This still doesn’t address the duck curve aspect, or overnight usage. It is fundamentally impossible to use PV to directly power your wonderful super efficient heat pump to warm your home at night. You will still need batteries!
How? There’s a significant portion of the world/year where duck curve evening peak is after sunset and PV alone is never feasible and so batteries/wind/etc are necessary.
I was considering "duck curve" and "overnight" to be separate categories. Were you not? Then I will rephrase to say that excess panels solve the part of the duck curve that does not overlap "overnight", so the problem is reduced to just "overnight".
I do consider them separate, but the duck curve peaking is in the 6-8pm range typically before falling off to overnight baseload. 6-8pm is frequently after sunset. That’s what excess panels does not help, and is still separate from what is typically meant by “overnight” in my experience.
Yep, those are just forms of batteries though so I think my point stands? There is lots of cool stuff you can do with PV+TES without even needing true thermal batteries, just using smart electric hot water heaters and dispatch, and even cooler things if you set up a peer-to-peer network of them! But again, that just goes to the point that other challenges have overtaken solar efficiency in urgency (which is a great thing to reflect on!)
Well, my original point at the top of this thread was specifically about how battery mfg/infra/costs/dispatch (especially at grid scale) and so on seem like the limiting factors/primary challenges still being worked on, not PV efficiency, so I think we are agreeing?
