1. As in relation to solar power, as of writing this, none that I know of that would provide the necessary cushioning.

2. You still ignore the fact that grid is essentially a single circuit, which means that AC that isn't perfectly in sync with on/off cycle across the neighbourhood (random switching you talk about) isn't going to stress it much. It's the "all at once" that does, like solar power. Similar switching on of the AC across working spaces for example, is typically preplanned by grid maintenance people based on historic references. Yes, you actually need to plan ahead on those things, and not planning ahead causes brown and even blackouts.

3. As pointed, the problem comes from the fact that solar in concentrated in certain wealthy neighbourhoods, which are experiencing massively increased stress due to net metering. At the same time, those who don't use solar are effectively paying for extra hardware and manpower needed to keep that particular circuit and its connection to transit network stable it in most cases.

They are not "your elected representatives". They are "representatives of the elite pre-selected for you to choose from".

There is a huge difference.

I strongly suspect it kills quite a bit more than that mainly because of mercury bio-accumulation in sea life and prevalence of basic coal power plants in developing countries.

But these problems are avoidable through high tech coal plants like the newer ones that manage burning process carefully and filter exhaust extensively. CO2 emissions on the other hand are an unavoidable part of coal burning, and in the long run, they will be a major problem.

But it's highly unlikely we're going to have wars over coal any time soon. Last I read, Europe alone has enough coal to last it at least two to three hundred years. And Europe has been aggressively mining coal and survived two world wars where coal was of paramount importance as fuel for power plants and heating needed for metal refining. And one has to remember that "real cost" of almost anything is usually more than financial cost, and typically very difficult to accurately measure.

You once again completely fail to account for a fact that conditioner on-off cycle is temperature based. People running the grids have their own thermostats in the area and supply more power to the grid which is determined to be in the area automatically when most people have theirs turn on.

You also completely fail to account for the fact that it's much easier to compensate for one way flow than two way flow.

Who is telling you that's it's miracle it's working? Whoever he is, he's lying.

It has nothing to do with miracles. It has everything to do with skilled engineers managing the grid to the best of their ability. And they are the ones telling you that we have a problem, it's just not big enough yet to completely exhaust their means of managing it.

But day by day, the margin is getting smaller, and you really don't want small margins on something that needs near-100% uptime like electric grid.

You really don't understand the difference, do you?

Spinning reserve, that important and expensive part of generation is part of grid management. Attempting to separate it from grid management is like attempting to claim that your car is fine, it's just that the oil isn't there.

I don't think you understand the issue judging from your last post. You seem assume that as long as "monthly average" isn't spikey, all is fine.

Grids need to adjust to momentary spikes. Early grid management involved lot of analysts predicting things like consumption spikes after football games.

This is essentially bigger spikes than that occurring several times a day in each segment of the grid where there's a significant portion of solar installation, in an unpredictable fashion. Even modern automation has severe problems keeping up with this, which brings cost of grid maintenance up significantly.

This is literally what you call "having it so good, you don't know what having it bad means", aka "first world problems".

If you want to understand what "grid twenty years behind the need" means, I recommend taking a look at a country like India.

If this was correct, you wouldn't be typing this on a computer tied to a functional grid, but tied to a diesel generator on a separate circuit.

See, the capability of grid to deliver electricity successfully and reliably is the measure used to measure grid's capability to function at any current time frame. Not capability to support new and completely unreliable and not yet ready power generation methods.

So let me see.

Now that I caught you in your bullshit, you'll pretend that you actually agreed, rather than disagreed with my original statement and use completely irrelevant factoids about... nuclear waste disposal as additional argument?

Are you perhaps drunk? You seem to be jumping between topics that are completely unconnected to one another, and you seem to assume that no one can look at your post just two tiers up.

No, I merely point out that you don't have a faintest clue of modus operandi of a grid operator, and the factors involved, as you guessed them completely incorrectly.

Which is something that any electric engineer that has ever worked on power supply systems would know, because they have to work with automation systems that have processes to counteract those factors.

Right. Dumb it down. You didn't even know anything beyond the very basic, did not understand the slightly more advanced concept at all, do not even know that rolling blackouts are a common thing to manage grid supply failures in Western countries, like Canada in 2014 and 2012 and so on.

And then you "call my bullshit". Right.

Yes, because A/C system is a drain on the total resources, which can be easily compensated by draining more from the transmission line which has reliable power sources with reliable automation to compensate for the drain.

2KW from solar is much harder to compensate for because it does the exact opposite, dump extra power to the grid in an unpredictable fashion. And 2KW is not a problem - your particular residential circuit of the grid will readily eat that up in most cases. The problem begins when a lot of households in the same area put up panels. As they are in the same area, they will all be in near perfect sync for production/cessation of production cycles, and will all flare up and cut off at the same time. This will create huge (for a residential circuit) nearly perfectly timed spikes in the residential grid which in some cases may case the power flow to even reverse. This requires extremely complex additional automation systems and in some cases even bigger transmission lines to handle.

Our energy generation system is from current century, as is our infrastructure. Both are century-level projects that are updated as we go along. Energy infrastructure from 19th century was a work by extremely specialized people who were always working to try to predict power peaks and fall-off from things like scheduled power plant repairs, ends of workday, ends of large public gatherings like sport matches, and so on.

Nowadays it's a complex modern automation directly hooked into the power plants and grid substations with notable predictive and learning algorithms.

The problem is that even that is simply insufficient to carry completely unreliable power sources. Because these power sources are not ready yet to move into mass production.

But if they are in space, how can anyone hear them scream?