Traditional "baseload" plants are a product of cost and engineering. Nuclear and baseload coal plants are designed to deliver maximum power for minimum cost. Due to engineering constraints, this means that it's hard to scale the output up or down to meet changes in demand (hours? days?). So short-term demand is dealt with by "peaker" plants, which are very expensive. They're less efficient, and they aren't always in use, which means tying up capital in something you don't always need.
I think of solar/wind as a sort of weird baseload, with a wide variance in output that is not controllable and not always predictable in the short term.
Where I think we have a real opportunity is the application of modern software to this unpredictable power grid, by pricing power dynamically at a rate that matches the fluctuations in both supply and demand. At this point, building storage to stabilize the grid is arbitrage, a market imperative. Independent storage systems can buy power from the grid when it's cheap (sunny, windy days), and sell it when it's expensive (cloudy days with no wind and high demand). Then it's just a numbers game, and the market itself will provide the right amount of storage.
This gets more fun as electric cars become more and more common. Every electric car is just a big battery, right? Plug it into this smart grid, and you can make a few bucks using the same arbitrage as big power companies. Sell the power in your car!
I think of solar/wind as a sort of weird baseload, with a wide variance in output that is not controllable and not always predictable in the short term.
Where I think we have a real opportunity is the application of modern software to this unpredictable power grid, by pricing power dynamically at a rate that matches the fluctuations in both supply and demand. At this point, building storage to stabilize the grid is arbitrage, a market imperative. Independent storage systems can buy power from the grid when it's cheap (sunny, windy days), and sell it when it's expensive (cloudy days with no wind and high demand). Then it's just a numbers game, and the market itself will provide the right amount of storage.
This gets more fun as electric cars become more and more common. Every electric car is just a big battery, right? Plug it into this smart grid, and you can make a few bucks using the same arbitrage as big power companies. Sell the power in your car!