[HankB99]

> A lot of that power currently gets discarded instead.

How is power discarded? I would expect peaking generation to be cut back or perhaps even base load plants can reduce output. (AFAIK "base load" means they are expected to be kept operating continuously whereas "peaking" is designed to start up when needed and shut down when not.)

[qeternity]

> How is power discarded

It isn’t, not at scale in any traditional sense.

[jillesvangurp]

wind mills are weather vaned (i.e. not broken, but deliberately turned off), solar panels excess energy is curtailed (prevented from going into the grid) and usually transformed into heat on the panels or in inverters.

As for baseload. It's one of those waffly terms that's rarely specified in GW that is needed. Which as it turns out is far less than we used to have given that much of it was replaced with wind and solar over the last decade or so. The real question is how low can we go with this stuff before we need some more solutions. Some would say all the way but the consensus is that the last 5-10% might get very hard and costly.

Either way, having some peaker plants on stand by ready to spin up over the course of hours/days while batteries slowly deplete is probably a good short term compromise. Replacing spinning mass (fly wheels) with batteries seems a particularly popular and very cost effective use for batteries.