Rooftop solar panels are flooding California’s grid. That’s a problem. As electricity prices go negative, the Golden State is struggling to offload a glut of solar power
Rooftop solar panels are flooding California’s grid. That’s a problem. As electricity prices go negative, the Golden State is struggling to offload a glut of solar power
As electricity prices go negative, the Golden State is struggling to offload a glut of solar power.
I'll note that right now, this is a seasonal issue, associated with moderate springtime temperatures when there is a lot of sunshine available.
Oh no! Not an excess of available power! How will the state ever recover from such a catastrophe?
Yeah, it's not like it can't be saved in the brand new storage facility that happens to be one of the biggest in the world. This article reads like propaganda against solar.
I hope it doesn’t spill into the water, permeate the air, or leave the land uninhabitable for thousands of years.
I’m not familiar with how power grids work, is an excess of power bad for the grid if it isn’t used?
No. They constantly monitor it and keep it in line. The power grid itself is totally fine. Completely.
The only "problem" is they cannot easily turn on or off huge old power plants, so if the sun is blazing, they might have to direct excess old generation power to batteries or other grids.
The only "problem" is the power companies don't get to charge much for simply managing the grid. They charge mostly for power generation, so it ends up costing them money. If they were simply a government paid service, they wouldn't have to care what so ever which direction power is flowing as long as it has somewhere to go.
Yeah, various power generation techniques (e.g., big industrial power plants) do not want to run without a load. And switching them off temporarily isn't really feasible (shutting them for good would ultimately be nice, but that's another topic...).
And you can't just "dump" huge amounts of excess of power --- it needs to go somewhere.
This is only a problem because of money. Maybe California should install some power storage centers in order to hold the excess for later.
There's already some storage: its the #1 source of electricity during the evening peak, but realistically, we're going to want enough renewables that we sometimes see curtailment
Way ahead of you. This article is like propaganda against solar panels.
I'm hoping to one day install some solar, and looking forward to setting up non-battery "storage" --- e.g., electric water heater that turns on when there's an excess of power, deep freezer that gets as cold as possible when there's excess power, that sort of thing. It seems thermodynamics is the relevant discipline for these sorts of "storage" methods :)
As an aside --- while smart devices are much maligned, some rudimentary smart features for matching consumption seems like a pretty good idea. (If I ever get around to this stuff it'll be local control via HomeAssistant.)
This makes me sad as a Texan.
The only problem is they need more of it. Some cost needs to be put onto solar to fix the grid. It needs upgrading because solar is making more work for the grid.
Solar is absoultely good, but it doesn't come without costs to the grid and that money needs to be raised to upgrade it.
if you had read the article, you’d know that they are.
To cope, CAISO is selling some excess power to nearby states; California is also planning to install additional storage and batteries to hold solar power until later in the afternoon.
don’t just read the headlines y’all. not a good look.
Capitalism is the problem, here.
This should be a warning: the rich are going to fight the idea of post-scarcity tooth and nail, because not being able to coerce people woth the threat of homelessness or starvation will remove just about the only lever they have.
It's more that people are confused about what an cost-optimal system looks like — if you're building around renewables, it means there will inherently be periods of excess production, where we're forced to curtail production, and spill sunshine or wind, and the price drops to zero or below. In California, that means the springtime, when there's a lot of sunshine, combined with moderate temperatures. There will also be periods where energy is relatively scarce (nighttime winter heating, hot days with lots of AC running) and the price is high.
props to you OP for understanding the article you posted. 👍
im as critical of capitalism as the next chronically online marxist loser, but even i recognize that this issue is a logistics issue which would present itself under any economic system given the immense rate of growth we are asking of the technology.
We have systems like "gravity batteries." If there is an excess of power then there should be storage systems like running water up a hill/tower, that can be released at times of greater demand.
