Wasn’t there a town in China that produced such a glut of surplus electricity that they didn’t know what to do with it all? And it was 100% solar?
Capitalism makes abundance problematic.
Supply side Jesus says put your faith in the wisdom of the CEO.
oh no the power is too cheap. God forbid our trillions of tax dollars go to something actually useful and good for the people oh well looks like we will get the F-47 instead and pay it to private military contracts 😂
Who is “we”? Fuck that.
The answer is batteries. And dismantling capitalism, but batteries first
A big flaw in German energy policy that has done a great job in expanding renewables, includes not giving its industry variable rates, that lets them invest in batteries, and schedule production more seasonally, or if they have reduced demand due to high product prices from high energy costs, just have work on the good days.
Using EVs as grid balancers can be an extra profit center for EV owners with or without home solar. Ultra cheap retail daytime rates is the best path to demand shifting. Home solar best path to removing transmission bottlenecks for other customers. Containerized batteries and hydrogen electrolysis as a service is a tariff exempt path at moving storage/surplus management throughout the world for seasonal variations, but significantly expanding renewables capacity without risking negative pricing, and making evening/night energy cheaper to boot.
Nah, lets squash capitalism first.
Honestly, this attitude is downright suicidal for our species right now. Capitalism took centuries to develop. Anything that replaces it will form over a similar time scale. And with climate change, that is time we do not have.
I’ve got some bad news though. If our markets keep ignoring the environmental cost of… well, pretty much anything, as they always have, capitalism will also fuck us over in the long run. I’ve even heard it’s already happening…
CapitalistsPeople in just about every system ignore negative externalities, which are defined as costs borne by other people for the benefits that they receive themselves. Ironically, capitalism might be the best short-term solution, if only we had the political will. One of the major functions of government is to internalize negative externalities, via taxes and regulations. It’s easy for a factory owner to let toxic effluent flow into the nearby river, but if it costs enough in taxes and fines, it’s cheaper to contain it. We just need to use government regulations to make environmental damage cost too much money, and the market would take care of re-balancing economic activity to sustainable alternatives. The carbon tax is a well-known example of this technique, but we’ve seen how well that has gone over politically. Still, it’s probably easier to push those kinds of regulations in a short time frame than to fundamentally revamp the entire system.
Lets squash it with batteries, they are heavy for a reason.
Not saying we shouldn’t do both, but in reality waiting to destroy capitalism before fixing the grid just means you have too much theory and not enough praxis.
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.
Without reading the article, I could already see what the problem was.
Unless you have capital to invest, you can’t expand or improve the power grid. That capital can either come from the gov’t–through taxation–or from private industry. If you, personally, have enough capital to do so, you can build a fully off-grid system, so that you aren’t dependent on anyone else. But then if shit happens, you also can’t get help from anyone else. (Also, most houses in urban areas do not have enough square feet of exposure to the sun to generate all of their own power.)
Fundamentally, this is a problem that can only be solved by regulation, and regulation is being gutted across the board in the US.
That’s not the problem the article gets to. The capital is there. Capital is being dumped into solar at breakneck speed. That’s the problem.
As more solar gets built, you get more days when there’s so much excess solar capacity that prices go near zero, or occasionally even negative. With more and more capacity around solar, there is less incentive to build more because you’re increasing the cases of near-zero days.
Basically, the problem is that capitalism has focused on a singular solution–the one that’s cheapest to deploy with the best returns–without considering how things work together in a larger system.
There are solutions to this. Long distance transmission helps areas where it isn’t sunny take advantage of places where it is. Wind sometimes blows when the sun isn’t shining, and the two technologies should be used in tandem more than they are. Storing it somewhere also helps; in fact, when you do wind and solar together, they cover each other enough that you don’t have to have as much storage as you’d think. All this needs smarter government subsidies to make it happen.
As a side note, you seem to be focused on solar that goes on residential roofs. That’s the worst and most expensive way to do solar. The space available for each project is small, and it’s highly customized to the home’s individual roof situation. It doesn’t take advantage of economies of scale very well. Using the big flat roofs of industrial buildings is better, but the real economies of scale come when you have a large open field. Slap down racks and slap the solar panels on top.
If what you want is energy independence from your local power utility, then I suggest looking into co-op solar/wind farms. If your state bans them–mine does–then that’s something to talk to your state representatives about.
It doesn’t take advantage of economies of scale very well.
