Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid • Hacker News Board

Re: Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid

#341

Post by dgacmu » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 11:17 AM UTC

nukemandan wrote: post #302

dgacmu wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same flaw as the other ideas - mining is very capital intensive. You can use mining in a demand response capacity, but it's best used when you can run it 98% of the time and shut down during the most expensive 2%. If you look at some of the data from Australia, peak cost per MW can go really high. It's also an environmental travesty, but that's already the case.

Remember that the alternative at the moments is literally pumping that energy into the ground as waste heat. I think that renewable resources otherwise wasted being used for mining instead of that seems like a win-win.

It takes resources - a lot of them, including energy - to build the miners. It's a net loss if you can't run the miners at a sufficient duty cycle. Cheap mining power is about 4c per kwh. A $350 GPU at 200W (hand-waving) takes about 20c/day to operate. At $70/year of power, and maybe a useful life of 3 years, it's actually capital-dominated.

Re: Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid

#342

Post by rapnie » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 11:51 AM UTC

dwd wrote: post #295

thinkcontext wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you wait for power prices to be negative (or merely lower than usual) you are not getting an economic return on the money you put into the desalination plant when it is not running. Think about it, if you get a 100M Euros loan to make a desalination plant, how long will it take to pay that off if you only run your plant a few hours per day vs 24 hours per day. Whether it makes economic sense depends on the differe…

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-08/hydrogen-fuel-breakthr... Ammonia would be preferrable as it is carbon-free and readily liquified.

Was about to mention that too. There is a HN thread about that currently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17711717

Re: Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid

#343

Post by korantu » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 12:00 PM UTC

The nagging thought here is that this property of wind/solar make them not sustainable in capitalistic setup.

Let me explain: soon there will be point where investment in W/S would stop making sense - very difficult to compete when you mostly get your investment to produce power when all your competitors also produce power!

In most other markets you are free to produce if the price suits you, and stop otherwise.. . Oil is too cheap - stop pumping it, ice cream in winter not very popular - reduce production, don't pay people to please eat it because your ice cream making machine works best in winter..

Re: Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid

#344

Post by themaninthedark » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 12:03 PM UTC

bunderbunder wrote: post #166

rwcarlsen wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cited natural gas being used for baseload power. In the last several years, gas has been installed frequently as baseload generation. All I'm saying is that I think governments' approaches to incentivizing energy production are very suboptimal for mitigating (negative) effects of climate change. And negative energy prices are one of the red flags that this is the case.

FWIW, my understanding is that the bulk of the baseload natural gas plants are being installed as replacements for older coal plants that are being decommissioned. Considering that the latest project to construct new nuclear plants in the USA nearly put Toshiba - like, the whole company, not just their power plant division - into bankruptcy, I'm not certain, on purely economic grounds, how realistic an option "more n…

Toshiba was hit because they acquired Westinghouse, I remember reading that Westinghouse had some accounting irregularities before the acquisition that then Toshiba continued until recently.

I don't think it was the projects and the cost of them themselves but previous underlying problems in the companies.

Re: Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid

#345

Post by talltimtom » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 12:11 PM UTC

rwcarlsen wrote: post #12

Negative energy prices have been a not uncommon occurrence in various places in the US and EU for a while. They are not necessarily a good thing. They occur due to a combination of how generating sources are managed/dispatched [1] and because of policies that make it possible for (some) generating facilities to still make a profit while bidding to provide electricity at a negative cost (literally paying the recipient…

> They are not necessarily a good thing

Indeed. I would even go as far as to say they are never a good thing. They indicate that the plants are having to spend money to keep things running, and that extra cost is carried over to the very same consumers who for short periods get “free” power or get paid to absorb the load. And since the scenario of having negative prices is far from efficient the total cost is still positive. So unless you have a very unusual completely selective powerusage you end up paying more net than if the prices had remained positive but slightly lower throughout.

