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Having the cost of power go to zero is a bit of a problem if selling power is your business model, so it’s not exactly ideal for solar providers.
So what they are saying is that our current financial system is too focused on short term gains to cope with short term losses?
Sigh, when I grew up, I was allways taught to save money so that I have a buffer to fall back on. This concept seems to have completely gone out the window for busniesses lately.
I dislike the talk about how capitalism is bad as a general concept, but when seeing stuff like this I do agree with it in parts.
Ok, so let’s solve the issue.
There is too much electricity, so generating power to transmit to the network will cost us money.
This has an easy solution, just don’t transmit it to the network.
Build a battery facility where you store the power instead, infact if the price of electricity is negative, use the power on the grid and charge your batteries as well, I mean, when the electricity cost is negative, you are being paid to consume power.
Then when the sun goes down, and the electricity price goes up, you sell the charge you have in the batteries.
Depending on your location you could even set up a pumped storage system, where instead of batteries getting charged, you use the cheap excess energy to pump a resarvoir full of water, and release it when you need the power.
This is generally the right idea of a solution, but it’s a difficult engineering problem.
It’s not “just an economics problem” despite the headline.
The “cost of power becoming negative” is phrased in an economic way but what it really means is the grid has too much power and that power needs to go somewhere or it will damage infrastructure.
Yes but there are many solutions already to that problem.
The first one being to shutdown a few stations production when overproducing. The second one being a myriad of storage solutions that already exists and scale them.
It is an economic problem because we already have many ways to skin the cat, but it won’t produce shareholder value in the short term.
“Economic problem” isn’t merely short form for “if we had a socialist system we could solve it with free money.” These solutions require us to dig huge amounts of minerals out of the ground and tear the earth apart in the process. And we’re already doing that at a rate exponentially larger than we ever have in history. Plus these are the same materials we need to build the batteries for EVs, so building them for grid storage competes with the EV transition.
And then you factor in the rapidly increasing electric demand we’re producing by switching over to EVs and that means the demand on the grid is even higher. The grid wasn’t built to be able to source power from everywhere so putting solar panels on everyone’s rooftops is making the situation even worse.
It’s always funny to me that the first argument is always thinking that socialists want free money.
How many billions are we giving away to big corpos for them to do buy backs and pocket the change?
Being socialist means reusing the tax money for the benefits of the citizens, not the corpos. Trickle down economics are a sham and never worked
I agree that it takes resources, but we could finance the extraction of these resources instead of giving subsidies to fossil and fuel industry, or paying for sports stadium for that matter, or giving money to any corpos really.
And let’s not play coy here and think that the fossil industry isn’t destroying the earth.
We have the money, and the solutions right now, but the profits are in the way.
The issue with the green energy transition (renewable energy, grid upgrades, grid scale storage, EVs, and elimination of fossil fuel household heating) is that well over 90% of all the critical minerals we need are mined and/or refined in China. No one wants to move any of this stuff to the US because the environmental damage and refining waste are extremely toxic, far more so than any other resource extraction we do here.
Furthermore, all the end-point usage of these resources (making solar panels, capacitors, semiconductors, printed circuit boards, and finished electronics assemblies) is all done in China as well. So if we mined and refined all the minerals we’d end up shipping them all to China to be used in manufacturing.
So now if you want to avoid all that you’re talking about building the entire electronics supply chain inside western countries. But then you face the further issue that there simply aren’t enough electrical engineers in the west to work at these factories. So now you’ve got to retool the entire education system to train a new generation for this critical work.
At the same time, you’re having to deal with the fact that most Americans don’t want to work in these places. TSMC has been very vocal about their struggles to build these chip foundries in the US and hire Americans at the low wages it actually takes to make this stuff competitive against the obscenely cheap products coming from China. Now consider the fact that TSMC is considered a crème de la crème employer in Taiwan, and the factories in China making capacitors and other bulk commodity components pay far less and have far lower margins, and you can begin to see the issue.
Americans want the green energy revolution but they don’t want to give up even an inch of quality of life to get it. Neither the rightest of the far right Republicans nor the leftest of the far left Democrats has expressed any desire to volunteer to lower their own standard of living. The whole story thing is a big fight to try to force other people to lower theirs.
I know that, and to incentivice people to use the power, they pay you to do it.
