13 ms·

Rooftop solar power may be flooding the grid

55 points by prostoalex 8y ago

baud147258 8y ago
So solar power is irregular and has a peak production (mid day) far from peak consumption (start and end of business day)? News at eleven, water is wet and all that... edit: I should have said irregular through the day.
- aligibbs 8y ago
  Solar power is not irregular at all, and is entirely predictable with a weather forecast. Unless Australia has an entirely different usage pattern to the rest of the developed world- businesses are perfectly aligned to use the solar power generated during the peak.
  - baud147258 8y ago
    From the article: "the growing peak demand that comes at the end of the day, as the sun sets.". So the solar production of electricity peaks earlier than the end-of-day consumption peak.
    - c12 8y ago
      There is a company in Australia that have improved flow batteries technology to the point where it can be miniaturised down to the size of a fridge freezer (previously they were the size of shipping containers) ten shipping containers full of them are able to store 3.2 megawatt-hours of energy and discharge a megawatt of power for over three to four hours which is roughly enough to keep 500-600 average homes going for the afternoon during the end of day consumption peak. They are perfectly suited to be paired with solar/wind/etc where they can store up the days usage and discharge at a regular rate throughout the evening peak when generation is reduced. And as for reliability, unlike lithium-ion, flow batteries can last for 20+ years with unlimited cycles.
      - robkop 8y ago
        I assume you are taking about red-flow? I head about them several years ago but haven't seen much since. Do they have the scale/ pricing to sell to the average consumer yet?
        c12 8y ago
        I am indeed. I think they got some press coverage three or four years ago. I personally discovered them by watching a documentary on YouTube that featured their technology and discussed its future. I know that they recently raised some capital to invest in increasing sales. However I think a large proportion of their target market are grid scale and remote outposts for telecommunications/industrial applications. That could be because their residential solution still cant beat something like the Tesla powerwall on price. However, I believe when investing in something that you expect to have longevity in the 20-30 years range it's better to go with something a little more pricey that is proven to last that long without degrading of performance, so on that point the flow battery wins. It's like with solar panels, you can pay a premium upfront and get panels that will be producing the same output in ten years time like my parents did, or skimp on price and end up with a 30-40% reduction over the same time period like their neighbour.
    - aligibbs 8y ago
      Sure, there is an evening peak when people get home and start cooking/turning on their homes etc- which can't really be offset with solar (without using storage, battery/hydro). Doesn't negate the fact that solar generation pretty much perfectly matches business usage.
- usrusr 8y ago
  "water is wet and all that..." ...and it's a very good energy store when much of your energy demand is for heating/cooling with target temperatures in the "habitable zone". The only real challenge (but a big one) is getting the incentive structures right so that they are not "hacked" (e.g. pretending to be a dispatchable consumer at high supply but actually just switching to the conventionally billed socket at times of high demand) and keep inevitable oversteering/pork cycle within a reasonable margin.
Angostura 8y ago
An interesting alternative to battery storage opened in the UK this week - liquified air energy storage. I wonder if this may be helpful. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jun/05/pioneering-liquid-air-project-can-help-store-excess-electricity https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jun/05/pioneering-...
- CaliforniaKarl 8y ago
  There’s also places like Dinorwig: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/16/geeks_guide_electric_mountain/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/16/geeks_guide_electri...
  - Angostura 8y ago
    Absolutely. The advantage of the liquified air approach is that you don't need a handy mountain. You could pop storage into city infrastructure quite easily.
  - Arnt 8y ago
    You may have seen some of these balloons appear here and there, too: https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=Biogasanlage https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=Biogasanlage Having now read the wikipedia article, I see that my answer to my youngest daughter was much too simple. "Daddy, what's that?" "That white balloon next to the barn? It's full of cow fart. The cows in the barn fart, the farmer keeps the fart in the balloon and then burns it to make electricity when people need lots of electricity". According to Wikpedia it's a little more complex. But I like the simple version better. Whatever the source, it's gas the farmer can burn whenever the spot price for electricity is high.
- D_Alex 8y ago
  >liquified air energy storage. I wonder if this may be helpful. Let me answer this: No, it would not be helpful, because on pretty much all metrics (capital and operating costs, efficiency, flexibility, size etc) this technology is way worse than battery storage. Unfortunately - today - a lot of money which could be sensibly used deploying cost effective technology such as solar and wind power (and to a lesser extent battery storage) is wasted pursuing fundamentally flawed concepts (such as compressed air energy storage, and now this liquified air), which have no chance of being competitive .
