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No, it’s not. It’s a practical problem, not an economic one, but leave it to the tankies here to take it as an opportunity to show how many slogans they have learned.
Prices going negative is Capitalism’s solution actually. Gives the price incentive for folks to charge their cars when prices go negative, or whatever.
We need natural batteries like solar power lifting water from a lake into a reservoir so that when we need that energy and the sun isn’t making it, released water does
Yes this exists and it’s called pumped storage hydroelectricity
I did some work at a place called The hollow mountain that does this. But seeing as it looked like an underground James Bond bad guy base and I was a rope access mook in a boiler suit, I felt like I could die at any moment by tuxedo clad hero.
It wasn’t solar they used to power pump the water back up though. They just, hmm I want to say, bought cheap electricity when no one was using it.This is the imperial base from Andor, right? Cool
Holeey sheet it is! I didn’t know that! Thanks.
With an energy conversion efficiency of usually 75 to 80 % they are really efficient and don’t have as much energy loss as other types of energy storage. It’s a simple, but powerful concept and I find it beautiful. However, there is some concern regarding their impact on the local ecosystem. Not only do they need huge water reservoirs, which are artificially created and therefore might impact nearby rivers and even fish migration, but the way they are sealed with concrete or asphalt also disallows the development of riparian vegetation. From an ecological perspective they are basically dead zones.
Still, considering several alternatives, I think it’s one of the better options. Although it’s not cheap to build those, which is a problem in our current capitalitic society
A cubic meter of water above your roof has the storing capacity of a AAA cell. That’s why you need huge, massive damms to store any significant amount of power. But unfortunately it’s not flexible enough (you need mountains nearby) or dense enough.
There are already companies making thermal storage systems to store excess energy. They heat sand up to about 500 degrees when there’s excess power and then convert it back to electricity or just use the heat directly for heating water or living spaces.
There’s also companies (googles do nothing but link to YouTube videos) working on scaling this down to about the size of a water heater.
What about storing energy as potential energy using some high density objects. This may work… Right?? gravitricity Check out their work.
It’s slithly better the more dense the material, but that’s basically the same thing. You could say that depending on the location, using water is much more practical.
A much more interesting one I saw was the molten salt ones, where basically you store the energy as heat in a sealed place, and then when you need it, you use that heat to run turbines.
I don’t think it’s feasible.
Yes, suspended weights, also spinning flywheels, hot salt, hot sand
There’s options besides pumped hydro, hydrogen and batteriesInteresting concept, thanks for sharing
I get the sentiment in here, but the poster is missing an important point: there is a reason some group of lunatics (called the TSO or Transport System Operator or in some cases other power producers) are willing to pay for people to consume electricity when there is too much of it; They are not doing it for the sake of being lunatics, the electrical system cannot handle over or underproduction. Perfectly balanced (as all things should be) is the only way the grid can exist.
The production capacity in the grid needs to be as big as peak demand. The challenge we face with most renewables is that their production is fickly. For a true solarpunk future, the demand side needs to be flexible and there need to be energy storages to balance the production (and still, in cold and dark environments other solutions are needed).
In off-grid, local usages we usually see this happen naturally. We conserve power on cloudy low-wind days to make sure we have enough to run during the night (demand side flexibility) and almost everyone has a suitably sized battery to last the night. The price variability is one (flawed) mechanism to make this happen on a grid or bidding zone level.
Well, you have to handle excess power produced, you can’t just dump it on the ground.
If the grid produces too much power in excess of what’s being consumed, parts of it need to shutdown to prevent damage.
That’s why the price can go negative. They’ll actively pay you to use the power so they don’t have to hit emergency shutdowns.
As we build more solar plants, the problem gets exacerbated since all the solar plants produce power at the same time until it’s in excess of what anyone needs. Unlimited free power isn’t very helpful if when it’s producing it’s producing so much that it has to be cut from the grid, and when demand rises it’s not producing and they have to spin up gas turbines.
That’s before the money part of it, where people don’t want to spend a million dollars to make a plant that they need to pay people to use power from.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/14/1028461/solar-value-deflation-california-climate-change/
They go on to talk about how getting consumption to be shifted to those high production times can help, as can building power storage systems or just ways to better share power with places further away.
Government should invest in more energy storage so the excess can be used later, like at night
That and incentivise smart devices like water heaters that run when power is cheap, which is effectively a rudimentary battery
If all grids did was put high resolution pricing data on the wire we could make those decisions for ourselves.
