Your biggest problem is dealing with educated ignorance. These people think they know what they are doing - they don't. They don't even understand how complicated the problem actually is.
This is a situation where how the question is framed can elicit wildly different answers. It is also incredibly easy to hide basic truths from the lawmakers. Details matter.
Just to add one stray thought I had, to illustrate the point:
Whenever we calculate how much energy wind and solar will generate per month, or per year, we always calculate it off the average. Which makes nominal sense. However, the system design isn't about average demand and average supply. To have 99.999% reliability (which is the current standard), you need to design your system around minimum supply and maximum demand - you have to assume they will overlap at some point.
For a NG plant that is easy. But that is where the wheels come off the bus for wind and solar - they always want to use AVERAGE not the MINIMUM. If you run the calculation off the minimum, you typically find the minimum is zero. You might get a week when it is close to zero wind energy. That cost MUST be accounted for. You might have an entire year where you get 50% of the average. Half the time production will be below average, by definition.
Overproduction is just as bad and just as expensive. It's easy to explain the problem - say I want to fill a pitcher of water. I go to the sink and fill it. What if I use a firehose to fill the same pitcher? The firehose may fill it slightly faster, but did the pitcher get "more full"? No. Over production didn't make the result any better and likely cost me more money. It's actually a worse solution.
Overproduction of wind and solar creates problems, because I have to dial back everything else to accommodate it. It creates additional costs. But wind and solar always count overproduction as part of their average production for the year, whether that energy was useful or not. It's like saying the fire hose can fill six pitchers instead of just one, so it is six times better, when I only have and need one pitcher filled to begin with.
Just one more analogy. Say I have a widget factory that produces an average of 100 widgets per day. Some days I might make 75, some 150. On Saturday and Sunday I produce zero. And my average demand is 100 per day. But I don't really have a problem, because I can store thousands of widgets in the warehouse, or in the supply chain, so variations in my demand and production work out. Heck, I could burn down the factory - I would not immediately run out of widgets because of the inherent system storage.
Let say I have a restaurant, and I have an average of 5 waiters, and my average demand for waiters is also 5. Is everything fine? No. the average covers up all sorts of problems - if all the waiters show up at 2 AM when I have zero customers, or only one shows up at 8PM when I have 50 customers, I have problems. The average supply and demand are meaningless words in that context. I have no way to move customers to a different hour or move the labor the waiter provides to a different hour. I can't store being a waiter till later. There is also no slack in the system. No shock absorber between supply and demand.
Okay, is the grid like the widget or the waiter example? It clearly resembles the waiter - it is more like a service than like a factory. Yet wind and solar advocates pretend the grid is just like a factory, where you can use averages to talk about supply meeting demand.
Good luck.
Your biggest problem is dealing with educated ignorance. These people think they know what they are doing - they don't. They don't even understand how complicated the problem actually is.
This is a situation where how the question is framed can elicit wildly different answers. It is also incredibly easy to hide basic truths from the lawmakers. Details matter.
Just to add one stray thought I had, to illustrate the point:
Whenever we calculate how much energy wind and solar will generate per month, or per year, we always calculate it off the average. Which makes nominal sense. However, the system design isn't about average demand and average supply. To have 99.999% reliability (which is the current standard), you need to design your system around minimum supply and maximum demand - you have to assume they will overlap at some point.
For a NG plant that is easy. But that is where the wheels come off the bus for wind and solar - they always want to use AVERAGE not the MINIMUM. If you run the calculation off the minimum, you typically find the minimum is zero. You might get a week when it is close to zero wind energy. That cost MUST be accounted for. You might have an entire year where you get 50% of the average. Half the time production will be below average, by definition.
Overproduction is just as bad and just as expensive. It's easy to explain the problem - say I want to fill a pitcher of water. I go to the sink and fill it. What if I use a firehose to fill the same pitcher? The firehose may fill it slightly faster, but did the pitcher get "more full"? No. Over production didn't make the result any better and likely cost me more money. It's actually a worse solution.
Overproduction of wind and solar creates problems, because I have to dial back everything else to accommodate it. It creates additional costs. But wind and solar always count overproduction as part of their average production for the year, whether that energy was useful or not. It's like saying the fire hose can fill six pitchers instead of just one, so it is six times better, when I only have and need one pitcher filled to begin with.
Just one more analogy. Say I have a widget factory that produces an average of 100 widgets per day. Some days I might make 75, some 150. On Saturday and Sunday I produce zero. And my average demand is 100 per day. But I don't really have a problem, because I can store thousands of widgets in the warehouse, or in the supply chain, so variations in my demand and production work out. Heck, I could burn down the factory - I would not immediately run out of widgets because of the inherent system storage.
Let say I have a restaurant, and I have an average of 5 waiters, and my average demand for waiters is also 5. Is everything fine? No. the average covers up all sorts of problems - if all the waiters show up at 2 AM when I have zero customers, or only one shows up at 8PM when I have 50 customers, I have problems. The average supply and demand are meaningless words in that context. I have no way to move customers to a different hour or move the labor the waiter provides to a different hour. I can't store being a waiter till later. There is also no slack in the system. No shock absorber between supply and demand.
Okay, is the grid like the widget or the waiter example? It clearly resembles the waiter - it is more like a service than like a factory. Yet wind and solar advocates pretend the grid is just like a factory, where you can use averages to talk about supply meeting demand.