Bus Megathread

[danbrotherston]

Actually, for every Kilo Watt Hour of electricity produced by renewables. (Wind or Solar), we require the same amount of production in the form of "instant on" to cover when the solar and wind aren't working (which is quite often).  The best performing instant source is natural gas.  That is why you have seen so many built in the past.  Milton, Brampton etc. They keep them close to use to point of consumption to reduce transmission costs.

Some misconceptions here....

First, no, you don't need every renewable generator to provided like for like with an "instant on" generator. Because while the wind might not blow on any particular windmill, rarely on planet earth does all the wind stop everywhere all at once. The point of having a distributed grid is that if the wind isn't blowing in Texas, solar farms in Arizona can pickup the load, for example.

Second, you can manage load instead of just supply. Instead of assuming that every electrical load can be turned on at every moment all the time, you can reduce loads in time of low production. This is easiest to do for large scale consumers (a smelting plant could turn their smelter off at times of low production in return for a lower price on power), but also possible at smaller scale (we already do this---your power is cheaper at different times to encourage you to use less of it at times when power is harder to generate) and there are even more advanced options, your EV could be programmed to supply the grid with power at times of low production and to charge at times of high production.

Third, natural gas, isn't the "best performing instant source" it's merely the one that is most frequently used. Hydro is just as capable of being turned on and off, and in fact, is used in hydro pumped storage for exactly this purpose. Hydro is better because for gas plants to be "instant on" the must be kept hot, which requires energy, but hydro doesn't require that. And of course by far the best form of "peak" storage is actually grid scale battery storage, which is actually instant on, unlike all the others, and also can store excess power during times of excess renewable production.

Yes the point of Ontario building these gas peaker plants is to provide instant on replacement for some enough of the renewable generation in order to stabilize the grid, but that was only done because it was the most convenient option, not because it was the best. That was the whole point of the discussion we had about hydro, that it can be used instead of gas, since Ontario has hydro in abundance and it is a renewable source itself. There are a large number of options for maintaining a stable grid with renewables and there is no one simple answer, it depends on the resources and strengths of each individual location.

Also, you mean kilowatts, not kilowatt-hours.