Thread by @SeanCasten

This is fascinating. A few brief observations:

"Demand on the New England regional power system fell to its lowest level in over a quarter century Sunday, thanks to the holiday, mild weather and ... an ever-growing number of solar panels."
rtoinsider.com/articles/31993…

1/ First, apologies that it's behind a paywall, but here is the key chart, and...

2/ ...Here is the key stat, and...

"ISO-NE said Tuesday that demand on the grid was the lowest it had ever recorded since the RTO began operations in 1997. The 6,814-MW demand between 2 and 3 p.m. shattered the previous record, 7,580 MW, set May 1, 2022."

3/ ... here's why this is a solar story.

4/ There's an obvious really positive part to this. Lots of people installing solar on their homes who are now "invisible" to the grid manager except for the way that they reduce load. It's not that we're using less electricity... it's that we're BUYING less electricity.

5/ That's going to affect how we talk about our economy. Electric sales were, for a long time a good indicator of economic activity. But that data is increasingly just one hand clapping; you've got to know what consumers are doing on their rooftops for the full picture.

6/ And that in turn means lots of folks without solar are going to pay less for electricity since less demand in electricity markets = excess supply = downward price pressure. Win, win all around.

7/ BUT... it also does potentially negative things to our grid regulatory structures. Just as a stock price is not a good indicator of value if most trades are private, off-market transactions, market electric prices also could get squirrelly with all this off-market generation.

8/ Also, in the absence of more energy storage you get the famous "duck curve" (famous to #energytwitter nerds like me, but maybe not everyone!) See comment 1 above, note the duck shape.

9/ Solar generation peaks at noon when the sun is high in the sky but loads tend to peak a few hours later in the day. So you see that ~12,000 MW peak load at the end of the day when the sun is down by load isn't yet.

10/ To be sure, these are manageable problems. As I told some folks last week, even though YOU may have just realized that PV doesn't run when it's dark out, you may rest assure that our grid managers have known that for a long time and plan accordingly!

11/ So the market design and storage deployment issues are good - very good, I dare say - problems. But problems nonetheless. That will be fun to solve.

12/ But overall this is a really good story. And if they can do this in New England, just imagine what's possible in the sunnier parts of our country. Onward! /fin