It’s funny how capitalist apologists in this thread attack the format of a tweet and people not reading the actual article, when they clearly haven’t read the original article.
Negative prices are only mentioned in passing, as a very rare phenomenon, while most of it is dedicated to value deflation of energy (mentioned 4 times), aka private sector investors not earning enough profits to justify expanding the grid. Basically a cautionary tale of leaving such a critical component of society up to a privatized market.
This is what the Cabal is doing !!
People keep reposting this like it’s a gotcha.
It’s not
If prices are negative most of the day there is less incentive to provide the capacity that’s needed during the night. The money for capex has to come from somewhere so it goes up significantly at night. And of course the negative price isn’t “real”, it just means power plants will shut down for swaths of the year until it’s affordable to keep the remainder running. Which then means lower average capacity on days that are cloudy, or additional maintenance on systems that only run in the winter. So then people throw battery stuff around… batteries are expensive. Really, really, really, really expensive. So you have to find a way to keep capacity up that’s not absurdly expensive or hard to maintain, or you have to keep all your fossil fuel plants at the ready while producing $0 in income to offset the upkeep, which…yes, gets passed to the consumer.
I know people want to simplify the national grid which spans across all continental states and connects to literal billions of devices producing and consuming power…but it’s actually kinda complicated.
The original article literally frames it as an economic problem under capitalism. Most of the article is about value deflation, not about the niche case of storing excess energy.
Lower prices may sound great for consumers. But it presents troubling implications for the world’s hopes of rapidly expanding solar capacity and meeting climate goals. It could become difficult to convince developers and investors to continue building ever more solar plants if they stand to make less money or even lose it https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/14/1028461/solar-value-deflation-california-climate-change/
Maybe take a break from the capitalist apologia to understand that this shouldn’t be a problem for a society that is trying to move away from cooking the planet.
“Instead of trying to solve the problem we currently have, with the systems and tools that are there, how about we forget about the problem and work on something much much harder instead”.
Don’t get me wrong you’re absolutely free and welcome to advocate for systemic solutions. But don’t attack people working on alleviating symptoms in a practical way or I’ll call you an accelerationist. “Here’s how we implement socialism! Step one: Burn the planet”.
wow, its almost like the government that we pay taxes to should be what’s powering the country and not private corporations that are only concerned about profits 😋
Hear me out: a giant water balloon. Roughly the size of the sun.
As a solar punk, I have solar panels, some batteries, and all my stuff runs off USB or 12v. I don’t pay utilities
How do you heat water?
Solar is at it’s most cost effective on buildings that use a lot of power during the day, such as factories and office buildings.
That way, you’re using most, if not all, of the power you generate, rather than selling it to the grid at a lower cost.
Ughh, no, negative prices aren’t some weird “capitalism” thing. When the grid gets over loaded with too much power it can hurt it. So negative prices means that there is too much power in the system that needs to go somewhere.
There are things you can do like batteries and pump water up a hill then let it be hydroelectric power at night.
I feel like having a colossal battery pack could help with that problem.
Colossal is an understatement
Absolutely. The hydro thing is really just a water battery, it’s just stored in potential kinetic energy instead of chemical energy. But sodium cells are starting to look like a good option for chemical energy too.
It can, but people need to build it.
But it doesn’t say “it can generate too much energy and damage infrastructure”, they said “it can drive the price down”. The words they chose aren’t, like, an accident waiting for someone to explain post-hoc. Like, absolutely we need storage for exactly the reason you say, but they are directly saying the issue is driving the price down, which is only an issue if your not able to imagine a way to create this infrastructure without profit motive.
Yeah mate. The people writing here are economists not engineers, and that’s the professional language for what they’re talking about in their field. It’s like if a nuclear engineer said “oh yeah, the reactor is critical” which means stable.
I hear the point your making and the point OP made, but this is how really well trained PhDs often communicate - using language in their field. It’s sort of considered rude to attempt to use language from another specialty.
All of that context is lost in part b.c. this is a screenshot of a tweet in reply to another tweet, posted on Lemmy.
The way it’s supposed to work is the economist should say “we don’t know what this does to infrastructure you should talk to my good buddy Mrs. Rosie Revere Engineer about what happens.”
All I know about nuclear reactors is that prompt critical is the “Get out of there stalker” one.
Economists think in terms of supply and demand. Saying it drives prices down or negative is a perfectly good explanation of a flaw in the system, especially if you’re someone on the operating side.
this feels like someone just looking for an argument… having negative pricing is a problem, and yes there are solutions like hydro and battery… hopefully this encourages that infrastructure to be created!
Yep, and the cost difference between those times should make this very cost effective.
Obviously any business model’s problems should be blamed on whatever breaks it.
Never forget the plot of space balls is that they figured out how to monopolize the air.
It was released in 1987.
Mel Brooks is the goat.
Great comments in here that understand the actual issues, instead of, ya’ know, the usual.
Something I haven’t seen in the thread: Can someone address the costs of keeping the infrastructure maintained? Free power sounds great, but it can never be free. Entire industries must be paid to manufacture pylons, wire, transformers, substations, all that. Then there are the well paid employees who are our boots on the ground. (Heroes to me!)
How is solar disrupting the infra costs?
The actual issue, as stated in the original article is value deflation, aka investors not making enough money to justify energy transition to a timeline where humanity still exists in 100 years. Decoupling the issue from the political and economic aspect is disingenuous at best.
