“the problem with solar is we can’t monopolize the sun or make it scarcer than it is”
Oh contraire. Have you seen the cloud seeding chemtrails?
Screen caps need dates. These tweets are pretty old from memory. It feels like making a joke about rotary phones not fitting in your pocket, it’s out of date.
Your mom needs dates, like even if she’s happily married to your father, great lady.
I dated his mom for a while
Someone should tell MIT about battery storage.
Yeah but once people see the balance sheet in the red that’s a big no no. If only someone smart, like maybe went to MIT could explain how it could be profitable overall…like humans living being a profitiable side effect.
Batteries are already being used profitably all over the world.
germany is developing a lot of hydrogen options, which is a surprisingly good strategy in a lot of fields. like, steel and cement can be produced with hydrogen alone, and germany is learning how to store and transport hydrogen through pipelines quickly.
Or, if the topology allows, use the excess electricity to fill up reservoir located up high so that it can drive turbines when needed. Organic energy storage is really cool
Yes, I consider this as a variation of hydro dams.
Use excess solar to turn the wind turbines into fans and reverse global warming
I want those salt batteries to kick off for mass home storage. Less likely to explode like lithium.
Where do you get free solar panels from?
How can the price go negative? There’s always going to be maintenance costs that have to be covered if nothing else.
Power grid stability.
Over generation and under generation can destabilize a power grid.
Thats why when there’s over generation it can sometimes go negative because that power needs to go somewhere so they’re willing to pay people to consume it.
Here in Sweden our electricity provider gives us a real time view of consumption and prices. When we charge the car during peaks of overproduction we get paid and the amount on our bill goes visibly down. It usually happens like 5-15 times a year during summers, and occasionally also because of excess winds on the farms year around.
prices do not actually go negative if the solar parks are correctly installed.
the issue is simple: the solar parks forgot an “off” switch, so they continue to push energy into the grid, even when there’s no demand. so that destabilizes the grid which is bad, so the grid produces “negative electricity prices” which just means they pay someone else for taking that energy out of the grid to stabilize it, and they’ll also charge the solar parks for pushing more power into the grid than the grid can handle.
honestly, it’s just a construction mistake. the solar parks should obviously have a simple “off” switch to stop pushing power into the grid. they just forgot it during installation, end of story, no big deal. this is probably not going to be a permanent phenomenon, i’m very sure.
I actually never thought about that. Is there any damage to the cells if they’re bombarded by photons but not discharged?
It’s like a dumpster filling up, where you have to pay a waste management company to come haul that stuff away, at least if people can’t find a way to take it off your hands for free.
The system is overloaded so there is no need for more power, in fact putting more power into the system has a negative effect. So there is no value to putting more power in the system and it may actually have a cost.
The system still has physical hardware that has to be maintained, the company has to charge it’s customers to pay for this maintenance at the very minimum. As well as any other cost to deal with the excess power, although I don’t see why that couldn’t be mitigated by simply disconnecting excess panels from the system. That price should never be negative. It makes no sense. A negative price would mean they’re paying their customers. For what?
Livin where it was an actual thing - they actually “paid” in the form of counting returned power as borrowed. So when you powered the grid, supplier counted energy you supplied and then promised to return the same amount when you needed.
They backed off of it but my friend caught that version and he was pretty hyped about it. Even when his solar panels will die, he’s gonna be set for at least next decade on that payment lol.
In general you’re correct, it’s just that currently this is how the system is. Grid operators in general don’t want their grid to be destabilised by oversupply to the point where they will pay you take the energy of their hands. Yes, disconnecting excess panels from the system would solve the issue, except that for most farms or households that was never a concern and solar panel owners have no incentive to care, so companies are now trying to push what are essentially smart plugs to let the solar panels be turned on / off on demand.
What negative effect do you have in mind?
More generation than load makes voltage go up. More voltage has varying effects on equipment, ranging from no problem to exploding in a shower of molten metal.
The idea is there such an abundance of energy that they are willing to pay you to consume some of it to keep the net stable at 50 (or 60) Herz.
In practice, there are always taxes and surcharges that the final prices is not negative, but is lower than the surcharges themselves.
Too much energy is not good for the system, so there must be a way of compensation.
Can they not just cut off some of the panels with some sort of breaker when the output exceeds consumption/storage?
They could, but those breakers are not currently installed in many many setups.
They started being mandatory in Germany last year, but many countries don’t have it.
Because its deterrent for people to supply electricity when its not needed.
I have a 10kWp system, sometimes I have to pay for the electricity I create and I dont use. There’s no maintenance costs in my system
Who are you paying when that happens?