It still takes upfront investment. that’s easy if you’re wealthy but a lot harder if you’re pay check to pay check + there’s no reason landlords would do it. part of it is the high resolution pricing data, but we need more than just that
Problem is that storing electric energy at a large scale is really difficult, with lots of engineering and research effort going into finding solutions. Investment into storage is good, but it’s still an area of active research how to even do it.
Everything is a cost.
It could quite easily be cheaper to pay people to use energy than it is to store it. Once that equation changes then hopefully they start buying storage.
We could do so much good with excess power generation if we wanted to. We could produce hydrogen. We could electrolyse CO2 out of the air. We could filter the plastic out of ocean water. We could analyse space radiation. We could run recycling plants. We could flood the bitcoin market. We could run a desalination plant. Why does this have to be a problem?
Because we’re not doing those things at the moment?
Having a solution available doesn’t make it not a problem.
Something having a problem doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing, and not all problems are bad things, they’re just things that need figuring out.
People too often think that identifying an issue with something means that it’s being argued that we should abandon it or that it’s unfixable.
Solar is not a perfect technology, because there are no perfect technologies. It has solvable problems are or will need to be addressed as we keep using it. That’s fine and normal.
It is normal, but this particular “problem” looks more like an opportunity than most. Seems silly to be complaining about it.
Anyway, is it “Fish and a …” ?
Who’s complaining? Read the article I linked, it’s what the quote came from. Informing people about an issue, discussing it’s consequences and listing some solutions is hardly complaining.
I’m not sure why you put problem in quotes, it’s an issue that has to be resolved which is the definition of a problem. It’s not silly to me to talk about an issue.
You think we should do carbon sequestration with the power. That’s a great notion. Should we tell the solar plants they need to do that, should the public build them, or should we incentivize companies to do it somehow?I just can’t see how people are this upset about an article explaining how “more than we can handle” means “people might stop making more” and “we need to figure out how to handle it”.
I’m not sure what you’re talking about with the fish?
This is interesting in the UK because the government agrees on a set a price it will pay wind farms for energy.
If power is expensive the wind farms lose out and get paid less than the value of energy. But when wind power is high and prices low they get paid the guaranteed price at the goverments expense. The government even tells them to turn of the turbines and they still get paid.
Bare in mind peak wind can last weeks rather than solar hours. But this system is one of the main reasons UK is a world leader in wind.
People struggle with the economics of losing money being the optimal solution and they want some magic situation where nothing is wasted at 0 cost but provides all demand exactly when required. Nothing works like that.
You quite literally could dump it into the ground (wire).
As some other comments have explained in better terms, you can hook it to ground directly, technically. But you can’t if you like, want things to be good and not broken all to hell.
You can’t.
“Can” and “should” are different things.
And that’s why you can’t.
Well, you have to handle excess power produced, you can’t just dump it on the ground.
Thats literally what a “ground” is electrically. The ground.
We literally design electrical systems to do exactly this, all day long. You can literally “dump power into the ground.”
As a professional engineer who literally designs solar power plants for a living, this is not how electricity works. It is true that solar inverters can throttle their output by operating at non-optimal voltages, but you can’t just dump power into the ground without causing major issues to the grid infrastructure.
Why?
I’m not doubting you, I’m just a big curious nerd
In an ideal picture, ground isn’t where energy gets dissipated — there’s no such thing as “dumping energy to ground” (or if you prefer, everything is “dumping energy to ground”).
If ground dissipates significant energy, this has all sorts of Very Bad implications. For starters, the ground can no longer be at uniform potential if it dissipates — so now we have a ground that isn’t actually at ground! (This just follows from Ohm’s law.)
Another way of stating this is to imagine what sort of circuit you need to “dump energy to ground.” This is probably just a wire connecting hot to ground — but what happens if you do this in your home, i.e., plug a wire from hot to ground (please do not do this!)? It gets really, really hot, and will probably either throw the breaker, melt, or start a fire. The reason it gets hot is because it’s the wire that dissipated the energy.
Ok. So the reason the wire gets hot is because it has finite resistance. So what if we choose an imaginary superconductor instead? Well, now we’re trying to draw infinite power, which is bad! In practice of course it won’t be infinite, and will be determined by the resistance of the power lines feeding it. But remember that wire that got really hot? Now we’re treating the power lines that way. So this is really not good, and besides, we wanted to use a controlled amount of power, which this clearly isn’t.
