It's likely a short-term problem. There are plenty of ways to fix it (besides the one you mention, just shut down coal & oil power plants for good and replace them with technologies like natural gas or hydro that can easily react to spikes in demand), but all of the fixes require capital investments and time to build factories & tooling.
Basically this is a problem because a bunch of existing incumbents are probably going to go bankrupt, or at least have to write down a lot of capital equipment and invest in new technologies. Boo-hoo for the incumbents, but it's good for consumers and good for society.
> Basically this is a problem because a bunch of existing incumbents are probably going to go bankrupt, or at least have to write down a lot of capital equipment and invest in new technologies.
That's not how it works. In Germany, the government subsidizes farmers to put up Windfarms, then forces the electric companies to buy the electricity at an inflated price, which those companies charge their customers for. As a result, energy prices in Germany are almost doubled for citizens, whereas companies get to have exemptions, of course.
Then they need to sell surplus energy for negative money when production is too high and import (often nuclear) energy from neighboring countries when it's too low. While they did get rid of most (domestic) nuclear energy, essentially the same amount of fossil fuel is still required to maintain the baseline.
It's utter nonsense, but the Germans get to pat themselves on the back for being so green. Well, except for all that coal energy that also needs subsidies because of those poor coal workers...
The coal terrorists are able to demand subsidies not because of their poor workers (they are in fact laying off lots and lots of workers as a side effect of mergers, and their total employment is just several thousand people) but because a lot of local government is funded by coal company shares held by cities. This is why coal is still a thing.
>"a lot of local government is funded by coal company shares held by cities."
Do you have a citation for this? What are examples of the many local governments that are funded by coal company shares? How do you fund a local government by buying shares in a coal company?
Coal is "still a thing" because it is incredibly abundant and despite being horrible for the environment, burning it is a thermally efficient means of creating steam to turn a turbine.
Over here, in Germany, specifically NRW, it's quite literally true - a bunch of local councils hold a lot of RWE (local coal company) shares and fund local services from dividents. They were very upset a couple years back when RWE decided not to pay out dividents. Here's a news article from back then (in German) https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/energie/article152907251/Waru...
You hit at an important dimension which is that the problem is not technical per se, it's really a problem of market design. Wind power purchase agreements should allow curtailment (since it is very easy to ramp a wind farm /down/) when needed for system reliability. However, this reduces the rate of return for wind farms so politicians that are looking to maximize wind build-outs will not favour this.
It's also beneficial to increase the size of the power market geographically, which reduces the variability of wind generation, rather than arbitrarily stopping at national borders.
We already have a mostly-unified central European power market. IIRC the whole central Europe grid is in a single market.
Also note that providers with international transport capacity can use that to arbitrage over them.
You do not want to force curtailment of clean energy. You either force curtailment of fossil generators (and let those operators deal with the operational complexity of doing so) or incentivize storage.
In the real-time operating window, some generators may have must-run characteristics. For instance, hydro with downstream flow requirements for fish habitat or agricultural use or nuclear without thermal bypass. It's easy to say 'let the operators deal with the operational complexity', but if you're going to need to that nuclear unit in 6 hours you can't tell them to pound sand and poison their reactor now. Furthermore, even if the energy from some conventional generators may not be needed, they may be required to run to provide grid ancillary services such as operating reserve (the ability to ramp up or down rapidly) or to avoid violating system operating limits due to physical constraints on the transmission system.
Since wind turbine generators will not experience or cause physical damage due to rapid curtailment, only commercial harm, in a scenario where the spot price is going to zero or negative (i.e. the marginal energy being produced is not valued by anyone), it can make operational sense to curtail them before higher emitting generators under certain conditions.
Keep in mind I'm speaking only to the real-time operating considerations (think a time horizon of 24 hours) not the larger generation planning perspective. The system should be planned in a way that minimizes the need for renewable curtailment, but that's a long-term goal that isn't accomplished yet. Operating on a strict zero-curtailment basis for wind turbine generators reduces system flexibility and maneuverability and results in costs for all ratepayers.
It's not utter nonsense because it provides a much more stable market for companies building renewable energy plants and allows them to finance research and development. A lot of the improvements in solar energy technology were financed thanks to this scheme.
Same in Ontario, Canada. They heavily subsidized green energy sources and then laid the debt on the publicly owned power utility which passed on the cost to ratepayers, leading to the highest power rates in North America and a utility that is still heavily dependent on legacy nuclear and hydro to provide grid stability.
RWE would like to shut down a few coal power plants that are no longer profitable in the current distorted market. But the government, the very same technically illiterate government that fouled up the market in the first place, declared that to be illegal, because the plants are "relevant for grid stability".
> Boo-hoo for the incumbents, but it's good for consumers and good for society.
Right, the most expensive electricity anywhere in the world, except for Diesel powered islands, is good for customers.
Is the responsiveness of an oil plant so different from a natural gas plant? Why? They're both essentially a furnace fueled by a flow of combustible fluid, right?
Note: many bigger gas plants are combined cycle, the exhaust of the gas turbine generates steam in a waste heat boiler for a steam turbine. Often multiple GTs on a single ST.
Basically this is a problem because a bunch of existing incumbents are probably going to go bankrupt, or at least have to write down a lot of capital equipment and invest in new technologies. Boo-hoo for the incumbents, but it's good for consumers and good for society.