You missed my point; I was talking about being entirely off-grid there. So unless the homeowner in question also has a large industrial building with a flat roof, we’re back to where I said that they didn’t have enough generative capacity to not be reliant on a power grid, at least in part.
If what you want is energy independence from your local power utility,
No, I want energy independence period. Not just from the local utility, I want independence from a co-op as well. I want to have my own well so I’m not relying on someone else to deliver water. I want enough arable land to grow most, or all, of my own food. This isn’t compatible with living in a city. (And part of the reason I want to generate my own power is so that I can use all electric vehicles.)
You missed my point. What you assumed the article said was completely off base.
No, I want energy independence period. Not just from the local utility, I want independence from a co-op as well.
Then what you’re asking for is a more fractured human society. This kind of independence from others is an illusion and is not compatible with how humans have evolved.
Transmission is tough. But the solution from too much solar investment driving down profits would be to invest that same money into storage. That seems like a natural follow up.
Imagine your profit if you can charge your storage with negative cost power!
It’s one of the solutions, yes.
But let’s look at this more broadly. The idea of combining wind/water/solar/storage with long distance transmission lines isn’t particularly new. The book “No Miracles Needed” by Mark Z. Jacobson (a Stanford Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering) outlined the whole thing in 2023, but was the sum total of the author’s insight that he had had over a decade prior. Dumping all the money in one was never going to get us there.
Capitalism does sorta figure this out, but it takes steps of understanding as it focuses on one thing at a time. The first step dumps money into the thing that’s cheap and gives the best ROI (solar). Then there’s too much of that thing, and the economics shifts to covering up the shortfalls of that part (be it wind or storage or whatever). That makes it better, but there’s still some shortfalls, so then that becomes the thing in demand, and capitalism shifts again.
It does eventually get to the comprehensive solution. The one that advocates in the space were talking about decades before.
The liberal solution–the one that leaves capitalism fundamentally intact–is to create a broad set of government incentives to make sure no one part of the problem gets too much focus. Apparently, we can’t even do that.
Wow, someone actually explaining the problem correctly. I’ll also mention that part of the fix should be on the demand side. Using your home as a thermal battery can load shift HVAC needs by hours, and with a water heater, it works even better. That’s not even talking about all the other things that could be scheduled like washer/dryers, dish washers, EV charging, etc.-
the real economies of scale come when you have a large open field.
And before anyone bothers you about the impact of turning fields into solar farms, I’ll add that we (the US) already have more farmland dedicated to energy production (ethanol corn) than would be necessary to provide our whole electricity demand.
And before anyone bothers you about the impact of turning fields into solar farms, I’ll add that we (the US) already have more farmland dedicated to energy production (ethanol corn) than would be necessary to provide our whole electricity demand.
Oh hell yes. 40% of the corn is grown in the US for ethanol, and it’s a complete and utter waste. Even with extremely optimistic numbers the amount of improvement is close to zero. It might be the worst greenwashing out there; sounds like you’re doing something, but its benefit is likely negative.
We have the land. That’s so not a problem.
Where did op put that link?
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.
negative prices aren’t some weird “capitalism” thing.
lmao.
🙄 It’s not like the need to get extra power out of the system magically goes away if money doesn’t exist.
Except the grid overload thing isn’t even an issue with renewables, since wind can be shut down in a matter of 1-5 minutes (move them out of the wind) and solar literally just be disabled. Any overload they produce would be due to mechanical failure, where you can cut them off the grid since they’re in the process of destroying themselves anyway (like in those videos where wind turbines fail spectacularly). Otherwise renewables are perfect to regulate the grid if available.
In a hypothetical grid with an absolute majority of many badly adjustable power sources (like nuclear) you’d have to work with negative prices to entice building large on-demand consumers or battery solutions. So far nobody was stupid enough to build a grid like this though.
tl;dr, this whole problem indeed is about economics and therefore may very well be a “capitalism thing”. Renewables do not overload the grid.
That’s also a pretty naive take on it.
First of all, you can indeed shut of the renewables easily. But that means that adding renewables to the grid is even less profitable, making renewables less desired to be built.
Hence in for example Germany a law was passed that prevented renewables being shut down in favor of worse energy sources, but that then leads to the issue we mention here.
It’s a tricky situation with renewables. But on the other hand, society is slowly adapting to using them & improving the infrastructure to handle such issues, so we’ll get there eventually :).
sounds like a great argument for nationalization.
