The massive deployment of wind and solar will turn you, the humble homeowner, into a critical actor in the operation of the US power grid. Are you ready?
The other force, ironically enough, is the massive deployment of renewable power—the best way to fight climate change and avoid these kinds of disasters. But this will demand a fundamental rethinking of how the grid operates. Gas and coal power plants generate continuous power by burning fuel, and how much they burn can be modulated based on the demand for electricity. But the generation of solar and wind energy fluctuates. The sun doesn’t shine at night, and turbines don’t turn without wind.
Yet by 6 pm, the sun is going down, and solar panels aren’t producing much power. And the wind can stop blowing at any time, leaving a deficit between demand and generation. As renewable sources take over the energy mix, utilities won’t be able to quickly spin up more supply by burning fossil fuels. So a future grid that runs on an often intermittent supply of energy from renewables will need to be far more flexible to compensate.
The same principle would apply to heating. In some colder areas of the US, demand during the winter spikes at 6 or 7 in the morning, when people are waking up in freezing houses. Here people could start to preheat their homes at 4 am. Sanders envisions that local officials might also tweak the operation of critical infrastructure to coincide with the availability of renewable energy—maybe a region would time the treatment of its drinking water to when there's a lot of solar power available.
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