That’s really not an easy solution at all. It’s simple, conceptually, but it’s a huge series of projects. And expensive.
Early adopters will profit the most, it’s a non-issue.
I know that, but with long term planning its fine.
This is exactly what we’re gonna see on a large scale in a few years.
I’m very hopeful for flow batteries to improve to a point where they can be very cheaply installed at scale. Seems much better environmentally than lithium ion, and the drawbacks matter less for grid storage.
Flow battery drawbacks aren’t drawbacks for home use, let alone grid scale.
Absolutely. Home use is what got me interested in them in the first place. I love to DIY stuff (recently I’ve been building planar speakers from scratch) and had the crazy idea of building one for my house.
What are the drawbacks?
Too heavy, and too big. They are also expensive but prices are bound to come down once production is up. But they have claimed zero capacity degradation for decades they say. And the liquid inside is a fire retardant, so if you puncture a battery that would actually put out the fire.
a few years
Snowy Hydro cost overruns would like a word
This has an easy solution, just don’t transmit it to the network.
It’s the base load providers that don’t like this. Coal and nuclear don’t like to ramp down. They can’t shut down easily and their installation keeps costing money but stops bringing in money in that period. They’ll go complain to daddy government how unfair it is.
Until batteries start replacing them by being cheaper.
Why are individuals expected to have an emergency fund yet corporations get money from the government?
From a grid stability point, you can’t produce more than is used, else you get higher frequencies and/or voltages until the automatics shut down. It’s already a somewhat frequent occurence in germany for the grid operator to shut down big solar plants during peak hours because they produce way more power than they can dump (because of low demand or the infrastructure limiting transfer to somewhere else)
Negative prices are the grid operator encouraging more demand so it can balance out the increased production.
But the thing is, you CAN simply turn them off at the press of a button (or an automated script) so its really a complete non issue. As long as big solar installations control systems are accessible by the grid operators, it should be fine.
If you’re spending billions to build a solar plant that has to turn off all the time during peak hours then you’re wasting your money. That seems like a fundamental issue to me, not a non-issue.
Are there any solar plants that cost a billion dollars each?
Secondly, you want to over build solar, so that you have enough capacity during off peak hours. Grid storage is obviously the better solution, but seems not widely available enough yet.
It doesn’t matter how much solar you build; without storage you’ve got zero power available at night.
The issue with overbuilding solar is that you drive daytime electricity prices to zero so that everyone is losing money on all these solar plants. Furthermore, base load plants such as nuclear plants also start losing money and they have no ability to shut down during peak hours. So you end up driving the base load plants out of business and they shut down permanently. Now you have even less capacity available at night! This causes nighttime power to become extremely unreliable, potentially leading to rolling blackouts and skyrocketing nighttime energy prices.
Another issue that people rarely discuss is the quality of power on the grid. All the grids in the world operate on 50/60 Hz AC which must be carefully maintained at an accurate frequency and synchronized with the grid. The main base load turbines are the source of this waveform which is carefully monitored and adjusted to remain stable.
Solar panels produce DC power which needs to be converted into AC with an inverter and synchronized with the grid. The problem is that if all the base load turbines are taken off the grid then there is nothing for the solar inverters to synchronize with! Turbines are nice and stable because they’re literally an enormous, massive spinning flywheel. Without them you’ll have an extremely unstable system where all of the solar plants are trying to adjust their frequencies and phases to match each other and the whole thing wanders all over the place.
You can do more with them too actually. You can ramp down the AC power production incrementally to meet curtailment requirements, in theory. When you do that though you subject your inverters to greater strain/losses and less efficiency which shortens your lifetime.
If inverter-based producers in solar, wind, and/or BESS want their sites to last for 30-40 years so that ROI is achieved via operation, then it is in their interest to protect their equipment and operate as much as possible at rated conditions or de-energized conditions.
You might think that it would make sense to have more of a slider control between ON and OFF to save everyone, from producers to grids to consumers, but my guess from being in the industry is that grids don’t really supply incentives for that kind of operation. If they did, maybe you’d see more variable control at utility- and community-scale levels.
Ok, but what do you do when you’re short of power at night? Keep in mind to turn on conventional power stations it’s expensive & time consuming. Once they startup they need to stay on for a long while to be efficient & cheap.