Its not tricky, energy shouldn’t be privatized.
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.
Your prompts are especially critical when you decide to let ChatGPT run your reactor controls.
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.
Why is it a flaw from an economic perspective?
Both generation and consumption of electricity have a supply and demand. This is perfectly accepted in many other markets as well. We also had negative oil prices during the first Covid spike because the excavation cannot be stopped immediately. Certain industries like foundries also struggle with fully shutting down and restarting operations so sometimes they rather sell at a loss than stop operations. Farmers sell at a loss when the market is saturated just to sell somewhere and in other years they make a good profit on the same produce (assuming they actually have market power and aren’t wrung dry by intermediate traders).
In terms of energy per capital investment and running costs solar power is among the cheapest energy sources, cheaper than fossils and much cheaper than nuclear power. So it is profitable overall to run solar power, even if sometimes the price is negative.
Nobody here is suggesting that we should avoid solar power because of this.
But the point is that it is not even a flaw from an economic perspective. There is demand both for short term flexible and long term stable energy production and energy consumption in the grid. If you assume prices to be a suitable instrument, which most economists do, then the negative price of the production is a positive price for the short term consumption.
Boy do I hate economists.
Why? Economists ≠ capitalists.
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!
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.
Yep, and the cost difference between those times should make this very cost effective.
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.
Capitalism does solve it. Eventually. It takes the information in steps and gets to a solution that experts were talking about decades before. This is not a good way to do things.
It tends to overinvest in the thing that has the most immediate ROI. That’s been solar. Wind/water/storage/long distance distribution are all important pieces of this, too, and this has been known in climate and civil engineering fields for a while. Solar can’t do it all by itself.
A sensible system would even out the investment in each. The wind often blows when the sun isn’t shining, so you don’t need as much storage to do the in between parts. Water not only provides an easily adjustable baseload (nuclear does not adjust very well), but it also doubles as storage. In fact, if we could link up all the hydro dams we already have to long distance transmission, we wouldn’t need any other storage. Though that isn’t necessarily the most efficient method, either.
What capitalism does is invest in solar, find that causes negative prices, and then invest in the next best ROI to solve that. Perhaps it’s storage. That results in a lot more storage than would otherwise be needed than if wind/water/long distance distribution were done alongside it. Or maybe the next best ROI is wind, but there are still lulls lacking in both sun and wind–as well as periods where you have too much of both–so you still need storage.
And what capitalism really doesn’t want to do long distance transmission. It’s not just big, but it’s horizontal construction. That means rights to the whole route have to be purchased. It means environmental concerns along the entire route have to be thought out. It means soil has to be tested for stability and footings made to suit for the entire route. Capitalism almost has to be beaten into submission for anyone to build anything horizontally. (See also: trains and highway systems, both of which came with substantial government investment and incentives).
I can’t ragebait if you people are being logical 😒
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.
I’m not sure much about solar curtailment, other than the fact that they receive curtailment requests and comply quite quickly as well.
Here in the EU, the DC-AC transformers are mandated to shut down if the grid frequency is out of bounds.
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.
And before you downvote/object with some knee-jerk reaction that I’m being pedantic, consider this alternative way of framing it:
The opportunity is that solar panels create lots of electricity in the middle of sunny days, frequently more than what’s currently required, so it is necessary to develop new flexible sources of demand so that the excess energy doesn’t damage the power grid.
That’s pretty vastly different, isn’t it?
I don’t like using the term capitalism because it is too vague. Political corruption protecting oligarchy/big corporations is the problem.
Inflation resulting from start of full war on Russia and resulting oil/diesel price spike forced the wrong policy of higher interest rates. The theory in the past is that increasing austerity on consumers reduce their driving, and preventing business investment also reduces expanded demand for scarce FFs.
In the dynamics of energy disruption, high interest rates are the biggest cost obstacle for renewables and less new renewables is more oil/FF extortion power. At 2000 sun hours/year, $1/watt solar installation, could get a 16 year payback = 100% overall profit at 3c/kwh price. 2c/kwh at 3000 sun hours/year. Every 2% in interest costs, increases required price by 1c/kwh.
Protection of existing assets/supply scarcity is not affected by higher interest rates. New oil wells do have a big upfront cost, but they also have a huge power and maintenance requirement that is paid for with the product taken out of the ground, with ROI protections if renewables can be suppressed, including with high interest rates.