Re: Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid

#346

Post by tyu100 » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 12:32 PM UTC

xigma wrote: post #88

nostrademons wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's likely a short-term problem. There are plenty of ways to fix it (besides the one you mention, just shut down coal & oil power plants for good and replace them with technologies like natural gas or hydro that can easily react to spikes in demand), but all of the fixes require capital investments and time to build factories & tooling. Basically this is a problem because a bunch of existing incumbents are probably…

> Basically this is a problem because a bunch of existing incumbents are probably going to go bankrupt, or at least have to write down a lot of capital equipment and invest in new technologies. That's not how it works. In Germany, the government subsidizes farmers to put up Windfarms, then forces the electric companies to buy the electricity at an inflated price, which those companies charge their customers for. As a…

Same in Ontario, Canada. They heavily subsidized green energy sources and then laid the debt on the publicly owned power utility which passed on the cost to ratepayers, leading to the highest power rates in North America and a utility that is still heavily dependent on legacy nuclear and hydro to provide grid stability.

Re: Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid

#347

Post by kbutler » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 12:36 PM UTC

The only reason power costs go less than zero is the contracts that the green (primarily wind) generators have that guarantee a minimum price for their power regardless of time of supply.

This creates an incentive for them to keep producing electricity beyond what people are currently willing to pay for it.

These minimums have been required to fund the capital expenditures to build the plants and have generally been funded by government subsidies.

Coal plants have a different incentive structure - they are very hard to bring online/offline quickly ("base load"). Natural gas plants are _relatively_ easy to spin up/down.

I expect this will resolve itself in changes to energy storage and contracts as the technologies involved become more pervasive.

Re: Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid

#348

Post by 08-15 » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 12:37 PM UTC

undreren wrote: post #296

eloff wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Desalinization isn't a good example for the reasons you say, but theptip writes below that heating water in residential and commercial settings might be better. Since water once heated stays hot for a good while in the insulated storage tank. Also buildings can be heated with hot water instead of forced air, typically through pipes in the floor. Which is nicer because it keeps your feet toasty and doesn't dry out the…

> but theptip writes below that heating water in residential and commercial settings might be better. When I worked at Ørsted, we did this all the time . We had a huge electric kettle, which we used to produce district heating water. But there are many more things you can do with surplus energy. You can make methane gas from pure CO2 and hydrogen when you apply electric power as a catalyst. The methane can then be ea…

> We had a huge electric kettle, which we used to produce district heating water.

...and you thought you were heating with renewable energy. You were not. Much of the "surplus" power on the grid comes from coal plants (especially in Denmark!) that can't throttle down, so someone burns coal, converts the heat to electricity at an efficiency of 40% or so, and you turn it back into heat.

Re: Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid

#349

Post by 08-15 » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 12:52 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #40

DoctorOetker wrote: post #22

I 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…

It's likely a short-term problem. There are plenty of ways to fix it (besides the one you mention, just shut down coal & oil power plants for good and replace them with technologies like natural gas or hydro that can easily react to spikes in demand), but all of the fixes require capital investments and time to build factories & tooling. Basically this is a problem because a bunch of existing incumbents are probably…

RWE would like to shut down a few coal power plants that are no longer profitable in the current distorted market. But the government, the very same technically illiterate government that fouled up the market in the first place, declared that to be illegal, because the plants are "relevant for grid stability".

> Boo-hoo for the incumbents, but it's good for consumers and good for society.

Right, the most expensive electricity anywhere in the world, except for Diesel powered islands, is good for customers.

Re: Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid

#350

Post by bunderbunder » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 12:54 PM UTC

themaninthedark wrote: post #344

bunderbunder wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, my understanding is that the bulk of the baseload natural gas plants are being installed as replacements for older coal plants that are being decommissioned. Considering that the latest project to construct new nuclear plants in the USA nearly put Toshiba - like, the whole company, not just their power plant division - into bankruptcy, I'm not certain, on purely economic grounds, how realistic an option "more n…

Toshiba was hit because they acquired Westinghouse, I remember reading that Westinghouse had some accounting irregularities before the acquisition that then Toshiba continued until recently. I don't think it was the projects and the cost of them themselves but previous underlying problems in the companies.

The big problem was that Westinghouse signed a contract that put them pretty much exclusively on the hook for cost overruns, without any good way to get out of it. That explains why it hit them so hard, but it doesn't necessarily explain the cost overruns in the first place. A lot of that can at least be partially explained by other, deeper problems. For example, they kept reworking the design even after breaking ground, which seems symptomatic of the loss of engineering expertise in the field over the past few decades.

The whole saga has also led to two major manufacturers - Toshiba and Westinghouse - exiting the market, which I'm inclined to take as an omen that, at least in the North American energy market, a lot of these deeper problems can be expected to worsen instead of getting better.