Sometimes we create our own problems.

It's a very capitalist way of thinking about the problem, but what "negative prices" actually means in this case is that the grid is over-energised. That's a genuine engineering issue which would take considerable effort to deal with without exploding transformers or setting fire to power stations

In fairness, capitalist expansion is predicated on generating and reinvesting profit. If you build an array of solar panels and generate a revenue less than the installation+maintenance cost of the panels, you don't have any more money to buy new panels and expand the grid.

That is, under a privatized system, anyway. If you're a public utility and your goal is to meet a demand quota rather than raise revenue for the next round of expansion, profit isn't your concern. You're looking for the lowest possible installation/maintenance/replacement cost over the lifetime of the system, not the high margins per unit installed.

Incidentally, this is why vertically integrated private firms that consider electricity an expense rather than a profit center have been aggressively rolling out their own privately managed solar/wind arrays. When the concern is minimizing cost rather than maximizing revenue, and you can adjust your rate of consumption to match the peak productive capacity of your grid, then solar/wind is incredibly efficient.

It's how capitalists think about land, water, air, etc.

... And violently attacking people by depriving them of these needs.

thats why Westinghouse had to crush Nikolai Tesla. you can't meter wireless power.

Also, fwiw, you can curtail wind turbines incredibly quickly. They're the quickest moving assets on an electrical grid typically. So you are using them to balance the grid quite often. You can just pitch the blades a bit and they slow or stop. it's not really a tech problem, but a financial one like you said.

I'm not sure much about solar curtailment, other than the fact that they receive curtailment requests and comply quite quickly as well.

Nice comment! Thanks.

I see this posted a lot as if this is an issue with capitalism. No, this is what happens when you have to deal with maintaining the power grid using capitalism as a tool.

The framing of it as the problem being that the price is going down rather than that excess power is feeding into the grid is what makes it an issue with capitalism. The thing you should be questioning is why MIT Technology Review is talking about some consequence of the problem that only exists because of capitalism instead of talking about the problem itself.

And before you downvote/object with some knee-jerk reaction that I'm being pedantic, consider this alternative way of framing it:

The opportunity is that solar panels create lots of electricity in the middle of sunny days, frequently more than what's currently required, so it is necessary to develop new flexible sources of demand so that the excess energy doesn't damage the power grid.

That's pretty vastly different, isn't it?

Just to be clear this can't be solved with storage. Currently it can be but not permanently.

For ease of argument let's say the grid runs 100% on solar with batteries that last a day. For 100% solar you need to build power for when demand is highest, winter, and supply is lowest also winter. Come summer demand is lowest and supply is highest. You can't store all that energy in summer because you got fuck all to do with it.

It's a really weird cost saving exercise but basically when supply is massively abundant it has to be wasted. No one is going to build that final battery that is only used for 1 day every 10 years.

Bringing it all together. In a 100% renewables grid with solar, wind, hydro and batteries a lot of electricity will be wasted and it will be the cheapest way to do it. Cheaper than now.

Quite a few people talk about this on youtube. Tony Seba and rethinkx is the best place to start in my opinion.

I can't ragebait if you people are being logical 😒

This is a problem that can be solved with storage. But storage is expensive and takes time to construct.

true. thing is, they've seen it coming for a decade, and knew it needed to happen. It shames me that we're just now trying to pick up the storage side when we've had ample evidence the need was growing rapidly.

Then tell me why the mechanism to control production via the solar panels themselves hasn't been implemented? I've seen several viable options, including covers that are manual or even automated and powered by the excess energy...

Capitalism does solve it. Eventually. It takes the information in steps and gets to a solution that experts were talking about decades before. This is not a good way to do things.

It tends to overinvest in the thing that has the most immediate ROI. That's been solar. Wind/water/storage/long distance distribution are all important pieces of this, too, and this has been known in climate and civil engineering fields for a while. Solar can't do it all by itself.

A sensible system would even out the investment in each. The wind often blows when the sun isn't shining, so you don't need as much storage to do the in between parts. Water not only provides an easily adjustable baseload (nuclear does not adjust very well), but it also doubles as storage. In fact, if we could link up all the hydro dams we already have to long distance transmission, we wouldn't need any other storage. Though that isn't necessarily the most efficient method, either.

What capitalism does is invest in solar, find that causes negative prices, and then invest in the next best ROI to solve that. Perhaps it's storage. That results in a lot more storage than would otherwise be needed than if wind/water/long distance distribution were done alongside it. Or maybe the next best ROI is wind, but there are still lulls lacking in both sun and wind--as well as periods where you have too much of both--so you still need storage.

And what capitalism really doesn't want to do long distance transmission. It's not just big, but it's horizontal construction. That means rights to the whole route have to be purchased. It means environmental concerns along the entire route have to be thought out. It means soil has to be tested for stability and footings made to suit for the entire route. Capitalism almost has to be beaten into submission for anyone to build anything horizontally. (See also: trains and highway systems, both of which came with substantial government investment and incentives).

