161–170 of 191 posts
Buy some Tesla Megapacks, install some DC fast chargers on-site and sell electricity for 0.2$/KWh or so all day long.
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Those giant cooling towers that are most people's image of a power station are almost exactly this. They are a giant system for dumping heat into the air, usually (but not always) by evaporating water. (The heat being dumped is usually low-temperature waste heat, not final output.)
Those giant cooling towers are pretty expensive and the water to run them can cause significant damage to the local ecosystem if it raises the temperature of whatever water body they draw from. It's a lot easier to just turn off the energy sources (such as solar) that can be turned off without ill effect.
The negative bids aren't coming from suppliers who can easily turn off, they have already turned off at this point.
And, cooling towers don't work by pumping hot water back into a lake. No need for a tower for that. They work by evaporating it, which lets you dump both the heat up to 100C, plus the latent heat of liquid -> gas.
Storage is definitely the wise answer here, as the article mentions. The fun answer here is giant crypto farm.
An answer that no-one seems to have thought of is a liberalized energy market where non physical traders are allowed, and allowed to deliberately take themselves to imbalance.
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I'm not sure I understand, in what system would this not happen? You can say that the goverment should store the extra electricity but that's not as easy as it sounds. Most things need very specific geographical or technical conditions for pumped hydro, compressed air energy storage, boreholes, hydrogen, molten salts. So in what system wouldn't this happen?
If you have a way for consumers to bid for zero-price electricity, there are many things that can increase demand now and give reduced demand later when prices are higher. Everyone has a domestic freezer. If the freezer is smart, when prices reach zero, it can switch on and decrease the temperature another 10C. When prices are higher, it won't need to run as it warms up slowly. Similarly with domestic hot water - jus…
An explanation of the mechanics of how I'd have to pay somebody else to take my electricity (e.g., a negative rate) would be helpful. As prices approaches 0, I could take the excess electricity and say, mine cryptocurrency. Is nobody considering the arbitrage opportunities here? Take the 0-cost electricity, move water up a hill, and convert it back to electric when it's needed, etc.
Anything you could do it with it would have capital costs. Maybe it's transient enough that that money would be better invested elsewhere. Like, if you only run your cryptocurrency mining when the price is negative, your capital is stuck in an idle asset most of the time, and if you run it all the time, it's the average price you want to consider, not the minimum price (even if the minimum price is negative), and my…
The reason people don't do this is that the cost of a grid interconnect (the paperwork, approvals, etc.) outweighs the profit from the very short periods of time the price really is negative.
I'm not a fan of most reporting of these negative price events. First, they rarely explain why the price is negative. As the article explains, solar can switch itself off, so it's nothing physical about solar that can cause negative prices, as all solar can switch itself off before it goes negative it would bottom out at zero for those reasons. In most cases I've seen so far, contractual agreements with gas, coal or…
A coal/gas/nuclear plant might actually need the entire day to shut down operation to 0 kW output. And probably needs a day to get back to full operation. So in cases of negative prices, a solar energy producer can do the sensible thing and switch off while a plant operator will probably try to weather it.
I'm not a fan of most reporting of these negative price events. First, they rarely explain why the price is negative. As the article explains, solar can switch itself off, so it's nothing physical about solar that can cause negative prices, as all solar can switch itself off before it goes negative it would bottom out at zero for those reasons. In most cases I've seen so far, contractual agreements with gas, coal or…
I agree. Negative prices make perfect sense in electricity markets, and journalism does a bad job at explaining it. Supply and demand must always be in equilibrium in real time with electricity (forgetting storage / batteries for a second). If there is more supply than demand or vice versa, then you have instability in the grid and can have blackouts. Those electrons have to go somewhere. This is in contrast to virtu…
What is it about nuclear that makes it impossible to reduce as fast as gas or coal? From my layman's point of view, they all use comparable (steam) turbines to power the actual generators, so I would expect them to be equally capable of disengaging the generator from the turbine.
Is this perhaps due to design decisions, or simply a size problem? A foolish question perhaps, but I don't have more knowledge to draw from.
1. As a means for alternative cheap energy; 2. As a means to gain independence from imported energy (oil, coal); 3. As a means to protect the environment
If a solar farm has to be switched off, because the power can not be sold, apparently 1.) has dominance over 2 and 3. If environment protection would have precedence, consumers should be forced to consume higher priced energy?
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Some places have flexible pricing, where electricity costs more at certain times, which allows users of electricity to do this. I don't think it should be the grids responsability to do that kind of scheduling. It would be nice if everywhere we had some kind of hourly pricing adjustment that would fluxuate within some predefined price range, then you could hook into the grids api to determine when to run your applian…
At a wholesale there is flexible pricing. The grid has to do that sort of scheduling because if more power is put into the network then is consumed then systems get damaged. This is also why the turbine based systems that coal and hydro systems are so important to the stability of the grid. The physical momentum of the spinning metal stores considerable energy and can smooth over short lived inbalences in power consu…
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why would they pay for someone else to use their energy? It just eats into their profits and means that their normal customers have to pay more for the solar energy.
I think the power grid should be socialised and electricity handed out for free, especially given our increasing dependency on it. Solar is technically "free" energy given there's nothing to setup and maintain except the infrastructure, versus coal/oil/gas which requires mining, refining and transportation of materials before you get to the generating and delivery parts of the process.