Quote:
Originally Posted by Angel And The Wolf
It would be better to just add the solar created electricity to the grid.
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The problem is that you can't just arbitrarily add energy to the grid, there has to be something out there to immediately* use the energy you put in. Try to put in too much or too little, and you risk destabilizing the grid and causing a blackout.
Most of the generation on the grid is can be throttled, at least within a range. You can let more or less water out of your dam, burn more or less fuel in your fossil fuel plant, &c. But there are limits on these. You may be required to maintain river flow within certain ranges; if you run your FF plant outside its most efficient range, you're wasting fuel, and so on.
But solar & wind aren't really throttable. You use what it produces, or it is wasted. The throttable generation on the grid can compensate for some of this, but only a limited amount. So if you have excess solar or wind power being generated, storing it - even relatively inefficiently - is better than just throwing it away.
*OK, technically that's not quite true, but it's a really good approximation. Adding energy will slightly increase the voltage & frequency, just as trying to draw more than is going in lowers voltage & frequency, causing "brownouts".