So, we can be smarter here and add some resistance to our load — instead of a wire from hot to ground, we now have maybe a coil of low-but-finite resistance wire. This works great, and it’s just a resistive heater.
The problem isn’t dumping energy at a human scale (e.g., an individual space heater) — the problem is when you have excess power on an industrial scale.
If all the energy is actually being released by the wire through resistance, then why’s the potential of the ground changing?
The potential at the ground isn’t (or shouldn’t) be changing — which is the same thing as saying the power isn’t being dissipated in the ground. So the power isn’t being “dumped to ground,” it’s being dumped through the wire.
So basically, two options: 1) you dissipate power in the load, which is what should happen, and everyone is happy. 2) you dissipate power across your ground, which means ground is no longer really ground, and all sorts of nasty and dangerous things can happen.
Does lightning cause those nasty things to happen?
If you could do that there’d be tones to research going on about how to extract the energy stored in the ground as the storage capacity would in many orders of magnitude greater than we have now. We’d also be probably capturing the energy released in thunderstorms.
No, you can’t.
The ground in a circuit doesn’t dissipate energy — the energy gets dissipated elsewhere. That’s what ground is: it’s what we call the electrical part of a circuit where the energy has already been dissipated (I’m being a little casual with my electricity, but I think it’s a valid statement nonetheless — ground is defined as the zero potential).
You can try this out by plugging a wire from hot to ground in your house (please don’t do this). The energy gets dissipated in the wires. This is bad, because it is a lot of energy dissipated very quickly. Best case you throw the breaker. Worst case you burn down your house.
You can run it through a very large grid of aluminum fins which get hot, and you know, I don’t know, boil water with it or something to be used for uh, purposes, such as heated water. :)
So… You can use it. As exactly described. By the description of the problem.
Sorry for being snarky, but this is exactly what the “paying people to use your energy” part of this situation is.
Yep absolutely — a few kW? I can burn that no problem. A MW? Well…that takes a little more thought. A GW? That’s a whole different ballgame.
Haha, thanks for taking my comment with humor and stride. Yeah, you’re right. I still think having too much energy is a good problem to have overall.
I do microsolar and when my batteries are full (rare), I just unplug them. The solar panels just sit baking in the sun, and then cool off at night.
What is microsolar? Tried looking it up, didn’t come up with much.
It’s having a very small (typically less than 2 kW) solar system
It’s weird that that’s possible as such an easy solution, and all those electrical engineers never thought to use it, instead putting in load banks and all sorts of contrivances to heat metal in an emergency, or find complex ways to hide excess production in normal load and balance production by managing the generators.
Even weirder that the people who run solar grids opted to pay people to take excess power rather than just dumping it on the ground, although a lot of them have also taken to heating metal instead, or water for smaller home setups.Yes, you can technically connect your generator directly to the ground. This isn’t something people want to do because it can damage equipment.
It’s why that heating metal trick is used as part of the emergency shutdown rather than as part of load regulation, and they don’t want to use it because they have to make sure the right bit of metal melted.None of this has anything to do with people needing to react to excess current in an electrical grid, and not just let it be a situation that happens. It requires intervention was the point of the phrase.
A chance for @bradorsomething, son of Gondor, to show his quality!
When we refer to the grounded conductor (the neutral), it does have a reference to the ground potential of the building receiving power. But the current generated by the power plant seeks the least resistive path back to its source, and the grounded conductor provides a path back to the generation plant that carries no voltage potential for electricity to draw towards or away from - the wire simply accepts the flow of energy to or from the power plant, to complete the circuit without changing the voltage potential.
There is also a grounding wire, which is green or bare, which is present in building in the US to allow anything electrified by stray wires to complete the circuit and trip the breakers in the panel. This wire joins to the grounded conductor (the white colored neutral) at the main panel where the utility provides power… utilities use the neutral as their ground, so current completes the circuit back to the power plant through the neutral.
When I say “the circuit looks for a path back to its source,” I’m playing a little fast and loose here… the current seeks the most potential to complete the circuit pathway. This path is almost always the return path to the power plant.
Join us next week, when I explain that lightning doesn’t care much about our wire at all, because at that scale it’s like the ocean caring about a moat at a sand castle!
Get on half hourly tariff if you can (example for the UK is Octopus Agile).
As long as you don’t concentrate your usage between 4pm and 7pm, it saves a shitload of money over a regular tariff. The other day, they paid me to put the washing machine on.