The real solution is to store excess power in batteries. Lithium ion is too expensive to scale, Sodium ion batteries are economically & capacity viable AFAIK.
Thats just not what this post is about. Obviously storing is the way but until then yiu just gotta turn em off
I’ve read that gravity batteries and sand batteries are ecologically sound options that work on the scale needed to support large sections of electrical grid.
I hesitate on
that work on the scale needed to support large sections of electrical grid
That first link is for a 10MW, 8 hour battery. 10MW is on the smaller end of generators, you’d need quite a few of these to start making an impact. For example, a small gas turbine is like 50MW, a large one is over 250MW.
And you could say “just build a lot of them” but the capacity per unit of area tends to be pretty low for these types of technologies.
Building them where we have ample space is okay. But now this power has to be transmitted, and we are already having a lot of problems with transmission line congestion as-is. The real advantage of energy storage is when it’s done local, no need for transmission lines.
Plus there’s permitting/stability issues as well. These wouldn’t work if the area was prone to earthquakes or other natural events.
That’s fair. They’re certainly imperfect, but a large improvement over electrolytic cells for large scale storage.
Spot on! I hoped this comment would be higher! The main problem isn’t corps not making money, but grid stability due to unreliability of renewables.
To be fair, the original tweet is kinda shit to begin with. They’ve unnecessarily assigned monetary value to a purely engineering (physics?) problem.
The original commenter’s (OC’s) point has nothing to do with renewables’ reliability.
It is entirely to do with generation vs demand. Grid operators could ask other generators like coal, nuclear, hydro, etc. plants to curtail so inverter-based renewables can export power, but that’s not likely because those producers can’t ramp generation up and down as easily.
Grid stability is a problem when you have overcrowding of generation without enough demand on given feeders. This is moreso an issue with the utilities anyways and how they plan their transmission and substation upgrades.
The issue is those coal, nuclear, hydro plants are what produce power when the sun isn’t out. If you consistently shut them down for solar, they will go out of business and there will be no way to provide electricity when solar doesn’t.
Well I wasn’t expecting to find THE right answer in the comments already. Kudos!
And to everyone reading through this post: If you have questions, need more explanations or want to learn more about the options that we have to “stabilize” a renewable energy system and make it long term viable, just ask!
What options do we have to stabilize a renewable energy system and make it long term viable?
Well, I set myself up for this, didn’t I… 😅 Actually I was kind of hoping for a more specific question, as I would need to respond with a wall of text - and I would like to avoid that as it is kinda rude to force people to read so much and it makes discussion difficult.
So maybe 3 options:
- Wall of text
- You have a more specific question in mind to rephrase
- I try to summarize my wall of text, but I might not get the point across
Lol yes you walked right into that one… Well let me try to meet you half way with some open-ended questions:
-
What does “stabilize” mean in this context, and are the challenges there different than the challenges with non-renewables like fossil fuels?
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What are the biggest bottlenecks for stabilizing renewables, and how surmountable are they? For example, I’ve heard lots of talk about how large-scale battery networks(…?) are important to smooth out capacity for swingy energy sources like solar and wind (i.e. you gotta make sure the power doesn’t go out at night!), but the materials for batteries (e.g. extractable lithium?) are scarce… Or similar concerns about photovoltaic cells. Is there any merit to those concerns? Or are the bottlenecks elsewhere? Or is there no bottleneck at all but Big Oil is conspiring to keep us on hydrocarbons?
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Piggybacking on your grid stability point, another issue I don’t see getting addressed here is ramp rate.
If we install enough solar where 100% of our daytime load is served by solar, that’s great. But what about when the solar starts to drop off later in the day?
A/Cs are still running while the sun is setting, the outside air is still hot. People are also getting home from work, and turning on their A/Cs to cool off the house, flipping on their lights, turning on the oven, etc.
Most grids have their peak power usage after solar has completely dropped off.
The issue then becomes: how can we serve that load? And you could say “just turn on some gas-fired units, at least most of the day was 100% renewable.”
But some gas units take literal hours to turn on. And if you’re 100% renewable during the day, you can’t have those gas units already online.
Grid operators have to leave their gas units online, running as low as they can, while the sun is out. So that when the peak hits, they can ramp up their grid to peak output, without any help from solar.
There are definitely some interesting solutions to this problem, energy storage, load shifting, and energy efficiency, but these are still in development.
