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In this thread: a bunch of armchair energy scientists who think they’ve solved the energy storage problem all on their own.
This is a real problem for renewables.
You don’t get paid when the sun shines, and you don’t get paid for when it does not.
You had to pay for building the solar panels and maintaining them. Corporate greed aside none sane would like their tax money either to be spent on producing electricity when it’s not needed.
Next step for renewables must be storage that is cheap enough for it to beat having fossil fuel on standby.
I feel like energy storage has been the challenge since I learned what a computer is, it really is the 3rd wheel of the cab
To be honest, at grid scale, I don’t see why the answer to this today isn’t that the government/energy companies just build a shit load of gravity batteries and use the basically free power times to build grid supply for when the sun’s gone down.
Scientists: Hi here is a physical, technical, materially real limitation of most renewables that most of you should know about by now.
Shitforbrains shitter leftie: must be capitalism
I wouldn’t be sure we can’t. Just have to find the right “angle”:
https://futurism.com/the-byte/startup-space-mirror-sunlight-night
Kinda different like during night time it doesn’t really makes sense to buy sunlight to make electricity.
From a grid stability point, you can’t produce more than is used, else you get higher frequencies and/or voltages until the automatics shut down. It’s already a somewhat frequent occurence in germany for the grid operator to shut down big solar plants during peak hours because they produce way more power than they can dump (because of low demand or the infrastructure limiting transfer to somewhere else)
Negative prices are the grid operator encouraging more demand so it can balance out the increased production.
Spot on! I hoped this comment would be higher! The main problem isn’t corps not making money, but grid stability due to unreliability of renewables.
To be fair, the original tweet is kinda shit to begin with. They’ve unnecessarily assigned monetary value to a purely engineering (physics?) problem.
So what they are saying is that our current financial system is too focused on short term gains to cope with short term losses?
Sigh, when I grew up, I was allways taught to save money so that I have a buffer to fall back on. This concept seems to have completely gone out the window for busniesses lately.
I dislike the talk about how capitalism is bad as a general concept, but when seeing stuff like this I do agree with it in parts.
Ok, so let’s solve the issue.
There is too much electricity, so generating power to transmit to the network will cost us money.
This has an easy solution, just don’t transmit it to the network.
Build a battery facility where you store the power instead, infact if the price of electricity is negative, use the power on the grid and charge your batteries as well, I mean, when the electricity cost is negative, you are being paid to consume power.
Then when the sun goes down, and the electricity price goes up, you sell the charge you have in the batteries.
Depending on your location you could even set up a pumped storage system, where instead of batteries getting charged, you use the cheap excess energy to pump a resarvoir full of water, and release it when you need the power.
This has an easy solution, just don’t transmit it to the network.
It’s the base load providers that don’t like this. Coal and nuclear don’t like to ramp down. They can’t shut down easily and their installation keeps costing money but stops bringing in money in that period. They’ll go complain to daddy government how unfair it is.
Until batteries start replacing them by being cheaper.
Why are individuals expected to have an emergency fund yet corporations get money from the government?
This is exactly what we’re gonna see on a large scale in a few years.
I’m very hopeful for flow batteries to improve to a point where they can be very cheaply installed at scale. Seems much better environmentally than lithium ion, and the drawbacks matter less for grid storage.
Flow battery drawbacks aren’t drawbacks for home use, let alone grid scale.
What are the drawbacks?
Too heavy, and too big. This is compared to an automotive battery though. They take up the size of something like a fridge. They are also expensive but prices are bound to come down once production is up. But they have claimed zero capacity degradation for decades they say. And the liquid inside is a fire retardant, so if you puncture a battery that would actually put out the fire.
There are number of videos on YouTube, it’s an interesting technology.
a few years
Snowy Hydro cost overruns would like a word
This is generally the right idea of a solution, but it’s a difficult engineering problem.
It’s not “just an economics problem” despite the headline.
The “cost of power becoming negative” is phrased in an economic way but what it really means is the grid has too much power and that power needs to go somewhere or it will damage infrastructure.
I know that, and to incentivice people to use the power, they pay you to do it.
That’s really not an easy solution at all. It’s simple, conceptually, but it’s a huge series of projects. And expensive.
I know that, but with long term planning its fine.
Early adopters will profit the most, it’s a non-issue.
Negative prices are an opportunity and people will take advantage. This would be the perfect time to change batteries, make hydrogen, send compressed air into an old mine or refill a dam
Ya know what, I’m gonna solar even harder
I don’t understand it well enough to explain it but I think that this actually is not the issue here. Something about it making the grids unstable?
Though based on their phrasing it 100% sounds like “lol how can be greedy if free”
Yeah yeah down with capitalism rah rah but if the electric company makes no money, how do they afford infrastructure maintenance?
Ok so we nationalize the electric company. Now taxes pay to keep up the electric grid?
I’m down for all of that, by the way. It’s a great solution. But there is absolutely, indisputably, 100% a problem here, and it’s childish to pretend that if evil corporations would stop being so greedy everything would magically fix itself. It’s completely valid to discuss this issue in terms of problems and solutions.
There’s absolutely a problem with how MIT Tech Review has phrased it. It could’ve been phrase like “modern power generation requires innovate solutions to the gride and large scale grid upgrades.” But no they blamed it has a Solar problem, not a grid problem.
I see headlines all the time such as “The US highways need a 1 Trillion investment in the next decade”. How come they aren’t phrased like “The problem with trucks and cars is that they destroy roads, leading to Trillions of cost to the taxpayer”. They’ve decided that transportation is non-negotiable and it’s needed. But renewable electricity is not?
If evil corporations stopped being greedy everything would literally fix itself, and it would not be magic.
Imagine getting electricity from solar as what it cost to deliver and not having a price set by a market at all.
Imagine if the corporations were not allowed to extract profit from you’d to give it to the shareholders and banks.
There’s an almost uncountable amount of spare money, when you remove ‘profits’ and put it back into the service .
Does the price I pay for electricity not already include the cost to maintain the infrastructure needed to deliver it?
Funny enough, no. Although that’s changing in some places, with electric bills being split into a base fee for everyone hooked up and a variable fee based on usage. Obviously, this pisses off home solar users because they expected to pay nothing.
But most places use the same old model that charges you solely based on usage and was not designed with consumers also being producers.
Home solar aside, significant upgrades to the grid will require higher prices. Introducing large grid-scale solar is a significant upgrade.
No one tell them that they can monopolize solar panels.
I know how to store excess energy from kilowatt hours to gigawatt hours without using batteries, and only using cheap, inert materials.