Post scarcity has been true since the dawn of the agricultural revolution.
run pumps, move water
The first factories were powered by waterwheels. Those were subjected to seasonal variations and limited geographic possibilities, what gave negotiating power to labor. Therefore the industry switched to fossil fuels, so they could run when and where they wanted, preferably near a city with excess labor force. It made it more expensive to run, but it was easier to exploit labor so more profit.
If there was room they’d put the factories as close to the coal fields as possible, and let the workers live in shanty towns.
In the case of Spain, at least, they own the grid, so all solar energy that you sell to distributors because you have no use for it yourself, they’ll only pay you peanuts for it and they will still make a devious profit.
The two solar panels companies that I got in contact with weren’t interested in selling me a quantity small enough that was coherent with my needs, and they’d charge me a premium if I wasn’t willing to make a contract with them to sell them specifically the excess energy.
But if you have batteries at home you almost don’t need the grid. Add an EV and you hit two birds with one stone.
i wonder if the battery in an ev can be used as a house battery?
Many can
I don’t see it. Better use less density (and cheaper) ones. Like the salt ones Chinese are developing/selling.
Yes absolutely, and some have this as an advertised feature.
Yes, but it tends to be the largest ones, like the F150 or the Hummer. In other words, the ones that FuckCars hates the most, and for mostly good reasons.
You also need to setup the charger right to make it work, but that tends to be secondary.
It’s certainly possible, but is it worth it?
EV batteries tend to use some of the best technology available in order to get power density and energy density where they need to be. A house battery can be much bigger and heavier if that makes it cheaper.
Somebody at work was just telling me about some efforts to reuse e.g. Tesla battery packs for home or grid storage rather than recycling them. Even if the pack can only hold 80% of its original charge, that’s fine if you can just buy a few of those cheaply.
We own the factories building the panels.
Solar cells don’t really grow on trees.
The majority of panels produced in the world right now is China. Like dwarfs the other countries.
Big oil currently does not own the factories.
Well yeah, but that’s like a one-time purchase (for years) compared to coals/etc. where they can charge for the “amount” used
Solar cells don’t really grow on trees.
Are you talking about
A scalable self replicating and self sustaining carbon capture technology that uses a mix of highly specialized biological processes to turn CO2 into engineering grade composite construction material, fuel and fertilizer.
?
You can’t earn the big money with it, so the capitalism isn’t interested. Planting a tree is almost for free. Maybe if we could file a patent on trees or something like that. Let’s ask Nestlé how they did it with water
A more apt comparison would be Monsanto with corn.
I think they’re talking about chloroplasts. The cell component trees grow to collect solar energy.
Photosynthesis - provided by the OG solar cells.
Yeah it won’t power my computer, just found the irony comical.
You could theoretically build a coal pit in your back yard to turn the wood into coal, then power a steam engine hooked to generators to make electricity to run your computer. If you wanna be super “efficient” you can route the gasses from the coal process through the steam engine too to get power from that as well
Probably cleaner and less work to do almost any other kind of power though
All power on earth is solar if you dig far enough.
Geothermal energy isn’t solar.
Almost… Nuclear comes from super-novae, therefore not strictly “solar” (in the sense coming from the sun) but loosely yeah everything comes from stars and star formation
Rent seekers always keep their hands on the tap.
Both of the statements in that screenshot are just so inane.
Frequency has to be maintained on the grid. It’s the sole place where we have to match production and consumption EXACTLY. If there’s no battery or pumped storage storage available to store excess energy, the grid operators have to issue charges to the producers, in line with their contracts, to stop them dumping more onto the grid (increasing the frequency). The producers then start paying others to absorb this energy, often on the interconnectors.
It’s a marketplace that works (but is under HEAVY strain because there’s so much intermittent production coming online). When was the last time you had a device burning out because the frequency was too high?
Turning the electricity grid into some kind of allegory about post-scarcity and the ills of capitalism (when in fact it’s a free market that keeps the grid operating well) is just “I is very smart” from some kid sitting in mom and dads basement.
Additionally, this has been a known issue for decades. If only there had been investment in handling it…
in fact it’s a free market that keeps the grid operating well
Like how in Texas’s even freer market the power grid is even more stable than in evil communist California.
No idea about the US. My frame of reference is an integrated European market in general and the Nordic integrated spot market in particular, which uses Swedish hydro and Danish wind on top of nuclear, biogas and wood pellet market.