CaliforniaKarl 8y ago
Reading this article, the first thing I wondered was, what does Australia have in terms of peaking power plants, which can come online—and, just as important, safely go offline—quickly to stabilize grid voltage? The second thing I was wondering is, where are the bitcoin miners? Assuming electricity prices are not being held artificially high, then when they start to come down, miners will start coming in. In fact, I could envision a two-tier pricing model, similar to what is used for EV charging. Combine that with something like Zellweger ripple signaling, and the grid would have a way to tell miners (et al) “Hey, we have excess, were reducing the rate so start mining!”
- ImaCake 8y ago
  Australia has some of the most expensive electricity in the world. There are no bitcoin miners of any size here. The electricity problems we are facing are pure corruption and negligence. Solar isn't the problem, its the lack of funding and poorly weighted energy markets that are crippling Australia's grid.
  - roenxi 8y ago
    Solar isn't the problem, but the renewables situation is related. We had a Labor government with the Greens holding a balance of power from ~2010 to ~2013. The Labor party had, I believe, been opposed to a carbon tax up until that point. Then, likely because of pressure from the Greens, introduced a carbon tax. The lesson there will not have been lost on big investors. If anyone invests in fossil fuel generation (ie, the economic option) then the Greens will find a way to destroy their profit margins at some point in the next decade. And so, little serious investment in the energy sector seems to be taking place. I'm not aware of any big developments planned except an interesting hydropower project by the current government and creeping smaller-scale wind and solar as prices rise and justify their existence.
    - henearkr 8y ago
      Following your reasonning, there is no reason why investors should shy away from renewables. The Greens would not harm any project of additional large scale batteries, for example.
pixelpoet 8y ago
Use the power for crypto mining (while it's still based on hashing), use returns for energy storage infrastructure.
- stephen_g 8y ago
  Better just to use it for aluminium smelting or some other productive purpose instead...
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
Interesting. In Australia do people regularly install rooftop solar installations without also installing battery units? What's the logic there? Just selling it to the grid?
- stephen_g 8y ago
  Yeah, we had extremely generous feed-in tariffs for a while. It's generally net-metering too so pretty good value, even as the prices have come down. We have no shortage of sun most places, so it's pretty easy to almost wipe out your entire bill (except for the service/distribution fees, which have gone up a lot over the last few years, I guess to combat that).
  - sjwright 8y ago
    A very relevant YouTube video from Dave at EEVBlog, where he goes through the numbers for his five year old solar installation, to see whether it has paid for itself. He also does hypothetical modelling of adding a battery, which proves to not be financially compelling at all. https://youtu.be/aQQE8V9NBXw https://youtu.be/aQQE8V9NBXw
    - John_KZ 8y ago
      This is because those "environmentalist" laws weren't created to satisfying national energy demand, but only the people's desire to roleplay environment-savers and get paid for it. Similar government schemes played out in much of Europe. Install subsidized solar panels, and the government/electricity companies have to buy your electricity at unsustainably high prices whenever you produce it, regardless if they need it/can handle it. Obviously, as far as I know, this didn't last very long, especially in the countries with more limited budgets. Eventually the sale prices dropped close to normal wholesale electricity prices and the subsidies were dropped. Those who installed the panels late in the bubble probably got out with a loss. It was just a terrible idea all around. The grid isn't made for distributed production, energy storage isn't solved, and solar electricity is just not sustainable as rooftop photovoltaics.
- 8y ago
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decentralised 8y ago
Good opportunity to mine cryptocurrencies. edit: https://cointelegraph.com/news/even-with-energy-surplus-canada-unable-to-meet-electricity-demands-of-bitcoin-miners https://cointelegraph.com/news/even-with-energy-surplus-cana...
jlebrech 8y ago
home appliances should be aware of the home's solar panels somehow. you could fill a washing machine and have it wait a few days and turn on if the solar panels are at full usage. other things could operate at peak hours (dishwasher) you could also pump water into a silo when it's bright outside.
- t0liman 8y ago
  >home appliances should be aware You mean IoT installed into wallplugs and whitegoods appliances, pool pumps, heaters, washers, heat pumps/air conditioners, hot water systems, etc. Yeah. If there was only an IoT standard that worked to allow for usage to be monitored and devices to be switched on/off in a standard way ... sure. There are "appliances" like HomeAssistant.io and OpenHAB and Domoticz out there to micro-manage these peripheral home devices and monitor consumption/excess/PV generation, and rulesets that can trigger responses and excess/egress of energy, but it's too complex for the Inverter/Solar managers to take care of usually.
