And DSM. What was that saying? A negawatt is worth than a megawatt or something? A peak negawatt is likely very valuable.
Yes, provided that we've got "peak" defined correctly. Too often historic usage is enshrined in time-of-service rates; as the Duck Curve shows, many of those historical "peak" hours will probably have
negative energy prices in the future. The real value will be in reducing the sharp run-up in consumption at sunset.
There's an awkward temporal line-up of California, too: sunset occurs at nearly the same minute across most of the coast, where most of the people live. E.g., today sunset is at 4:48 in San Diego, 4:50 in LA, and 4:58 in Oakland. By contrast, in the eastern/mid-Atlantic/mid-west markets, we have much more east-west diversity in the solar resource.
This talk of "negawatts" really underscores how poorly we price power. If consumers simply paid the current, 5-minute or hourly, price of power, and generators were simply paid that price, then everything would line up neatly. Instead we have "big" generators (>=10MW) seeing that real-time price, but retail tariffs burying it, both for purchases and injections.
And, I've managed to wander far from the nuke question. I'll offer this on that subject: nuclear plants see the actual prices in the market, based on actual scarcity or surplus. Rooftop solar doesn't. If rooftop solar did, my guess is that the economics would be much less attractive than it is today. Still better than building a nuke, but certainly not enough to trigger shutting down an existing, well-functioning nuke.