Also, the panels never wear out or get damaged or have to be cleaned or anything? This isn’t me trying to make a point against solar, I’m just questioning how there could ever be absolutely no cost to having it. More in the sense of an electric company rather than private owners.
Cleaning solar panels is quite literally spraying them with water, it takes about 5 minutes once a year. They do “wear out” over time, after 20 years they may only put out 80% of what they used to… Damage is possible, but the system I had at my old house withstood several severe wind storms and a couple hail storms with no noticeable lasting effects.
I don’t have solar panels but I’ll try to answer your questions. Let’s start with why you may be charged for supplying electricity to the grid.
The Electrical grid is amazing, we can transfer power from one place to another with ease because of it, although it has several limitations. One limitation is that for the most part electricy that is generated must be immediately used or else it decay into heat. The more electricity generated the more heat is produced, and unused electricity becomes extra heat. The components on the grid are only designed to operate within certain limits. If the grid is already supplying more power than it needs and then someone starts to supply even more electricity the grid will be in trouble, components will wear out faster or break. So extra electricity that can’t be stored in just as bad as not enough. That cost is shared between grid suppliers in some areas resulting in a cost for supplying electricity.
Also solar panels have switches that regulate the electricity they provide to the grid and it’s those switches which wear out and break. Solar panels don’t need much maintenance or repair but the supporting circuits do.
Won’t someone PLEASE think of the prices?!
the best solar and wind ad you can imagine is russian energy grid attacks and how communities had built diverse workarounds to mitigate the grid going down here and there. it also spawned local businesses to maintain these stations which greatly helps local economies.
Lack of capitalist imagination
We own the land you need to build the solar panels on.
We own the factories that build the solar panels
We own the solar farms.
If it were feasible, it would have been done as quickly and easily as poking holes in the ground in 1859.
TIL modern medicine isn’t feasible because you couldn’t do it in 1859
I mean, a surplus in the electricity grid is actually sort of a problem, especially if you don’t have any way to store the extra energy.
we can just put a white blanket on top of the panels…
I’m ignorant of the mechanism of solar panels and electrical grids…do they just explode if they are set up and not draining power?
Because why can’t you just cut the inflow of electricity on a signal? I’d appreciate actual answers.
Edit: In fact, I don’t see why “just don’t send the power if it isn’t needed” doesn’t work for any power generation source. In lieu of answers, I can imagine the issue is with the non-renewable resources. Maybe you want to spin down burning generators, if you don’t need the extra energy. So it’s a planning problem to know when you don’t need energy, so you know when you don’t need to burn resources.
But you don’t waste wind if you just let the turbines keep spinning while blocking of energy output. Sunlight isn’t burnt up if solar panels keep slurping while the downstream draw is blocked.
Is this a problem being baked in because it’s assuming “burnable fuel” restrictions?
Yes solar panels and most renewables can be turned off easily if there is too much energy on the grid. The term for this is “curtailment”. Some energy sources can’t be turned off easily, like nuclear, large coal plants, and combined cycle gas turbines. So you will tend to turn off the easy things before the hard things.
The only major problem here is that this upsets the capitalists that own the generation; they don’t want to pay for stuff that isn’t producing money at every instance that it could be producing money. There are no real technical reasons why you can’t curtail wind and solar plants whenever you need to.
Worth noting that a large amount of “renewables bad” you’ll see is fossil fuel propaganda too, so be careful there.
Yeaaaah, I hate that. A lot of the structures that everyone says are shite seem to be propped up by “solutions” that create and perpetuate the problems they “solve.”
Would a nuclear or fossil fuel turbine power plant just tear itself apart if disconnected from load at speed? I vaguely understand that the load provides a sort of magnetic resistance on the spinning generator. Without load they would they spin too fast? Or is it a matter of there not being any easy way to dump the power by doing something useless with it like just melting sand or smth?
Fossil plants, not really. The hard part for them is getting them started again which can take hours. But disconnecting them suddenly won’t hurt them. There are many layers of protective devices keeping them from overspeed events.
Nuclear plants are similar but they will continue generating heat long after they are disconnected from the grid and you have to have a plan for removing that heat or bad things will happen. This was what caused problems at Fukushima.
You can cut it, but how? If you don’t have a system in place, thousands of private home will be injecting power into the grid because they don’t know any better. In extreme cases it could overload the grid. Not really explode, but cause voltage spikes, trip breakers, and ultimately (and somehow ironically) cause a blackout as the grid protection mechanisms kick in.