People expect the lights to turn on when they flip the switch, and wouldn’t be very happy if that wasn’t the case. Grid operators are unable to provide that currently without dispatchable units.
One solution to what you’re describing is to expand the grid. If your grid stretches half the planet, when the East starts to experience night, the West still experiences day and can ship electricity from renewables to the East to make up for their self curtailment. The same goes for wind where if one location on the planet doesn’t experience wind, odds are another location does and the power can be shuffled around.
Another option is to build out more battery storage such that any clipped energy from solar or wind - that is, the energy that can be generated from your solar or wind resource but that can’t be exported because it would overload your inverters or transformers or exceed your PPA agreement with your utility - is stored and can be exported for 2-4 hours as the sun goes down or wind dies out.
Not a lot of renewables sites are colocated with battery storage, but more and more are.
If we install enough solar where 100% of our daytime load is served by solar, that’s great. But what about when the solar starts to drop off later in the day?
Store the surprus of energy from the solar panels and use that as a buffer with batteries or gravity
But some gas units take literal hours to turn on. And if you’re 100% renewable during the day, you can’t have those gas units already online.
Why not? Just time it and start it hours before, wind energy could help in that too
Gravity energy storage doesn’t scale well. I’ve replied to other comments with more detail on this.
There are more feasible energy storage technologies out there, but these are super cutting edge and are not ready for grid-level deployment yet.
The future of grid level energy storage is almost certainly not going to be gravity based. At least not on a large scale.
You can’t have 100% of load be renewable/solar and have gas units online on top of that. That’s over generation. You have to match the supply exactly with the demand. If you mismatch, you destabilize the grid. Undersupply causes blackouts, oversupply melts power lines.
If a unit takes 10 hours to start, solar hours are from 6am to 6pm, and peak load is at 7pm with 0% solar; when do you recommend we start this unit? At the minimum, we’d have to order it on at 7am. Units have to run at a minimum load, let’s say 100MW for this unit. So now you can’t 100% solar from 7am to 6pm, you have to leave 100MW of room for this base loaded unit.
This doesn’t even factor in regulatory requirements like flex, spinning reserve, and other balancing and reliability requirements. Grids are required to have emergency units available at an instant to prevent mass destabilization if parts of the grid fail.
10hours to start oof, i though it was less, maybe individual batteries in house, like we have with water?, that wouldn’t be cheap for industry tho
To be fair 10 hours is either a pretty old or pretty massive unit. 2 hours might be a little more reflective of modern gas turbines. Especially combined cycles. But depending on how big the peak is, you need every available unit, both old and new.
Ultimately the issue is it’s very hard to meet that peak when all of your gas units have to go from 0 to 100% output. Much easier (and more reliable) to take them from 10% to 100%. Which is what grid operators do currently.
Yea an affordable battery in every home would be a slam dunk. This is kinda already happening with vehicle2grid (v2g) electric car protocols. But not everyone has an EV yet. And operators are still working out the kinks using this in the grid.
Plus the lithium batteries in cars have their own supply/recycling issues.
As someone with a technical background this is the stupidest problem with solar that I don’t get… just turn off the panels in groups until generation is closer to demand… how have engineers not figured that out. And if they have why does this still get written about.
Someone is an idiot. Maybe it’s me?
I’m in solar/BESS, and I mean more and more DER sites are making use of string inverters which break out arrays into greater chunks than with central inverters. With those, you have more granularity of control where you can drop entire blocks/strings at a time to fall to your curtailed export rate.
You might ask yourself though why DERs can’t just ramp inverter outputs up or down to match curtailment automatically across a whole site. You can absolutely do that, but what happens is your solar or wind resource stays high on the DC or low frequency (LF) AC side, respectively, while power frequency AC is low on the other side of the inverters. This is referred to as DC:AC ratio in the biz, and the higher that ratio, the more losses your inverters experience and less efficient they are. This also puts a huge strain on your inverters and can lessen their operational lifetime.
But really, DERs tie into the grid at distribution level and so they don’t fall under the regulations of FERC & NERC (at least in North America). This means that smaller producers don’t have the same requirements for control as do utility-scale players, so the incentive to control these string inverters at that granular level isn’t there. It’s much easier to just trip the main breaker and wait until the utility gives you the go ahead to turn back on.
