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?
Generally not, no. Most manufacturers would rather turn it off as needed rather than turn it on as needed. Unpredictable outputs require unpredictable staffing rosters, introduce more risk into plant operations and does not give confidence to customers (“we need to delay your shipment”).
Desal would need very big reservoirs to be able to erratically run, but perhaps that is done off peak in some places? Aluminium is complex, you can’t let it cool too much otherwise you risk the whole process solidying (no recovery, requires rebuilding entire smeltery).
fair enough, makes sense, I was trying to think outside the box of “storing” the power as pumped hydro or batteries…but I guess where they exist, these industries still welcome the negative prices when they happen :)
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.
I agree, if the point had been we didn’t have enough energy storage at the grid scale to accommodate the excess power I would agree with that. Instead, it points out the price.
How about this: power generation and distribution is not as easy as you think, it requires lots and lots of infrastructure and maintenance and that has a cost. If prices go negative too much it might become a problem to keep that running. There, that wasn’t so hard, now was it?
Negative prices are short-term self-regulation reactions of the market, they can’t stay negative long-term, just because of how the system works. So I’m not sure what you’re worried about.
Also, cut the condescending tone, it does nothing but make you look like an asshole.
You were. Publicly run power would function the same as the fire department - paid for via taxation to fulfill a societal need instead of charging for profit.
Or, are you under the impression that the Fire Department is privatized?
So why was the problem expressed in economic terms? The practical problem isn’t “oh noes there’s a price label with a minus on it”; it’s that there’s a surplus of power which is dangerous.
In reality what that represents is an opportunity for someone to come in, and store the excess power, and sell it back to the grid when supply is lower – but energy companies only want to model the flow of money going one way.
You never made a point to begin with. That was my point. You just spout slogans you head somewhere, that I’ve seen reported ad nauseum, and when I point that out, you want me to write something well thought out?
First come up with something that is a slogan, then well talk
This is a real problem but you can only have so many words in a tweet. Note that the price isn’t zero but instead negative. It means there is literally too much power in the grid and it would need to be used. If a grid has too much power then it is bad. It can damage it. There are things we can build that essentially amount to batteries (or natural variants like a dam) that get charged during times of higher supply than demand and discharged during times of higher demand than supply.
No but see you can’t build infrastructure to solve problems. What is this the 1700s? Go ride a train, commie!
Problems are only solved by grinding humans into a fine paste/powder, or destroying things for quarterly profits. Or doing a giant mountain of cocaine.
Yes, infra can be built, but not fast enough to keep up with all the solar panels being installed. For example: In the Netherlands our network can’t keep up with the requests being put out by companies, and we’ve already been busy for the last 5-ish years to install new infra, but that shit can take over 10 (!!!) years before a large line has been added. Land needs to be bought, people need to be informed, plans need to be made or adjusted, local companies need to be hired, the materials bought in and build into new pylons, etc.
It’s a MASSIVE undertaking. Even if you talk on a local level, where “The Last Mile” is the time-consuming problem there.
What infra? Youre acting like its a single thing. Sure pumped hydro takes a while. Even small scale, water towers on buildings. Sure.
But build a metal smelting thing. Take a crack at fusion. Use crypto mining techniques to tap cables and install massive racks of computers to do comedic deep fake smut of fascist politicians. Basically all meta-capacity can be applied to this, and some of it is really fucking portable.
Sorry, I should’ve been explicit that I meant the power grid. You can generate all you want, but if the power grid can’t handle it, you’re shit out of luck :)
but not everything needs to feed the main grid. solar near a major factory, for example-its mostly generating during the same hours the machines are on. or in the middle of residential in a hot region, that power all gets eaten up before it hits (and I’m going to assume from what little I know of power grids that they look at least a little similar to networks) a trunk line. you need a lot less wire there. if you use generating methods closer to sites, and storage closer to sites, theres less transport to to, right?
not everything is more efficient at centralized scale. thought that was like half the point of solarpunk.
