[binbag]

As another commenter says, it's actually easier the more generators you have because the rotational inertia of all the spinning masses is larger. This (and the storage problem) is one of the reasons that wind and solar destabalise grids - they are interfaced to the rest of the grid by converters that create ac sources - but there's no real rotating mass there, so the inertia is tiny. The result is that as we add more renewable power to the network, it becomes less able to 'roll with the punches' of loads coming on and off line.

PS One of the answers in the SO thread mentions JET in the UK. I spent a few summers there as an electrical engineering student (it's home to the MAST and JET fusion reactors). When the JET tokamak ignites a plasma, it can't sustain it for very long (we are not yet at the point of extracting enough energy to sustain the reaction). As a result they need to ignite the plasma and keep it hot. They can't do it for more than 1-10 seconds. During that time, they draw massive amounts of power - they're permitted to draw up to 1% of the UK's capacity for a short period, whilst they simultaneously dump all the energy stored in two gigantic flywheel generators housed in a nearby building. I've never been there when the flywheels are running but I've climbed around beneath them. There's nothing quite like massive engineering :)

[ilyt]

> This (and the storage problem) is one of the reasons that wind and solar destabalise grids - they are interfaced to the rest of the grid by converters that create ac sources - but there's no real rotating mass there, so the inertia is tiny. The result is that as we add more renewable power to the network, it becomes less able to 'roll with the punches' of loads coming on and off line.

Other problem is that for renewables to be profitable you want to push all the energy out all the time, especially in peak. Even now solar installation users have problem with that when there is too many small solar installations installed on same street the voltage goes too high and the inverters just trip and stop pushing the power to the grid, losing owner money.

We just need to have more cheaper storage solutions. Technically utilities could just put a bunch of batteries near concentration of residential solar and just basically sell the service of "storing the kilowatts" to them (say "you can receive 80% of what you put into it in next 48 hours"), all while having the capacity to use that stored joules in case a peak needs to be handled

[skykooler]

If the inertia of turbines helps cover small loads, couldn't that be scaled up with a bunch of flywheels connected to motor/generators? Seems like it would be better able to handle sudden changes in the network than batteries+inverters.