Microblog Memes

Hear me out: a giant water balloon. Roughly the size of the sun.

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 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.

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.

If you're describing nearly free and unlimited electricity as a problem, you may want to reconsider some things.

As a solar punk, I have solar panels, some batteries, and all my stuff runs off USB or 12v. I don't pay utilities

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?

You can read the Technology Review article here discussing why this is problematic beyond a JPEG-artifacted screenshot of a snappy quip from a furry porn Twitter account that may or may not have read the article beyond the caption. We need solar power plants to reach net zero emissions, but even despite their decreasing costs and subsidies offered for them, developers are increasingly declining to build them because solar is so oversaturated at peak hours that it becomes worthless or less than worthless. The amount of energy pumped into the grid and the amount being used need to match to keep the grid at a stable ~60 Hz (or equivalent where you live, e.g. 50 Hz for the PAL region), so at some point you need to literally pay people money to take the electricity you're producing to keep the grid stable or to somehow dump the energy before it makes its way onto the grid.

One of the major ways this problem is being offset is via storage so that the electricity can be distributed at a profit during off-peak production hours. Even if the government were to nationalize energy production and build their own solar farms (god, please), they would still run up against this same problem where it becomes unviable to keep building farms without the storage to accommodate them. At that point it becomes a problem not of profit but of "how much fossil fuel generation can we reduce per unit of currency spent?" and "are these farms redundant to each other?".

This is framed through a capitalist lens, but in reality, it's a pressing issue for solar production even if capitalism is removed from the picture entirely. At some point, solar production has to be in large part decoupled from solar distribution, or solar distribution becomes far too saturated in the middle of the day making putting resources toward its production nearly unviable.

"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."

Why not do something with all that power? In the past there were some projects where they pumped water upstream when there was too much power on the grid. Then on low energy times, the water was released making energy again. Or make hydrogen (I think it was hydrogen). Or do AI stuff

I also seen energie waste machines that basically use a lot of power to do nothing. Only the get rid of all that extra energy so the power grid won't go down/burn.

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.

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.

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.

If anyone is curious as to why we don't run the world off solar, from what I understand the big issue is power grid frequency. Unlike a turbine, solar has no intertia. If you take away light the power drop is instant. With turbines, they keep spinning due to their weight. This is especially important since if a large load is suddenly energized, the turbine might slow down but still won't stop immediately. Maybe in the future giant electric powered flywheels or pumpgen systems can take up the slack. Nuclear would likely also help since those are essentially giant steam turbine generators. Good video with some more info here.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7G4ipM2qjfw&t=589

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.

Just install a bunch of spotlights that point back at the Sun so when power prices go negative you can return all that excess energy! Come on MIT, I thought you were supposed to be smart.