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replies(7):
Your other comment probably got flagged because it started with a huge straw man and had multiple unwarranted jabs in it.
Also, have you read after the market part? Please watch this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7G4ipM2qjfw if the last quote is gibberish to you. It discusses somewhat different issues, but the point still stands.
Why is the problem the cheap source of supply rather than the market rules and incentives that made everything act the way it did?
Your comment suggests move back to good ol' expensive fossil generation instead of looking at how to bring the market rules up to date with evolving technologies.
I explicitly mentioned this line of argument in the GP. The problem is that renewables only sometimes cheap and plentiful and often not when we want it. Even without accounting for the politically-driven preferential treatment covered in the sibling comment, from the purely technical point of view intermittency above certain threshold wreaks havoc in the traditional grid architecture designed for the traditional easily controlled "rotating" generation. It becomes really hard to manage the grid with existing tools when you have too much of intermittent highly distributed generation and in the extreme it leads to collapses like this.
As I wrote, yes, you could upgrade the grid, increase transmission redundancy, add battery/pumped/flywheel storage, introduce "smart" tools to manage the grid, and do a plethora of other things to accommodate renewables. Hell, you could even migrate the grid to DC!
But the cost of doing it is substantial. It's effectively a form of externalities of renewable generation, which are not accounted for in naive "cheap" $/kW metrics. Properly accounting for those externalities and adding them to the cost of renewable generation is possible, but politically unappealing.
>Your comment suggests move back to good ol' expensive fossil generation instead of looking at how to bring the market rules up to date with evolving technologies.
No, I believe we should remove the politically motivated shoehorning of renewables at the cost of grid stability. There should be a limit on how much intermittent generation we can have depending on the preparedness of the grid and we should pay less for power from such sources, not guarantee purchase from them!
As you say, we should have proper incentives structure which accounts for various externalities (including CO2 emissions!). We need to remove the existing subsudies on renewables which made sense in the early days, but not now. Let the generation sources play at the even field.
Market-based economies are great to follow technology trajectories and are efficient at capital allocation but even for them we need additional incentive structures to speed up the process.
I also think that most countries have massively reduced subsidies for new projects but existing subsidies will still be served for a long time.