Excess power on the grid is a very real problem though. It's easy enough to shut off photovoltaic solar when not needed (which is probably what should be happening here!), but industrial scale generators cannot all be turned on or off on a whim. Serious damage can result if power production does not match the load.
It's easy to dump a few kW (just boil some water or turn on a heater), but dumping many MW or even GW is not trivial.
The capitalism that has encouraged people to install lots of rooftop solar capacity?
How is capitalism the problem?
Capitalism is the solution, it's the cause of this huge deployment of solar.
Market forces have chosen the cheapest cost and that has been deployed. That itself through supply and demand and impacted the price of electricity. This has caused low and even negative prices in the day.
Denholm says that as solar continues to drop in price, installing solar that is curtailed regularly can still be cost-effective. “Throwing away some amount of renewable energy can absolutely make economic sense,” he said.
Those same market forces and causing the huge development of batteries as people can make money buying low selling high in the evening. The issue is that solar is causing excess costs to the grid, as such that cost needs to be recouped or the grid will fail and people won't have power at all.
This website is very capitalism is bad propaganda and gives no reasoning. I'm surprised you have so many upvotes without explaining your position. Why is capitalism the problem here?
Selling the power to other regions is alright, but what I'd really like to see is pumped storage. Even just two grey water reservoirs- massive, probably underground. "Spend" all that free electricity during the solar day. Release that energy as hydropower during the mornings and evenings to reduce surge pricing and demand on the grid. Sell additional power as needed, but don't let solar go to waste.
Batteries are...okay... but lithium ion cells will last 10 or 15 years before needing to be replaced, which seems wasteful when we have perfectly reusable options like pumped storage, which involves a few pumps, a hydroelectric turbine, and two cement or dirt reservoirs, one higher than the other.
I'm sure whatever we do, it will fix itself in time. I just hope CA doesn't permanently cut incentives over this "problem", haha.
A few pumps, a hydroelectric turbine, and two reservoirs 30 to 530 times larger than an equivalent lithium ion battery storage site, according to the energy densities listed here: https://cleanenergywiki.org/index.php?title=Storage_Basics
Someone should show this to that guy in Texas who was complaining about the 8 minutes of power generation solar loses every few decades during an eclipse.
texas needed power and im sure they are connected to the national grid........wait
I've got a pretty easy fix, just pass those negative rates on to the consumer. I'd be happy to teach my car to charge when the price goes negative, but noooo, utilities are the ones double dipping on negative power rates.
In Finland that's what we do (if you have a 'market priced' contract). I have my heating set up so that it will 'overheat' my apartment when power is very cheap, effectively using the interior space as a rudimentary thermal battery.
There was an incident a few months ago, that caused power price to became absurdly negative, someone made a wrong bid and people used 90M€ worth of power in a few hours as a result.
Allow the free market to behave like it's supposed to when it benefits the little guys? You must be joking, we don't do that here.
article:
“california is having this problem because solar grew faster than we expected but we are building storage systems to hold power for later.”
commenters who didn’t read the article:
“this is so stupid why don’t they just build storage systems to hold power for later 😡😡😡”
You know it may speak poorly on the commentors, but you have to some faith in humanity restored when the common sense solution is what is already in the works, right?
absolutely a fair point.
my only fear is that maybe ppl may come away from this post with some kind of disdain for california, like they are “doing it wrong” or something just because they are encountering growing pains. unsure how big of a problem that is so i’m not going too hard on commenters.
just wish more people read stuff before chucking their opinions in the ring.
Why would we read an article when the headline is so much shorter?
Oh no, the sun is free power? What ever will we do! We must protect the profits of our monopolies!!!
Their inability to modernize the grid is not solar's problem.
California could provide credits for people to install in-home batteries. That could level out the wild swings in supply and demand, while letting people enjoy continuous, cheap power.
Add a car charger transformer and a lot of EV demand on the grid can be handled by in-home batteries.
People don't seem to have read the article or seem to understand anything at all.