  - jlebrech 8y ago
    it's better to spend the energy directly than to sell it cheap now and buy it expensive later.
  - usrusr 8y ago
    As long as feed-in tariffs are artificially high (e.g. anything not noticeably below 1:1), neither xkcd:927 nor total absence of standards are what is keeping solar-aware consumption from happening. PS: I absolutely don't want the subsidies to go away, I want them restructured into better subsidies that do not nullify other important incentives.
carreau 8y ago
"Monitor electricity 3600 times a second" in the video seem wrong, as AC is usually 50 to 60 HZ that would be measuring the consumption 60 to 72 times per period which does not really make sens. It's likely 3600/hour or 1/seconds. Immediately make me doubt the quality of the research. Edit: DC -> AC. was tired.
- rabidrat 8y ago
  *AC is 50 to 60Hz (DC does not alternate). Also I can see how it's possible that electrical fluctuations could happen at a higher rate than the utility frequency. 3600 Hz does seem like a lot though.
  - carreau 8y ago
    Oops. Fixed AC/DC. I know better. 3600Hz seem also quite a weird number while 3600 time an hour ends up being exactly once a second.
- 0ld 8y ago
  > DC is usually 50 to 60 HZ Immediately make me doubt the quality of the comment
  - carreau 8y ago
    Sorry meant AC, got things mixed up in my head with solar beeing DC.
- setquk 8y ago
  3600 times a second is reasonable if you want to calculate true RMS values at 50/60Hz. This is almost required as well as most inverter and supply waveforms are far from sinusoids.
- donquichotte 8y ago
  If you have distorted currents and voltages, you need to do this. 3.6kHz sampling captures harmonics up to 1.8kHz, which is the 36th harmonic. Power is 1/T \int_0^T U(t)*I(t)dt for periodic signals with period T, and if current and voltage cannot be assumed to be sinusoidal, faster sampling is needed.
D_Alex 8y ago
Please note that there are powerful lobby groups in Australia that have interests in fossil fuel businesses and promote journalism that exaggerates problems with renewable energy. Eg see this: http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/climate-change-communication/files/2013/09/Newspaper-reporting-of-South-Australian-mid-latitude-cyclone-2016.pdf http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/climate-change-communication...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- theshadowknows 8y ago
  I thought exactly the same thing. It looks like the power companies want to have more control over individual homes’ solar panels and they are inventing a “crisis” as a way to do it.
- ThomPete 8y ago
  Just as there are powerful interest in solar and wind. Edit: To the downvoters. What are you disagreeing with? Are you claiming that the wind and solar industry doesn't have special interest and that they aren't powerful especially when you look at the support it has politically?
  - pjc50 8y ago
    People are generally familiar with the self-interest of the fossil industry, but you seem to be saying that everyone who supports renewables is also in it for the money? Without evidence?
    - ThomPete 8y ago
      What do you want evidence for? Are you saying that those who invest in solar or wind do not have a self-interest in what they invested in. That seems to be a much bigger claim that the very obvious that any investment you make you have a self interest in. Climate gate should have made it quite obvious that no one is excempt from bias. Thomas Kuhn wrote a whole book about it.
StreamBright 8y ago
People finally starting to realise that energy systems and grids are more complex than just put a solar cell to your roof. There is minimum level of service has to be provided (even over night) and the balance of production and consumption has to be kept in balance otherwise very bad things happen.
- terminatax 8y ago
  It’s called battery storage of excess energy
gregoriol 8y ago
Renewable energy is quite predictable: there is sun during the day, and no sun during the night. Wind is a bit less but could be too. Why not organise accordingly? First, there are batteries: solar roofs should come with batteries, than will power the house during the night. Authorities could enforce that, and could also build larger energy storages with batteries at a region level (see recent examples from Tesla). Then, this is mostly communication: why not make the grid and the roof "talk" to each other and the roof be turned off from the grid when there is no need for it? Is it because subsidies or some kind of mandatory buy from the grid that this could be an issue? otherwise there could be incentive to have this better integration with the whole system. Otherwise, use bitcoin miners, during the day!
