Solar will get too cheap to connect to the power grid

> When there’s enough surplus energy supply from renewables, prices can even go negative. That's great news for consumers - who get paid to use energy - but it's bad news for renewable generators.

That isn't correct, it is just bad news for everyone. Sure if there was a sustainable deal that offered negative prices that'd be good, but in this case it just means the prices when positive will have to go up to cover the overall profits of the energy producers. Negative prices represent waste and it is quite unusual for waste to be good for consumers.

Although this is a minor point. The solar revolution is pretty exciting.

Solar PV is probably the technology best suited to avoiding negative grid prices, if that is your goal.

It's sad that this scientific/engineering fact has been lost in the race to make dramatic headlines and climate denial propaganda.

Here we see it repeated by someone who seems genuinely positive about solar PV.

Basically, you need to shut off energy supply quickly and efficiently when demand drops. Anything with a giant spinning mass involved fails this test. If they have to keep steam hot they fail it even more. (Not to go on a tangent but this fast response is what the initial grid batteries have been getting paid for)

Of course, demand response systems have for decades paid people to shift demand towards the periods of cheap and/or clean energy because it is financially beneficial to the system. Any need that is met slightly earlier or later does not need to be met with more expensive and/or dirtier fuels. A simple system optimisation.

Apply that to a predictable supply of cheap clean energy in a market based system and suddenly you have the "problem" of people being incentivised with money to use energy when it is available.

What a tragedy, who will save us from this cheap clean energy that is going to destroy the grid with the evil magic of negative numbers.

Where I live, the major consumer of power is cooling. I want to build an underground pool, that each day, during solar peak, I use the excess energy to freeze the water. Then during the evening, use that ice block to cool my house - with only grid power (or battery) required to pump the coolant. It seems like this would be a much cheaper solution than tesla power packs, but doesn’t appear that I can buy this system off the shelf.

> When there’s enough surplus energy supply from renewables, prices can even go negative.

Why would prices go negative, when you can just cut off the solar plant from the grid if prices go <= 0?

So how are we going to get to that lovely dream when the power companies are now charging you to deliver your power bank. It's nice buying batteries, but if you are not making savings with solar then there's not a lot of money left over to spend even more on batteries. Likely then, there will be some new tax that the government doesn't curve.

In the Netherlands, they have a law that means that what you generate has to be offset against what you produce (In high level), but the energy companies simply started charging for delivering back, which is in effect simply bypassing the law. The obvious response from this would be to ban it because it's an obvious flaunting of the law. But no, the politicians allow it.

And then we have that Belgium politician a few years ago who, despite the urgency from global warming, thought it would be smart to put extra taxes on buying solar from China. What did he achieve? At best a little more destruction for the planet.

How many gallons of water can you desalinate and pump if you only operate during the magic lump? How much sewage can you treat?

Seems like there would be a big demand to let EV’s connect to the grid. They can buy and sell electricity to even out demand.

> Solar PV is the only way to make electricity with no moving parts

RTG

Optimistic articles like this makes gives me a bit of hope that maybe we can start cutting down on current trend of increased total subsidies for the energy sector. Taking a European perspective like the article, subsidies are around €200 billions per year, and €400 billions in 2022 if we account for interventions during the energy crisis of that year. As much as the trend of solar prices is going downwards, the trend of subsidies are pointing upwards with an alarming speed and consistency.

An other big part of government funded energy sector is the reserve energy strategy, generally made by paying natural gas power plants to be on stand-by. A major part of "connection grid" taxes goes directly to pay for those fossil fueled power plants. Rather than expanding the capacity and building new such fossil fueled thermal power plants, existing ones should be under planned obsolescence and be demolished when they reach their end of life. The increased dependency on natural gas is also having an impossible to ignore effect on the geopolitical climate in Europe.

https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/32d...

In all its excitement this post just glosses over one major point that grid operators know very well: demand == supply for every 50th or 60th of each second of every day.

Renewables like solar that can not be modulated are a PITA for grid safety as those plants that instead can, such as coal and gas, then need to scale for solar suddenly dumping energy into the grid.

Day-before markets exists for this sole reason.

I'd like to know how much space all these battery and solar farms are going to take up. Where I live in SE England they seem to be trying to take productive agricultural fields out of use to cover them with solar panels.

How does space usage compare against nuclear plants?

[And yes I realise some portion of solar will be domestic, but that's not always allowed if your house is listed].

What cost is involved in moving electricity around? The sun is always shining somewhere.

The negative prices also encourage grid- and home-scale storage. Buy low, sell peak. We make a pile of cash more than we spend in summer on energy and really take the edge off winter.

Storage is the only answer to an abundance of solar and wind. We can't just bitch and moan that there's too too much at peak gen because we need all this power. We just sinks to catch up with generation. Install more in-home batteries, more water heaters, and make EV charging omnipresent (and more reflective of wholesale prices). Early adopters get more beneficial rates to offset higher outlays. The market is working as it should.

Is SAF produced from electricity alone is a real thing at all, at any significant scale (say is there enough of it produced worldwide to fuel a single 737 once daily)?

A wild thought just hit me: if batteries and solar get cheap enough, could the power grid as we know it become at least partially obsolete?

The power grid is the greatest machine ever built by humans. It's gigantic, elaborate, amazingly reliable, and civilization as we know it would collapse without it. It's so ubiquitous that it's hard to imagine it not being here save in a "Mad Max" or "The Road" type collapse scenario.

It makes me think of this link that was posted here a bit ago:

http://cityinfrastructure.com/single.php?d=RuralOutsidePlant...

The analog "POTS" (plain old telephone system) would have seemed like the power grid to me as a kid and a teenager. It seemed that way up until the 2000s when the runaway growth of packet switching digital networks and cellular rendered it completely obsolete. It's been a while since I've even seen a POTS phone line.

Could the power grid be reduced to something you only see in big cities and industrial areas where you have tons of demand? Could it eventually go away entirely, or go away "as we know it" in favor of a bunch of lateral load-sharing links between independent mini power plants?

It's interesting to think about.

It’s weird to think about if solar is cheaper than building materials like fence panels or pavers.

Do we have storage AC for homes yet?

What does it mean when he says there's huge grid connection queue? Capacity built but cannot be used at all?!

Any idea how China is solving this, if at all? Guess their problem will be even bigger?

For some types of e.g. compute heavy workloads, you could also move jobs to wherever the sun shines. I wonder if anyone is already doing this...

So we get batteries and sell the power back at night?

Sounds like a solution to two problems to me

A reminder pricing in electricity supply is not a good in itself, its a mechanistic approach based on (in my opinion) flawed economics around the "best" way to deliver a public utility function.

Nearly choked on my cornflakes at this:

> The solar panel is wizardry manifest. It literally prints energy from free shit that falls out of the sky.

this is why nuclear doesnt add up.. the cheapness of solar power during the day makes the investment in nuvlear just so much more expensive and harder to justify.

Bro. Batteries.

Bitcoin mining could be the solution