but really boring, non headline grabbing things like better/more transmission lines and slightly more sane usage patterns make up the low hanging fruit.

[TheLoafOfBread]

Solar/wind power plant + storage at the same place and consider it as one unit. Then you have a powerplant which can supply electricity on demand (as gas, coal, nuclear can) and you don't need to worry about rebuilding whole grid.

[brucethemoose2]

But ultimately you still need to move the electricity.

I know in Texas, we are largely making more wind/solar power than we can even transmit. There are projects to address this, but they are slow.

[cbmuser]

You still have the unresolved problem that wind and solar do not produce on-demand.

Any other market would have dropped a production machine already that does not produce on-demand.

It's like having a worker that only works when they feel working and be it 3 AM in the morning. No company boss would accept such a behavior in the long term.

For wind and solar, it's just widely accepted and rather than accepting that you can't build an electricity grid on top of unreliable generation, people try to come up with all kind of weird solutions to force a solution based on solar and wind.

[hef19898]

And seem to fail to understand that industrial electricity demand is flexible nowadays. And has been for almost a decade now.

So to put it in your words, yes, companies are absolutely accepting that kind of behaviour from their electricity suppliers. Companies are even benefiting greatly from it.

[troupo]

They are not as flexible as stopping all production when there's a quiet night and wind+solar produce 0 electricity.

[hef19898]

Hard to say absolutely, because some actually are, e.g. producing graphite as the rest heat can keep the process going for quite a while. And, more importantly, because we do not have 100% renewable grids yet.

Hydro does provide power without wind or sun so, as does bio gas, geothermal, pumped hydro.

Nowadays, base load is nowhere near as important anymore so as it was decades ago, industry quitely adapted without any body noticing, unless they wanted to know.