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Comment by FooBarWidget | Hacker News Reader

Yes this is ridiculous. The Netherlands has been pretty good at expanding residential solar, but apparently the electric grid operators have been sitting on their asses for years, and so now we have too much solar because the grid can't handle the solar power during peak sunny days in summer.

It's like they plan nothing and just let things grow organically, which causes lots of issues and is inefficient.

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The technology is not there for the grid to handle a whole bunch of excess solar energy during peak sunny days. We just don't have options for energy storage on the scale required. The usual approach of groups pushing for this is to handwave the problem away and call for more subsidies on domestic solar, which is of course popular with the public because it means money for them and punts the incredibly expensive and difficult part until later for someone else to deal with.

The technology is there, it's called demand response. Air conditioning and refrigeration are major workloads at the peak of summer, and can easily absorb any "excess" supply at a moment's notice. The heat capacity of whatever is being actively cooled then acts as your "battery".

Among many other things. We should have started figuring out this stuff -- and implementing it -- twenty years ago. Such a missed opportunity.

This isn't even about storage. This is just about having thick enough electric cables so that the grid doesn't overload. Right now the grid fails even if there are consumers for all that power. We're failing to transport the power.

Residential solar is very different to regular solar though. Grids weren't designed to aggregate lots of tiny feeds from people's houses, and it makes sense not to over-build that ahead of demand because in many cases the maths don't really work out except via subsidies, which can be here today, gone tomorrow.

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