“These are not insurmountable challenges,” said Michelle Davis, head of global solar at the energy research and consulting firm Wood Mackenzie Power and Renewables. “But they are challenges that a lot of grid operators have never had to deal with.”
And
Solar can still grow in California. In the summer, when high air conditioning use strains the grid, solar can be useful even in the middle of the day. Denholm says that as solar continues to drop in price, installing solar that is curtailed regularly can still be cost-effective. “Throwing away some amount of renewable energy can absolutely make economic sense,” he said.
People want to eat their cake and have it too. The grid is old as fuck and is built for a easy system where plants can reliably come online and run all day. They have inertia and can balance the grid. The value of a traditional plant is higher than that of a solar plant. Solar absolutely has additional costs to the grid and that shouldn't be ignored. So the only way for solar to compete is to be cheaper, which it is. But those added costs need to be recouped for investment. That's all that the article is saying.
This amout of solar is absoultely causing the grid problems that no grid in the world has ever seen before solar became a thing. But it can be fixed, it just takes investment.
on the internet everyone is their own expert and reading is below oneself. i get all my opinions from the headlines and the top two upvoted snarky comments ✨🧚♀️
Clearly under a capitalist vision “””smart”””appliances like your dish washer could be set to run at some point in the next X hours, and they would optimally wait until there was a local excess of solar energy in the grid to run. What would make the device “smart” is just that your device would be watching the price of electricity and have some basic rules of how long to wait before needing to run no matter what (you need your clothes clean by tomorrow).
I don’t know if that is the future I am most confident in being the best, but clearly this is VERY possible with current technology it just takes the structuring of appliance companies and software in a way that makes this not impossible for dizzyingly insane reasons.
Also, here’s an idea, use the spare electricity to charge public bicycles and put a free amount of power into them so the next random person who uses them gets a subsidized ride? Like why not have some kind of publicly owned power bank in the vicinity of surplus alternative energy sources that is known to occasionally have a lot of very cheap power that could be used to power cars, power banks or other large batteries?
Surely people are doing this right???? Right??
This is exactly what Octopus Energy are doing in the UK. You tell them when you need your car charged by and they schedule it to happen (usually overnight) so that it's done by then.
Rather than laying 30p/kwh you pay 7p/kwh.
You can of course tell it to just charge, and pay the usual rate.
Yes, and some people on Octopus Agile have been seeing negative electricity prices as consumers recently, although that was due to high winds hitting the offshore farms rather than solar.
The App for my Bosch washing machine does have links to a couple of proprietary 'smart home' solutions that can synchronise start times with solar output, but none of them are compatible with my other kit so I never looked further. It does also support IFTTT so I guess I could set something up myself if I had the skill.
Start times are better than nothing, but what would really be useful is the ability to modulate the heater output to say 1 or 0.5kW over a longer period if there's thin clouds reducing the output from the inverter. Also cross talk between appliances that allows you to turn them all on at once, and they can introduce pauses in their programmes, so they don't overlap high power tasks.
I do think that this is a good solution. Not the best, but yeah, when there’s an excess of electricity automatically using it for tasks that aren’t time dependent is wonderful
Battery power and transferring power across the entire nation. When is sunny one place it's not sunny elsewhere. As things get connected together this is useful. We can all use cheap as free electricity
That's what storage is about
Yeah, California's utility-scale storage can only absorb 6GW for about four hours. Will probably be double that by end of year, but still needs a fair bit more to handle the full daily cycle. You can see what that looks like in practice on the CAISO web site showing how electricity was supplied on April 21, 2024
Let's make a cheap battery.
Connect pump to body of water. Pump up when electricity is cheap. Let water run thru turbine when electricity is expensive.If only we hadn't spent the past four thousand years or so storing electricity chemically and had focused on what to do about sun no shine at night!!!! we could have cheap virtually limitless power available. Oh, well, drill up some more dead dino goo!