Part 1 showed why outages and price spikes will pull on-site assets like generators and battery storage into weekly service. This continuation focuses on what equipment must do to succeed. Availability comes first with economics a close second.
Fast forward to 2030: we’ll have demand outrunning firm capacity, and the grid shows it:
Aging thermal plants are cycled hard, so forced outages creep up, while the gear that could relieve some of the pressure – large transformers, combined cycle gas turbine powerplants and new transmission – takes years to arrive. Grid batteries help for hours, but not for days of wind and solar drought. The result: more curtailments and more requests to dispatch on-site storage and power generation systems. Prices mirror the strain: negative at night, punishingly high in the afternoon and evening. On-site power will soon be on weekly or even daily duty rather than on standby.
Now, if you want your system to become 2030-ready, it must be able to do two jobs: to keep critical loads online during blackouts, and generate cash by decoupling peak power usage away from periods of peak power pricing.