Seems to work well enough: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?tab=chart&time=1961..latest&country=USA~DNK~SWE~NOR
Which I think reinforces my point. The Nordic states are much more highly regulated than the US, and Texas went so far as to disconnect their grid to make it even less regulated. So now it collapses at the drop of a hat, and people get electric bills in the thousands of dollars.
Your explanation works very well, but completely falls apart in the last paragraph.
Solar power production clearly is (at least in part) a post-scarsity scenario, given we literally have too much power on the grid.
Furthermore, calling the power market anything like “free” is just plain wrong. A liberal approach to market regulation here would have led to disaster a long time ago, for the reasons you described at the beginning of your comment.
The market “works” because of, not inspite of regulation.
And negative prices are a good thing for consumers, not market failure.
A liberal approach to market regulation here would have led to disaster a long time ago, for the reasons you described at the beginning of your comment. The market “works” because of, not inspite of regulation. And negative prices are a good thing for consumers, not market failure.
Regulation of a market by the government is liberal politics. A laize faire approach is conservative lol.
Somehow internet populists have become convinced that liberalism = the government never does anything. Ask literally any economist and they will tell you government intervention and regulation are needed in many things.
For example, read this study on the policy views of practicing economists: https://econfaculty.gmu.edu/klein/PdfPapers/KS_PublCh06.pdf
You will find that most economists strongly support things like environmental, food and drug safety, and occupational safety regulations.
Convincing people liberalism is an evil capitalist ploy to deregulate at all costs is a conservative psyop, and judging from comments like the one to which you’re responding, it’s working.
Somehow internet populists have become convinced that liberalism = the government never does anything. Ask literally any economist and they will tell you government intervention and regulation are needed in many things.
ah yes, the classic laissez faire interpretation of libertarian.
Neo liberalism is the core ideology of modern conservatism. For example, both the republican and democrat parties in the United States adhere to Neo Liberal ideology. They are both conservative.
Neo liberalism is the ideology of deregulated capitalism. Neo liberalism holds that everything should be marketable without government interference, including healthcare, real estate, power generation, water, etc. Pioneered by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, it is the dominant political ideology across Western democracies. Liberals and Conservatives are both adherents of Neo Liberal capitalist ideology. Leftists are those who support regulation, they are definitionally anti-capitalist. When people refer to the democrat party as socialist or democrats as Leftists, they’re just misusing those terms. Democrats are Neo liberal conservatives who, by and large, support deregulated capitalism.
Okay, and?? None of that goes against what I said. In the scope of us politics, Deregulation of markets in the US is Republican platform. Regulation of markets is Democrat platform. Democrats in the US are more liberal than Republicans even though, as you said, they are far from real leftists.
Their platform at times advocates regulation, but they don’t do much in the way of it. They are largely still in favor less regulation. We have had Democrat presidents since Reagan, quite a few actually and despite that unilaterally regulation had decreased pretty constantly over that time period.
There’s no post scarcity. The power available on the grid must always equal the power consumed. Or all the hell will break loose.
That’s wrong and it’s simple to explain why.
If the grid allows negative prices, grid storage becomes a profitable business opportunity.
The power consumption will always go up or production will go down if prices go negative.
We are missing a key piece of the puzzle to decarbonise the grid and that’s storage of the abundant renewable power we could easily create.
This is a sign the market is ready for investment in storage.
Question: Who do you think is paying these “negative prices”. Spoiler: It’s the TSOs. They can’t do that for long, or simply go bankrupt.
Yes, “storage of the abundant renewable power” is a key piece of the puzzle, but “The power available on the grid must always equal the power consumed” is something that can not be broken. If it does, equipment will break, people will be without power, and it’ll cost the TSO tons of money to repair.
There’s post scarcity, but only during a short time of the day, when power consumption is relatively lower (it spikes when people come home, because everyone turns their lights and machines on around the same time).
Oh, and I don’t know about the USA, but the Dutch grid is pretty much overloaded, so there is no space to move the power to the storage units (whether the storage exists or not doesn’t matter ATM). We’re working on it, but here’s we’re kinda fucked ATM.
Bankruptcy is seen as a bad thing. In reality it’s the part of market forces everyone has forgotten is important.
If something we need becomes unstable in the market, the government has to provide it and usually does on a break even basis.
Base load electricity will likely have this future.
If the grid allows negative prices, grid storage becomes a profitable business opportunity.
in fact, if the price of electricity on the grid changes at all. Storage becomes a point where money can be made.
The person you’re responding to is talking about physics, not economics.
There’s no point about talking about the physics of the grid without the economics.
