https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/california-solar-...
What's going to happen in the future is that May will be a month of extreme electricity abundance, with a good chunk of the electricity just not being collected at all because the grid doesn't need it, and it will be cheaper to have unused electricity in May than to have too little solar in December.
Iron-air storage is still being proven out, but it still requires so much material that only getting 1-2 cycles per year just won't justify it, because electricity is going to be so cheap.
It's hard to overstate how cheap solar panels are these days. Even in the US, which has costs 3x-5x the rest of the world because of failed protective tariffs.
The arbitrage is solar cost vs storage cost vs other energy source cost vs capital cost vs transmission cost.
Appropriately priced risk with all of those factors in and what you get out is solar+storage capping the price of other energy sources.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2026/07/27/global-battery-storag...
https://www.spglobal.com/energy/en/news-research/latest-news...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-...
Of course once we have solar that we won't use in summer there will be programs to use that power. I suspect things like ore refining, steel mills, and the like: will start running in summer only. They will go offline in winter for maintenance. (Investors will make a ton of money buying in summer and selling in winter - as they already do for lots of other commodities that have seasonal aspects)
If you look at the pumped storage projects built and under construction in China, they are all daily focused.
Solar's zero marginal cost generation, with cheap capital costs, requires rethinking a lot of the economics of electricity generation. Not paying for fuel changes so much, and it will take a while for people to internalize this.
Of course every plant is different. There is a big difference between "batch" processes where you can shutdown after any batch, and "continuous" processes where startup/shutdown is a large process since the machines depend on running. They have different abilities to respond. Some plants/processes use more energy than others - obviously if they don't use much energy they don't care about free energy much either. The more energy a plant uses the more they are interested in cheap energy. In some cases a less efficient process may suddenly become better when solar is "free"
If there's enough free energy and automation there gets to be a point where there will be people will start to disregard the capital costs as well and run 0ish input cost businesses with a vertical stack of stuff that they produced with 0ish input cost.
Heavy industries are usually pretty low on the value chain in economies. They do not provide much return on capital, compared to the high tech options and service options that are available in the US, but not available anywhere else in the world.
The rest of the (non-European) world dreams of the economic opportunities that are possible in the US, from Silicon Valley tech, to biotech, to the financial opportunities. China has been trying to climb up the value chain ladder for decades, and is slowly getting there.
It's mystifying to me why people are fantasizing about climbing down the value chain in the US, to being poorer, and allocating capital to things with lower return on investment. I just don't get it! What's the appeal?
My read on why we want it back, anyway. I'm sure there are other reasons, too.
Silicon Valley was built on defense contracts for control systems, that's what funded all early semiconductor work, what built the technical empire that led to software's dominance in more recent decades.
And Ukraine is proving that heavy manufacturing competence is not the key discriminator. Now light manufacturing, high tech, and bottom-up organization and logistics are letting a small country defend itself against a far far far larger enemy with 4x the people and an absolutely massive dominance in heavy industry and manufacturing of heavy vehicles.
The biggest weakness of Ukraine is the same weakness of the US at the moment: inability to manufacture large amounts of interceptor missiles for air defense. That's not a heavy industry problem, that's a technology problem, a logistics problem, an operations problem. This requires the skill of Apple, not the skills of GM. And in the time it takes the US to scale up production, Ukraine is going to invent their own far cheaper option from scratch.
And that's because the US has not yet moved beyond the style of military industry built on massive high-capital manufacturing, that's slow moving and design iteration measured in years rather than months. The US is currently repeating the same mistake, but even worse, with its drone initiatives because the rewards are based purely on corrupt personal relationships rather than any sort of competitive process.
Heavy industry and manufacturing are not the model for building a military of the future, or an economy of the future.
And yeah, controls, signal processing, decisionmaking, etc are all going to be big determinants, and we're no slouches in that stuff.
One of the big examples of what you're talking about - it used to take a huge bomber fleet and an absurd number of bombs to score as many hits on target as a single B-52 load can now score, thanks to the ability to strap cheap guidance packages onto dumb bombs.
its the k shaped economy. the big opportunities are great if you can get into them, but otherwise all there is is serving coffee to the wealthy. People are already poorer without a ladder or fulfilling work at the bottom
People understand that these jobs are worse than what's currently available, yet for some reason want them here.
Also industry is only low value so long as someone friendly to you has it. The world really worried about China climbing that latter because they are making some political moves that could lead to war. Maybe they won't, but China clearly is building a powerful military and they are not friendly to the freedoms that the US and western Europe likes. If it comes down to war we need heavy industry.
> pumped storage is still significantly cheaper for seasonal storage
Only because most of the costs have been financially depreciated long ago. Try to build a brand new dam nearly anyplace and the costs will be much higher.
There are literally millions of unused locations identified that are suitable for pumped storage: https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/
hydro generation sites are mostly taken. pumped storage doesn't need flow, just 2 reservoirs (one or both of which can be built) and a elevation change.
> a brand new dam
pumped storage facilities generally don't use dams.
