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Cheap solar power is sending electrical grids into a death spiral

economist.com

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Re: Cheap solar power is sending electrical grids into a death spiral

#81

Post by zekrioca »

snailmailstare wrote: post #20
PlunderBunny wrote: post #9

> "lots of self-generated power will ultimately be wasted." This is sunlight falling on a roof. If you convert it into electricity but then don't use that electricity, is it really a waste? It's like saying that the overflow from my water tank that collects rain water off the roof is 'wasting' water. It could be argued that it's a waste in the sense that the generated electricity could have gone to someone else if th…

It was an infrastructure investment with the idea that it returns an expected amount of energy over an expected life and an assumption that that energy has a value that makes it pay for itself in X years.. If its not worth using a lot of that energy that's a first slide.. A much further slide is when the energy to produce it is never paid back in what it produces, which can be considered true for the enormously over…

One just needs to align supply with demand. But since the centralized model doesn’t like such a “decentralized” idea, they cast the problem as something impossible to be solved, which is very funny I have to say.

Re: Cheap solar power is sending electrical grids into a death spiral

#82

Post by zekrioca »

daedrdev wrote: post #16
PlunderBunny wrote: post #9

> "lots of self-generated power will ultimately be wasted." This is sunlight falling on a roof. If you convert it into electricity but then don't use that electricity, is it really a waste? It's like saying that the overflow from my water tank that collects rain water off the roof is 'wasting' water. It could be argued that it's a waste in the sense that the generated electricity could have gone to someone else if th…

The other grid operators have to lower their production during the day. That itself can be expensive, but more importantly they run their same equipment to power fewer hours of the day; when solar is not available, which is expensive since they have significant fixed costs. Batteries are not a grid scale solution any time soon, but maybe one day.

That’s not true everywhere. See Australia[1] , California [2], Denmark [3], Iceland [5] for some counter examples.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Australia

[2] https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/Others...

[3] https://www.wri.org/update/sustained-portfolio-policies-have...

[5] https://gogn.orkustofnun.is/Talnaefni/OS-2021-T009-01.pdf

Re: Cheap solar power is sending electrical grids into a death spiral

#83

Post by Ekaros »

YurgenJurgensen wrote: post #18
m3kw9 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, we’ve been wasting the suns energy for billions of years

It’s even worse than that. We’re wasting all the energy of every star in the Universe every second we spend not building Dyson spheres around them.

No, Dyson spheres is short term thinking. What we really should be doing is breaking up the stars and storing they hydrogen for future use. Just allowing fusion to happen and radiating the energy away is inefficient and wasteful.

Re: Cheap solar power is sending electrical grids into a death spiral

#84

Post by zekrioca »

sanderjd wrote: post #24
daedrdev wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other grid operators have to lower their production during the day. That itself can be expensive, but more importantly they run their same equipment to power fewer hours of the day; when solar is not available, which is expensive since they have significant fixed costs. Batteries are not a grid scale solution any time soon, but maybe one day.

I guess you could say "batteries are not a grid scale solution" as long as you ignore ERCOT and CAISO...

In 2010, someone sticked some battery shortcoming knowledge (e.g., not grid scale) into their head, but it takes double the amount of energy to update it today.

Re: Cheap solar power is sending electrical grids into a death spiral

#85

Post by tim333 »

The two girds they talk about were not doing that great before solar either.

Eskom South Africa:

>CEO and the cyanide-laced coffee...dramatic example of how criminality has seeped into South Africa’s state...organised theft, mainly of copper, on an industrial scale https://www.ft.com/content/5fe8291d-9895-4272-9e0a-eefa27911...

Pakistan:

>Pakistan's energy shortfall refuses to abate amid scorching heat, load-shedding...Pakistan's urban centres are now suffering up to six hours of load shedding...Calling it a "crisis of leadership and coordination", a former PEPCO head criticised... https://energy.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/oil-and-gas...

Not sure you can blame solar for that. The rest of the world seems to manage solar without death spirals.

Re: Cheap solar power is sending electrical grids into a death spiral

#86

Post by m3kw9 »

Ekaros wrote: post #83
YurgenJurgensen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s even worse than that. We’re wasting all the energy of every star in the Universe every second we spend not building Dyson spheres around them.

No, Dyson spheres is short term thinking. What we really should be doing is breaking up the stars and storing they hydrogen for future use. Just allowing fusion to happen and radiating the energy away is inefficient and wasteful.

