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Is there a reason the electrical plants don't short / burn off their excess electricity rather than paying consumers to use it?
by rusbus 11y ago
Is there a reason the electrical plants don't short / burn off their excess electricity rather than paying consumers to use it?
- gizmo686 11y agoThe same reason people do not take their own trash to the dump, it is cheaper for electrical plants to outsource the wasting of electricity.
- michaelt 11y agoPresumably in a wind turbine you can adjust the pitch of the blades and bring the rotor to a stop. I agree that in the case of a nuclear power plant it's hard to stop generating power if the price goes negative - but if there were no subsidy presumably wind generators could switch off easily if they wanted to.
- cperciva 11y agoFor conventional electrical generation, because disposing of large amounts of power safely is more expensive than dumping it onto the grid. For wind power, because wasting the power before it hits the grid would result in them not getting their federal green energy subsidy.
- lmm 11y agoAt the scale we're talking about it's not trivial - the sheer amount of energy you're dumping has to go somewhere, probably turning into heat one way or the other.
- zhte415 11y agoIt would be interesting if this could be linked with hydro, and use -ve price points to pump water into reservoirs that can release power a short notice via hydro within a few minutes of demand. Then refill at -ve price points. Using wind and gravity to make money.
- improv32 11y agoLot's of people do this, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...