All/almost all net metering plans will still charge access and/or infrastructure fees.
That’s exactly why i want it, but i can’t in our appartment…other than a single mobile panel on our balcony and a mobile battery, which will cost about €1000 and will only allow me to partially run some electric devices.
Hear me out: pump the excess solar power from the sunny side of Earth via maser into space at a geostationary microwave mirror array that reflects and focuses power back at a ground station on the dark side of Earth.
I see this posted a lot as if this is an issue with capitalism. No, this is what happens when you have to deal with maintaining the power grid using capitalism as a tool.
Power generation needs to match consumption. Always constantly the power grid must be balanced. If you consume more than you can generate, you get a blackout. If you generate more than you use, something catches fire.
Renewables generate power on their own schedule. This is a problem that can be solved with storage. But storage is expensive and takes time to construct.
Negative prices are done to try and balance the load. Its not a problem, its an opportunity. If you want to do something that needs a lot of power, you can make money by consuming energy when more consumption is needed. And if you buy a utility scale battery, you can make money when both charging and discharging it if you schedule it right.
That’s not renewables being a problem, that’s just what happens when the engineering realities of the power grid come into contact with the economic system that is prevalent for now.
I can’t ragebait if you people are being logical 😒
This is a problem that can be solved with storage. But storage is expensive and takes time to construct.
true. thing is, they’ve seen it coming for a decade, and knew it needed to happen. It shames me that we’re just now trying to pick up the storage side when we’ve had ample evidence the need was growing rapidly.
I see this posted a lot as if this is an issue with capitalism. No, this is what happens when you have to deal with maintaining the power grid using capitalism as a tool.
The framing of it as the problem being that the price is going down rather than that excess power is feeding into the grid is what makes it an issue with capitalism. The thing you should be questioning is why MIT Technology Review is talking about some consequence of the problem that only exists because of capitalism instead of talking about the problem itself.
That’s pretty vastly different, isn’t it?
Not really. It’s like saying toast falls butter side down, vs toast falls non-buttered side up?
MIT Technology Review is talking
they did talk about this many years ago. This is a very old screenshot that has been around the internet for probably a decade at a guess. You might notice the check mark because this was from a time that twitter actually vetted sources. There’s nothing wrong with a publication having bad takes on occasion. That does happen now and again.
The telling part is the fact that this one single tweet keeps being reposted repeatedly, with the reply as if this is a substantive criticism of capitalism.
Also, fwiw, you can curtail wind turbines incredibly quickly. They’re the quickest moving assets on an electrical grid typically. So you are using them to balance the grid quite often. You can just pitch the blades a bit and they slow or stop. it’s not really a tech problem, but a financial one like you said.
I’m not sure much about solar curtailment, other than the fact that they receive curtailment requests and comply quite quickly as well.
Just to be clear this can’t be solved with storage. Currently it can be but not permanently.
For ease of argument let’s say the grid runs 100% on solar with batteries that last a day. For 100% solar you need to build power for when demand is highest, winter, and supply is lowest also winter. Come summer demand is lowest and supply is highest. You can’t store all that energy in summer because you got fuck all to do with it.
It’s a really weird cost saving exercise but basically when supply is massively abundant it has to be wasted. No one is going to build that final battery that is only used for 1 day every 10 years.
Bringing it all together. In a 100% renewables grid with solar, wind, hydro and batteries a lot of electricity will be wasted and it will be the cheapest way to do it. Cheaper than now.
Quite a few people talk about this on youtube. Tony Seba and rethinkx is the best place to start in my opinion.
Hydo power can be used as storage, and can generate power on-demand. I’d recommend avoiding YouTube if you want reliable information.
Yes it can, I didn’t say otherwise. I’m not sure what your point is.
The electricity grid is about matching supply and demand. Hydro is not going to stop massively amount of wind and solar being wasted in a 100% is it?
Also most grids don’t have enough hydro storage or inertia to solve to problem by itself.
Then tell me why the mechanism to control production via the solar panels themselves hasn’t been implemented? I’ve seen several viable options, including covers that are manual or even automated and powered by the excess energy…
South Australia has run into this problem and implemented a solution.
When the solar exports in a section of the grid exceeds the local transformer’s limits, a signal is sent to all of the inverters in that section to limit the export rate. The same signal can be send to all solar inverters in South Australia if the entire grid has too much renewable energy.
This signal only limits the export to the grid, so the homeowner can always use their own solar power first. The permitted export is guaranteed to be between 1.5kW and 10kW per phase.
The was a minor oversight during implementation. Homeowners on wholesale pricing would often curtail or switch off their solar inverters if the prices went negative. If the grid operator sent a signal to reduce the export rate, it would override the homeowner’s command and force a 1.5kW export during negative pricing (costing the homeowner to export). No-one considered that anyone might not want to export solar all of the time.
Something catches fire lol what, as if they can’t just disconnect the solar cells if they run out of batteries
You can do. If you don’t that’s when you get the fire, or more likely a whole bunch of breakers flip and you are in a black start situation.
Nice comment! Thanks.
“Well you see there is generations and generations of ghouls that have made their entire livelihood off the established and continued monopolization of vital resources such as water and power and for some reason the rest of us haven’t gotten together and solved that clear and obvious threat to everyone and everything collectively, I know I don’t get it either.”
