[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.

[troupo]

> because some actually are, e.g. producing graphite

How much graphite are we producing compared to, well, almost literally everything else?

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

Hydro, geothermal and pumped hydro have the downsides of: you can't build them everywhere. "Bio gas" is a euphemism for, well, burning hydrocarbons (though burning gas is cleaner than burning coal)

> Nowadays, base load is nowhere near as important anymore so as it was decades ago,

This is a patently false statement. If anything, base load is much more important now than decades ago because almost everything we have and depend on requires electricity 24/7.

> industry quitely adapted without any body noticing, unless they wanted to know.

Well, if your only example of such industry is "graphite production", then it sure has. I sampled a few countries here: https://app.electricitymaps.com (note: the time is European, so you have the reversed numbers for "the other side of the world")

                     02:00     14:00
    Germany         43.7 GW   61.9 GW
    France          58.6 GW   59.2 GW
    UK              25.3 GW   31.4 GW
    Central Brazil  47.4 GW   48.2 GW
    
    US
    PMJ Interconn   94.2 GW   88.0 GW
    SW Power Pool   33.6 GW   34.6 GW
    California      21.9 GW   16.2 GW

Oh, look. You need significant baseload everywhere.