Next level thinking let’s start these conversations early

Re: Cheap solar power is sending electrical grids into a death spiral

#87

Post by flgb »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #41
r00fus wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hubris in this article is unreal: it's posing that privately owned utilities are a good thing and that bypassing them is some crime that's done by ratepayers. I hope that business model dies in a fire. Instead the entire paradigm of centralized generation may need to be called into question and we should instead be focusing on a hybrid centralized baseline + local generation and storage. Places like China do fine…

> Instead the entire paradigm of centralized generation may need to be called into question and we should instead be focusing on a hybrid centralized baseline + local generation and storage I don't think that moving the generation around is really an "instead", because the problem at hand is that distribution is expensive and someone has to pay for it if you want a grid. And most of that cost is the local stuff. So h…

It’s not 100% “instead”, but equally it’s not 0%. A grid with more distributed generation (and storage and load flexibility) can be smaller and cheaper.

Re: Cheap solar power is sending electrical grids into a death spiral

#88

Post by afpx »

r00fus wrote: post #21
PlunderBunny wrote: post #9

> "lots of self-generated power will ultimately be wasted." This is sunlight falling on a roof. If you convert it into electricity but then don't use that electricity, is it really a waste? It's like saying that the overflow from my water tank that collects rain water off the roof is 'wasting' water. It could be argued that it's a waste in the sense that the generated electricity could have gone to someone else if th…

The hubris in this article is unreal: it's posing that privately owned utilities are a good thing and that bypassing them is some crime that's done by ratepayers. I hope that business model dies in a fire. Instead the entire paradigm of centralized generation may need to be called into question and we should instead be focusing on a hybrid centralized baseline + local generation and storage. Places like China do fine…

I used to build microgrids and work closely with utilities - generation, transmission, and distribution. This was probably 15 years ago, but they talked about the 'solar death spiral' even back then.

In my opinion, a lot had to do with how they set retail rates. The retail electric companies set different rate categories and tiers. Most residential customers don't realize that they're often subsidizing commercial and industrial customers. So, of course there's going to be a death spiral when those residential customers decide to generate themselves.

Re: Cheap solar power is sending electrical grids into a death spiral

#89

Post by kylehotchkiss »

r00fus wrote: post #64
kylehotchkiss wrote: post #33

This reminds me that utilities can limit the size of your rooftop solar system, which locks you into whatever your usage you had at install time. Because of that it's difficult for me to actually achieve net zero electric usage and it's more cost effective for me to remain on a gas furnace instead of upgrading to a heat pump. This is such a shame. I wish I could just get 2 more KWh.

Not sure if your utility allowed for planned usage changes (ie, planning to buy an(other) EV, planning to install heat pump). This is what my installer submitted to justify my 180% over-specced solar install. This is PG&E in CA.

San Diego's limit is 150% but if you don't have a heat pump/car charger to start with, you're def going to be at more than 150%. Did you have to show them concrete plans for EV charger or heat pump?

Re: Cheap solar power is sending electrical grids into a death spiral

#90

Post by Leherenn »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #73
PlunderBunny wrote: post #9

> "lots of self-generated power will ultimately be wasted." This is sunlight falling on a roof. If you convert it into electricity but then don't use that electricity, is it really a waste? It's like saying that the overflow from my water tank that collects rain water off the roof is 'wasting' water. It could be argued that it's a waste in the sense that the generated electricity could have gone to someone else if th…

Unlike the economist I know something about accounting. If there is excess power at zero marginal cost someone cunning is already planning on making some coin off it. As it is utilities with excess solar and wind are rapidly adding battery storage. I think there are three stages of renewable development. The first stage renewables partly offset traditional suppliers. The second stage is you actually have excess part…

> If there is excess power at zero marginal cost someone cunning is already planning on making some coin off it.

I'm not sure it's that simple as evidenced by the ever increasing hours of negative electricity prices.

As far as I know, there are so far no good applications for short bursts of negative prices. Everything that would love those is so capital intensive/high fix costs that even 10 or 20% utilisation rates at negative prices are not enough to make it economically viable.

Season excess is also a big problem. Batteries to smooth the days/nights cycles are fine, you can use them ~365 times a year. But a battery to smooth out summer/winter cycles can only be used once a year!

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