Political corruption favouring scarcity over abundance is the problem. Cheap energy or steel is a huge competitive and life quality advantage. Use cheap inputs for more productivity and happier life with cheaper cost.
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?
Perhaps some are conditioned for an emotional response, rather than a rational one, upon hearing certain words? That’s why you suggest to avoid them, even to describe the same issue?
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.
Nice comment! Thanks.
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.
You can’t store all that energy in summer because you got fuck all to do with it.
Main value of H2 electrolysis is solving (more economic return from renewables than just curtailing) this problem. Also provides exportable energy to cover winter clean power/heat needs.
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.
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.
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…
Then tell me why the mechanism to control production via the solar panels themselves hasn’t been implemented?
Why would you want people to tell you things that are untrue?
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.
This is what the Cabal is doing !!
If you’re describing nearly free and unlimited electricity as a problem, you may want to reconsider some things.
It’s how capitalists think about land, water, air, etc.
… And violently attacking people by depriving them of these needs.
It’s a very capitalist way of thinking about the problem, but what “negative prices” actually means in this case is that the grid is over-energised. That’s a genuine engineering issue which would take considerable effort to deal with without exploding transformers or setting fire to power stations
Home owned windmills, solar panels and battery storage solves that.
Edit: Look at this awesome diagram of how it’s done for a hybrid setup that’s about $400 on Amazon.
Home owned windmills are almost a total waste. Its surprising how little electricity they generate especially given how much the cost to buy and install. Some real numbers. A 400w can cost almost $18k to buy and install. A 410w solar solar panel is about $250 + $3k of supporting electronics and parts. And that same $3k can support 10+ more panels. I looked into it myself really wanted it to be worth it for home, but it just isn’t. Now utility grade wind? Absolutely worth it. You need absolutely giant windmills with massive towers, but once you have those, you can make a LOT of electricity very cost effectively.
Solar panels worth it? Yes. Absolutely.
Batteries, not quite there yet for most folks. Batteries are really expensive, and don’t hold very much electricity $10k-$15k can get you a few hours of light or moderate home use capacity. For folks with really expensive electricity rates or very unreliable power this can be worth it financially, but for most every else. Cheaper chemistry batteries are finally starting to be produced (Sodium Ion), but we’re right at the beginning of these and there not really any consumer products for home made from these yet.
Yeah, right now end of life EV batteries are great for making your own power storage but that’s a level of diy beyond what 95% of people are willing or able to do
What’s infuriating is that we had electric cars before ICE powered cars. 1899. If we would’ve been investing money and effort into research for battery technology since then, we wouldn’t have this problem. Salt batteries, solid state batteries, and other promising tech is in it’s infancy because we just started to take this seriously as a society like 10 years ago.
Better late than never but it grinds my gears that the best argument against solar and wind is power storage requirements due to unpredictable power generation. Like this is an extremely solvable problem.
Yeah, right now end of life EV batteries are great for making your own power storage but that’s a level of diy beyond what 95% of people are willing or able to do
End of life EV batteries are great for grid-scale operators doing power storage, but I highly recommend against homeowners use them this way. Not just because they are complex DIY projects as you point out, but because the EV batteries that are aging out of car use are NMC chemistry. These are great for high density power storage, which you want in a car, but they are susceptible to thermal runaway if they get too hot. The original Tesla Powerwall and Powerwall 2 also used these same chemistry batteries. I wouldn’t want these in my house. However, in a utility grid scale? Sure, they won’t be anywhere near people so in the unlikely event they do catch fire its a property problem, not a lost human life problem.
I understand your concern, I totally agree that the volatility isn’t ideal, but putting it in a steel box outside your house isn’t that beyond the scope for a diy-er. Envision it the same way a generac sits outside and ties in to your house but with a safe enough enclosure.
As long as you check the cells you use when you deconstruct the car battery it should be fine. All the projects I watch online they don’t even need the liquid cooling system that it utilized when it was in the car because the discharge rate is so far below the C rating the battery that they don’t generate great like when they are in cars
I understand that cell could go bad though at any time, so the box is necessary imo
Oh yeah, super expensive. /s
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087BY2YV7/?
The first link that came up: https://www.bobvila.com/articles/best-home-wind-turbines/
Ahh I get it now. You have no idea what you’re talking about. You have the smallest understanding of something and assume that is everything. You’re so very far away from understanding the practical applications and limits. You’re also clearly not interested in learning, so I’ll leave you to your impractical delusions.