I Germany all new installations need to be able to be remotely controlled to prevent grid feed in when there’s too much production.
Disclaimer: hobby self-taught solar panel enthusiast, not an electrician or grid engineer.
Yeah the remote connection to the local utility would be the obvious answer.
People with Nest systems can enroll into “Energy Saver” programs that start the AC at 3pm to cool the house early for the energy spike at 5pm when many get home from work. All you get is a minor credit per year.
If that shit works they can setup a system for solar.
Of course you can… but it’s not there right now. Imagine your AC needs a physical switch to flip. No incentives can overcome that, and new equipment is expensive.
We setup a 25kw setup recently in Pakistan but ran out of money to have inverter and batteries for it. So far they have been up for a couple months, none have exploded yet.
Solar panels have no problem if nothing consumes the power they can produce.
Wind turbines can be feathered and the turbine break engaged until they stop, at which point they’re not generating anything.
So negative energy prices are not really a technical problem of renewables, rather they’re due to the way the decision of “who stops their generation” being left to market systems - rather than there being some kind of centralized control, possibly with agreements in place, that decides which generators are stopped first when there is excess generation, market prices just float as offer and demand float and individual suppliers are left to individually decide if it’s worth it for them to generate for a given price or not and thus if they should reduce or stop their generation.
There are delays and inertia in the whole process of signalling demand/supply balance via market prices, so there result is that the price can overshot and undershot, the latter being sometimes all the way down to negative prices.
Can’t it go to some AI datacenter or smth?
Datacenters largely have fixed power needs; the computers are going to be running constantly, or else they aren’t making money for their capitalist overlords. What you want is something located at the solar arrays themselves, so that you can selectively switch whether the juice is going to the grid or to your power sink - and the power sink ideally should be something that also makes you money, but doesn’t need to run 24/7 to do so. Like a crypto farm.
LLM training and processing batched requests are 2 things that can be done i think. Batched requests have a 24-48h window when they need to be processed.
Big dams are actually great since they let you store the energy for later.
This gets posted regularly on Lemmy, and while the economic take is tone-deaf at best, there’s a real issue with generating more power than you can use. You can’t just dump grid power — it needs to go somewhere. The grid needs to consume as much as it generates at all times or else bad things happen.
There are of course solutions, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an engineering challenge to implement.
Figuring out what to do with kilowatts is easy, but figuring out what to do with megawatts, at the drop of a hat, is substantially harder.
I feel like a 4g cellphone plan and a shutoff switch would do the trick. You can control what is being generated in real time
Why wouldn’t batteries work?
Oh they absolutely do! My only point is that grid supply must equal grid demand. There are many ways to achieve this, as folks here have pointed out.
Throttling power generation (turning off/disconnecting PV from grid for example), and storage (chemical, heat, or hydro battery) are all established technologies, they just need to be implemented properly to avoid supply/demand mismatch.
Peak energy production would be a good time to train the damn llms instead of building natural gas power plant I guess.
Sorry, but Johnny Oil with a shotgun to my head disagrees with your math. and while I never looked at the numbers myself, I am inclined to agree with him that such a plan would be disturbingly “unprofitable”.
-anyone around western spheres of influence in the vicinity of any sort of lever of power to authorize such changes in infrastructure investment
Given the price of RAM and graphics cards, it is obvious that running LLM is at least somewhat limited by the amount of hardware available. So having that hardware sitting idle, except when there is too much solar power, is obviously not economically viable.
obviously
citation needed
I’m saying this because a lot of things seem obvious at first glance, but are still incorrent. Sometimes reality behaves in unexpected ways and one actually has to check some stuff regularly instead of just assuming it.
Like, which scenario is more profitable? Use 100 chips and run them at all times, even when energy prices are high; or buy 200 chips and use them only when energy is cheap? Which scenario is cheaper? One actually has to do the maths, otherwise one cannot just know these things.
Power and grid infrastructure is a limitation that can exceed hardware availability in some regions. Musk has a datacenter with 20-something methane gas generators running throughout the day to power his mini-me sycophantic AI, Grok.
At the cost of a cultural deficit, solar could provide an environmental benefit there during the day.
Illegal methane gas generators, I might add.
Then you use taxation to change the viability. Make the non renewable energy so expensive for that usage that they’re better just to shutdown.
Gotta admit, didn’t think about that. Maybe the solution was a few guillotines all along. (This solution has its own problem tho, see the Robespierre gambit)
Yes but that would be woke soy and gay. You dont want to get gay woke soy in your ai. Thats against like the entire point of the thing!
Solar panels don’t care if the energy they could produce isn’t consumed.
