Fast Frequency Response is something that can be provided by all inverter-driven systems, but isn't. Once a strategy is agreed it can be retrofitted at very reasonable expense.

What would be the price to have it retrofitted onto the home solar I had installed last year? Unless my inverter firmware can be updated remotely that doesn't seem like a reasonable expense at all.

I don't think it would ever be retrofitted at the individual level, but there are plenty of bigger installations.

short-term grid stability (on the order of seconds to hours) is essentially a non-issue with a renewable grid that has even the fraction of the storage needed to make up for longer term variability in supply (days/weeks). Inverter systems connected to batteries are already the best and most cost effective means of providing frequency control to a grid (they can simulate an incredible amount of rotor inertia): this is one of the ways in which Tesla's grid-scale battery in Australia is making lots of money (and eating the lunch of gas turbine operators who previously provided this). You can also add this capability to wind and solar generation, it's just not generally worth the extra effort (it's easier to coordinate a few larger providers somewhat specialised to the task than distribute it to everything on the grid).

Also, it seems the main issues are shifted to the baseload/nuclear, instead of incentivizing or asking the flexible power sources like wind to switch on/off as per needed.

The root cause is that we build wind and solar on wrong incentives. If they get support of x per unit produced at any time. They are still making money as long as market prices is higher than -x...

Most UK systems are paid on a "contract for difference" basis. This is an option-like agreement where they get paid a subsidy when power is cheap .. but pay back when power is expensive.

The impact of that is that high UK natgas and power prices resulted in renewables with "negative subsidy" paying money back to the taxpayer. https://www.current-news.co.uk/cfds-set-to-pay-back-10-5bn-a...

(Heck, I myself am part of this: I'm paid a 15p subsidy for electricity generated by my panels. This was a good deal when electricity was 10p. Electricity is now 30p.)

> Renewables and storage can provide the aux services needed, and already are on many grids.

Which grids? I wasn't aware of grids powered entirely by renewables with grid scale storage as the backup, that would be pretty cool if true.

They weren't talking about supplying energy with batteries.

The initial use case for small batteries on grids are providing the grid stability, frequency control, (synthetic) inertia and other important operational factors that the original comment thinks are being ignored.

> Unfortunately this is article fails to talk about grid stability, frequency control, inertia, and other important operational factors that keep transmission grids running.

This 'value stacking', which the immediate parent called 'aux services' makes them much more valuable to the grid than just their delivery of power would suggest.

Though we're now approaching a point in the mass deployment where the batteries have flooded that market on many grids and there's only actual energy storage left for them to do (and maybe avoid some transmission bottlenecks).

There is an island or two in UK that does that, involves signals in homes to disable various kinds of devices to drop usage whenever capacity falters.