How Does Your State Make Electricity? America isn’t making electricity the way it did two decades ago.

That's not really accurate.

Traditional generation relies primarily on huge "base load" generation plants: nuclear, coal, etc. These plants can only fulfill the "base load" - the minimum demand during the day. To make these plants more effective, generators incentivized off-peak consumption: raise the minimum, overnight load, and the base load plants can take on a much higher percentage of the total demand. Steel mills, aluminum smelters, and other heavy industries have been pushed to move their demand to overnight hours, to make base generation more efficient and effective.

As wind and solar take over larger shares of total production, the incentives reverse. Daytime power becomes extraordinarily easy to produce, and nighttime power becomes progressively more difficult. We stop encouraging heavy industry to operate overnight, and shift them to the day.

This sort of "Demand Shaping" is the real solution; grid-scale storage and natural gas generation are only for those essential overnight loads that we just can't shed.

Further, hydrogen electrolysis offers a sustainable and scalable, long-term grid storage method. We can soak up every excess watt we can produce during long summer days to crack water, and use it for power during the winter. The availability of that additional load allows us to overbuild solar and wind, far in excess of our immediate needs.