What the Duck?

What the Duck?

If you follow stories in energy, you’ve likely heard of the “Duck Curve” and if so, this post is not geared to you. If you’re not familiar with the Duck Curve, read on.

Solar, wind, rivers, and waves are incredible sources of energy that we’ve only just begun to harvest. The stories around these generation sources are incredible testaments to mankind’s ingenuity, perseverance and progress. I applaud and endorse every bit of effort to advance the technology and adoption thereof on all these fronts.

Nevertheless, it is important to note that these sources of generation are not without issue. For one, solar isn’t inherently dispatchable. That’s a fancy way of saying you can’t generate energy from solar on demand, like you can with coal or gas. With solar, you get it when you get it. You can’t ask the sun to shine harder as demand rises… such as when folks turn on lights and air conditioning on summer evenings.

In markets where solar is heavily deployed (like Hawaii, California, Nevada and North Carolina), solar generates a meaningful amount of energy. That sounds like a good thing.

It is, in the grand, long-term scheme of things. But, from a utility standpoint, it creates problems today.

At scale, solar impacts baseload, turning the utility’s most efficient assets (baseload generators) into operational headaches.
Overgeneration by renewables can ultimately lead to backflow and generate voltage issues that utilities are on the hook to solve.
Solar actually exacerbates the need to build out new capacity, which is driven by late afternoon demand, when the sun isn’t shining.
Solar forces utilities to ramp up alternate generation assets rapidly and aggressively later in the day.

All that costs money for the utilities.

Below is a picture that demonstrates the described problem. It shows generation from a utility in Kauai, where solar is producing significant energy. As you can see, the amount of solar production eats into baseload and fails to contribute at the peak.

Short story, under the existing models, solar creates new expenditures for utilities, with very little relief on existing costs. Over time, the problem that solar creates makes the utility’s energy profile look increasingly like a duck.

Hence the Duck Curve.

The solution to the Duck Curve problem is multi-faceted, but storage almost certainly will play an important role. In fact, we’re already seeing storage deployed in Kauai as a solution to the problem depicted above.

To put solar truly at par with gas and coal in terms of capability, we need storage. Storage allows utilities to take off-peak overabundance and turn it into a deployable generation asset at peak. Storage turns solar into dispatchable energy.

The pairing of storage with renewables is the future. It is a key element in the ongoing growth of renewables and resilience of the grid. In my view, solar policy that fails to consider storage is lacking.

Yes, storage has a cost. But, it is declining and now reaching levels necessary for broad adoption. We need to stoke that and drive down the costs of storage. The good news is that governments are starting to tackle regulatory regimes. Tesla and LG Chem are making massive strides in manufacturing efficiencies. A number of utilities are pressing forward with trials around storage.

Also, worth noting, the cost of storage is significantly lower than the real cost of carbon emissions in our atmosphere. Metaphorically, we’re sitting in a gymnasium in which a car is running. While it may not present an immediate problem and the gas for that car may be cheap, there‘s a looming, bigger cost that needs to be recognized.