The grid also has lots of excess overnight capacity. From the California Independent system operator data, the state has 42,000 MW of total capacity. Overnight demand is below 23,000 MW for much of the night. Even if we exclude the top 20% of capacity as too expensive or polluting, we still have 11,000MW of available capacity today in the overnight window in California alone.
I wonder how much longer the excess in CA will be there. As we are moving more and more towards solar we need more storage to handle shadow and the loads at night.
