Oil and Coal dead in the water, page-19

Take this real-world ten-day demand curve from South Australia:


Peak demand is a little over 3GW, but minimum demand is only about 1GW. That means in this system inflexible baseload is only really viable for about 1/3 of total capacity, and the rest must be taken up by dispatchable supplies which spend varying amounts of time sitting idle.

Now, solar PV is doing a good job at eroding those peaks, and when expanded and combined with storage will reduce them further - which will immediately remove all those $10,000/MWh spikes in the spot price (incidentally, this is a major driving force for the backlash against solar - it's driving these generators out of business). But equally, a few GWh of storage will allow the incorporation of another few hundred MW of baseload into the mix.

Moral of the story: don't think in black and white.