Are you just talking about total capacity dominated breakeven? The economics of both want daily cycles. Water has a more favorable power/$ scaling curve for storage if you have a site.
A battery storage facility has watts and watt-hours roughly equivalent. A typical storage battery is around "1C" -- it takes about one hour to fully charge or discharge. The limiting factor on the build price is the MWh -- if you keep the power the same but double the storage the price of the plant still roughly doubles.
A typical daily storage facility wants around 4C, so that coupling between power and energy for batteries is not a significant drawback.
Seasonal storage is not coupled in this way. You increase MWh by increasing the size of your reservoirs. You increase MW by increasing the number of pumps/turbines. MWh is usually a lot cheaper than MW. A typical pumped storage facility today has MWh only being 10-20X the MW which means they're tuned for daily-ish usage (see top line). One tuned for seasonal usage would have that ratio >> 100.
- pumped hydro reuses the water in a loop rather than sending it downstream like generation
- pumped hydro only needs to produce power a few times a year rather than 24/7/365 like generation.
> Electricity demand growth and new actions by the current U.S. presidential administration may slow this decline in the short-term, but with no proposals to build new coal plants anywhere in America and worsening economic competitiveness – particularly where policymakers are strengthening air and water standards to protect their constituents – its long-term share of U.S. electricity generation will continue to decrease
https://energyinnovation.org/expert-voice/what-is-coals-futu...
what a freaking horror show we are living in
https://www.opb.org/article/2026/06/18/federal-order-keeps-w...
They're on the western interconnect.
Combined solar and wind are about 25-30% of production there.
These articles about individual states are trash.
Now if we are comparing a hypothetical place that doesn't have anything else this wouldn't be interesting, but that isn't the case. (I'm sure my suburb generates more energy from solar than anything else - as you would expect the only other generation we have is backup generators)
(passed in 10 states, 2 awaiting signatures, as of this comment)
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-NW-PACE/live/fif...
Nevada Power serves a substantial amount of western Utah.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-NW-NEVP/live/fif...
articles like this talking about high solar or wind in one state are tricking people into thinking we're can actually increase inverter power sources past about 25-30%.
local power authorities power mix data is about contracts and paper not energy.
this kind of article is basically just lying to people.
electricity from a DC to AC inverter instead of a direct an generator powered by steam
yeah a grid that was more than 30% inverter sources (which includes batteries) would likely fail randomly. the big spinning metal in the stream generators provides literal inertia to the grid, flywheels can replace that but those also cost money.
solar panels are cheap... of you want 200-400v DC, but if you want a national scale grid with 99.9999% uptime... they're actually not
TLDR Renewable generators<->Battery storage<->Transmission<->Battery storage<->Electric consumers.
https://ember-energy.org/chapter/the-rise-of-batteries-plus-...
Potential analysis of current battery storage systems for providing fast grid services like synthetic inertia – Case study on a 6 MW system - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23521... | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.est.2022.106190 - Journal of Energy Storage Volume 57, January 2023, 106190
> Large-scale battery energy storage systems (BESS) already play a major role in ancillary service markets worldwide. Batteries are especially suitable for fast response times and thus focus on applications with relatively short reaction times. While existing markets mostly require reaction times of a couple of seconds, this will most likely change in the future. During the energy transition, many conventional power plants will fade out of the energy system. Thereby, the amount of rotating masses connected to the power grid will decrease, which means removing a component with quasi-instantaneous power supply to balance out frequency deviations the millisecond they occur. In general, batteries are capable of providing power just as fast but the real-world overall system response time of current BESS for future grid services has only little been studied so far. Thus, the response time of individual components such as the inverter and the interaction of the inverter and control components in the context of a BESS are not yet known. We address this issue by measurements of a 6 MW BESS's inverters for mode changes, inverter power gradients and measurements of the runtime of signals of the control system. The measurements have shown that in the analyzed BESS response times of 175 ms to 325 ms without the measurement feedback loop and 450 ms to 715 ms for the round trip with feedback measurements are possible with hardware that is about five years old. The results prove that even this older components can exceed the requirements from current standards. For even faster future grid services like synthetic inertia, hardware upgrades at the measurement device and the inverters may be necessary.
(this paper is ~3 years old, state of the art has advanced in that time from an improvement perspective)
> Balancing authority (electric): The responsible entity that integrates resource plans ahead of time, maintains load-interchange-generation balance within a Balancing Authority Area, and supports Interconnection frequency in real time.
https://www.nerc.com/glossary-of-terms
> Definition & Scope: A BA is a NERC-certified entity responsible for matching electricity supply and demand in real-time within a specific geographic area. An ISO is an independent, non-profit corporate entity that manages regional transmission grids and runs competitive wholesale power markets.
https://www.ferc.gov/electric-power-markets
A balancing authority is quite literally a federally certified entity for maintaining grid stability.
(Utah only has ~2.5GW of coal generation capacity remaining, as of this comment)
https://www.gem.wiki/Utah_and_coal#Existing_coal_plants
https://www.gem.wiki/Utah_and_coal
https://utahnewsdispatch.com/2025/12/05/intermountain-power-...