The story of the New York blackouts is not one of groundbreaking physics.
It’s the story of two lightning strikes, some very basic physics, and a systemic failure.
Understanding the systemic failure is not a physics question. Electricity is already well understood and that physics isn’t changing.
A renewable grid is not a physics question either. It’s one of regulation, redundancies and the end goal hasn’t changed.
Saying “production and consumption on the grid must match” might as well be put in the pile with statements like “wires must be made of conductive material”. They’re just 2 things that haven’t changed.
They’re mixing the two to attempt to make a point. “Post-scarcity” is an economic concept, and I’ve never heard that term used in physics.
ah yes the physics concept of “post scarcity”
Power plant operators are known to have dreaded this inevitability. There will be no more electrons.
It’s two separate statements. We don’t live in a post scarcity world. Power grids have physical limitations regarding power in and power out.
Ah then it’s just two non sequiturs that don’t relate to each other
But too much power on the grid isn’t “here, have at it”. It’s fried devices and spontaneous fires breaking out. The grid can’t “hold the power”, only pumped and battery storage can, of which we have nowhere near enough. The grid literally cannot work if other producers put more electricity on to it.
If you have smart meter, you can literally be paid to use power at that point.
I think we’re quite a long way off from “too much power on the grid”, no? Even in America we regularly over-strain our grids. My power provider has even started discouraging folks from using their power as much, and charging more, because they simply decided not to do this work of increasing the amount generated. Like my bill has never once gone down, this paying people to use power concept is completely unheard of in practice.
That said I’m willing to be wrong. If you can show me evidence we have “too much power” I’d be happy to take that to my elected officials, insist I should get paid to heat up my noodles or whatever.
Where I live at the moment (UK), people with home batteries are regularly paid for storing excess energy from the grid. I haven’t got a clue about the American energy market, but intermittent energy production is causing huge strain on European grids.
Interesting… Can y’all make room for one more over there? The bill for my 3-bedroom home is around $150 per month T_T
We don’t have too much power overall, but there are moments where solar and renewable production in a region exceeds usage in that region.
Nobody said it can hold power
wait until you figure out how we solve this problem…
wait for it…
You just don’t produce that energy.
lol. Yes, it’s that simple.
that’s how we’ve been doing it for the past 2 centuries, it’ll be how we continue to do it for the next 2 centuries.
Frequency has to be maintained, and it is trivial to do so when you have excess renewables because inverters are instantly throttle-able. The reason why you’ve never heard about devices failing because frequency is too high is because it is and has always been such a non issue to shutter unneeded generating capacity.
Typically with fossil fuel plants, when the price drops below the cost of fuel for the least efficient plants they drop offline because they are no longer making a profit on fuel and the price holds. Because renewables have upfront cost to build but are free to run on a day to day basis, when there are a lot of renewables the price signal has to drop all the way to nothing before it is no longer profitable to run them.
All this means that all that happened was that for a few hours, solar production was actually enough to satisfy demand for that region. Along term, if low wholesale prices can be counted on midday then people will build industry, storage, or HVDC transfer capacity to take advantage of it.
If these prices are sustained for enough of the day that it is no longer profitable to add more solar farms, then they will stop being built in that area in favor of was to generate power at night such as wind, hydro, and pumped hydro while the panels will instead go to places that still don’t have enough solar to meet demand.
Also as an aside, the wholesale electricity market in north america is by definition about as far from a free market as it is possible for a free market to be without having exact outside price controls. It is a market built solely out of regulation that only exists at all because the government forced it to exist by making it illegal to not use it, either by making contracts off market or by transmission companies in-houseing production, or use it in any way other than as precisely prescribed by the government.
Now we can argue whether or not the wholesale electricity market is well or poorly set up or even if it should exist in the first place, but I don’t think that anyone can argue that it is a free market. At least not without defining the term free market so broad that even most of the markets in the USSR qualify as free markets.
Also, free markets and capitalism are very distinct concepts with no real relation between each other. You might argue that free markets tend to lead towards a capitalist system, but given free markets existed thousands of years before capitalism was invented I don’t think many people would say it was a very strong relationship.
Isn’t there any kind of economic activity that could make use of this excess energy, even if it isn’t very profitable?
Yes there is. So consumers (with the right kind of smart meters) are paid to use energy and we are slowly moving from pilot plan into small scale production of hydrogen. But there’s nowhere near enough and the grid will literally fry itself unless producers stop pumping more onto the grid (during windy and sunny days, in areas with high penetration of intermittent production.
the grid will literally fry itself
I don’t believe this is true for three reasons.
