An interesting problem is highlighted on that graph: solar seems to be peaking around mid-day, but energy demand peaks at 5 - 7 pm when solar is pretty weak. The curves showing pre- and post-solar have almost identical peaks; solar hasn't yet successfully reduced peak load. (The California energy system posts a similar graph, with a similar shape:
http://www.caiso.com/Pages/TodaysOutlook.aspx , made worse by the fact that the California wind farms apparently perform best in the morning and worst in the afternoon.)
The difficulty is that, unless storage gets dramatically better, we'll still need a huge conventional electricity base. And it will still burn a huge amount of fuel: most generators are not "instant-on" -- it can take weeks to spin up a nuclear plant, days to spin up a coal plant, and hours [1] to spin up a natural gas plant. Of course, there are some savings, but there is huge waste if you have to keep the whole conventional energy infrastructure spinning during the day just to fuel that 6 pm peak load.
Advice to entrepreneurs: finding a cost-effective way to store solar energy for 4 hours will be worth more than another 2% increase in efficiency. And inventing instant-on conventional-fuel plants will also make a huge difference in GHG emissions.
[1] - Page 8 of http://www.euec.com/getattachment/euecjournal/Paper_3.pdf.as... gives times between 1.2 hours for a warm start to 6 hours for a cold start.
The difficulty is that, unless storage gets dramatically better, we'll still need a huge conventional electricity base. And it will still burn a huge amount of fuel: most generators are not "instant-on" -- it can take weeks to spin up a nuclear plant, days to spin up a coal plant, and hours [1] to spin up a natural gas plant. Of course, there are some savings, but there is huge waste if you have to keep the whole conventional energy infrastructure spinning during the day just to fuel that 6 pm peak load.
Advice to entrepreneurs: finding a cost-effective way to store solar energy for 4 hours will be worth more than another 2% increase in efficiency. And inventing instant-on conventional-fuel plants will also make a huge difference in GHG emissions.
[1] - Page 8 of http://www.euec.com/getattachment/euecjournal/Paper_3.pdf.as... gives times between 1.2 hours for a warm start to 6 hours for a cold start.