Aside from that, price incentives should come into play. Everyone charges their cars and electronics during the day when power is cheapest. If you want to run your equipment at night you have to pay more.
An interesting side effect may be that it could encourage us to return to more natural sleeping schedules, based on the actual time when the sun is in the air. Of course that does pose problems in areas that are very close to one of the two poles
2) Timing demand to peak solar moments. When the sun is brightest, why not start heating your well-insulated home & start your washer and stuff?
3) A bit of local battery storage could help the grid immensely, especially wrt appliances like electric cookers (induction or whatnot), toasters & kettles etc. These usually draw a lot of power for a pretty short amount of time -- and to make matters worse, everyone uses them around roughly the same moment around sunset. I think this is where the value in things like the PowerWall truly lies.
I guess when those three things are in place, it should be a lot easier to provide power outside of peak solar moments.
First off, 100% solar is not likely to win out unless it's a small grid on an island. Any realistic grid will have wind and solar and hydro. New nuclear is already far more expensive than lithium ion batteries + solar, so that's out of contention for new builds unless a government is trying to subsidize the industries that are companions to fission power (nuclear submarines, etc.)
Among the ways to time shift electrical demand:
- lithium ion batteries. These will likely be only 5-6 cents/kWh within five years.
- thermal storage: cooling (making ice) or heat can be stored for these energy applications
- demand response: EVs and many other large demand sources can respond to price signals or aggregated demand response to shift their consumption to the best times. Currently this is mostly used to shave the peaks off of demand but with critical mass of EV there will be huge amounts of valley filling too.
- vehicle to grid: I'm somewhat skeptical this will win a cost battle, but it's being investigated: high penetrations of EVs mean that there will be a day or more of storage on wheels. This can be used in all sorts of ways, potentially.
- flow batteries: I'm also skeptical that these will win on price, but they might.
- concentrating solar power: this is solar power from heat, therma storage can be used in conjunction to deliver 24 hour power. Early pilots were super expensive but recent project have dropped drastically in price to the point where it has a chance of being competitive with other storage tech.
- lots of others that I'm forgetting.
Basically solar is will probably get so cheap that we'll overbuild a ton of it and have more power than the inverters can handle, and size the installs for the winter lows, most likely. This means that there will likely be tons of extra unused DC power at solar sites for large chunks of the year. Could be an opportunity...
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/lightsail-energ...
(2) Pragmatic: Use on-demand power sources at night: fossil, nuclear, etc.
Just as big as the storage issue, though, is distribution.
Available solar power in the American Northwest is laughable compared to the American Southwest.
Power usage is typically lower at night, of course. And wind generation tends to be a bit higher at night in most places.
There are several of these facilities in the US, although no new ones have been built in quite some time. I believe that as the price of solar goes down, more of these styles of facilities will open.
https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...
https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...