Western US Grid Can Handle More Renewable Energy Than Previously Predicted

[Daox]

This is good news indeed.

The researchers found that one way to keep the number of new backup power plants to a minimum is to expand the geographical area that renewable energy is gathered from, says Debra Lew, the NREL project manager in charge of the study. [...] The NREL study estimated that drawing only on local resources would increase variability on the grid by a factor of 50. That's "a huge increase," Lew says, too big for a local utility to balance using backup power and other resources. If you aggregate resources over several states, the increase is less than a factor of two.

Western US Grid Can Handle More Renewable Energy Than Previously Predicted : TreeHugger

[Phantom]

Great I love seeing that groups are realizing that renewables can be used along with current power plants.

This means that utilities would contact some of their biggest customers during the few hours a year when they can't match demand and ask them to reduce their consumption

What might work better is using the CooresTec batteries for the times that demand is higher than supply.
New battery could change world, one house at a time