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Solar farm has to switch off every second day due to negative prices

reneweconomy.com.au

91–100 of 191 posts

Re: Solar farm has to switch off every second day due to negative prices

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The ground is a poor load and also there's a finite amount of energy you can dump into it because every watt that goes in gets turned into heat, you'd liquify the ground very quickly at the multi MW scale.

Well, I don't know. Let's think about how you would turn off solar panels. I remember hearing about solar panels (~10 years ago?) that would actually break under very-sunny-but-zero-load conditions, so I did some research using queries like 'solar panels without load' and am led to think that this isn't usually a huge problem (with regular/modern panels?). But physically speaking, unless you cover the solar panels with a blanket, the amount of incoming sunlight won't decrease, and when you aren't turning that into electric power, it'll turn into some more heat.

If your solar panels are on an open circuit with no way to generate electric power, I guess the amount of heat produced in the panels would be roughly equivalent to the heat produced by other dark objects -- which may or may not be too hot. If you keep turning the sunlight into power to route some of that energy into the ground, that may be a lot if you're doing that in a single spot, but I don't think it would be impossible to come up with a workable grounding system.

That said, I'd be very interested to hear how a large solar farm like this turns off their panels.

Re: Solar farm has to switch off every second day due to negative prices

#92
post #4

Storage is definitely the wise answer here, as the article mentions. The fun answer here is giant crypto farm.

Even the giant crypto farm is a type of energy storage - as long as you can afterwards sell coins to buy electricity.

Re: Solar farm has to switch off every second day due to negative prices

#93
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tl;dr: the Australian grid is working on a faulty system because of politics. This is not a technical limitation there.

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?

> in what system wouldn't this happen?

In any system designed by half-competent engineers, instead of by politicians who hate renewable energy for ideological reasons.

Re: Solar farm has to switch off every second day due to negative prices

#94

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…

> and my guess is that Australian electricity isn't cheaper on average

South Australian electricity is actually some of the most expensive in the world due to incredibly high transmission costs.

Re: Solar farm has to switch off every second day due to negative prices

#95
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at that levels of output. With large enough machines it's "we're going to spend X to spin everything down, do maintenance checks, spin back up" vs "we're going to pay you X/2 so you take the output and we can keep going". The X may be spent on extra workers, on extra maintenance, on replacement for posts that wear out faster, etc. It's the cost of unusual operation. And once you're generating there's no great way…

This makes me wonder how do you stop generating with a solar farm that is made of PV panels. They're entirely passive, right? The light hits them and they output electricity. How do you stop them? I guess the process is somehow invertible, and once reached a certain static charge each panel stops absorbing energy? In which case you're sort of already dumping the (non)produced energy in the environment- as heat, on ea…

It's electricity. Break the circuit and it stops flowing.

Re: Solar farm has to switch off every second day due to negative prices

#96
post #25

Sounds like someone needs a small aluminum smelter?

Australia has some of the worlds largest aluminium smelters. Unfortunately they are on the south east side of the country and the places that have the negative price events are in the north and south west.

The long term solution is to connect the grids together so the places with an excess of supply are connected to the places with an excess of demand.

Re: Solar farm has to switch off every second day due to negative prices

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are older bitcoin ASIC miners that aren't nearly as efficient but if you are getting totally free electricity... definately an opportunity here.

Yea shutting off anything that is producing free electricity to keep a market price stable is moronic....

It's not to protect market price, it's to protect the grid. You basically need to use as much power as you produce, if this becomes imbalanced, you damage the grid.

In this case, demand is lower than supply, so either you decrease the supply (shutting down the solar farm here), or increase the demand (lower the price). Because this is transient, and some powerplants (e.g. nuclear) take time and effort to shut down, for those operators it is cheaper to pay you to use their energy during those times (negative prices), than to shutdown/restart when needed.

Re: Solar farm has to switch off every second day due to negative prices

#98
post #21

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?

Because the whole premise is that you don't really have a way to store or use that energy in other ways. Then converting it into cryptomoney makes sense- then you can use that crypto to buy things which are helpful to the local community- even things that are produced on the other side of the world, where your energy could never reach.

An interesting thought is that of using that crypto exclusively to buy energy when the prices are non-negative. But I'm not sure that makes sense from an economic point of view, it's a snake biting its tail.

Re: Solar farm has to switch off every second day due to negative prices

#99
EXPLANATION: Some power sources can’t be shut down and restarted quickly and cost-efficiently. If the cost of stopping and restarting plant is higher than the cost of selling energy at a negative price for some time, prices go negative.

This kind of price fluctuation can increase the overall cost of energy production. We need cost effective power storage solutions and better electric grids to make renewable more effective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve

Re: Solar farm has to switch off every second day due to negative prices

#100
The solution is to deregulate the market and allow multiple companies to buy and sell electricity. The problem here is not an over supply but poorly regulated demand that causes energy to be priced higher than is justified; mainly to protect expensive sources of energy such as coal and gas plants.

The basic issue is not that there is no demand but that it is unevenly spread. People turn on their ACs when they get home after work. Peak demand is in the evening when the sun is about to go behind the horizon. Peak supply is in the late morning and early afternoon when people are at work.

So, all you need is tuneable demand. Say you had a web service that simply announces the current price of electricity that updates in real time based on your production capacity and a whole bunch of things that can turn themselves on/off based on that price. Whenever there is excess demand it just continues to drop that price until demand picks up. Now say you have an apartment complex with a lot of batteries in the basement and a bit of simple electronics that controls the charging behavior based on the price several energy providers (why limit to one). Now basically you have an energy sink that charges cheaply that automatically picks the cheapest provider.

Now imagine that battery has some overcapacity that can be sold back to the grid when prices are highest (aka. demand is high). Now you have an apartment building that buys energy when it is cheap and sells energy when it is expensive and it has enough capacity to serve its own needs.

Add EVs to the mix and battery to the grid technology and you have a mobile battery capacity that when it is not driving around can be plugged in to act both as an energy source and sink as well.

Now make the rest of the energy available to industrial users that can install their own solar panels and you have even more supply and demand.

The key bottleneck in this system is the current oligarchy that controls prices: the existing energy companies. They make the most profit when prices are high. They don't mind buying in some excess capacity cheaply but they have no incentive to do that when they don't need it. And since they control the market, there's nobody else to sell it to. Worse, since they have fixed cost associated with legacy plants, they have to keep prices high to prevent those becoming loss leaders. The whole system is geared towards protectionism rather than efficiency. Once you create an open market for energy, that's no longer sustainable.

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