Robin Gaster
Introduction
The share of U.S. electricity produced by wind and solar (“variable renewable energy” sources, or VRE) is growing very rapidly now. While it’s possible that firm clean power sources (e.g., nuclear, geothermal, or fusion) will expand dramatically, that seems unlikely barring important technological breakthroughs. VRE is expanding quickly, and will likely become dominant in coming decades.
As a result, variability in electricity supply is becoming a formidable challenge. Some variability is short term—the sun doesn’t shine at night. Some is seasonal—solar generates much less power in winter. And some is unpredictable across a longer timescale: Some weeks, months, or years are just much less windy, for example. These problems are not yet acute, but they will quickly become so, depending on the level and speed of VRE adoption.1
The current focus of both industry and government is on short-duration storage, which helps shift energy within the day and also helps solve a number of technical challenges to the grid. But short-duration storage technologies alone won’t work for much longer duration needs.
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