The duck curve describes the growing imbalance between the timing of solar energy generation and consumer demand patterns. Just as the sun sets, energy use rises. Conventional power generators, like fossil fuel plants, need to quickly ramp up every evening to pick up the slack. But traditional power plants aren't engineered to flip on in an instant.
An out-of-the-box solution is to pair our new source of energy to new drivers of energy demand. Rather than re-engineering our power plants or expensive storage solutions, smart software and consumer incentives can rule the day.
Electric vehicles are rapidly being adopted. Like most vehicles, they sit idle 95% of the time. The timing of their charging can be tuned to match the duck curve. When there's lots of excess solar is exactly when it's smartest and cheapest to charge vehicles. And vehicle chargers can quickly turn on and off.
What's needed is: communications software that links EV chargers with real-time solar generation and load data. A second piece is clean economic signals that make it cheapest to charge cars/fleets/buses when there's excess generation.
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