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Power at peak times is cheap because load is distributed throughout the day. If everybody ran their heaters at the same time, power wouldn’t be so cheap and we’d reach the same situation we’re in.
Power at peak times is cheap because it's the time of highest insolation.
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I am not familiar with Chinese politics or motivation, but I wonder if it's for the same arguments we have in the US, "save the world" vs. "the strong can do whatever they want". I am not sure China does for the sake of sustainability and environment. Yes I know the end result might be the same but are the reasons the same?
I keep hearing this argument (that China does not care about climate change or the environment so it must be doing it for other reasons) but I just don't understand it. Why would you think they don't care about these things? The Chinese leadership understands several things very clearly: - The country has experienced multiple catastrophic natural disasters in the past. - Such disasters often lead to regime change (lo…
On the concrete side we do know that they also care deeply about local pollution. They made massive efforts to clean the air for the Beijing Olympics, amongst other many other moves to reduce local air pollution.
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And the US and Germany since the 1970s for putting public funds into early research
US fossil fuel subsidies: 757B$ [0] US solar subsidies: 7B$ [1] [0]: https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-proposals-to-red... [1]: https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/fossil-fuels/rene...
Ignoring the politics, we have to say that China has done the world collectively as a whole a major service in strategically developing and mass producing super cheap solar panels.
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And the US and Germany since the 1970s for putting public funds into early research
US fossil fuel subsidies: 757B$ [0] US solar subsidies: 7B$ [1] [0]: https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-proposals-to-red... [1]: https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/fossil-fuels/rene...
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I keep hearing this argument (that China does not care about climate change or the environment so it must be doing it for other reasons) but I just don't understand it. Why would you think they don't care about these things? The Chinese leadership understands several things very clearly: - The country has experienced multiple catastrophic natural disasters in the past. - Such disasters often lead to regime change (lo…
That's speculation, and probably good speculation. On the concrete side we do know that they also care deeply about local pollution. They made massive efforts to clean the air for the Beijing Olympics, amongst other many other moves to reduce local air pollution.
Of course there are still a lot of obvious problems to be addressed, but the rate of progress is the really impressive thing.
* only in the middle of the day, when the real price of that electricity may be negative, so it's still sold at a profit
Prices have gone negative because of things like subsidies - which in the short term is a good thing IMHO - it subsidizes industries developing systems to make use of that free (but not negative cost) energy...
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And the US and Germany since the 1970s for putting public funds into early research
US fossil fuel subsidies: 757B$ [0] US solar subsidies: 7B$ [1] [0]: https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-proposals-to-red... [1]: https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/fossil-fuels/rene...
Charge the batteries in the free time and then use the stored power the rest of the day.
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Let's hope someone can do the same for grid-scale seasonal storage. "Excess" solar electricity won't be free in (noon, summer) if you can easily bank it for (night, winter).
Power travels near the speed of light. In theory, the entire globe can be connected and countries with daylight can supply those at night in a cycle.