I suspect that at lot of producers may want to look into greater control capabilities in the future, but this also depends on inverter OEMs too allowing that control.
I’m adjacent to this problem, so I have a little context, but am not an expert at all.
To my knowledge, we don’t have granular control over panels. So we can shut off legs of a plant, but that’s a lot of power to be moving all at once.
Instead, prices are set to encourage commercial customers to intake more power incrementally. This has a smoother result on the grid, less chance of destabilizing.
A customer like a data center could wait to perform defragmentation or a backup or something until the price of power hits a cheap or negative number.
Thanks that’s helpful.
But right…?
Solar plants can be reduced to rationalize supply.
To my understanding. The bigger issue is you can’t as effectively do this with other non-renewables like coal/gas… so this not a solar problem but a problem of legacy power plants.
So stupid. The narrative as well.
Yea, more control over the panels will help with the overgeneration issue.
But there’s other issues like ramping supply to meet peak demand and general generation during non-solar hours that still have to be addressed.
Each have interesting proposals on how to solve them, but they haven’t been developed to the point that they’re ready to be put onto the grid at a large scale.
Literal free goddamn energy from the sky and these greedy fucks are going to burn the world down because they can’t flip it for a buck
you know we could just put our collective foot down and take the power away from them.
It sounds dumb, but because you can’t turn off solar power, if it produces more then you need, you have to use it somehow or it can damage equipment. Hence the driving prices into negative territory. It’s a technical problem more than it is a financial one.
Sounds like energy companies or independent entities should invest in energy storage so they can get paid to draw from the grid.
But then you’ve got cities like Morro Bay, CA that are trying to stop a plan to replace a coal plant with a battery storage facility because batteries are supposedly dangerous.
Gotta love any time anybody argues against replacing coal with something else, and the tactic is to spread FUD about the thing that is NOT coal!
It is a financial problem. Technically you can just cover the solar panels. But that’s not good financially.
Your “technically you can” is actually a huge logistical nightmare to implement.
Having electricity rates go really low is intended to incentivize people or companies to sink the excess energy to wherever they can. And also to discourage producers to produce more at that hour, if they are able to.
Logistical problems are still financial problems though. That’s my point. Hire enough people/develop the appropriate automation and the issue is no more.
We have the technology to solve this, the problem is the money.
In fact, you could just buy enough batteries and the problem will also go away. Still a financial problem, not a technology one.
EDIT: just to clarify, if at some point energy prices go negative, it means that it is cheaper to buy energy usage than a solution. Unless the energy company is dumb enough to just lose money for the lazyness of considering other options.
You could spend the money, but you also need to consider whether that money is well spent. Batteries do not last forever. Maybe that money is better spent on R&D to develop better batteries first. Also natural resources and environmental impact needs to be considered. Batteries take natural resources to build and also occupies a lot of space.
20 years ago, we also have the technology to run AI workloads. Except we probably had to deploy billions of CPUs to match the capability of today’s GPUs. We have the technology then, but it is not practical. And that money was much better spent in the R&D that lead to today’s GPUs. So similarly our batteries probably needs to be a few magnitude better than what we have today before it is practical to use.
Really? I’m seriously asking, because I thought solar farms already had automated ways of cleaning off the panels, surely an automated way to cover the panels wouldn’t be any more complex than that. It would add maintenance costs for sure, but calling it a logistical nightmare seems like an exaggeration.
You need to consider more than just solar farms. There are many roof top solar systems on people’s houses. That’s what I’m referring to regarding logistical nightmare.
Second, if we are just going to cover up solar panels, then it really defeats the purpose of having it. A better way is to come up with ways to store this excess energy to use when there is low production and not have to depend on fossil fuels at night.
Yeah I understand storing and using the energy is obviously a better solution than to stop producing the energy. But in the short term, in the context of large solar arrays, until we have storage solutions or ways to store the excess, covering the panels up or turning them to face the ground for a bit doesn’t seem like a very big logisticical hurdle.
There are many roof top solar systems on people’s houses. That’s what I’m referring to regarding logistical nightmare.
Are there really enough residential rooftop panels for this to even be a problem? And couldn’t it be solved just by installing a battery for your home to store the excess? Again, if you could explain how this would be a logistical nightmare for my ignorant self, I’d appreciate it.
