this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2026
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Yes solar panels and most renewables can be turned off easily if there is too much energy on the grid. The term for this is "curtailment". Some energy sources can't be turned off easily, like nuclear, large coal plants, and combined cycle gas turbines. So you will tend to turn off the easy things before the hard things.
The only major problem here is that this upsets the capitalists that own the generation; they don't want to pay for stuff that isn't producing money at every instance that it could be producing money. There are no real technical reasons why you can't curtail wind and solar plants whenever you need to.
Worth noting that a large amount of "renewables bad" you'll see is fossil fuel propaganda too, so be careful there.
Would a nuclear or fossil fuel turbine power plant just tear itself apart if disconnected from load at speed? I vaguely understand that the load provides a sort of magnetic resistance on the spinning generator. Without load they would they spin too fast? Or is it a matter of there not being any easy way to dump the power by doing something useless with it like just melting sand or smth?
Fossil plants, not really. The hard part for them is getting them started again which can take hours. But disconnecting them suddenly won't hurt them. There are many layers of protective devices keeping them from overspeed events.
Nuclear plants are similar but they will continue generating heat long after they are disconnected from the grid and you have to have a plan for removing that heat or bad things will happen. This was what caused problems at Fukushima.
Yeaaaah, I hate that. A lot of the structures that everyone says are shite seem to be propped up by "solutions" that create and perpetuate the problems they "solve."