The duck curve

Assembled from 27 blocks · 1 evidence · 23 related

1. Story
2. The shape that appears in a grid's net load — total demand minus wind and solar output — once solar penetration passes a threshold, named for its resemblance to a duck in profile. The California Independent System Operator published the original chart around 2013 as a projection of what its own net load would look like by 2020; the projection was not merely met but exceeded, and the shape has since appeared in South Australia, Chile, Hawaii and elsewhere. The belly is midday, when solar suppresses net load toward and sometimes below zero; the neck is the evening ramp, when the sun sets while demand is still high, requiring the system to bring on many gigawatts within about three hours. Two consequences follow, and they are different problems. Midday abundance produces curtailment and negative prices, which is an economic problem for generators and a signal to move demand or charge storage; the evening ramp is an engineering problem for whoever must supply it, and it is the reason four-hour batteries were built in California at scale before they were built almost anywhere else. The duck curve is the cleanest available demonstration that a variable resource changes the shape of the residual problem rather than simply shrinking it.
3. Knowledge
4. Photovoltaic solar generation
5. Variability and intermittency in generation
6. The duck curve
7. Connections
8. Photovoltaic solar generation
9. Variability and intermittency in generation
10. The experience (learning) curve
11. The duck curve
12. Bhadla Solar Park
13. Electrolytic (green) hydrogen
14. Bell Telephone Laboratories announce the practical silicon solar cell
15. The conventional start of the photovoltaic module price series
16. Germany's Renewable Energy Sources Act takes effect
17. Chinese manufacturing takes over the photovoltaic supply chain
18. The photovoltaic learning curve is popularised as Swanson's law
19. The first Global Stocktake calls for tripling renewable capacity
20. Lithium-ion battery storage
21. Nuclear fission power
22. The duck curve
23. Dunkelflaute (dark doldrums)
24. Transmission and grid interconnection
25. German power prices spike during a December Dunkelflaute
26. Evidence
27. Supports the description of the net-load shape, the deepening midday belly and steepening evening ramp, and the growth of solar and wind curtailment in California. V55 verification basis: not retrieved in this session; the original duck chart publication year is given as approximate, and no ramp magnitude or curtailment volume is quoted as a figure.