#1 it’s glossing over the mechanics of how equipment will get damaged
#2 the people that own the equipment have ways of managing excess capacity.
#3 minuscule increases in grid frequency result in devices using power less efficiently, so they use more power. There’s time to adjust power generation in surplus events.
You can pump water uphill back into reservoirs so that you can use it to generate hydro-electricity later https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ffestiniog_Power_Station
There is, but you have to set it up and link it with the central control system of your grid, similarly to how power generators have an automatic generation control to balance the network.
Central heating
Yes. Desalination or hydrogen separation via electrolysis
Both uses are productive, one generates fresh water, the other can be a form of energy storage.
Both are extremely energy intensive for the yield, making them unprofitable, but are extremely useful things to do with a glut of electricity.
Usually too low frequency is issue, I can’t imagine why even double frequency can damage PSU.
Ok, your particular device may handle a wide band of frequencies. Congrats.
But do we agree that not all devices can? What about sensitive devices keeping patients alive in hospitals?
Those would not be plugged straight into the grid but with a power conditioner inbetween
Oh ok, I guess frequency maintenance on the grid isn’t a problem then and all the pumped storage and battery installations can shut and all the grid planners can go home and the spots markets can close and we can just dump as current as we see fit onto the grid and you’re right and I’m wrong.
All of that matters, but I think the parent post was only calling out the hospital equipment as a bad example. Like how your keyboard and your SSD don’t care what the grid is doing as long as the PSU can handle it.
But back to maintaining the frequency on the grid, along with keeping it within tolerance don’t they also have to make sure that the average frequency over time is VERY close to the target? I believe there are devices that use the frequency for timekeeping as well, like some old plug-in alarm clocks.
Fair enough. I was getting frustrated because I was trying to make a larger point about the fact that the grid can’t endlessly handle production. At some point the grid has to say “it will cost you to dump this onto the grid”. And suddenly I found myself discussing PSUs. I mean, yes, I’m aware there’s equipment on the grid that can handle different frequencies better than others but I felt we were discussing the bark of a single tree when I was trying to talk about the forest.
Also fair enough!
It really is a good point you make though. There’s a large balancing act to produce the right amount of power at exactly the time it’s needed. I think in our daily lives, and especially for non-tech/STEM folks, electricity is just taken for granted as always available and unlimited on an individual scale. I think people don’t envision giant spinning turbines when they plug something in, just like they don’t think of racks of computers in a data center when they open Amazon or Facebook.
Maybe it will be less like that in a couple decades when there is distributed energy storage all over the grid, including individual homes & vehicles.
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But do we agree that not all devices can?
By not all you mean motors with windings connected to grid? Well, they still will work on higher frequencies, but on higher speed. Real problem is low frequency, not high. Well, 0.5kHz not all devices can handle, but most consumers(even conumer electronics, no pun intended) even rated to 50-60Hz range. So 46-64Hz should be fine for them.
What about sensitive devices keeping patients alive in hospitals?
Sensetive devices that can’t handle range bigger than ±0.4Hz? Are you kiddding me? How does that even pass certification?
Most frequency-sencetive devices are not consumers, but transformers and turbines.
Transformers are very important for the grid though. You also have large synchronized motors connected to the grid.
lol If you think hospitals don’t have managed power systems you shouldn’t be contributing.
Also lol if you think medical equipment isn’t required to be robust, have you ever read a supply tender spec for a hospital?
There’s a reason why the frequency is exactly 50hz or 60hz, and it’s not “at least 50hz or 60hz”. You can’t just have 55hz on the grid, you’ll destroy half a country.
That’s why I say low frequency is problem, but high is not as much.
I don’t think you said why?
It’s not just about frequency - though that is important for devices that synchronize using the grid. When your frequency is going up because of too much power so will voltage. Think about that for a minute.
Not necessarily(see field windings), but higher voltage is indeed a problem
Not everything on the grid is a motor. Even if it was you would still need to rebuild the motor to change field windings.
some clocks are bound to grid frequency. It’s the easiest most accessible way to clock time semi accurately.
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Nikola Tesla was a radical anarchist then, I guess? :-P
I mean, in a lot of ways he didn’t care about the economics of his inventions. He wanted to transfer electricity wirelessly across huge areas and there really wasn’t a way to monetise that if everyone could just tap into that.
In a communist society you could build something like that, in capitalism you’re not going to find an investor to do this.