Most use a horizontal single axis configuration and could just tilted the panels away from the sun.
The real question that we should be asking, is why nobody can think of what to do with free energy?
Desalination? Mine Bitcoin? Giant space laser?
It’s not a question of ideas, it’s a question of money. Building things to use excess power costs a lot of money.
In some markets, the power price actually goes negative and consumers can be paid to use energy.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/20/energy/three-mile-island-microsoft-ai/index.html
I think there’s plenty of money out there to use excess power, someone just has to connect the dots…
Or in a pinch: just run big-ass space heaters. Seriously. It’s a stupid way to burn off excess power, but it’s dirt simple and cheap. Just have a big array of resistive heaters out in an empty field somewhere with a high fence around it. Need to burn off an extra GW? Run it through massive heating elements and burn burn it off. It’s a stupid waste of good energy, but as an emergency backup, it’s not a bad option. It’s trivially easy to dispose of huge amounts of excess electricity if you just run the mother-of-all space heaters. Run your stupid giant resistive heater at the bottom of a lake for even better effect.
Afaik photovoltaics are fine running open circuit, i.e., disconnecting them. Thermal solar, and wind, are (I think) much trickier (but covering things for solar thermal, like you suggest, is perhaps feasible).
Factorio players: hold my beer
It is a technical problem of how can you convince electrical companies to overcome a problem they have no financial incentive to solve.
that’s not a technical problem. that’s a weakness of the people’s resolve problem. we can, at any time, force them to do the right thing.
I’m aware its not a technical problem, I was using the word ironically to point out the person I was responding to was wrong to say it…
Also saying we can at any time fix a problem is just being ignorant of the many near impossible steps needed to fix the problem. In this case the problem is capitalism. We could come up with ways to end capitalism or make capitalism work in the interest of humanity, but will it realistically ever happen? No it wont, private money won, look at the topics discussed for presidential debate, never a mention of doing something about private capital owning Washington. Just super effective wedge issues.
You’re being too broad. We don’t need to undo all of capitalism here. Nationalising the electric grid is a reasonable solution to this particular problem.
What incentive does a politician have to support nationalizing the power grid? It wont be a super splashy issue to tackle so it isnt worth doing it for the credit, and the different power companies of the world will just put their money into buying opposition to your effort anyways.
That’s the problem with capitalism is that any single thing you would want to do that would impact some cocksuckers capital, and the threat alone makes it a necessity to pay to win in congress. Usually the only way stuff like this happens is because there is new capital entering the market that can afford to donate against the old capital to overtake them. Its just rich assholes all the way down.
If the government seizes control of a major industry, that’s a lot of power and opportunity for politicians. It’s already been done in some local areas, and it had the broad support of the people because “the electric company is gouging us, the gov should take it over” is an easy sell.
Didnt Nikola Tesla try to sell Westinghouse on providing free unmetered electricity to everyone on earth and got laughed out of the room?
Yes, because Westinghouse was running a business.
Can they not route excess electricity into the ground?
No, unfortunately, you can’t.
Ground doesn’t typically dissipate power, rather, power is dissipated in the circuit/load — so if you just hook a wire to ground, you’re dumping gobs of power into the wire. If you do this in your home (DON’T), best case it will trip the breaker, worst case it will melt and catch something on fire.
It’s easy enough to burn a kilowatt — just boil some water. But it’s entirely something else to burn megawatt, or yikes, gigawatt scale power.
It seems braindead simple to me to work some controls into an industrial scale solar array to manage its output by regulating its input. Like, rotating the panels to put them out of their optimal alignment with the sun or mechanically partially covering them with shutters.
Simple but extremely expensive.
“Damaging equipment” is just nonsense. I’ve got an off-grid solar system. When the battery is fully charged the solar panels simply stops producing. It has potential (voltage) but no current until you draw power. Just like a battery is full of energy but it just sits there until you draw power from it.
All solar systems could have smart switches to intelligently disconnect from the grid as needed, some inverter already do this automatically. So it’s not a technical problem. It’s a political problem.
This can cause degradation of the PN junction on the panel shortening life. The plans I’ve seen all have a resistive heater some place to dump the excess when full. Smart equipment does help mitigate most issues like moving the resistance point on the panel for lower efficiency when signaled to do so but less is not the same as none.