Oh I’m willing to learn. Explain it to me.
Did you not look at the specs on that product? It only produces energy when winds are above 7mph and don’t actually hit the rated output unless the winds are almost 35mph.
Almost none of the country averages an amount of wind power per square meter equivalent to the rating on home turbines at 10 meters above ground level (yellow and red on this map):
Compare to this map of average insolation:
It’s a hybrid solar and wind. Also, that’s why you have batteries for storage.
Why not skip the middleman and go straight solar, then?
Wait so the same people that can’t drop 500 USD for an emergency are expected to drop 300 USD for a wind turbine and provide the installation of it to boot is that right
“put the excess energy into batteries” is an idea, and is already pretty much what is done, but the large scale implementation still requires a lot of time, effort, and expense.
How, exactly, does that solve anything? It’s not like we can add some kind of magic automatic residential cutoff system (that would just make it worse) and residential distribution is already the problem! Residential solar is awesome (tho home batteries are largely elon propaganda…) but they only contribute to the above issue, not solve it. There are ways of addressing it, but they’re complicated and unglamorous.
I don’t see why home batteries are propaganda. Those prices are plummeting and they have decent payback times in some markets.
The reasons for getting solar is the same reasons for getting batteries.
Because home batteries, while provisionally useful in the same way as a standby generator (though the generator is going to be far more eco friendly than the batteries over their respective lifetimes), is a vastly inferior solution to the implementation of even local grid scale solutions. Also because there is essentially 0 infrastructure designed to handle said batteries, they wear out quite quickly at home scales (unless you’re using uncommon chemistries, but if you’re using iron-nickle batteries you’re not the target audience here) and because Elon popularized them with his “powerwall” bullshit entirely to pump the stock value of Tesla’s battery plant (which is it’s own spectacular saga I encourage you to look up, it’s a real trip).
Batteries in the walls are useful in niches, but the current technology which uses lipo/lion/lifepo4 chemistries is inherently flawed and a route to both dead linemen and massive amounts of E-waste. They could be useful potentially, but as it stands, it’s really bad right now.
provisionally useful in the same way as a standby generator (though the generator is going to be far more eco friendly than the batteries over their respective lifetimes)
A generator can provide backup power for unlimited time if fuel is available, but it is highest cost power in the world. Batteries can be charged/discharged every day, displacing dirty energy. A generator is either rarely used or eco destructive.
You need to look up how much grid storage lithium batteries are being built. It’s exponential growth. Faster than solar.
The reason it’s worthwhile is because solar makes energy with 0 or near 0 price to the owner in certain places, if they store that and use it for later they save money. There are cost calculators out there and for certain markets they make sense.
Of course Tesla pushes it they got a product people want and it makes the consumer and Tesla money. Win win. That’s business, nothing shady about that.
Yes batteries are better on the grid but that’s for exactly the same reasons why solar is better on the grid.
O…kay but that doesn’t address anything I actually said.
How, exactly, does that solve anything?
After installation, a home owner has free electricity? I’m not trying to solve the issues for the power grid people, they have teams of people for that.
Spain and Portugal had almost complete blackouts today. You know who wouldn’t have had blackouts? The people with their own solar panels and windmills.
I acknowledge that there’s no real way to communicate sincerity online, but I’m gonna go ahead and promise I’m not trying to be a dick here when saying this:
a home owner has free electricity
I think you’re bonking up on the Dunning Kruger limit here, because that’s absolutely not how it works. Not only are the vast majority of homes not candidates for useful solar installs (you can pay someone to do it, but holy cow nearly every residential solar installer is a scam looking at you, Lumio International (how’s that RICO case going?)), but solar for home-use power generation is very much not the norm for a whole host of reasons (dead linemen one of the biggest ones) and the safety considerations for implementing it generally make it an onerous enough task to manage that it’s appeal is restricted largely to special interest users (homesteaders, preppers, S&R, power system enthusiasts, van life, etc ). There are ways this could be mitigated, but it would require a massive grid overhaul and additional constant upkeep beyond what any current grid already requires.
Here in Australia 37% of households have rooftop solar. Hardly “only special interest groups”.