We don’t aim to censor anyone. Mods don’t enjoy receiving or responding to reports. Just be mindful of the words you chose as I asked. Unfortunately a word you used jokingly was reported for violating the very few and basic rules of this instance ( no bigotry, including racism, sexism, ableism, transphobia, homophobia or xenophobia; ) that exist to make everyone feel welcome. “Hold back” on that and we’re all good.
Actually there is a good amount of credible economic theory which backs the idea that localized post-scarcity markets do cause capitalist influences to wither away, and that power generation is a big fucking domino in that equation. The simple version is that maintenance of artificial scarcity is modeled as capital overhead, so there will always be an inflection point where that overhead actually exceeds the value of all other inputs. The same way eg, marketing cannot create infinite or arbitrary demand.
The other angle here is how there is often incentive for alternative commodification of abundance, which in turn incentives that abundance. This is another common model for various forms of post-scarcity capitalism. Take a YouTube video for example. The commodification of content takes the form of advertising, which effectively transfers the scarcity of one market onto another. Content is basically infinite compared to viewership time inputs. The key here is that there will always exist some forms of scarcity - and time is the big one. Art, company, leisure, physical space, etc. the model here is that eventually something like energy and physical resources might be completely abundant and effectively free, but enabled by competition over attention or leisure or aesthetic experience. You can make a strong argument that this is already happening in the post-industrial world to some degree.
The final issue is that this equation isn’t unique to capitalism. Socialism mediates scarcity in more or less the same way - by transferring and meditating it across various markets using labor as the quanta of scarcity instead of capital. Indeed, many economists will argue that regulated, democratic, liberal forms of capitalism theoretically reduces to the same core basis, since “free [as in speech] labor” itself both creates the market regulation as well as provides the consumption which mediates access to capital. This is, in fact, the core thesis of “third way” market socialism, though it is obviously contentious among orthodox Marxists.
I think the best nation-states, in terms of happiness index, practice “third-way” market socialism or as close of an approximation as they can to it in all but name. I would even include the United States during the post-WW2 economic expansion.
The nordic countries, which tend to score higher on “Happiness Indexes,” are Social Democracies. Social Democracy is a form of revisionist Marxism that believes Capitalism can be wielded for the benefit of all, not just the bourgeoisie.
Unfortunately, these same Nordic countries have been seeing a sliding of the Social Safety Net, similar to what has happened to America following the New Deal (though not nearly as bad yet). Additionally, Imperialism is still the dominant method by which these countries subsidize their safety nets, alongside a dependence on NATO.
US post-WW2 was almost a functioning social democracy, but not market socialism. Market socialism would be something more along the lines of the Labour-dominated era of Israel, or Socialist Yugoslavia.
Yup. The US model is occasionally referred to as “pension fund socialism” (sometimes sarcastically) in the sense that there is a welfare system which resembles a social dividend for the less fortunate, social security which resembles a social dividend for the elderly, and privileged IRA accounts, which resembles collective ownership of capital for the working class. The collective value of US IRA accounts is actually something like 20% of nominal GDP, and social security is like another 10% of GDP. Depending on how you measure it, this makes the actual collective share of the US economy proportionally larger than it was under the USSR or modern day China.
The big thing the US is missing is a healthcare dividend. Also, the welfare layer is arguably much too small, which creates much worse wealth disparity than need be. Still, this is arguably an issue of buttons and knobs rather than the structural issue many make it out to be.
Prices going negative is Capitalism’s solution actually. Gives the price incentive for folks to charge their cars when prices go negative, or whatever.
The electricity will still cost some money because of fees from for example the network owner and maintainer The prices would have to go pretty negative to outweigh any fees.
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.
Thank you, it’s very valuable to correct that misinformation.
It seems like an easy mistake to make as the original post being replied to is framing it explicitly in terms of economics.
It’s just a bit of shitshow of weird communication. How hard would a tweet like “A problem with solar panels is that they produce too much electricity during the middle of the day, putting strain on the grid and requiring increased power consumption”.
That’s not as sensationalist but I’m also not a headline writer. It just seems like this shitty piece of journalistic malpractice was made to stir up outrage
The reply is what makes the excerpt seem inflammatory. It’s an article about the economics of solar power, so the excerpt is a fair representation of both the article and the real issue it’s discussing.