How does it damage the PN junction of the panel is open circuit or barely loaded? It doesn’t seem logical that this would damage the panel, but I’m open to being proven wrong.
There are all kinds of follow up questions to ask as well, but I think the main one is how big an effect are we talking?
Not a huge effect now with smart systems but if you leave solar panel disconnected from everything and out in the sun for weeks at a time you will damage the panel. Open circuit voltage is higher than operating voltage and higher voltage will break down insulation. PN depends on the insulating properties of a doped layer. If I remember correctly electron tunneling causes damage by making the band gap smaller
Concentrated solar and wind are a bit different though?
With the economic damage resulting from covid lockdowns, you’d think this “somebody think of the stock market” narrative would go away.
The economy is something everyone relies on, not just rich people.
If you have a solar farm, invest in LLM and bitcoin server farm. Run it whenever you can’t make money selling energy.
Wasting energy isn’t the same as investing
You could actually put some thought into what you devote the energy to, and if wanting to do a blockchain based system, run Stellar or Ethereum nodes. Though they don’t use Proof of Work, so it would not use that much energy, relatively. You could offer supercomputing as a service that run batch jobs during the peak hours though.
Resource inefficiency is inconsequential as long as it generates profit within a capitalistic system.
If you’re going to create infrastructure to use the extra power, you may as well do useful work with it.
Aluminium smelting is about the most energy intensive thing we do, so better electricity management around that would be far more useful to far more people than creating digital assets for board members to get excited about. Just as an example.
Realistically the easiest way to use cheap/free electricity is to charge electric cars with it. Then we have energy storage and offset power usage later on when electricity is more expensive. There are plenty of ways to continue to make money off that process even if the electricity itself costs very little.
I doubt aluminum smelting makes sense as an intermittent thing.
This is where people keep coming back to hydrogen. While hydrogen doesn’t make sense for vehicles, or long term storage, it might for time shifting of intense energy uses locally
Solar—>hydrogen—>aluminum smelting?
Right, this is essentially another form of battery. Maybe it’ll work out. It doesn’t require flooding an entire river valley somewhere, so that’s nice.
Yes, we need to stop thinking “battery” and broaden to energy storage as a whole, which can take many more forms (wind up a big coil! Push things uphill!).
P1: I agree. P2: The issue of negative electricity prices is not just one of demand; It is also one of lacking power delivery infrastructure. So you can use the extra power remotely, as long as we also upgrade the power transmission infrastructure. However; I don’t agree with the statement that it is the easiest solution. Using the energy locally is easier. It would be nice though.
No one tell them that they can monopolize solar panels.
The real special bit is that this crap isn’t coming from, say Harvard, who one expects is all about business, but MIT which is supposed to be about Science and Engineering.
The media arm of MIT has been steaming garbage for years and constantly misrepresents the studies from their own researchers for clickbait.
But that aside, even though the engineering work out of MIT is solid, their economic opinions heavily reflect the fact that it’s an institution full of trust fund nepotism.
The grid needs to balance input and output. You can’t just “throw away” power.
It’s a real problem — not the “electric companies are losing money” part, but the “we need to keep the grid balanced” part.
That can indeed be a problem.
It is however not what the MIT guys wrote as being the problem: they quite literally said the problem with too much solar generation at peak times is that it drives prices down.
Also, curiously, the prices being driven down actually helps with the real technical problem that you point out: those consumers who can move their consumption times will tend to move them to those hours when the prices are lowest thus helping solve it. Same thing goes for investors: the more the price is pushed down at peak solar production times, the more appealing it is to invest in things like storage or even solutions with lower efficiency (such as green hydrogen or electricity transportation cables to markets less well served by solar).
The low prices aren’t the problem from a technical point of view, quite the contrary: they’re an incentive to invest in solutions (which is going to employ a lot of techies, so supposedly MIT would be all in favor of it)
Well then there is another way of seeing this: there is an engineering/difficulty with such large power fluctuations that “drive electricity prices negative” because it implies a much more variable demand on existing power infrastructure.
You’re way better at this than the clowns in the MIT press department and you only tried for a few seconds. Which means the people who wrote the headline are either so stupid they can’t tie their own shoes, or they have a malicious agenda. I lean towards the latter.
