Most of these issues can be improved through a combination of software and policy changes, and the report makes some suggestions along those lines.
The inertia provided by generators with lots of spinning metal—think hydro or natural gas turbines—is generally thought of as improving the stability of the grid, but this analysis suggests that even tripling the amount of inertia would have only dampened the system’s oscillations by about 3 percent. So it’s not clear that having more traditional power online would have helped.
That said, there is one area where potential problems were clearly assigned to one form of renewable generation: rooftop solar. The problem there is less
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