Wind generators can be feathered and breaked until they stop rotating and generating.
Hydro-generation dams can simply close their water intakes and stop generating.
The things that have problems stopping generation are not renewables, they’re things like nuclear power plants.
Negative energy prices are not a technical problem - if the decision to do so is made, renewable generation systems can quickly stop producing.
Negative energy prices are due to Market systems being used to decide who stops generating if supply exceeds demand - instead of some centralized entity deciding who will stop, the individual suppliers look at the market price for their product and decide themselves to stop/start producing or not.
Because electric power supply/demand balance changes way faster than said market signals are produced and processed ultimatelly to decisions to stop or start generation, you end up with prices overshooting and undershooting the ideal price point which is in equilibrium with the supply/demand balance, and sometimes the undershooting results in negative prices.
So negative energy prices are the result of the political choice of using market systems rather than some kind of centralized control - a system with centralized control would respond far faster to falls in demand and would thus not generate more power than demand to the point that somebody is actually paid to consume power.
So yeah, the idea that it’s solar panels that are the problem by causing negative energy prices is complete total bullshit - the choice of a market system to regulate supply and demand is the source of the problem and solar, because it has very low operational costs and thus the price solar operators are willing to sell their product for is lower, just means that when the market at times naturally undershots (because it’s SLOW at responding to changes in supply/demand) it will do so against an equilibrium price which is lower because solar is cheaper, and will thus more frequently end up going below zero price and into negative territory before bouncing back and stabilizing at the price which is in equilibrium with the current supply/demand balance.
No. No no no. You can literally turn solar generation off, nearly instantly. It’s called curtailment and it’s done all the time in saturated markets. Older residential inverters don’t have the reactive technology, but residential solar is a drop in the bucket compared to utility-scale solar.
Solar panels need an aperture.
Again, though, using gravity batteries or pumped hydro is a great way to manage excess juice, though these are expensive options.
They still cost much less than evacuating the entire coast line of the world when we finish melting the Greenland and Antarctic land ice.
The economics of that are great. Negative power prices are an incentive to store energy and get payed for that. Then release the energy again later in the day or at night to earn money on it again.
Then release the energy again later in the day or at night to earn money on it again.
This process is called “arbitrage” btw. Take one thing when it’s cheap and sell it some other time/place where it’s valued at a higher cost, and make a profit that way. It’s one of the foundations of trade in general.
Yes, and plenty of companies are doing just that. The effect is that as they charge the batteries, they increase demand and that increases the electricity price a bit. Grid doesn’t tip over and everybody wins!
Trouble is that at some point they run out of batteries. Batteries are expensive. And when they run out of batteries, the demand drops and the grid has to figure out where to dump the excess. And the price drops again.
Pumped hydro is a more scalable solution, but it’s slow to react and even that has its limits.
What you are saying is factually correct, why the down votes I don’t understand.
Load dumping is not really a big problem as any fail over solutions have some dumping capacity. Just let it heat a big ass resistor somewhere.
What you are saying is factually correct, why the down votes I don’t understand.
Lots of people are offended by people speaking in un-convoluted, direct ways. I’ve made that experience many times.
Batteries? Boil water? Anything?
Use excess to boil water for steam turbines. Solved. Big oil has INSANE propaganda.
I have played factorio so im an expert. Just boil billions of gallons of water and store the steam for as long as you need with zero loss of enegry.
Bam
You just took the excess energy to generate more energy with it?!?
No, the hot steam is for onsen. It’s hot-tub baths, kinda. Very comfy, very recommendable. 10/10.
Steam store in tank. Tank lose little-to-lot depend on how long. Use steam night when no sun.
Or
Move water to higher tank from lower tank. When needed pour high tank through generator to low tank. Repeat.
Batteries are usually to expensive to have standing by on this scale.
There’s been significant advances in super-cheap batteries that have lower power density, but excellent resilience, utilizing common materials. Those are ideal for solar storage where space isn’t an issue.
Something tells me they can “economy of scale” those bitches and make making massive battery bank warehouses cheap
Grid scale storage is actively being worked on.
Chemical batteries, like rechargeable lithium ion batteries, are a big part of it. Sodium ion batteries and iron air batteries are coming up, as well.
Somewhat related are rechargeable fuel cells and flow batteries, that similarly store chemical energy that can support two-way charge/discharge cycles.
Gravity storage, like pumping water up into a reservoir and then using it to drive turbines on the way down, or elaborate elevator shaft type systems, can store some energy but require lots of land and material, or require very specific geographic features not commonly found.