Not only are the vast majority of homes not candidates for useful solar installs
Australia is an edge case for everything solar and I’ll quite happily admit that! Yay Australia, well done. That said I’d be very willing to bet that the majority of those are not-above-50%-ideal installs (don’t take that bet, I’m cheating)
Hardly “only special interest groups”
Sorry, you’ve misunderstood, I was talking about direct home power generation being special interest, not residential solar in general. Aussies don’t have a higher rate for direct power generation than anywhere else because grids are, by and large, all suffering from the same fundamental design issues. I’m not at all attempting to argue that solar installs in general are special interest, and especially with the incredibly well thought out incentives the aus gvmt has been offering for both new construction and residential conversion/installation. 100% best handling of it in the world right now.
In no home outside of fringe uses are any lights 12vdc, with the exception of maybe led strip lights for undercabs. They’re all designed for 120vac. That lightbulb in the diagram is an e37/medium base for 120vac.
Couldn’t solar farms just strategically disconnect some of their panels from the grid to avoid that? Solar panels are always collecting energy, but if you disconnect them that energy just goes into making them a bit warmer rather than overloading the grid.
You can have your own batteries as well. If those then get overloaded, disconnect.
Nothing an open/close gate couldn’t fix. The real problem is how overly complicated we feel we need to make things.
This is some real “basic biology” level thinking here. Even if it were as simple as “Pull the lever Krunk!” then you’ve just turned all that solar infrastructure into junk for the majority of the time that we need power.
People use the vast majority of electricity in a day in the afternoon and at night - times that are noticeably after the peak solar production time. So you have all that energy going into the system with nowhere to go because battery technology and infrastructure isn’t there, and then no energy to fulfill the peak demand. This is an issue nuclear runs into as well because a nuclear plant is either on or off and isn’t capable of scaling its power to the current demand.
There are times where power companies have to pay industrial manufacturing facilities to run their most energy consuming machines just to bleed extra energy out of the grid to keep it from overloading and turning into a multi-million dollar disaster that could take years to get people back on the grid.
Sorry for the naive question, but is it not possible to send the excess electricity to the ground (in the electrical sense)?
It would definitely need to be ground in a literal sense.
And even the earth has its limits. Soil is only so conductive, pump enough energy into it and you’ll turn it to glass (which won’t conduct anymore).
To effectively waste electric power like that would take quite a bit of effort. It would be easier to make a giant heater that heats up air. But that would of course also be absurd. Just turn off the wind turbines etc. to reduce power generation.
Not an engineer but I sometimes watch them on YouTube.
Could you not just set up a breakout point and have it arc to ground? If the power source is renewable then wasting a little when you have a full grid shouldn’t be a big issue. I’m thinking something along the lines of StyroPyro’s arcing plasma flamethrower should chew up plenty of excess power if you scale it up. As you ramp your total storage up toward 100% capacity I’d start shutting off inputs (disconnecting solars, etc) and then have what’s basically a big old Tesla coil to vent excess power over 95% capacity.
There’s obviously a lot of issues with that idea, but I’d like to throw my wholehearted support behind it anyways, just to see the expressions my FCC/Radio buddies would make when they realize someone’s running a MW-scale tesla coil as some kind of electrical blowoff valve. I can’t easily tell you the exact size of the area you’d utterly obliterate all radio communications in, but it’d be hilariously large.
Faraday cage should cover that no? Styro even mentions in the linked video that he needed to encapsulate his workshop in one in order to not get angry visits from the FCC. I’m sure for something scaled up like this you might want to nest a couple of them together.
Again, not an engineer, I could be (and likely am) wildly off base here. Not sure what makes it such a terrible idea though. I am pretty certain that a MW-scale Tesla coil probably wouldn’t blow out a larger area of communications than, say, nuclear testing would, and we do that all the time in the Midwest.
Mmmmm no, a bit of napkin math here but the RF this thing would throw off would just melt any faraday cage smaller than a midsized town.
Also no, there are not nuclear tests all the time in the midwest.
The grid is always over energized. That’s not a problem. Large solar and wind farms connect to the grid with great specificity about the maximum amount of energy they will put on the lines. The problem would be not enough energy. Batteries are beginning to solve the dispatch energy issue with renewables. As long as republicans don’t get their way and ruin renewable energy with unfair fossil fuel mandates, the grid will continue to modernize in this way and we’ll be fairly independent of fossil fuels in the future for electricity.
No it’s not, it’s energized just right. Otherwise you run into either over or under frequencies. Both pretty catastrophic.
