{"id":90667,"date":"2025-03-22T07:05:06","date_gmt":"2025-03-21T21:35:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.solarquotes.com.au\/blog\/?p=90667"},"modified":"2025-03-22T09:48:39","modified_gmt":"2025-03-22T00:18:39","slug":"phase-shift-curtailment-is-cool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.solarquotes.com.au\/blog\/phase-shift-curtailment-is-cool\/","title":{"rendered":"Phase Shift: Curtailment Is Cool"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"When I was a kid growing up in Yorkshire, wasting electricity was almost criminal. Coming from a place synonymous with frugality, I learned early that every kilowatt-hour was sacred. And fair enough: back in the 1970s, generating each kWh of electricity meant burning roughly a kilogram of coal mined by Arthur Scargill’s finest1<\/a><\/sup>.<\/p>\n

Fast-forward to today and things couldn’t be more different. Solar and wind have free ‘fuel,’ and we often find ourselves with more electricity from wind and solar than we know what to do with.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The solution: curtailment, the practice of intentionally limiting renewable energy output when there’s too much.<\/p>\n

Curtailment means we’re well on our way from energy scarcity to energy abundance. And counterintuitively it is not a sign to slow down or stop building more renewable generation.<\/p>\n

Continuing to build more solar and wind capacity, which will only increase curtailment, isn’t wasteful; it’s strategic. It ensures our future electricity mix is cheap, clean, and abundant most of the time.<\/p>\n

Renewables Are Already Dominant<\/h2>\n

To give this some substance, consider the work of renewables expert David Osmond<\/a>, who runs simple weekly simulations2<\/a><\/sup> of Australia’s main electricity grid using scaled-up amounts of solar and wind generation and real demand data. His findings show Australia can get close to 100% renewable electricity using 120GWh of storage (about 5 hours at average demand). His most recent results indicate that<\/a>:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n