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

Post by TheCoelacanth » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 3:42 PM UTC

caf wrote: post #243

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #103

Price 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…

There is another transition point at zero price, though - that's where it starts to make sense to vent the steam to the atmosphere instead of running it through the turbine.

Post by r-bryan » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 4:06 PM UTC

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #103

Price 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…

Post by amluto » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 4:10 PM UTC

mikec3010 wrote: post #123

amluto wrote: post #74

Earlier 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?

Post by dredmorbius » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 4:15 PM UTC

fuzzbuzz wrote: post #310

undreren wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

A banal long term way of storing energy is to pump water up to some high ground. Whenever you need it, use a turbine to get the energy back.

Post by LgWoodenBadger » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 4:31 PM UTC

kmc059000 wrote: post #329

eitally wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some electricity utilities offer this as a sort of service to their customers, where they detect high grid utilization days and notify customers they can save $ by reducing consumption on those days. Here's PG&E's page about their version: https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/rate-plans/rate-plan-o... It's not "smart" or automated, but it's a baby step.

This concept is called Demand Response and is quite prevalent. Consumers receive a discount for reducing their load at peak times. This frequently targets very high demand customers rather than residential for the simple fact that it's easier to ask a company to delay starting a single piece of machinery than to reduce the load on an equivalent but large number consumer appliances like refirgerators. Doing this at a…