They keep it in line by curtailing or switching off generation. The generator typically still gets paid as if it were generating whatever it has available, which is perhaps an issue, but the total generation is reduced to meet the demand.
This is why there is negative pricing, it’s cheaper to sell electricity in the negative than to pay a generator to be offline.
They can’t direct excess generation to batteries if the batteries aren’t there yet. They’re being installed, but the overall capacity is still relatively low. Transferring it to other grids also has limits, and in particular if there’s an excess of solar in one region the neighbouring regions also probably have an excess, so there really is no other option but to curtail.
Nollij@sopuli.xyz 6 months ago
“Batteries” don’t need to be what we commonly think of as storing electricity. They can very much be a different way of storing energy instead. For instance, pumping water up to a tower (or upstream), or splitting water into hydrogen + oxygen (for consumption/combustion later)
TWeaK@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Yes I’m aware of that, and even quite fond of it, but it’s very dependent on geography (as you need a very large body of water so you can’t really just use a water tower) and also incredibly expensive. There are generally more effective and profitable uses for land.
Meanwhile BESS is tiny, something like 30MW per acre.