Notwithstanding the shutdown of many nuclear plants, fairly moderate energy-saving and load-shifting measures have been enough to avert severe service interruptions.
The bid-cost recovery mechanism is supposed to provide make-whole payments that cover start-up and minimum load costs for parties requesting electric energy.
If they had taken a chunk of the energy that went into the champion-challenger tests and put it against faster web load, the business lift could be much greater.
These platforms are also increasingly capable of providing ancillary services to the local utility such as spinning reserve, load-following regulation, and intermittency management for wind and solar energy.
Advances in fuel cell technologies are critical in supporting the integrated grid systems, with their peak-load management and mitigation capabilities, and without which integrating renewables into the energy mix will be a much more expensive and painful affair than often supposed.