consider the implications for a post scarcity future
consider the implications for a post scarcity future
I saw some context for this, and the short of it is that headline writers want you to hate click on articles.
What the article is actually about is that there's tons of solar panels now but not enough infrastructure to effectively limit/store/use the power at peak production, and the extra energy in the grid can cause damage. Damage to the extent of people being without power for months.
California had a tax incentive program for solar panels, but not batteries, and because batteries are expensive, they're in a situation now where so many people put panels on their houses but no batteries to store excess power that they can't store the power when it surpasses demand, so the state is literally paying companies to run their industrial stoves and stuff just to burn off the excess power to keep the grid from being destroyed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I hate to be the akshully guy but the big problem isn’t economics but usage. We can’t store electricity at any kind of meaningful scale so generation needs to be balanced to meet demand. Unused excess power needs to go somewhere, hence the negative prices (the market way of saying, “please somebody take this electricity it’s doing more harm than good on the grid”).
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.
Lately, quite a few people* in the UK have been enjoying negative domestic electricity prices with the recent high winds in the North Sea. They always find something to use it for, either extra laundry or using electric heaters rather than gas for space heating. I know big chunks of spinning iron are needed for grid frequency control, but if having to pay generators to curtail their output is the cost of having adequate redundancy, it should at least start with the fossil fuels.
Right now gas is providing 2.3GW out of the nations 33.3GW demand (18GW domestic renewables) coal is completely off. A few days ago I saw it as low as 1GW which I'm pretty sure is as close as it can get to idle standby.
*I don't have a battery, and I have a family that always wants to use the most power in the evening peak, so I'm not one of them, but export at least covers import in the summer months
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.
I dont get the argument about hydrogen not being effective and too much energy going to waste in its production, when we have to stop wind turbines during windy seasons because they generated too much electricity that what can be sold. If we have too much electricity. We can store it in hydrogen and dont mind how much goes to waste. It would be wasted anyway
My shareholders!
Remember what Conservatives said about "not enough power"? I think that might be a lie
If only there was a way to turn waste energy into money.
Post scarcity has been true since the dawn of the agricultural revolution.
run pumps, move water
Solar panels are pretty far from free, and not unlimited either.
Not many thing can do opportunistic consumption, especially consumer electronics. I can only think of charging, heating(water and air) and AC. If price update period is big then washing machines and dryers.
'Unlimited' and 'free' are blasphemous to capitalists. To start off a gaslight post with them is just ensuring your pilot light remains unlit
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.
