Microblog Memes

A big flaw in German energy policy that has done a great job in expanding renewables, includes not giving its industry variable rates, that lets them invest in batteries, and schedule production more seasonally, or if they have reduced demand due to high product prices from high energy costs, just have work on the good days.

Using EVs as grid balancers can be an extra profit center for EV owners with or without home solar. Ultra cheap retail daytime rates is the best path to demand shifting. Home solar best path to removing transmission bottlenecks for other customers. Containerized batteries and hydrogen electrolysis as a service is a tariff exempt path at moving storage/surplus management throughout the world for seasonal variations, but significantly expanding renewables capacity without risking negative pricing, and making evening/night energy cheaper to boot.

Nah, lets squash capitalism first.

Without reading the article, I could already see what the problem was.

Unless you have capital to invest, you can't expand or improve the power grid. That capital can either come from the gov't--through taxation--or from private industry. If you, personally, have enough capital to do so, you can build a fully off-grid system, so that you aren't dependent on anyone else. But then if shit happens, you also can't get help from anyone else. (Also, most houses in urban areas do not have enough square feet of exposure to the sun to generate all of their own power.)

Fundamentally, this is a problem that can only be solved by regulation, and regulation is being gutted across the board in the US.

Where did op put that link?

Except the grid overload thing isn't even an issue with renewables, since wind can be shut down in a matter of 1-5 minutes (move them out of the wind) and solar literally just be disabled. Any overload they produce would be due to mechanical failure, where you can cut them off the grid since they're in the process of destroying themselves anyway (like in those videos where wind turbines fail spectacularly). Otherwise renewables are perfect to regulate the grid if available.

In a hypothetical grid with an absolute majority of many badly adjustable power sources (like nuclear) you'd have to work with negative prices to entice building large on-demand consumers or battery solutions. So far nobody was stupid enough to build a grid like this though.

tl;dr, this whole problem indeed is about economics and therefore may very well be a "capitalism thing". Renewables do not overload the grid.

But it doesn't say "it can generate too much energy and damage infrastructure", they said "it can drive the price down". The words they chose aren't, like, an accident waiting for someone to explain post-hoc. Like, absolutely we need storage for exactly the reason you say, but they are directly saying the issue is driving the price down, which is only an issue if your not able to imagine a way to create this infrastructure without profit motive.

I can't ragebait if you people are being logical 😒

I see this posted a lot as if this is an issue with capitalism. No, this is what happens when you have to deal with maintaining the power grid using capitalism as a tool.

The framing of it as the problem being that the price is going down rather than that excess power is feeding into the grid is what makes it an issue with capitalism. The thing you should be questioning is why MIT Technology Review is talking about some consequence of the problem that only exists because of capitalism instead of talking about the problem itself.

And before you downvote/object with some knee-jerk reaction that I'm being pedantic, consider this alternative way of framing it:

The opportunity is that solar panels create lots of electricity in the middle of sunny days, frequently more than what's currently required, so it is necessary to develop new flexible sources of demand so that the excess energy doesn't damage the power grid.

That's pretty vastly different, isn't it?

Also, fwiw, you can curtail wind turbines incredibly quickly. They're the quickest moving assets on an electrical grid typically. So you are using them to balance the grid quite often. You can just pitch the blades a bit and they slow or stop. it's not really a tech problem, but a financial one like you said.

I'm not sure much about solar curtailment, other than the fact that they receive curtailment requests and comply quite quickly as well.

It's a very capitalist way of thinking about the problem, but what "negative prices" actually means in this case is that the grid is over-energised. That's a genuine engineering issue which would take considerable effort to deal with without exploding transformers or setting fire to power stations