It would be sensationalist if they said “critical problem paying for solar power comes from negative prices, threatening future of solar adoption”
Framing it as though it were a condemnation of solar turns a statement of fact into something different than what it is.
The resurgance of sand batteries has been interesting. While not great for converting back into electricity, it’s great for heating and cooling which is a massive portion of our energy consumption. They can also store quite a ton of energy with crazy efficiency, especially when paired with heat pumps. And from what I’ve been able to deduce, they aren’t dependent on beach sand and can use rougher or man-made sand reliably.
First if we could get enough large buildings and neighborhood/home installation sand battery heating & cooling infrastructure operating with heat pumps. Then when during high times of energy production we can dump the energy into the sand battery infra and help keep the grid stablizied and keeping our heat & cooling overall percentage of use down.
In the end, we’re going to need tons of solutions and strategies for storing excess production during low demand times. I’m hopeful to see where we go here, the crazy things were seeing in energy storage is extremely interesting. I’m super excited to see the advances were seeing in calcium and sulfur based batteries expand in adoption and the production lines can scale with demand.
I’ve been really curious about the possibility of a small DIY sand battery type system. I currently store my “negative value” midday solar power by dumping it into a water tank and using it to feed my hydronic heating system.
However as we know that results in a tank containing useless low-grade heat on a cloudy day, where a sand battery would result in a small amount of usable high-grade heat.
The cooling equivalent could actually be implemented fairly easily at home with common consumer ice machines (which are effectively heat pumps). Make ice when there’s surplus, dump it in an insulated hopper with a heat exchanger for night-time cooling, recycle the near-freezing melt water to make ice the next day. Water is a lot easier to handle because it can be pumped instead of conveyed, and you get the advantage of phase change storage.
Entire system is home built and programmed except the inverter which was a surplus rack-mount.
The dump load in the water tank tracks the battery bank voltage, drawing more power as the voltage rises into the float range. This is used to sense available surplus power, which is used to turn on other dump loads, i.e. air conditioning in summer.
I have a couple window units that are cranked to max cooling and come on in sequence as the surplus power rises, on an early summer day with clear skies it can get to the point of needing a sweater in the house :D I’m migrating to a homebuilt multi-stage heat pump this year after the prototype worked quite well last year.
Also seriously considering the ice storage concept for hot nights, though I might need to make an actual ton of ice!
Just made a deal on 8 massive surplus AGM batteries too to refresh my bank
I have been running the numbers on one myself and it seems to me the best case would be to actually have one inside my home, since the waste heat will also end up heating the space. I admit it is similar to just having a lot of thermal mass in the house.
Yes, also it doesnt technically have to be sand, there are concrete mixes and even just bedrock that can be used for similar purposes. I’ve been looking at sand batteries myself for this reason: run the battery hot when power is cheap, let it cool when not.
This sort of thing is of course why it’s useful to have a market mechanism for energy, it can encourage us to build environmentally friendly solutions.
Actually a modern “sand battery” does have to be sand or at least a granular material. The difference between a sand battery and thermal mass is that you use a conveyor to superheat small fractions of the sand, allowing the isolation of high grade heat.
If you have a single kWh to store and 1 ton of sand to work with, you could heat 1kg of sand to hundreds of degrees (sand battery), or 1 ton of sand by one degree (thermal mass).
1 ton of slightly warm sand is useless, while you can extract the high grade heat from the 1kg and get your 1 kWh back.
They can, and they do. They’re typically considered safety devices since they can be damaged by having excess load dumped on them, and they either are dumb, in which case they don’t act like an actual load the generator is expecting and can maybe cause damage to the generator, or they’re smart and can mimic the type of load the grid would actually give, but now they’re expensive and need maintenance and testing in excess of what the dumb one needs.
It’s something you would need for off grid solar as well, with batteries that can only take so much charge, but at the power grid level it’s a much bigger task because you’re in the realm of “metal explodes” power, and exploding metal is bad.
i feel like you wouldn’t need a dump load for solar, due to how it’s setup. At best you just dont do anything, and worst you disconnect the panels entirely, that could be bad for the panels though idk.