Kinetic energy storage, turning lots of heavy flywheels and then recapturing that momentum to produce electricity when needed, is also on the grid (and kinda mimics the rotational inertia of the turbines traditionally synced across the grid).
Some other storage technologies include capacitors, pressurized gas containers, and thermal heat storage with molten salt that can be used to make steam to drive turbines on demand.
But all of these solutions are difficult to scale up to the point where they make a significant difference in addressing the mismatch between supply and demand at different times of day. We gotta do all of it, and right now the most cost effective solution is chemical batteries, so that’s been growing at an exponential rate.
Like, there is a huge focus on inventing and implementing exactly this. I have seen many technical science/engineering articles about the different approaches to make it work. Because it would be amazingly useful. But the solution has generally not been found yet.
Reality bites. Some stuff is just not possible to make economically. You can’t just say “economics of scale” like it is a magic incantation.
Is it more expensive than excess production harming the grid or the economic impact of recurring blackouts?
There has to be some solution in use today, since I as a consumer don’t have recurring blackouts. I don’t know what they are, but they are likely not chemical batteries, and they are likely cheaper than batteries.
It’s power generation that can be quickly ans easily ramped up and down on demand. Mostly nuclear and fossils.
You can’t just dump grid power — it needs to go somewhere. The grid needs to consume as much as it generates at all times or else bad things happen.
we figured out this problem centuries ago it is called capacitors. long term it is called batteries
Of course. Like I said, we know how to do it, but it’s still an engineering feat to get it done.
Neither of which grow on trees.
Edit: well I guess lemons grow on trees and those are batteries if you try hard enough…
my dude gravity is a battery if you know how to use it
There are only so many places where grid level pumped storage hydroelectricity works, and the capital and environmental costs are non negligible for most new locations.
That’s only one method of using gravity
The problem we have to solve is that the energy storage that’s built into the grid was built before widespread home solar adoption. We need new energy dumps, and those cost money. Of course the obvious answer is taxes, but good luck convincing Americans to pay for vital infrastructure
That relies on them not already being full and enough of them existing
shit like this burns power fast if you need to clear capacity. just ground it. i’m not that smart of an engineer and this is not that hard of a problem. the hard part is the grid, the interconnectedness, the load balancing, and that’s already done.
That would actually be sci-fi as fuck, and I’m now 100% for it. I want power plants to have constantly zapping Tesla coils
i was mostly just thinking arc gap sparking bullshit but tesla coils playing music for the workers and running the PA system. yesss now we are cooking
Reverse lightning rods.
The extra power issue is not that hard to solve, when you get close you can start mandating the inverters to have smart connection to the grid, so they stop providing power to the grid if demand is satisfied.
Maybe I don’t know enough about electricity at large scale, but at small scale you can just cut the circuit. Electricity isn’t like water that just sits in the pipe when you close a valve, right?
It is a lot more like water than you think. The solution of “just cut the circuit” is like solving the problem of overflowing storm drains by “just plug the pipe”.
The power has to go somewhere. If you don’t do anything about it, the voltage in the cables will rise until things start to fry. Real world power balancing involves adjusting the output of power plants (e.g. how much fuel to burn) in response to changes, and in some cases, dumping power into the ground as safely as possible. This problem gets complicated when power grids span vast distances and involve many different power plants that all need to be in sync or things catch on fire.
In the case of solar power, this is part of why improved large-scale battery technology is so important. It lets you absorb the excess power at peak generation times, and then release that power at night.
Can’t you cut the power at each individual solar panel? I assume that the amount of electricity out there is low enough to not cause that kind of problems?
You’re pretty much describing what hybrid inverters do for home solar panels. They can disconnect and not export to the grid when you don’t need it and just power your house and charge your batteries.
But hybrid inverters are quite a bit more expensive than standard grid-tied inverters that are always pumping into the grid.
For instance, I just had to replace my home inverter that died and I got a cheap 6 kilowatt inverter for about $1,300. A hybrid inverter would be at minimum 3 or 4k.
Im not that guy, but im picturing moreso just that solar panels come preinstalled with the glass that turns opaque when it recieves voltage. When your batteries are full and the grid isnt pulling power, that would progressively look more and more like either a short citcuit or, more likely, an open circuit. When the voltage rises too much due to na open circuit, the solar panel shuts off by turning the glass opaque, which also adds a load to the battery hopefully trickling its voltage down.
