While its name -- the duck curve -- sounds pretty innocuous, it's a serious problem with integrating solar into the power grid. Two experts take a closer look at the duck curve and how energy-storage technology is the answer to unlocking its long-term potential to be a bigger part of the world's energy future.
A full transcript follows the video.
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This video was recorded on Dec. 20, 2018.
Nick Sciple: Let's talk about some of the challenges that we're going to see in solar over time. The first thing I want to call out is called the duck curve. Traditionally, what we see with power generation is that it starts to tick up after the sun rises, folks go to work. It rises throughout the day while people are at work, then reaches a peak right after folks go home, say, six, seven. Folks are home making dinner, turn on the air conditioning, all those sorts of things. The duck curve is that middle of the day where we start to see a surge or increase in energy demand. Once you get a certain amount of solar into your grid, you start to see demand from your traditional energy sources, whether it's hydrocarbons or otherwise, really start going down. The sun goes up during the day, you reach your peak of solar production, so you don't need to use another energy source.
Where it becomes an issue is when the sun goes down and that solar power rolls off the grid, you really have to ramp up very quickly your hydrocarbon or other energy-producing sources to meet that demand. It's led to some complications for utilities navigating how to shift between those demands, particularly with energy sources, say, like coal, that are really difficult to bring on quickly intraday.
Jason Hall: Yeah, especially coal. These baseload power generation facilities, these legacy facilities, were never intended to be able to handle these really quick surges like that. They just weren't built to be able to do that. This has been a major challenge, it really has.
The thing with the duck curve that's interesting is that, if you go back four or five years ago when this first started becoming a major concern, especially where I live here in California where we have a massive amount of solar, huge populations, so it's really the perfect environment for something like the duck curve to happen and to be a problem, batteries weren't even really on the radar as a long-term solution. But the technology has improved as global scale of manufacturing batteries has grown and the costs have come down. It's really become an interesting potential solution. Energy storage, great big batteries, as Elon Musk has called it, has an amazing amount of power to fill this need.