It’s different with typical generation because it’s almost always converting mechanical energy into electrical energy. Which means if you load dump, suddenly the RPM of the turbine driving the generator, and likewise, the generator, is going to vastly speed up. Which given the fundamental mechanics of how those work, is going to fuck shit up. Dump loads exist as a really easy solution there.
But with solid state generation, i’m not sure it would really matter. Unless you’re running a decentralized grid maybe.
The panels still generate power even if they’re disconnected as long as they’re in the sun.
In a home setup they’ll probably just get warm, but if you’re making a lot of current you’d want it to not do that.
I think a lot of home setups will switch to a water heater, since that’s easy and also a potentially useful way to spend extra power.
I did some googling to try to get an idea of what happens if you just quickly disconnect a solar cell, and things seemed to indicate that it’s the inverter that switches the DC to AC that likes it the least.
Regardless of the specific reason, I’m quite confident you need something in the mix to eat the excess power from an underutilized solar plant, because otherwise the electrical engineers who built them probably would have taken the seemingly obvious and easy way. :)
solar panels are typically pretty warm already. There are even panels that allow you to push water through them to keep them cool.
I wonder if that would be more effective than dumping resistive heating into water. I suppose it could still be bad for the panel, i would assume panel manufacturers would have data on this, but im too lazy to look it up because whatever site they have is probably a shitfest that i wouldn’t be able to navigate easily.
Yeah, when I looked them up they recommended a dump load to mitigate fire risk, since however hot they get normally is the baseline for when all the energy they produce gets turned into heat on the panel as well.
Gotta send extra power somewhere, and better to send it someplace built for it than into the expensive thing that’s not.
That is of course absolutely true. But fossil fuels are still a tool of power that is used for political purposes. Of course, this also applies to the metals needed for batteries, for example. However, access to this is not so promising in terms of power, because on the one hand, as you say, you can also live and produce “according to the times of day”. On the other hand, there are untapped reserves of these raw materials - such as cobalt and manganese - in the deep sea, i.e. international waters. In short, I do think that some players have an interest in boycotting solar energy and other renewable energy sources in favor of fossil fuels in order to maintain their power base - Russia, for example.
Unlimited free energy of any sort is unsustainable. Our planet is a balanced system that has evolved over eons, simply adding energy upsets this balance and probably not in ways that will ultimately be beneficial for us. We can see many negative effects already from adding massive amounts of fossil energy to the system (besides the greenhouse effect and pollution) such as population growth beyond the bounds of the planet.
Solar panels are capturing energy that would otherwise just heat the ground. It won’t upset the planet’s energy balance. If anything, we can use the excess to capture CO2.
If we capture a non-trivial amount of the energy that would’ve returned to space and use it in industry, that adds energy to our system and causes it to heat up – climate change. This is not an issue currently with intentional solar capture (greenhouse effect is unintentional solar capture).
I was simply refuting a claim that clearly violates the laws of thermodynamics - that unlimited free energy is without problems.
I want to be clear, I’m not anti-solar panel. I have them on my house and it’s awesome.
Or worst case, power some down. Excess electricity that can’t be used is a problem, it’s just that while solar may not be the easiest energy source to fix that problem with, it’s probably the second easiest behind wind. You can literally put retractable awnings over solar panels if you need to
Or just fill debts. Overclock every air conditioner freezer and industrial coolant system for those hours, store that not-heat. Do cpu intensive processes, time industrial machinery to be active during those hours, Sure, desalination, but pumped hydro(even just on a residential scale, more water towers, dammit!) or… Anything.
OR we could just decline to build them because they’re… Sometimes too good to make a profit off of?
Yes we need more long time energy storage. It helps to balance the energy grid and it helps for days when not enough energy is produced. Batteries aren’t really the answer, but pumping water uphill might be.
Many places actually do pump water uphill into reservoir lakes for hydroelectric dams. In that case it is a form of energy storage, a literal water battery.
Unfortunately, it’s not always a feasible option. For instance, in the great planes there’s not much of an uphill to pump the water to.