Something catches fire lol what, as if they can't just disconnect the solar cells if they run out of batteries

But it doesn't say "it can generate too much energy and damage infrastructure", they said "it can drive the price down". The words they chose aren't, like, an accident waiting for someone to explain post-hoc. Like, absolutely we need storage for exactly the reason you say, but they are directly saying the issue is driving the price down, which is only an issue if your not able to imagine a way to create this infrastructure without profit motive.

Except the grid overload thing isn't even an issue with renewables, since wind can be shut down in a matter of 1-5 minutes (move them out of the wind) and solar literally just be disabled. Any overload they produce would be due to mechanical failure, where you can cut them off the grid since they're in the process of destroying themselves anyway (like in those videos where wind turbines fail spectacularly). Otherwise renewables are perfect to regulate the grid if available.

In a hypothetical grid with an absolute majority of many badly adjustable power sources (like nuclear) you'd have to work with negative prices to entice building large on-demand consumers or battery solutions. So far nobody was stupid enough to build a grid like this though.

tl;dr, this whole problem indeed is about economics and therefore may very well be a "capitalism thing". Renewables do not overload the grid.

I feel like having a colossal battery pack could help with that problem.

Yep, and the cost difference between those times should make this very cost effective.

negative prices aren’t some weird “capitalism” thing.

lmao.

Supply side Jesus says put your faith in the wisdom of the CEO.

Nah, lets squash capitalism first.

A big flaw in German energy policy that has done a great job in expanding renewables, includes not giving its industry variable rates, that lets them invest in batteries, and schedule production more seasonally, or if they have reduced demand due to high product prices from high energy costs, just have work on the good days.

Using EVs as grid balancers can be an extra profit center for EV owners with or without home solar. Ultra cheap retail daytime rates is the best path to demand shifting. Home solar best path to removing transmission bottlenecks for other customers. Containerized batteries and hydrogen electrolysis as a service is a tariff exempt path at moving storage/surplus management throughout the world for seasonal variations, but significantly expanding renewables capacity without risking negative pricing, and making evening/night energy cheaper to boot.

In other words… Maybe 29 word Twitter captions aren’t a great way to discuss issues?

I do like how this Twitter account, in the rush to blame capitalism, overlooked the fact that the sun rises and sets every day.

I've known about the issue with a lack of ways to store the energy produced for about 5 years now, does it seem like we're making any steps in it recently? Also how does it work in a "green" fashion to produce all of the batteries necessary for that sorts of energy storage, I feel like that's going to be one of the next discussions about how "pure" this method is.

Without reading the article, I could already see what the problem was.

Unless you have capital to invest, you can't expand or improve the power grid. That capital can either come from the gov't--through taxation--or from private industry. If you, personally, have enough capital to do so, you can build a fully off-grid system, so that you aren't dependent on anyone else. But then if shit happens, you also can't get help from anyone else. (Also, most houses in urban areas do not have enough square feet of exposure to the sun to generate all of their own power.)

Fundamentally, this is a problem that can only be solved by regulation, and regulation is being gutted across the board in the US.

Negative prices are only mentioned in passing, as a very rare phenomenon

Negative prices are occurring more and more frequently. The cause is baseload generation: it can't be dialed back as quickly as solar increases during the day, and it can't be ramped up as fast as solar falls off in the evening. The baseload generators have to stay on line to meet overnight demand. Because they can't be adjusted fast enough to match the demand curve, they have to stay online during the day as well.

The immediate solution is to back down the baseload generators, and rely more on peaker plants, which can match the curve.

The longer term solution is to remove the incentives that drive overnight consumption. Stop incentivizing "off peak" consumption, and instead push large industrial consumers to daytime operation.

We need more military! Cut social security!

Why not do something with all that power?

This is a relatively new problem, so it will take awhile for the market to respond to make industries optimized to take advantage of this.

I saw an article a few months ago (couldn't find it quickly just now) about a small manufacturing company (metals maybe?) that set up shop specifically to run during the excess power events. So its starting to happen, but its not going to be a perfect fit. It means spending lots up front for infra, but only being able to use it a few hours a day cost effectively.

In the past there were some projects where they pumped water upstream when there was too much power on the grid. Then on low energy times, the water was released making energy again.

This is already done with pump hydro. But this needs existing hydroelectric infrastructure to take advantage of. Even then there are usually holding ponds upstream and they themselves have limited capacity.

Or make hydrogen (I think it was hydrogen).

This is being done too at small scales right now. There's difficulties with it. Hydrogen really sucks to try store and transport. The H2 molecule is so small it leaks out through valves and gaskets that are fine for containing nearly all other gases and liquids. So this means the gear needed is hugely more expensive up front. What a few are doing is using the hydrogen to quickly make Ammonia (NH3), which is much easier to store and contain. However, the efforts doing this are still fairly small.

