How Energy Storage Affects Supply Dynamics

India’s Deepening Duck Curves Highlight Urgent Need for Storage and Demand-Side Solutions The January and April duck curves below reveal India’s growing net demand gap: solar generation floods the grid during the afternoon, but demand surges again in the evening—just as solar fades. The chart shows average hourly demand (solid black lines) and net demand (demand minus variable renewables, in colored lines) from 2019 to 2027 (actuals through 2025; projections for 2026–2027). By 2025, India had become energy sufficient across the day, but increasingly peak deficient. Key insights: ✅ Surplus solar during midday ⚠️ Steep evening ramps stressing thermal generators 🔥 ~50 GW higher nighttime demand in April vs January—likely due to cooling loads This growing mismatch creates operational challenges for thermal power plants and raises the risk of evening shortfalls, especially during hot months. Energy storage is now essential—to shift solar generation from afternoon to evening and maintain grid reliability. Just as important are demand-side strategies, including energy-efficient cooling, time-of-day pricing, and demand response programs. These can help flatten the curve, reduce system costs, and enhance reliability. India’s duck curve is no longer a future—it’s already here. Now is the time to act. #DuckCurve #EnergyStorage #IndiaEnergyTransition #CoolingDemand #GridFlexibility #Renewables #EnergyEfficiency #DemandResponse #EnergySecurity Amol Phadke Shruti Mahajan Deorah Neelima Jain Umed Paliwal Soonee Sushil Kumar Narasimhan S.R. Samir Chandra Saxena India Energy & Climate Center (IECC) Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) Grid Controller of India Limited

What happens when more than 28 GW of the ERCOT fleet goes out on extended maintenance at the same time, including a large number of the fast-ramping gas peaking units? Nothing. When you have 10 GW of dispatchable energy storage to back it up. Today, Net Load + Thermal Outages peaked at 71.7 GW! Fortunately, there is now ~10 GW of battery energy storage operating on the grid on a daily basis. Peak dispatch today of these units was 4.5 GW, which at the time was 9.7% of all dispatching units and of net load requirements. Up from 0% 24 months ago. Why only 4.5 GW out of 10 GW? Because as a group they deployed for many hours, optimized based on traders and AI algorithms. In addition, there were another ~4-5 GW of battery storage units in the ancillary markets. Why does this matter? Because having instant-ramping battery energy storage backing up the system in the ancillary markets helps CREATE additional gas capacity by ensuring that gas units can participate in the energy market and not just sit in reserve. Ancillary markets are critical for the safe operation of the grid by providing instant backups when unforeseen events occur. By allowing technology-appropriate optimization of the whole system and battery storage to provide backup services, new gas capacity has been created that now is able to focus on energy markets during tight days like today. Today is the epitome of what actual resource adequacy (RA) and Reliability looks like, and highlights the negligent approaches to RA and Reliability that classical approaches like rote ELCC calculations wantonly avoid. Today also highlights why it would be sheer lunacy to use DRRS as a reliability product without the inclusion of 4-hour battery energy storage, given that the thermal fleet is a massively-correlated systemic risk to the system during the periods when it must take planned outages for maintenance. Reliability and Resource Adequacy must be defined by clear and objective technical operating criteria to promote technological innovation and the addition of new uncorrelated resource types - rather than discriminating against specific resources. When the thermal fleets have to go on maintenance, the power still needs to flow. If market participants hadn't built 10 GW of battery energy storage in 36 months, then 4.5 GW wouldn't have been available at the peak moment of net load, and the PRC would have dropped from ~7 GW down to 2.5 GW. Today would have been an EEA 2 event with prices at the market cap of $5000/MWh without the billions of dollars invested in the construction of battery energy storage built in the last 36 months. #ERCOT #ResourceAdequacy #DispatchablePower #Powermarketdesign #energystorage

California generates more solar power than it can use. The challenge isn’t making clean energy—it’s storing it. The state’s battery capacity jumped from 500 megawatts in 2018 to nearly 16,000 megawatts in 2025. During peak solar hours, California often produces excess electricity that would otherwise go to waste. Now those giant batteries scattered across the Mojave Desert capture that surplus and release it when the sun sets. This couldn’t come at a better time. Data centers powering AI are consuming electricity at unprecedented rates, while electric vehicle adoption is reshaping energy patterns. At peak times, stored solar power supplies up to 30% of California’s electricity. We’ve figured out how to bottle sunshine—but energy demand continues to rapidly increase and more solutions like this are needed to keep our grid resilient. Post edit: incredible how much interest this post got! It looks like there was a hiccup in the picture regarding nuclear generation, don’t want to miss that, find the updated image in the comments below:! #SolarEnergy #EnergyStorage #AI #ElectricVehicles