[hyperhello]

The main load is during the day when the sun shines anyway, and then the seasonally changing periods before and after, basically ramping when people are getting up, then dropping off while people are going to bed. On the west side of a continent, the power for the ramp can come from the east because the sun shines earlier there; on the west the sun shines later and the east can get power. At night, there are still nuclear and other plants, and it is very foreseeable that installations of ground battery technology will have been in place well before twentieth century plants are retired.

[pdq]

High load in the day during sunlight is mostly true for summer heat, but in the winter you have cold evenings which requires base load or storage, combined with solar angle/efficiency being worse in the winter.

[nicoburns]

> in the winter you have cold evenings which requires base load or storage

If the energy is for heating then there is always the option of storing the energy as heat. Which is much simpler than storing electricity.

[Broken_Hippo]

Actually, the US uses more power during the day in the summer - there is a dropoff in the night for both summer and winter. Night time use is somewhat similar. [1]

Cooling takes more energy than warming, so the summer daytime use is higher. Summer = warm evenings. I'm from Indiana - it was almost always cooler at 10am than 7pm, even in the winter. It takes time to heat up or cool down. I'll also mention that nights and weekends use less power because business and industry tend to shut down during these times.

Which would somewhat logically mean that despite the efficiency being worse during winter, it isn't as much of a strain because power demands are less.

[1]https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915

[ssl-3]

Yeah, it's imperfect.

Does that mean that it is untenable?