That's not at all what MIT is talking about here. This goes into detail around the challenges tied in rolling out grid scale solar in a way that aligns with supply and demand curves, and how to make sure we're able to capture overproduction so that we can use it when not enough is being produced. It's a complex shift to work out in our over 100+ year grid production structure, and has been an ongoing discussion across the energy sector. But you know...memes and shit.
"For years, mankind has yearned to destroy the Sun." - CM Burns.
of course it's a furry shitposting about it.
They aren't wrong though, storage technology is only starting to come to market in significant enough capacity to be beneficial.
And for storage plants to be financially viable energy costs during the day need to be really cheap, so they can raise them at night and make a significant enough profit to break even.
The real issue isn't the overproduction per se, but that we (globally speaking) don't have enough cheap scalable responsive distributed storage. I'm writing this from a privileged position since Switzerland has loads of dams and can pump water during such peaks. But it's clear that's not the solution everywhere. I hope a good cheap mass producible battery tech with less rare earth metal requirements comes along soon.
Before commenting, you should know there are 2 types of solar panels:
- the ones owned by people (which may or may not feed into the grid)
- the ones owned by corporations
The article is probably about the 2nd kind (if you can only sell energy when there is a surplus, your company will fail), while the twitter user makes it seem like the 1st kind was meant. We probably need to built more of both types. Identify what type the other commenters are talking about before getting in any arguments here.
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MIT thinking they're Doc Ock
This is idiotic. The fact is your electricity transmission system operator has to pay a lot of money to keep the grid stable at 50 or 60Hz or your electronics would fry. With wind and especially with solar power, the variable output is always pushing the frequency one way or the other, and that creates a great need for costly balancing services. Negative pricing is an example of such a balancing service. Sounds good, but for how long do you think your electricity company can keep on paying you to consume power?
The "problem" of negative energy costs is easy to solve, but quite costly.
Build water desalination/carbon capture and storage/hydrogen generation plants that only run when the price goes below 0; even though these are very energy intensive, they would help stabilize the grid.
Then build more solar; you want to try to have the daytime price stay in the negative as often as possible.
If only there were some way to take energy made from sunshine and store it in some form for later. Like in a battery. Or as heat. Or in a flywheel. Or just use the energy for something we'd really like to do as cheaply as possible. Like sequester CO2. Or desalinate water. Or run industries that would otherwise use natural gas.
The problem with solar panels is that they produce energy the most when you least need it, and they produce the least when you most need it. Fuck the market. It's a resource storage and production management problem.
This reminds me of a quote (that probably isn't real) from Westinghouse to Tesla in regard to wireless energy transmission he was trying to create.
"This is wonderful, but where would we put the meter!?"
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.
Didn't China have a community use lots of solar and they ended up with such a glut of excess power that they didn't know what to do with it?
All communities should have that. Electricity should be free and it would be plausible to make it free. Except for maintenance costs, but that would be peanuts compared to what we pay now.
Every time someone mentions "oh no solar is producing too much energy" I think of this deranged Forbes article from a few years back.
alt-text
Microsofts billionaire founder Bill Gates is financially backing the development of sun dimming technology that would potentially......{blahblah global cooling}
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.
That's not what they were saying, they were saying that it's not economical to have an abundance of electricity when people need it the least, and little or no electricity when people need it the most. It would be one thing if utilities could sell solar electricity at peak demand hours for a higher price, to make up the difference, but that's just when solar generation is slowly down significantly or stopped entirely.
And, yes, I know that battery storage could theoretically solve this, but battery technology is not currently capable of providing electricity for the entirety of the time we need it. New technologies are being developed right now with the goal of achieving long term grid storage, but they are still in the R&D phase. I'm confident a suitable storage technology, or multiple technologies, will eventually come to market, but it's going to take a while.
Regardless, it is likely we will always need some kind of on-demand power generation to supplement renewables and maintain grid stability, and I think nuclear is the best option.
But we shouldn't act like the problem is that utilities are just greedy. Many utilities aren't even for-profit companies, as many are either not-for-profit cooperatives or public entities. Sure, there are also many for-profit power utilities as well, maybe even some with connections to the fossil fuel industry, but generally power utilities are not some great villain.
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.
that's a ridiculous argument tho. of course you can. just very selectively choose who you sell solar panels to
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
Sure we can we just don’t have the technology for a Dyson Sphere https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
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.
A case of the quiet part being spoken outloud. That's my beef with nuclear energy as well - why? Solar power clearly work, and best of all, it isn't centralized. Same with wind power. It even works in circumstances you might have to shut down nuclear power plants due to excessive heat. You even have to worry about the increasing load on the grid because they are easier to distribute. It needs energy storage, and there's no shortage of means for energy storage.
Nuclear power plants are going to be charging you the same as coal plants for energy as long as they are owned by market tycoons. Nuclear power plants make the best sense in an ideal world where society matters and there aren't people gaming the market. We do not live in an ideal world.
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"
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But this basically is the reason why no one wants to build a nuclear plant. Such a power plant will basically run at a massive loss during high solar and wind energy supply. A nuclear reactor takes a long time to shutdown once the reaction has started. So it can’t dynamically scale the production based on market demands. A nuclear power plant cost at least $8 billion and 8 years to build and needs to be operating for 50 years to see a return on investment. But during those 50 years wind, solar and battery tech will obviously advance as well. It’s basically a given that a nuclear power plant is never going to make the investment back. Hence why no one wants to build one. And therefore the government should do it.
Needed to double check that I'm actually still on Lemmy as so many of the top comments made sense.
... Yet
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
President Rufas: hold my Midgar, I'm goin in
The actual problem with painel solars, is that they require an existing infrastructure to sync with the AC grid but if that infrastructure fail, or just get out of sync, it could trigger every painel solar fail safe making the damage 10x worse especially if the infrastructure depends on the solar panels to supply most of the energy
The horror....the horror....
Bet she thought she was real smart making that smarmy comment, while being completely wrong.