I wish Tesla had just invented induction stoves instead of going for his holy grail. I don’t think induction is a good way to move power over large distances, but it’s a great way to cook dinner.
I guess since we still don’t have wireless transmission there were probably physical limitations to what he was trying to do. You would think someone would’ve tried it in the century since.
I don’t think there was a huge capitalist conspiracy to stop this from happening unless someone can point me to something that says otherwise.
We do have wireless charging for phones, and induction stoves that transfer heat. And yes there was a bit of a conspiracy regarding Tesla, it is quite famous, but I will leave you to direct your own studies there however you see fit. One part is that Edison was not so much the “inventor” as his reputation may naively lead people to believe as an “exploiter” as in he ran an invention sweatshop company. But anyway you are right to be suspicious of Tesla ofc - he wasn’t very practical and maybe it was after being burned by his experiences with Edison but he did not set out to prove his ideas in the most practical manner and instead went off the deep end trying to solve the more scientific and engineering aspects further rather than take forward what he had already shown irt short distance transfers. So the conspiracy wasn’t “huge”, just a consequence of him having been blacklisted by Edison combined with his own business ineptitude to not find financial backers. I am only saying though that the limitations were not entirely physical (the long distance ones are, but not the short distance ones), so much as practicality especially in the business sense of taking a product from conception all the way to market.
Yeah, obviously induction charging has been around (and is easy enough to monetise), but he was famously trying to build a way to transfer electricity over long distances, and I’m assuming this isn’t possible without incurring huge losses.
Agree on all you said about Edison, he basically was that eras Elon Musk, taking credit for the work of others.
he was famously trying to build a way to transfer electricity over long distances, and I’m assuming this isn’t possible without incurring huge losses.
Yes, I believe you are correct about that, although I too do not know what precisely those limitations are:-).
For one thing, Tesla was not entirely truthful to his investors:
Astor thought he was primarily investing in the new wireless lighting system. Instead, Tesla used the money to fund his Colorado Springs experiments.
And for another, he chased down the wrong path for awhile:
The observations he made of the electronic noise of lightning strikes led him to (incorrectly) conclude that he could use the entire globe of the Earth to conduct electrical energy.
So, it is not quite a full “conspiracy” to claim that he somehow deserved additional funding despite all of his past shortcomings. It sounds to me more like hindsight being 20/20, we now realize how he was correct, how he was wrong, and overall people try to use him as an example of capitalism’s failings. Like the first rule of inventions are that when one fails you should try try again, except that’s obviously not true - yeah try a few times but ultimately spend your time on what looks most likely to work, not repeating to extend forward a string of endless failures. i.e., people try to use his example in spite of the facts, not because of them. Maybe, it looks like.
And it’s likely true - if as much effort had been put into that technology as was put into Edison’s, perhaps we really would have solved that long-distance problem by now - maybe. Therein lies the germ of truth imho: you cannot overcome it if you refuse to even so much as try? So in that case, it is truly the constraints of capitalism that killed the spirit of innovation there, as in we could (maybe) have had something, if only profits were not people’s sole motivation.
Similarly and in a much more damaging manner we see drug companies researching palliatives and “care options” rather than actual cures. The goal of any corporation - even ones working in a medical field - is solely to make profits. Hence Viagra and Cialis, and funding goes towards further development of pain relief and such, even as funding was taken away from research towards cures for common diseases (even ones the researchers themselves believed they were “close” to solving!).
All of this works together as arguments against capitalism being the best economic system - it works well in theory but only up to a point, similar to socialism, and irl the systems that have worked the absolute best was a blending of the two, with each providing a different mixture of benefits and detractions. e.g. if Tesla had been under a socialist system or in more of a blended one, could his excesses have been reigned in and what innovations would we have today in that case? We will never know ofc, but at least I am attempting to frame the argument that I commonly hear from people who don’t quite state their reasoning, so this is my attempt to reconstruct it. :-)
I guess I should’ve started with the wiki article, which spells out he was working off the erroneous assumption that the atmosphere was somehow more conductive than it really is.
Anyway, thanks for the interesting discussion.
Thus, Ben Franklin wins electricity, and they made Tesla into a joke, who goes on to be a recluse, yeah? Edit: Thomas Edison rather
There is never surplus power with a network of a few “turn it on as needed” intensive industrial uses like haber-bosch reactors for ammonia, dessalination plants and electrolysis for aluminium or other metals…right?
If only there was a way to turn waste energy into money.
