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

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

#381

Post by bogomipz »

Kliment wrote: post #363
bogomipz wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"a lot of local government is funded by coal company shares held by cities." Do you have a citation for this? What are examples of the many local governments that are funded by coal company shares? How do you fund a local government by buying shares in a coal company? Coal is "still a thing" because it is incredibly abundant and despite being horrible for the environment, burning it is a thermally efficient means of…

Over here, in Germany, specifically NRW, it's quite literally true - a bunch of local councils hold a lot of RWE (local coal company) shares and fund local services from dividents. They were very upset a couple years back when RWE decided not to pay out dividents. Here's a news article from back then (in German) https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/energie/article152907251/Waru...

Oh interesting, were these stocks originally purchased with tax payer money then?

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

#382

Post by gene-h »

verisimilitude wrote: post #31
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…

I believe aluminum is nicknamed "solid electricity" due to the ore purification process or somesuch; which dovetails well with the strategy you outline here!

There are some aluminum plants in Germany that do this[1]

More ambitiously ARPA-E has a program where one of the goals is light metal production(aluminum, magnesium,etc) using variable energy sources[1]. One of the interesting possibilities they present in the program is being able to use molten metal produced in refining as an energy storage medium. Although I couldn't find any program participants doing this one is using thermal energy storage for metal production[2]. A fair amount of metal refining processes need high amounts of heat and heat can be stored easier than electricity at scale.

[0]https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/german-firm-tur... [1]https://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/documents/file... [2]https://arpa-e.energy.gov/?q=slick-sheet-project/high-temper...

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

#384

Post by whateveryou381 »

Another way to see this problem is: you have too much energy at the wrong time of day. This is a fundamental problem with unmitigated installation of green technologies without grid level storage mechanisms. The green plants are losing money while this is happening.

Solar/wind energy aren't delivering enough power in non-peak operation to shutdown other traditional sources. It is just the coal/traditional power industry optimizing for total profit...

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

#385

Post by apendleton »

kleiba wrote: post #370
matthewmcg wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

Note the "Reynolds wanted to keep [...] his employees at work" part. This was at a time where being an employer was understood to come with a responsibility towards the people you employed. Well, at least today people have 40 hour work weeks with the weekends off.

Hard to know for sure, but it might well have been more self-serving than that: good employees might have been hard to come by, and hard to re-acquire/retrain once lost, so maybe he just wanted to keep them around and occupied so that they'd still be available once demand rose again.

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

#386

Post by MertsA »

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…

>You can make methane gas from pure CO2 and hydrogen when you apply electric power as a catalyst.

You can make methane gas from pure CO2 and hydrogen period. The reaction is exothermic, it's just the Sabatier method. You could however use electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.

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

#387

Post by white-flame »

nine_k wrote: post #257
WalterBright wrote: post #189

I'll suggest again that the solution to this is to charge variable prices to the consumer based on the supply. For example, I pay exactly the same rate, 24/7. Of course this will result in a mismatch of supply and demand. A lot of electricity demand can be shifted to when the supply is cheapest. When the supply varies wildly, like solar and wind do, there's a giant impedance mismatch when demand is charged a fixed pr…

Night rates are a thing in some countries. I'm not sure it's implemented anywhere in the US, though.

It certainly is in Arizona (called on-peak and off-peak), where air conditioner usage is high during the day.

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

#388

Post by bacon_waffle »

mprovost wrote: post #322
bacon_waffle wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've got these in New Zealand - once you have a "smart meter" (which I believe most homes now have), then you can pick an electricity retailer like https://www.flickelectric.co.nz that bills you according to the current price. Flick provides an API to allow you to turn on/off loads when you see fit.

Even before smart metres, NZ has had a ripple control system since the 1950s which sends signals over the electric lines to your circuit breaker so the utility could remotely turn domestic hot water heaters off during periods of high demand. The technology is pretty simple, you could reverse it to turn appliances on when power is below cost. http://www.oriongroup.co.nz/customers/load-management-and-ho...

Yes, in my house that is implemented as a ripple control "receiver", which switches on a circuit that has its own meter. The receiver is a rather simple thing I think; basically a high pass filter connected to the mains, with the filter output driving the coil in a relay. It audibly hums when ripple is on. Every couple months, the meter reader comes by and records the total amp*hours consumed at "night rate" and "normal rate".

So, it's important to note that the old system doesn't allow one to run the heat pump both whenever it's wanted, and also on the lower price ripple-controlled power. Similarly in the other direction, it doesn't make sense to use ripple control to decide when to feed back in to the grid if you have generating capacity from PV or whatever.

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

#389

Post by notatoad »

swalsh wrote: post #372
notatoad wrote: post #190

This seems like an opportunity for all that currently-useless "smart home" tech that companies are so eager to sell. I don't need smartphone notifications from my internet connected washing machine to tell me when the laundry is done, because i know when i started it. But if i could load the washing machine and tell it to switch on when the cost of electricity dropped below a certain threshold, and it would actually…

" I don't need smartphone notifications from my internet connected washing machine to tell me when the laundry is done" I'd like to point out that I would LOVE this feature. I often throw laundry in, go do something else, and completely forget it's in there.

yeah, i do the same thing. but i find it eventually, and it never seems to be a problem that it's sat in the washing machine for half a day.

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

#390

Post by DrJaws »

bacon_waffle wrote: post #283
ksolanki wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is insightful. The solution is probably to have a spot market for electricity that is accessible via an API so that smart AC or fridge or electric car charger can make use of it. This will encourage market for devices that can utilize the lower spot prices dynamically and keep the things more efficient overall (in steady state).

We've got these in New Zealand - once you have a "smart meter" (which I believe most homes now have), then you can pick an electricity retailer like https://www.flickelectric.co.nz that bills you according to the current price. Flick provides an API to allow you to turn on/off loads when you see fit.

that's brilliant
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