In fairness, capitalist expansion is predicated on generating and reinvesting profit. If you build an array of solar panels and generate a revenue less than the installation+maintenance cost of the panels, you don’t have any more money to buy new panels and expand the grid.
That is, under a privatized system, anyway. If you’re a public utility and your goal is to meet a demand quota rather than raise revenue for the next round of expansion, profit isn’t your concern. You’re looking for the lowest possible installation/maintenance/replacement cost over the lifetime of the system, not the high margins per unit installed.
Incidentally, this is why vertically integrated private firms that consider electricity an expense rather than a profit center have been aggressively rolling out their own privately managed solar/wind arrays. When the concern is minimizing cost rather than maximizing revenue, and you can adjust your rate of consumption to match the peak productive capacity of your grid, then solar/wind is incredibly efficient.
thats why Westinghouse had to crush Nikolai Tesla. you can’t meter wireless power.
Hear me out: a giant water balloon. Roughly the size of the sun.
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.
In other words… Maybe 29 word Twitter captions aren’t a great way to discuss issues?
In other words… Maybe paragraphs of word salad aren’t a great way to debunk an obvious truth?
I found the post to be succinct and coherent.
Some problems need 2 or 3 paragraphs to even begin to convey them. They could’ve said “the problem isn’t just capitalism,” and that would have been met with vitriol, as it doesn’t convey that the actual article is more nuanced than “anti solar,”that meeting variable power demand with solar supply is a challenge, that at some point one does indeed saturate regional demand for solar to the point that building more plants isn’t productive (which frequent negative prices are an indication of), and so on.
And if that’s too long and complex, well… I dunno what to tell you.
Nah, I see nothing wrong with an information diet composed of random people with no background sharing their pet conspiracy with 5 million people on TikTok that they learned from three minutes with ChatGPT, furry porn accounts clapping back on Twitter to an out-of-context 29-word quote from an MIT Technology Review article (reshared so many dozens of times that the quality has noticeably degraded), or a picture generated in a Russian disinformation farm showing a muscular Donald Trump rescuing crying orphans from drowning in Hurricane Helene while corrupt FEMA agents loot their houses.
God fucking help us.
But on the plus side,
On the plus side I guess: accessing good, robust information has literally never been easier as long as you’re media-literate enough not to fall into the landfill of trash information that you’re walking over.
- During its start in the 2000s and early 2010s, Wikipedia was like a shadow of what it is today. As an example, take a look at the article for the element oxygen in 2006 (ignore the broken templates) and the article today. Its editors were just as smart, well-meaning, and hard-working, but guidelines and a deeply entrenched culture hadn’t emerged around making sure things are as verifiable, reliable, independent, unbiased, inclusive, and comprehensive and as possible. It’s kind of insane how much you can find there now as a starting point for further research. Wikipedia also forced the web-ification of Britannica, meaning even if you deeply distrust Wikipedia for some reason, you no longer need to pay hundreds to have an encyclopedia in your home.
- Additionally, I imagine there are serious, experienced editors who are using LLMs to great effect as essentially a search engine on steroids to find obscure information, thereby speeding up their work (and they have the media literacy from years or decades of editing Wikipedia to wield this responsibly). Those who use it irresponsibly seem to be very quickly found out, although because I can’t prove a negative, I can’t say how much slop has slipped through the cracks.
- Extremely niche hobbies and specialties have e.g. YouTube channels, subreddits/communities, etc. dedicated just to them providing a fantastic wealth of knowledge. Right now, I can go watch Gutsick Gibbon on YouTube to catch up on various findings in primatology from a PhD candidate on the verge of becoming a doctor. I can watch Gamers Nexus for highly comprehensive breakdowns of tech products. Realistically, I can self-teach in ways I never could have 20 years ago as long as I’m responsible.
- Piracy has arguably never been easier to gain access to paywalled research papers, books, etc. There’s a movement in academia to make research open-access.
- Software is moving more and more toward open-source. This gives entrenched, capitalist power structures increasingly limited control over people and opens up this knowledge to everybody.
That all being said, things are really dire because so many people really lack the basic media literacy skills to utilize these tools and avoid the ocean of shit around them.
It’s a bit scary because many of those things (Wikipedia, academic piracy) are being threatened and villainized, others (Reddit niches, maybe eventually YouTube) are hemorrhaging useful info, and utilitarian LLMs are simultaneously being vilified and enshittified by opposing political sides.