Again, that would increase cost significantly. I didn’t think of this at first because my array doesn’t have RSD because it’s older but all new solar arrays in the US and elsewhere have what’s called rapid shutdown technology for firefighter safety and it is a device that is mounted to each solar panel and does effectively reduce the output to zero or near zero on each solar panel in the event grid power is lost or somebody hits the rapid shutdown emergency button. So the technology is already in place to do what you’re describing but more cost-effective and less elaborate.
Also, something I should have mentioned is that newer inverters like my own, even though they are grid-tied, can be configured to export nothing and only power the home even without a battery. But the problem with this whole line of thinking is that it would screw over homeowners who should be getting money for the solar they put into the grid, but would be getting nothing in these scenarios.
Another point of failure, another cost… do you retrofit old panels? There are challenges with this at scale
It’s not only possible but also required already. The system needs to be able to shut itself off to protect the grid.
You can dump megawatts. But there is no need for that. It’s not like solar panel inverters will just keep increasing voltage until they can push the power into the grid. They have an upper limit.
Basically I don’t see your point
Short term is grounding the power. Medium teen is building up storage or electricity intensive industries that can start up and shut down based on electricity swings.
a giant flywheel for every town!
Pumped Hydro is a pretty safe storage method using preexisting technology if you have hills in the area.
i don’t want safe, i want DANGER!
Store it as compared air in steel tanks buried underneath your home. No protective coating.
why not hydrogen?
Already done and he hasn’t blown himself up yet.
sounds like he’s not even trying then
Giant flywheels are also safe. Great for smoothing out energy generation from a fickle source as well.
not if you leave them uncovered!
Like any hydroelectrics it has large environment impact and dam failures tend to be the deadliest industrial disasters when they happen. Also most good locations have already been used. You cannot just build it wherever (without insane costs). Pumped hydro is hardly a solution here.
Pumped hydro isn’t the same as a hydroelectric dam. Because both reservoirs are engineered and you don’t have the concrete wall as the single point of failure, you don’t have the same risks involved. Pump Hydro can be whatever size you want and spread out to distribute the grid load.
Also, are dam failures worse then Climate Change or are they just more dramatic?
Then you either have small cheap and safe, without much capacity (so you need many of those), or big, with the problems of the big hydroelectric projects.
Of course pumped hydro has and will have its place in the grid, but it cannot solve all the energy storage problems.
Apparently you can do something similar with sand if you live in a desert.
Thermal sand batteries are a thing, I think?
That was some solution talked about on Undecided.
Gravity Batteries? They’re much, much easier using water compared to solid masses.
You could store solar energy as heat in sand and use turbines(if you have water) or Sterling Engines(if you don’t) to spine a generator. Peltiers are a solid state method to convert heat to electricity, but they aren’t very efficient.
Figuring out what to do with kilowatts is easy
So what you’re saying is that if it’s distributed enough (say, on the roofs of houses, sized to serve the needs of the occupants) it’s not a problem.
Distributed vs centralized has no impact here. It’s all about excess power across the entire grid.
Sure, the solar system I own generates a few kilowatts and if I’m home cooking or running AC, I use almost all of it. But if I’m not home, my AC is off, fridge isn’t running at that moment, all of that power gets dumped onto the grid. My neighbor’s down the street do the same thing, their next door neighbor, the houses all in my neighborhood, and across the entire city, we’re all doing this. A hundred or thousand homes generating excess few kilowatts adds up to megawatts
Sure, the energy company pays a pittance for the energy I put onto the grid, but it’s still payment. I’m not gonna put a dummy load on my house to not export power
But if I’m not home, my AC is off, fridge isn’t running at that moment, all of that power gets dumped onto the grid.
And if it couldn’t do that, your solar panels would warm up a little bit and nothing else of consequence would happen. Ditto for your neighbors’ solar panels, and everybody else’s. Whoop-de-do.
It wouldn’t even cause a net increase in the urban heat island effect, because if that energy weren’t hitting solar panels it would just be heating up people’s roofs instead.
Sure, the energy company pays a pittance for the energy I put onto the grid, but it’s still payment. I’m not gonna put a dummy load on my house to not export power
You’re conflating an technological problem with an economic one. The only reason you claim my proposal wouldn’t work is because you don’t want it to because it cuts into your profit.
You can cover them with a sheet You can pump water. You can do desalination. You can overcool houses during summer so the house is pleasantly chilly when you get home. Plenty of industrial processes already set the machines in-phase. You can do cool displays arcing it through the fucking air.
Youre inventing problems so your stonks stay valuable.
this is not the intractable problem you make it out to be.
there’s a fantastic way to smooth out production peaks, and hey, it fixes the lulls - it’s called storage. battery storage can take all kinds of forms, from pumped hydro to large stationary chemical batteries. we’re finally starting to see large rollouts of storage and it’s one of the few bits of light in a dark future.
