Understanding Solar Energy

Great article. Unfortunately his California duck curve graph only shows 2023. A graph including 2024 shows how batteries are dramatically flattening the duck curve:

https://cdn-ilcjnih.nitrocdn.com/BVTDJPZTUnfCKRkDQJDEvQcUwtA...

https://reneweconomy.com.au/battery-storage-is-dramatically-...

Hot water tank heated by electricity and powering on at noon is flattening curve. You can say hot water tanks are cheapest, simplest and fastest deployed energy storage device.

Solar + hot water tank can provide any house in US with 100% solar hot water (from PV!) for 80% of time, remaining 20 % of time you can have 10-99% solar heated water.

So we should focus on saying to people that if they buy solar and add electric heating element to hot water tank, then PV system will pay itself much sooner and their batteries will last longer. Becasue it is known and predictable load, you need hot water every day. And hot water is order of magnitude more energy then TV, lighting...

By lowering household usage like this we can make energy transition faster, cheaper.

Also proper construction - house heated only 10 days in a year - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KHScgjTJtE

Slightly less convenient/has more impact on how we percieve our environment, but HVAC (the number 1 power use, hot water is #2), can also be a decently good battery, if your house is well insulated. Where I live, power is incredibly cheap over night, so I over-heat or over-cool my house (depending on season) overnight, and then let it gradually equilibrate during the day.

I realize that some people won't be willing to have a very warm/very cold house that gradually shifts to the more ideal comfortable range, but for people who are willing to deal with that (it personally doesn't bother me), it's a pretty easy way to shift a lot of power use and, if you have Solar or Time of Use billing, save a lot of money.

Yeah that too, but that has limits, for example european union regulates building industry in such way that every new build, rebuild has to be done in a way that your heating energy requirement is already lower than your hot water energy requirement. Because hot water energy usage can not go lower in current society, but buildings can be improved a lot. So yes as you said if building is modeled in software tools like OpenStudio ( Revit, archicad uses this sw developed in collaboration by NREL, ANL, LBNL, ORNL, and PNNL ) before build, to make building not waste energy and capture as much sun in cold period as possible then even such strategies can be used. You can not preheat/ precool 1870s handhewn cabin, all energy will be lost very fast. It sounds obvious to you and me but most people do not really understand this deeply enough to "click" in their heads.

time of use billing - tool to incentivie you to use "off-peak" power, but i guess it will be deprecated in favor of "realtime" billing in future, because there will be so much solar (almost zero $ per kWh on market) that your energy provider will incentivize you to draw energy during peak solar "activity" AND off-peak hours. it will be simpler for them to give you market price every 15 minutes window than 4hour window at same time every day.