I’ve seen some interesting ideas from Low Tech Magazine - one that I found particularly interesting was flywheel energy storage. Take a heavy disk or drum and spin it up with excess electricity, then discharge the spin from the battery when the Sun goes down.
My favorite solution for storage of excess power is closed loop pumped hydro. Two bodies of water of different elevations are connected by a generator/pump. When there is too much power, the pump moves the water to the higher lake. When the power is needed, the water flows through the generator to the lower lake.
depends a bit on how much energy it costs to build it all, how many decades it should be used how often, and if it’s then durable enough to actually earn back the extra energy it costs. It might, just sayin’
We use gravity batteries in the UK. They work well and are pretty good at their efficiency. When you are creating massive systems they are made to last decades. There is always upkeep but it is the same with coal, gas and nuclear plants. All these renewables are far cheaper and far more cost effective than these power stations and for years the main problem has been that wind and solar cannot be used as base load, but with battery storage on a mass scale, thermal and hydrogen storage, we are now at a place where building out far more solar and wind than we need is viable and mixing in these technologies to provide base load and grid stability.
Lol that’s great, and I was more talking about the ones for mines that already have deep holes, this one is hilariously stupid though. Water does make a lot more sense though, only issue I can see with it would be evaporation.
It’s easy to use closed tanks. Mines are still a good site for energy storage, but using water instead of weighted sleds still makes more sense. Simpler over all system.
That’s my second favorite solution. One of the cons of the mines is they tend to be too remote from urban areas. But if that’s not a factor then you’re golden.
Hydrogen fuel cells also. Use the excess to make hydrogen which is simple to store and then use it as a fuel to burn when you have demand. These have started to be put at the bottom of wind turbines so they don’t need to be stopped when the wind is blowing but there is no grid demand.
All these systems help balance the grid too meaning these renewables can be used as base loads instead of dirtier base load generators like coal or gas fire stations.
Hydrogen is famously not simple to store. This is part of the reason that SpaceX rockets use kerosene instead of hydrogen despite the better performance.
Be careful that other rockets run on liquid hydrogen, which should be kept extremely cold. That is the main problem for them. That being said, hydrogen is indeed not easy to store and transport.
i mean, conceptually it’s simple to store, you put it in a container, the tricky part is doing it effectively, in a way that won’t create a massive bomb. And also at density.
Conceptually, yes, it’s like putting it into a container. But it’s also made up of the smallest atoms possible, which means it leaks out through a lot of materials. It also reacts with other materials - which makes it a good rocket fuel - but it also corrodes materials it comes in contact with in innovative and frustrating ways.
I was talking with an engineer about using a closed loop hydro system at home, maybe in a tower. He said the water wouldn’t have enough head to generate electricity. But that compressed air energy storage just might be the solution I was looking for.
the other arguably more effective option for home use is dumping it into heat. Heating up water is a great heat storage solution for radiant heating for instance. Getting that energy back out is arguably harder, but hot water is also pretty useful, so.
pumped hydro is pretty slick but incredibly dependent on geology and ecosystem.
Thermal storage is a similar vein, you can even use water, we do use water for this even. Compressed air as suggested, i believe there’s a mine somewhere in the US that’s used a compressed air storage plant. And of course, motion, flywheels go hard i hear, but i find those to be less preferable, even if high energy density. I imagine those would work better at scale.
I mean it is a problem, not because of capitalism but because of reality, while there can be a lot of overlap between sunny day and lots of solar energy for all the ACs running our energy usave is also significant in the afternoon when solar is winding down and the evening where its non existent and we need to balance that and transfer all the energy, copper prices are going through the roof, there are shortages in electric grid components, its nice that solar is cheap but you need to distribute that energy and at some point we will have to bite the bullet and deploy a lot of nuclear energy, last time I checked the wind/solar installations didnt even offset the energy demand increase happening that year.
TLDR: All turbines on a electrical grid have to turn at the same speed. Hydro, Fossil fuels, Nuclear all use turbines. There is no way to dump energy into nothing to prevent the turbines from spinning too fast. So pure supply and demand capitalism is why we pay people to take our energy to allow our electrical devices to work.