It doesn’t even have to be stored in a way that can be turned back into electricity. Electrical heaters are damn near 100% efficient except for transmission losses, and there are tons of industrial processes that can store and use that heat.
You can store it in batteries, what are you on about?
We don’t have that many batteries (yet).
At least in my state of California, we’re building fuck loads of batteries
https://www.caiso.com/documents/2024-special-report-on-battery-storage-may-29-2025.pdf
Channel it to an underground phase change storage.
Oh no, I have too many megawatts, and somehow no batteries, turbines or any other shit, what could I possibly send it to
The humble ground:
Why waste it on the ground when we could start desalinating seawater
That is not how it works.
When you short something to ground, it’s everything in between that needs to dissipate the heat. Think about what “sending it to ground” means—it means you connect the hot to the ground. But with what do you connect the two? A wire? Sure, but you better hope that wire can dissipate all that power, because that’s what it’ll try to do.
You can’t just “dump power on the ground.” That’s not how it works.
So, I’m not good at these things, what you’re saying is that if I take a 240V cable in the street and just shove it into the ground, the cable will end up uh… melting? Trying to saturate itself until it matches the resistance of the ground or something?
If it’s a low resistance path to ground, it’ll get very very toasty! If it’s a lousy ground though, then it won’t…but it also won’t consume any power, so it’s not an effective way of scrubbing off electricity.
A good ground (low resistance) is found in your household wiring (the ground and/or the neutral). Of you short to that…well…you can guess what will happen! (Let’s hope you have proper circuit breakers.)
Yeah it’s, like, normal. I don’t know what I was confused about.
Guess those SWER powerlines are just for show then
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Just FYI: The claim that solar panels barely break even in regards of carbon is misinformation:
Indeed, the solar panels exported from China in 2024 will have paid off their “carbon debt” within an average of just four months, according to detailed recent analysis for Carbon Brief. Manufacturing the solar panels will have added some 72m tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2) to China’s emissions in 2024, but will cut them overseas by 203MtCO2 per year, the analysis found. In total, these solar panels will save some 4.1GtCO2 over their lifetimes, paying off the upfront “carbon debt” some 57 times over. Looked at another way, the lifecycle emissions of solar power are far lower than those of fossil fuels, as shown in the chart below, which is based on UN data published in 2021.
And since most solar panels are produced in China and China is rapidly building clean energy, that will also go down further in the future. Solar is great.
Can you point me to a study saying carbon cost barely breaks even? Compared to what?
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The owners of my family’s last house left us with solar panels, and as a struggling barely middle class family, it helped my parents afford all our expenses; from groceries to rent and even a vacation. It makes me so happy to see solarpunk become so popular, the good it can do is nothing short of awesome.
I used to genuinely be against solar because the carbon costs barely break even,
Carbon costs are not break even. The monetary costs include all economic inputs including the dirty energy used to produce the panels. So even if 100% of the $1000 cost to create a panel was from burning coal, that means once the panel has generated $1k in electricity, it has recouped all the carbon output. Because the alternative to $1k in burning coal to make a solar panel is $1k in burning coal for electricity.
Solar takes 10 years to break even and lasts a minimum of 20 years. And 20 years it hasn’t stopped working but is only outputting at worst 80% less power. There are 40 year old panels outputting 80% of what they did when new.
Can you clarify how the recycling works? We had BP solar panels and after 6-7 years they all cracked (the crystalline silicon couldn’t handle the sun or heat) and stopped working
If they cracked, your installer may have fucked up. You need to leave a gap between panels because they expand with humidity and heat, kinda like flooring.
They were installed correctly and BP said they were faulty. They offered to replace them if an NDA was signed
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It’s kind of a ridiculous “problem” with easy fixes, that are long known.
There’s high demand on Hydrogen. It’s fairly easy to produce Hydrogen via electrolysis (storage/logistics is another issue, but that is also true for blue hydrogen…). It could also be processed further to Methane or even Gas for cars…
If there’s a will…
This is actually a solid use case for crypto mining. When supply outstrips demand, turn your excess solar power wattage into crypto instead of feeding it into the grid. 100% green, and helps stabilize the power grid to boot if you do it right.
yeah the only downside with crypto is that it has absolutely 0 meaningful use cases AFAIK and also it does not only consume energy but also requires computer chips which are also expensive to produce. (wait, that was two downsides)
Don’t worry, there are literally startups, and Elon Musk, working right now to block sunlight from you and sell it back to you.
