41–50 of 191 posts
I wish these prices were reflected to the consumer. Electricity bills in South Australia are ridiculous, and as a renter you don't have the luxury of installing solar panels.
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The grid has to finely balance supply and demand. You can't just dump power into the grid. If you did the grid frequency would increase out of spec and it could damage connected equipment and machinery. Water storage would only work if there is a steep mountain or big hill nearby. Another way to look at negitive pricing is the grid is paying industrial users to burn as much power as they can.
I think the dominant question here is, "I have this machinery that produces electricity, and it's hooked up to the grid. Why can't I also hook it up to the ground, and -- during periods of negative prices -- send the electricity into the ground instead of the grid?" Nobody charges you to ground your wires.
Might want to buy some of the Power Miners: https://powerminingshop.com/ As chips reach the limits of the cutting edge tech, the only advantage will be how expensive your electricity is rather than replacing chips every 12 months
Why waste energy on a system that's designed to grow increasingly inefficient over time (Crypto PoW mining), when you could simply store the energy or use it on something that is helpful to the local community, as in food or manufacturing?
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If the grid were smarter it could schedule demand for the excessive production times. It could be used, for example, in render farms or other non-time-critical high load batch operations.
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…
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Yeah I had thought surely they can find a use for free electricity rather than just turning it off
Free electricity that turns off half the time and run basically randomly for the other half? Without a battery it’s useless, and you have to pay for that battery. Treating the electric grid as a battery shouldn’t be free. It’s just in this case they found the cost of battery to be greater than the value of the electricity they’re creating.
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In SA there are some pump-hydro storage projects in the pipeline which should smooth out some of these variations.
Good stuff. I was wondering if maybe a desalination plant could work..
Desalination plants use a lot of power, but it's not obvious to me how to use it to store power.
I wish these prices were reflected to the consumer. Electricity bills in South Australia are ridiculous, and as a renter you don't have the luxury of installing solar panels.
In part that's why rooftop solar is hazardous for a grid in high amounts- you don't pay the infrastructure price half the time, but the infrastructure still has to be there for you.
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I think the dominant question here is, "I have this machinery that produces electricity, and it's hooked up to the grid. Why can't I also hook it up to the ground, and -- during periods of negative prices -- send the electricity into the ground instead of the grid?" Nobody charges you to ground your wires.
At that point, isn't it cheaper, safer and easier to turn off the machine? The machine being on has no value, only producing energy being consumed on the grid has value.
I'm in SA and I'm currently looking at getting solar panels and maybe a battery because we have the highest cost of electricity in the country. I'd like to know why we have the highest when the price seems to be going negative every other day?
As for why it's what way... probably regulatory capture
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Why do they have to pay someone to take the electricity? I could take a dollar bill and rip it in half (perhaps not legally, but besides the point). I understand there's costs to shutting down a system. So, they might keep it running. But what I don't get: the electricity producer has to pay someone to take the excess electricity off their hands? The producer can't route the excess to, well... nowhere?
I'm going to hazard a guess. If we assume the numbers for a sort of medium-size nuclear plant, we've got a total power generation of 500MW. Dumping that kind of power is... hard. If I haven't missed an order of magnitude, that's enough to boil an Olympic-sized swimming pool in about 25 minutes (500MW to boil 2.5ML of water, assuming STP). So you'd either need to build and maintain the infrastructure to burn that kind…
This is in a country that — as I understand it — could definitely do with more desalinated water. How capital intensive can putting a huge kettle element in the sea with something to catch the vapour be?