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Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid
141–150 of 419 posts
Re: Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid
#142Can someone please explain then why we are paying the highest prices in the continental US for retail electricity, at $0.28/kWh, in a state with the highest percentage of renewables in the country?
$0.07 here in Texas. Maybe you should move...
>$0.07 here in Texas. Maybe you should move...
Where at? Is that wind power or just natural gas?
Re: Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid
#143Last time there were "weird" issues with power someone was gaming the system: Enron. Something about this article just seems off to me, something isn't right from a technology point of view, and I suspect someone is manipulating things. (No, I do not have evidence. Just a feeling like this isn't such a hard problem to solve technically.)
> Enron "Quien se quemó con leche, ve una vaca y llora." It can seem weird to have an excess of power availability, but it's a consequence of electric power not being easily stored -- electricity is just a good energy _transmission_ system. While using electrostatics (batteries) is possible for storing very small amonts of energy, when you think at a state or country scale, it's just too much to store. This means exc…
To save you the Google tour:
> Quien se quemó con leche, ve una vaca y llora.
This appears to be a saying that corresponds to the English saying "A burnt child dreads the fire."
Re: Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn’t work. By the time you’ve moved any non-negligible amount of ions, you’ve built up an insane amount of charge and hence voltage. That voltage will be impossible to work with, not to mention many orders of magnitude higher than the voltage needed to split water into H2 and O2. One mole of singly charged ions is ~1e5 Coulombs. At an insanely high capacitance of 1 Farad (which you’ll never see in such an applicat…
Could you store electrical energy this way more efficiently than pumped hydroelectric? Like make a capacitor the size of a wastewater storage tank?
Wouldn't it self-discharge? And at that size, also blow itself up?
Re: Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid
#145I don't truly understand this "problem". I understand storing the energy in batteries is currently very expensive economically and materially. However I believe there are plenty of "goods" (irrespective of if they are bulk materials, or partially processed products) which have a high processing energy per volume ratio (this does not need to be recoverable stored energy). Allow me to give an example: currently we have…
To reverse the process we can then run an osmosis power plant and have a way to store energy. I'm sure someone out there already ran the numbers.
Re: Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid
#146Interesting that the utilities with fixed sunk costs are feeling a pinch from renewables.
I suppose some of them will take the bailout path (companies keep profits, taxpayers or ratepayers shoulder losses).
Traditional utility economics guarantees a return on capital, and imposes ratesetting in return for geographic monopolies. The real story here is the upending of that model as carbon-based fuel loses its deathgrip over the grid. A consequence of this is less economy-of-scale advantage for vast generation plants. Small distributed generation is more attractive than it was a generation ago.
But every market has its quirks. The Texas grid system doesn't have any way to export power to other markets. And West Texas is a windy place. So they find themselves with excess capacity sometimes.
I wonder if any grid operators will respond to these price signals by developing smart grids: by realizing that their future lies in offering both electricity and good information about that electricity. Then they can send signals to local time-shiftable equipment (for example car charging, water heating, power storage, desalinization, even blockchain mining).
In Norway the grid operators deliver near-real-time supply signals to customers using the same sort of radio signals that tell people the song that's playing on the radio station. Sure, the US is bigger. But if the don't try to do this, they'll never figure out how to do it.
One negative consequence of this pinch: as it spreads the net metering deal that current solar-cell households enjoy will fade away.
Re: Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid
#147I don't truly understand this "problem". I understand storing the energy in batteries is currently very expensive economically and materially. However I believe there are plenty of "goods" (irrespective of if they are bulk materials, or partially processed products) which have a high processing energy per volume ratio (this does not need to be recoverable stored energy). Allow me to give an example: currently we have…
You "currently" have a drought, but otherwise you have plenty of water, so a desalination plant isn't a wise investment (yet). Also keep in mind that these are energy spikes that cause negative prices, whereas most industrial uses need a constant and even supply. These spikes are countered by periods of little to no energy . This is the biggest problem with (most) renewables, they cannot entirely replace coal or nucl…
Overbuilding renewable capacity can significantly reduce the needed storage capacity, so the issue will probably get more pronounced rather than better with time.
Re: Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid
#148I don't truly understand this "problem". I understand storing the energy in batteries is currently very expensive economically and materially. However I believe there are plenty of "goods" (irrespective of if they are bulk materials, or partially processed products) which have a high processing energy per volume ratio (this does not need to be recoverable stored energy). Allow me to give an example: currently we have…
Interesting thought. In Richard Rhodes new book Energy, he describes how an early iron smelting works in England, faced with temporarily low demand due to a recession, rolled its excess iron into railroad tracks which could be re-used for other purposes once demand recovered:
Richard Reynolds, who managed the Darbys’ Ketley
ironworks, near Coalbrookdale, in the 1760s, introduced
cast-iron plates and then cast-iron rails to protect the
wooden rails from wear and tear or to replace them. He
had another reason as well for using iron: as an
ingenious storage system. A depression following the end
of the Seven Years’ War in 1764 reduced demand for iron
products. Prices fell. Reynolds wanted to keep his
furnaces going and his employees at work. Rather than
warehouse the excess production, Reynolds used it for
rails. Then, if iron prices went back up, he could have
the rails removed and sold. Reynolds “tried it at first
with great caution,” his granddaughter recalled, “but
found it to answer so well, that very soon all their
railways were made with iron.”Re: Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid
#149I don't truly understand this "problem". I understand storing the energy in batteries is currently very expensive economically and materially. However I believe there are plenty of "goods" (irrespective of if they are bulk materials, or partially processed products) which have a high processing energy per volume ratio (this does not need to be recoverable stored energy). Allow me to give an example: currently we have…
I think Pumped Hydroelectric Storage is what you are looking for. I've seen a few of them here in Switzerland. I think many were originally built out with the train system's grid for it's reliably scheduled low and high capacity times. http://energystorage.org/energy-storage/technologies/pumped-...
Does Belgium (OPs example) have the geography necessary to support pumped hydro? Your example, Switzerland, is significantly more mountainous than Belgium.
Re: Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid
#150Price signals that go negative seem to really freak people out, but the real transition point is when the price dips below the marginal cost. If you're burning 1 dollar of fuel to generate one dollar worth of electricity then anything less is a signal to switch off. If your boiler has physical reasons for not turning off and on sharply then you can find yourself eating a loss in the short term to make money on averag…
Agreed. The only nationwide incentive that drives negative prices in the US is the wind Production Tax Credit. It's paid per MWh generated, regardless of market price at the time. The solar Investment Tax Credit incentivizes construction, not generation, so there's no incentive for selling solar MWh at negative prices -- though they can go arbitrarily close to zero.
If the wind PTC were to be renewed in the future, it could be structured so as to avoid negative-pricing incentives. Instead of $N dollars per megawatt hour, it could be something more like "up to $N dollars per megawatt hour, where $N IMO a change like this would take a lot of wind out of the sails of fossil generators decrying "irrational and unfair" renewable tax credits. But it would not actually solve the overarching problem of unprofitability. The things mostly killing profitability for threatened fossil plants are lower price spikes and lower median prices. Ensuring slightly-above-zero prices instead of negative prices won't save them.