The advances of renewables are definitely dependent on strong compute and widespread global (or at least widespread local) networking. Smart grids need all of the different tools from different manufacturers to talk to each other, which an agreed-upon networking protocol like IP on top of an existing internet backbone makes very easy to ipmlement. On-demand energy storage and providing from battery banks - or even hydroelectric storage or (as mentioned in the article) gas-powered backup turbines need the analytics power to study and predict load variations on all of the collected data, which existing data centers for search or even apps makes trivial to acquire.
Now, there could have been technical solutions for these issues found in the 80s or 90s, but more probably than not the engineers back then would not have thought about this beyond the obvious corporate aspects - after all, it's much more "practical" to focus on connecting the big power plants together and just vaguely estimate the required consumption.
It's probable that, if you sat at a design meeting in the 80s and proposed, as "an energy-efficient solution", to have a small computer in every consumer's breaker box that monitors the incoming electricity, sends the info through a combination of radio and country-spanning wires to a central server, and then do analytics on it to predict when the power is needed, you'd have been laughed out of the room. And yet, that's how smart grids work nowadays and it is the correct solution to this problem.
The improvements in energy storage and solar/wind renewables would have started decades earlier, sure, and that would have mattered. But I don't think anybody would have been able to use them the way we can use them today if it was done twenty or thirty years ago, and the technology might have died down instead. It's hard to know for sure, but it's a very plausible outcome.
Now, there could have been technical solutions for these issues found in the 80s or 90s, but more probably than not the engineers back then would not have thought about this beyond the obvious corporate aspects - after all, it's much more "practical" to focus on connecting the big power plants together and just vaguely estimate the required consumption.
It's probable that, if you sat at a design meeting in the 80s and proposed, as "an energy-efficient solution", to have a small computer in every consumer's breaker box that monitors the incoming electricity, sends the info through a combination of radio and country-spanning wires to a central server, and then do analytics on it to predict when the power is needed, you'd have been laughed out of the room. And yet, that's how smart grids work nowadays and it is the correct solution to this problem.
The improvements in energy storage and solar/wind renewables would have started decades earlier, sure, and that would have mattered. But I don't think anybody would have been able to use them the way we can use them today if it was done twenty or thirty years ago, and the technology might have died down instead. It's hard to know for sure, but it's a very plausible outcome.