this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2024
140 points (97.3% liked)

Mildly Interesting

17468 readers
510 users here now

This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.

This is obviously an objective criteria, so the mods are always right. Or maybe mildly right? Ahh.. what do we know?

Just post some stuff and don't spam.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

For reference, the price for fixed-cost plans is around 10c/kWh.

As someone who’s been constantly running an electric heater in the garage while painting my car, I was quite lucky with the timing.

It’s not literally free, though. Transfer prices are fixed, and there are taxes and some other minor costs associated with it, so where I live, it still adds up to around 6c/kWh even when the price drops to zero. The cheap prices are due to an excess of wind power, but once the wind dies down, prices usually spike hard.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (2 children)

It's more of an example of how we don't have anywhere near enough storage for existing renewables.

[–] BeautifulMind 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

This is actually an area that's developing quite quickly. In 2023, California managed to put almost 14mw worth of storage on the grid; if they keep building out at that rate, peaky/transient power sources like wind and solar will have someplace to park until someone needs that energy. Almost 12mw of that was utility storage; it's like the utilities have the chance to get out of the business of producing power themselves and into the role of renting storage (or buying surplus energy then selling it later when it's needed)

Granted, 14mw isn't a lot in the scale of California, but the rate of growth in grid-storage over time is humongous

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

10gwh is last report I have of CA utility battery storage.

[–] zergtoshi 3 points 1 month ago

It's fair pointing out the lack of (sufficient) storage for electric energy, but I'd say the average price of electricity in Finland for the past week indicates both capabilities of renawables and lack of storage.