But this basically is the reason why no one wants to build a nuclear plant. Such a power plant will basically run at a massive loss during high solar and wind energy supply. A nuclear reactor takes a long time to shutdown once the reaction has started. So it can’t dynamically scale the production based on market demands. A nuclear power plant cost at least $8 billion and 8 years to build and needs to be operating for 50 years to see a return on investment. But during those 50 years wind, solar and battery tech will obviously advance as well. It’s basically a given that a nuclear power plant is never going to make the investment back. Hence why no one wants to build one. And therefore the government should do it.
Uhm, the baseload myth? Build a 100 buffers (be it battery or lakes or heat) for the money one nuclear plant costs. Like you said.
What the fuck do you mean by “base load myth”? Lol
Lol the first link mostly squabbles over definitions, and argues for natural gas.
The second link relies on simulations and required specific blends of several renewable sources to get rid of the need for a baseload source, which is not a broadly applicable solution. Not every location can have 50% wind supplying power (fucking lol) and they STILL required natural gas to ramp up supply.
The horror…the horror…
This is idiotic. The fact is your electricity transmission system operator has to pay a lot of money to keep the grid stable at 50 or 60Hz or your electronics would fry. With wind and especially with solar power, the variable output is always pushing the frequency one way or another, and that creates a great need for costly balancing services. Negative pricing is an example of such a balancing service. Sounds good, but for how long do you think your electricity company can keep on paying you to consume power?
This whole thread has way too many people who see the price as some kind of made up number that dictates how people behave, rather than recognizing that the price is a signal about the availability of useful real-world resources.
Even if the prices were strictly mandated by a centrally planned tariff that kept the same price throughout the day, every day, we’d still have the engineering challenge of how to match the energy fed into the grid versus taken out of the grid.
The prices are just a reflection of that technical issue, so solving it still needs to be done.
With wind and especially with solar power, the variable output is always pushing the frequency one way or the other, and that creates a great need for costly balancing services.
Speaking as a flashlight enthusiast…there’s many different ways to get a constant and consistent current. Sure we’d need to scale it up from a pocket-sized device to a whole fucking power grid, but with a big enough driver with the right arrangement of capacitors and all that, you’d easily be able to get a totally consistent current out of wind or solar
Sure, but for all the times my electricity goes negative for half an hour, the monthly bill indicates that is vastly outweighed by all the times that it isn’t.
sounds more like we should just change away from a shitty system that needs to be a specific frequency. If only there was an alternative…
Amazing! Every word of what you just said is wrong.
People also don’t realize that too much power is just as bad as too little, worse in fact. There’s always useful power sinks: pumped hydro, batteries, thermal storage, but these are not infinite.
Solar panels are easily disconnectable. Unlike conventional power plants it does not have spinning rust, that can walk away entire building.
Stupid question but can we not like, make toggleable solar panels? Like if I Just pull the plug extracting power from a solar panel does it explode or break or something?
Not really. You can discharge into the ground, but for large installations even the ground has a limited (local) capacity.
I have no idea what i am talking about… But what would happen if you pulled a black tarp over the panel? Could even be automatic like the blends on a building. And even partial.
- Unplug solar panel array
- Less electricity being generated
- …
- Profit (for the power company)
Could they not just break the circuit for the panel, and stop it feeding back into the mains?
Just have few percent of spare capacity. If suddenly it will become too sunny, you can just disconnect solar cells. If not sunny enough, then connect them back.
Obviously I’m talking only about day - the only time when solar panel output can fluctuate.
Why isn’t this as easy as storing some of that excess energy in a home battery and letting the rest down in a wire into the ground? Then if it’s smart enough it could only give back energy when needed.
You’re answering the wrong questions. I don’t think people are assuming that it’s simple to manage the power grid (if so, they shouldn’t be…) but rather why are we locked into a system that lets business profit motive be responsible for the continued existence of the ecosystem.
Guys. Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. Every cell has its own power house where it stores up the molecules needed to generate ATP on the spot. Our body does this because that’s very stable! Society should do it too. It’s called batteries.
Based and red-pilled. (Don’t yell at me back in my day the red pill entered the matrix, instead of just meaning racism.)
yeah the new it only have like a billion other stocks for these scumbags to get rich off of and short into the ground
that’s a ridiculous argument tho. of course you can. just very selectively choose who you sell solar panels to
