Policy foundations for affordable, reliable, lower-emissions power, absent NE'G' nonsense

Consider the results of a Californian study on seasonality by MIT in a paper titled'The $2.5 trillion reason we can't rely on batteries to clean up the grid', James Temple, MIT Technology Review, 27/7/2018.

For solar power especially, there are large sun intensity variations between the summer and winter solstices. Polar region variations are obviously large, but even in sunny California, they're large too.

For reliability, these variations require massive solar power 'over-production' in summer, massive battery storage of it, and massive battery storage depletion in winter, to ensure year-round reliable power.

There are seasonal cycles for wind, too. Seasonality further multiplies generation and storage capacity needed for reliability, especially for solar, and its costs.

In California, the MIT study estimated that, if solar and wind each provided 40% of power generation, in summer total generation would be around 12 times as much as in winter.

That's lots of excess renewables generation capacity in summer, plus similar battery storage capacity, to ensure adequate reliable winter power.

See chart 1.

Chart 1

Clean air task force analysis of CAISO data, 'The $2.5 trillion reason we can't rely on batteries to clean up the grid', James Temple, MIT Technology Review, 27/7/2018.