Earlier quoted context omitted.
Batteries. Or pumped storage. Or lifting a really heavy thing and letting it fall slowly. Or retaining an amount of fossil fuel capacity to be turned on during peak consumption and sun and wind dips while still focusing on renewables and storage with the goal to reduce the duty cycle of peaker plants to zero.
> Or lifting a really heavy thing and letting it fall slowly. I challenge you to run the numbers on this. Or at least read or watch someone who has. Whenever you’re certain you know the answer, it behooves to try to prove yourself wrong. Unsurprisingly, gravity is an extraordinarily weak force. It merely appears otherwise because the total mass of the Earth is literally astronomical at around the 5.9722×10^24 kg mark…
Niagara Falls, to the unaware, uses pumped hydro during night and off-season to account for power dips for when tourists want to look at the waterfall.
For the chemical batteries section, that’s an endorsement: Australia built a system that can handle grid-scale charge and discharge! At this point it’s a matter of buying more batteries and sticking them in, a resourcing problem rather than an engineering one.