Or do AI stuff

AI aside, this is one place I haven't seen develop yet. That being: cheaper compute costs during excess power events.

I suspect its the same problem for the manufacturing. It means spending money on expensive compute infrastructure but only able to use it during the excess power events. As in, the compute in place is already running flat out at full capacity all the time. There's no spare hardware to use the excess power. If you had spare hardware, you'd add it to your fleet and run it 24/7 making more money.

Or use it on large scale computing for protein folding simulations, or something.

And yeah, gravity batteries is the best I think we have, with water being the most common medium with pumped-storage hydroelectricity. But the scales of the things are kind of incongruent and... Autoincorrect actually got it right trying to correct that to inconvenient. Still really cool. I think we may need some innovations to cut down on scale issues though. Although it looks like the total power storage available is about one day worth of power for the US in PSH, I'm curious if the instantaneous output is sufficient for the grid and how spread out the storage locations are, as I somewhat doubt they're often in flatter regions. All in all, I'm not a power engineer, I just know a few and I should bug them sometime.

We still have hydroelectric turbines that can reverse themselves to pump water to a higher elevation reservoir to store surplus energy. We call them pump-gens at my job. The problem is that, as nearby areas develop, that water gets reserved for other things, so they can't pump it back up because it's needed further downstream for irrigation or communities or whatever.

Some hobbyists turn up the set point on their electric water heater to store the power as domestic hot water.

Why not do something with all that power?

Because profits are a result of deprivation not progress.

Isn't it easier just to cover solar panels with reflective material, so they stop producing energy?

See also: Solutions for capitalism are problems for humanity

I guess the biggest bottleneck for renewables is energy storage.

Story of 2010s Germany as well.

Ya I'm not an engineer at all so I'm not sure how hard it is to store that much power but that always seemed like a good idea. Even for electric cars, if we designed a universal battery pack good for a few hundred kilometres that we could swap out at recharge stations I feel like that would be a smart way to do things. But again I have no idea if thats feasible or how it would be implemented.

Agreed. It's framed incorrectly, but the real problem is the "duck curve," the time disparity between peak generation and peak consumption. Pumped hydro, battery storage, electrolysis, and mechanical storage are all options, but each has its own constraints. Ultimately, though, it's an engineering problem with viable solutions. We just need the political will for the investment.

Distributed rooftop solar is the worst way to use our grid. It's designed to pump a lot of power from a single place to a lot of little places. The opposite doesn't work very well.

The solution is to not focus on solar by itself. Solar/wind/water/storage/long distance transmission need to be balanced with each other. Each has strengths and weaknesses that cover for the strengths and weaknesses of the others.

The actual issue, as stated in the original article is value deflation, aka investors not making enough money to justify energy transition to a timeline where humanity still exists in 100 years. Decoupling the issue from the political and economic aspect is disingenuous at best.

It’s called a connection fee that is levied whether or not you used any energy that month. Those fees will likely go up to make up for decreased energy distribution revenue.

All/almost all net metering plans will still charge access and/or infrastructure fees.

Here in Belgium, the component related to power generation is only about one fifth of the residential power bill.

Most are (1) connection costs (what you describe), (2) taxes, (3) subsidies for solar and wind to replace gas power generation, and (4) since 2 years, subsidies for gas power generation for when there's too little solar and wind.

Those flywheels are already being installed right now

https://www.neso.energy/news/first-phase-stability-pathfinders-delivered

I got you.

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

Economists have long forgotten that society has been around a hell of a lot longer than capitalism.

The capitalist class?

How do you heat water?

Capitalism isn't "when people get paid for working." And people getting paid for doing a job isn't the problem highlighted in this post. In any case, there are any number of ways people might be motivated to do something useful.

Historically, people have worked due to real scarcity in order to meet their basic survival needs. We don't face such scarcity in the modern, developed world.

I've often conceptualized UBI or other such schemes (e.g. negative income tax) to provide a basic, spartan standard of living. If you want luxury, you need to work for it. Of course what constitutes "luxury" might fluctuate over time. And in times of greater abundance, UBI might be more generous while being scaled back in times of scarcity. If too many people opt out of working and only collect UBI, then real scarcity may indeed become and issue requiring such programs to be reduced.

But the point here is that we produce FAR more than what people actually need. This "must work and produce for the sake of it" leads to a lot of make-work in the form of things like artificial scarcity, planned obsolescence, or people producing and selling solutions in search of problems. The amount of actual fucking trash produced is mind-boggling. Something like fast fashion that produces low quality apparel only intended to be worn a few times has an enormous impact on our environment.

Imagine a world where we worked towards quality and making sure that actual needs were being met rather than being fixated on highest profitability at the exclusion of everything else. A more collaborative society instead of a hyper-competitive "winner take all" freak show.

The same way arts and crafts were invented - humans want to do things whenever they aren't stressed out of their minds.