Prices going negative is Capitalism's solution actually. Gives the price incentive for folks to charge their cars when prices go negative, or whatever.
this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2024
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I hate to be the akshully guy but the big problem isn’t economics but usage. We can’t store electricity at any kind of meaningful scale so generation needs to be balanced to meet demand. Unused excess power needs to go somewhere, hence the negative prices (the market way of saying, “please somebody take this electricity it’s doing more harm than good on the grid”).
I like the system where the excess power is used to pump water into a reservoir up a mountain and when power is needed it runs it down a turbine into a lower reservoir.
Most places where this can be done, it is already being done. The low hanging fruit for pumped hydro was all picked decades ago, and at great cost to the ecosystems it destroyed in the process - turns out that drowning thousands of acres in massive man-made lakes had a bit of an impact on the plants and animals that lived there.
Not saying that the benefits weren't worth the cost, that's a whole different debate. But there's little to no opportunity to scale this energy storage tech beyond it's current footprint.
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Lately, quite a few people* in the UK have been enjoying negative domestic electricity prices with the recent high winds in the North Sea. They always find something to use it for, either extra laundry or using electric heaters rather than gas for space heating. I know big chunks of spinning iron are needed for grid frequency control, but if having to pay generators to curtail their output is the cost of having adequate redundancy, it should at least start with the fossil fuels.
Right now gas is providing 2.3GW out of the nations 33.3GW demand (18GW domestic renewables) coal is completely off. A few days ago I saw it as low as 1GW which I'm pretty sure is as close as it can get to idle standby.
*I don't have a battery, and I have a family that always wants to use the most power in the evening peak, so I'm not one of them, but export at least covers import in the summer months
"the problem is the suggestion that we give some of this money back... ever"
I mean it is a problem, not because of capitalism but because of reality, while there can be a lot of overlap between sunny day and lots of solar energy for all the ACs running our energy usave is also significant in the afternoon when solar is winding down and the evening where its non existent and we need to balance that and transfer all the energy, copper prices are going through the roof, there are shortages in electric grid components, its nice that solar is cheap but you need to distribute that energy and at some point we will have to bite the bullet and deploy a lot of nuclear energy, last time I checked the wind/solar installations didnt even offset the energy demand increase happening that year.