They’ve found the same is true for the wind, that the oil robbers can’t own that either… I think Maria may own the wind… I’m not sure. They call it that… the wind, that is.
Here’s the article this is responding to if anyone wants to read it. Here’s the study it’s reporting on.
I’d say the tweet is at least a little bit disingenuous because the article is not arguing against the adoption of solar power, rather the focus is on what the challenges to California’s solar goals are and what possible solutions might be. The tone is “economic constraints might slow down solar, how can that be addressed?” This is all from 2021, and it looks like since then the slowdown in solar capacity increase it cites as a concern has not materialized, still lots of consistent growth since then. I haven’t read enough to know whether this is because the study was wrong somehow, or that it’s premise that solar installation costs might not continue to drop just didn’t pan out, or that the increased subsidies it suggested came through, but it’s an interesting topic.
It’s colosally stupid to tie solar power generation to It’s economic value. We are quickly heading to a future with climate extremes without doing something different.
Well there is one problem with negative electricity prices though. It’s that you’re gonna have to pay to produce electricity, charge batteries you might not have, or disconnect from the grid. I suspect fancy new inverters allow doing the latter automatically, but people with older setups will have to either do it manually by the hour when prices go negative, or upgrade their setup.
Good news is that negative electricity prices also apply to fossil fuels so there’s incentive to reduce production there too.
Here is an idea.
What if we do something becsuse its a net food, and who cares if there is a positive or negative price because tying everything ever to monitary value is cancer on society.
The reason the price goes negative is that there’s too much electricity being produced and not enough being used. The grid isn’t a magical electricity sink. Things will break if the frequency raises too much due to overvoltage. I hate money and capitalism as much as the next guy here, but this dynamic is based on material realities, not market scheming.
Okay but you’re still free to do that. Put up solar panels and PAY for the privilege of producing electricity when there’s not enough demand.
If you do it on a large enough scale, you can probably bankrupt some coal plants or something.
It’s not stupid to acknowledge that individuals and businesses make decisions on the basis of money. That isn’t the same thing as giving climate concerns a lower relative priority. You can have climate as your highest priority, and still pursue that priority much more effectively by considering financial incentives and their effects, and to me that is what this article and connected study seem to be doing.
Nothing matters if the planet is nearly uninhabitable.
I’m not sure what your point is
Im saying its insane to worry about the economy when we are facing down making parts of the earth uninhabitable.
I see, but I’m saying that nobody is worrying about the economy here except as a means to make sure more solar power is deployed, in service of not making parts of the earth uninhabitable, and I don’t see how there could be an objection to that.
Because we aren’t deploying it enough, because we are entertaining a return to coal or and fighting wars over oil still.
When we should be converting to solar and wind, reguardless of cost or return on investment.
When the last tree has fallen and the rivers are poisoned, you cannot eat money.
You are missing the point. Why have you, RamenJunkie not personally set up enough solar panels to provide everyone with all the energy they need? You can’t afford it? Well, surely there must be a bank somewhere that would loan you the money. All that electricity would be really valuable. Oh, the bank doesn’t think the economics make sense.
One way or another the economic problems need to be addressed and, in order to do that, they must first be acknowledged and understood. That’s what the article was trying to do. You can’t just sweep it under the rug and figure some sucker will pay for it for the rest of us.
If the private sector can’t handle it then the government should do it, preferably with bull shit war machine funds, and provide it to the populace.
And you don’t think some kind of economic analysis is necessary before deciding if the private sector can “handle it” or exactly how the government can beat interveine?
You’re not exactly wrong about anything, but understanding exactly how the economics break down is important, regardless of how we break down responsibility between the public and private sectors.
Of course this is all academic when the country elects Republicans and the Democrats keep nominating neoliberals. At least with a private marketplace solution it wouldn’t get shredded the moment Republicans win power.
I mean, we have had like a decade or more now to prove out that the private sector can’t handle converting society to solar.
My unscientific personal experience answer to your last paragraph’s question:
The study didn’t anticipate that California power companies would be so unbelievably corrupt and that the price of electricity would nearly double since 2021. We pay $.40-$.60/kWh while the national average is like $.12-$.16 so us Californians are willing to do literally anything to get away from the PG&E cartel. There is supposed to be a governing body that reins in the prices but it’s controlled by the Governor. In this case that’s Gavin Newsom who just happens to own hundreds of millions worth of shares in the utility companies….🤔
Solar panels costs continued to drop. A bit slower, but still. https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication/2025/Jul/IRENA_TEC_RPGC_in_2024_2025.pdf#p91
