Everyone in the room knows exactly what is going on; what they don’t know is how to deal with it. An all but instantaneous 81 percent drop in generation at five in the evening when everyone is coming home from work, switching on their air-conditioning, TV sets, and computers is the kind of story that sets the hearts of electrical engineers palpitating. Electricity consumption on this, the world’s largest machine, must at every moment be balanced with electricity production. The more solar there is in any given mix of “fuels” used to generate electricity, the harder it is to cope with the
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