[kragen]

Storing multiple days of consumption is feasible but definitely harder than the usual case of storing hours.

The pricing problem sounds like an artifact of how you've structured the market, not a fundamental obstacle to the profitability of intermittent power sources.

An alternative structure that would solve the problem would be for generation operators to buy put options for energy they expect to be able to produce, eliminating the risk of a price collapse. Consumers who want access to such intermittent energy would have to write those put options, which would be limited to particular times on particular days when they could use the energy. Having written the option, they would have to accept the generation operator's decision whether or not to exercise it. Utility-scale storage providers could write puts for low-demand times and buy puts for high-demand times, or they could write puts for low-demand times, write futures contracts for high-demand times, and make up the shortfall on the spot market. This might produce major changes in consumption patterns, but, more likely, would enable continued investment to minimize those changes.

[Paradigma11]

I think this would show the true cost and unviability of the system. Which would be good.

[kragen]

I agree wholeheartedly, though I suspect we may have very different ideas about how much the true cost is and how much unviability there is.

[Paradigma11]

A step forward would be to show for all those solar/wind + battery proposals the expected uptime and distributions given historical weather and how climate change might affect that.

For example this solution would be sufficient and have no blackouts/brownouts per year in 99% of historical data....

[kragen]

We can do a pretty good job of predicting solar and wind production; that's done routinely. What's harder is predicting how load will change when electric energy is nearly free in most daytimes and expensive on calm nights.

[Paradigma11]

That does not matter. You can only postpone washing your clothes for so long and heating in northern winters is non optional. The problem are things like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute

Extreme weather events are what is important and we do have the data.

[kragen]

Heating in particular is an especially easy problem to solve; various kinds of thermal energy storage (sensible-heat, phase-change, TCES) can store heat for later climate-control purposes several orders of magnitude more cheaply than batteries. Washing your clothes is a harder problem, although a stockpile of clean clothes is easily stored.

Predicting how willing Swedes will be 10 years from now to buy extra jeans and install phase-change energy storage in their houses, however, that's beyond anybody's ability.