Like, with the Qwen3 release, I just realized my internet barometer for “is it any good?” and technical info is totally gone… Reddit and other niches have withered away, Twitter/Linkdin are pure engagement farms, and I can’t hardly discuss it anywhere else populated without getting banned as an alleged AI Bro (whom, for the record, I hate with a burning passion). I seriously considered joining WeChat just to see some sane discussion.
This is true for other fandoms and niches I’m in.
I hate to sound apocalyptic, but it feels like my information sphere is imploding. The real marker will be when the US government starts taking action against Wikipedia.
America: …Nah, this is fine. In fact, let’s elect the platforms’ owner-influencers. scrolls happily
I do like how this Twitter account, in the rush to blame capitalism, overlooked the fact that the sun rises and sets every day.
I’ve known about the issue with a lack of ways to store the energy produced for about 5 years now, does it seem like we’re making any steps in it recently? Also how does it work in a “green” fashion to produce all of the batteries necessary for that sorts of energy storage, I feel like that’s going to be one of the next discussions about how “pure” this method is.
The size of the storage problem is not well understood by most. The world production of batteries is insufficient to power germany with 100% renewables.
A possible solution is changing consumption patterns (in jargon known as demand-response). This runs into 2 issues: (1) people need to change their behaviour, with they wont. (2) You handicap your economy, to the benefits of countries that do not care about emissions. With a good chance that the net result is more emissions.
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.
Why not do something with all that power?
Because profits are a result of deprivation not progress.
Agree, but there is also profit to be made when using the leftover free power.
Why not do something with all that power?
This is a relatively new problem, so it will take awhile for the market to respond to make industries optimized to take advantage of this.
I saw an article a few months ago (couldn’t find it quickly just now) about a small manufacturing company (metals maybe?) that set up shop specifically to run during the excess power events. So its starting to happen, but its not going to be a perfect fit. It means spending lots up front for infra, but only being able to use it a few hours a day cost effectively.
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.
This is already done with pump hydro. But this needs existing hydroelectric infrastructure to take advantage of. Even then there are usually holding ponds upstream and they themselves have limited capacity.
Or make hydrogen (I think it was hydrogen).
This is being done too at small scales right now. There’s difficulties with it. Hydrogen really sucks to try store and transport. The H2 molecule is so small it leaks out through valves and gaskets that are fine for containing nearly all other gases and liquids. So this means the gear needed is hugely more expensive up front. What a few are doing is using the hydrogen to quickly make Ammonia (NH3), which is much easier to store and contain. However, the efforts doing this are still fairly small.
Or do AI stuff
AI aside, this is one place I haven’t seen develop yet. That being: cheaper compute costs during excess power events.
I suspect its the same problem for the manufacturing. It means spending money on expensive compute infrastructure but only able to use it during the excess power events. As in, the compute in place is already running flat out at full capacity all the time. There’s no spare hardware to use the excess power. If you had spare hardware, you’d add it to your fleet and run it 24/7 making more money.
Or use it on large scale computing for protein folding simulations, or something.
And yeah, gravity batteries is the best I think we have, with water being the most common medium with pumped-storage hydroelectricity. But the scales of the things are kind of incongruent and… Autoincorrect actually got it right trying to correct that to inconvenient. Still really cool. I think we may need some innovations to cut down on scale issues though. Although it looks like the total power storage available is about one day worth of power for the US in PSH, I’m curious if the instantaneous output is sufficient for the grid and how spread out the storage locations are, as I somewhat doubt they’re often in flatter regions. All in all, I’m not a power engineer, I just know a few and I should bug them sometime.
We still have hydroelectric turbines that can reverse themselves to pump water to a higher elevation reservoir to store surplus energy. We call them pump-gens at my job. The problem is that, as nearby areas develop, that water gets reserved for other things, so they can’t pump it back up because it’s needed further downstream for irrigation or communities or whatever.
Some hobbyists turn up the set point on their electric water heater to store the power as domestic hot water.
Now that’s a good idea! I have a couple of ideas to automate that. Crank the hot water balls out during peak production hours, but cut it off at night. Something like that?
Sounds like a deal for power companies that change prices during on/off peak hours. But wait, am I backwards? Typically peak power costs more? Anyone?
You seem confused.
Peak Solar hours and peak utility rate hours are different. Often both are shorted to “peak hours”.
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“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.”
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.
Isn’t it easier just to cover solar panels with reflective material, so they stop producing energy?
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