- llukas 8y ago
  We're trying to fit square peg into round hole - after 50 years of centralized grid with one type of predictable demand curve now we got all those people that dare to install their own solar. I'd wish that utilities would stop fighting and accept inevitable.
  - slavik81 8y ago
    What's the inevitable?
    - js8 8y ago
      I would think move to renewables and more decentralization (more choices for individual consumers, as it happened with almost any other industry).
      - gregoriol 8y ago
        Decentralized is not really the problem here: it's more about the links between each installation and the surplus. It's harder to see it with electricity, but think as if it was water for example: if people were pumping water at home and pushing it into pipes to others, and not that many water was actually needed, where would it go?
Double_a_92 8y ago
Couldn't the problem be solved my publicly registering your solar panels (location and power output)? The utilities could access that data and actual weather data and predict the demand curve in a better way.
- pjc50 8y ago
  Those on feed-in tariffs will be registered in order to pay them. Mine certainly are in the UK.
niftich 8y ago
This is a tough and awkward problem, because accounting for the externalities of a "good thing" would curtail progress towards a good thing. Meanwhile, the externalities of bad things get a free pass. Ouch. The solutions are either very expensive, very counterproductive, or very unfair. The expensive solution is grid energy storage, where the utility installs a bunch of storage to time-shift some of the generation to better match the demand. The unfortunate aspect is that this is capital intensive, and most utilities are already loaded full of debt to pay for capex. This will probably result in the increase of rates billed to consumers, which is ironic, even if the grid is now providing a more complex service. The unfair solution is to legislate that onsite storage must accompany all residential distributed solar generation. This pushes the costs significantly higher, and forces homeowners to locally account for the added complexities of their green energy generation. But full suite of complications around other energy sources isn't priced into their cost. One counterproductive solution is to force market pricing on all consumption and generation. The revenue on residential solar generation would free-fall, because all of it in a particular area gets generated at a time when it's most plentiful. It wouldn't be worthwhile for a small player to generate it anymore. Another counterproductive, but simple solution, is to dump excess solar at the inverters at peak time, then run a bunch of natgas peakers in the evening once solar drops off. This is an environmentalist's nightmare, but takes no effort to execute.
- Ibai0tha 8y ago
  A better solution is to find a way to use the excess energy. If it gets cheap enough (zero or negative spot prices) you can just run any inefficient process once you have built the facilities to run that process. A common example is hydrogen production. It's far less efficient as a form of storage than batteries or pumped hydro. But it has other uses beyond storage. Desalination, electric heating for heavy industry as alternative to heating with fuels, etc. are other ways. Basically, we need consumer-side technology that can take advantage of fluctuating availability, not just producer-side adjustments.
John_KZ 8y ago
Why don't Australians use Solar water heaters? It's the best ROI you can get from solar, Mediterranean countries and the sunny parts of China have absolutely massive capacities installed. It's direct thermal, so it's not a cool high-tech gadget, but if you're worried about the environment, it's "better" than solar panels when applicable. It also essentially includes on-site thermal storage, so no grid instabilities.
- stephen_g 8y ago
  Lots of them around (especially in my state, Queensland, which has hot summers and mostly fairly warm days in winter), but you need to use a gas or electric booster to have hot water all the time. So in a lot of places it actually turns out to be fairly similar energy use to put in a high-efficiency heat-pump hot water heater. I've just evaluated this because I want to replace the hot water system at my house, and I was initially thinking of solar because my parents have had one for years and it generally works well but the heat pump will be cheaper and I'll eventually get some PV anyway. So all in all it should be a bit cheaper and more efficient per square metre of roof space.
  - John_KZ 8y ago
    Solar panels mix well with heat pumps in hot and dry climates indeed, because of the happy coincidence that peak solar radiation=peak demand for cooling. In that case it's not a bad combo, especially if you have mild winters without temps deep in the freezing (which ruins the COP for heat pumps, assuming you use them for heating too).
ianai 8y ago
If you’re going to replace something and keep uptime then you’re going to have situations where you have more than you need.
nabla9 8y ago
The same thing is happening in Europe. Energy markets need large reorganization for the transition and energy grid and storage technology needs to catch up big time. This takes lots of money. Wind and solar turn spot prices negative when it's sunny and windy. Existing nuclear, coal can't be easily turned off for just a part of day. In free spot energy markets, the price of electricity must jump sky-high during low supply to pay for the rest of the time. What is needed is load following power plants and large scale energy storage (flywheels and lithium ion are only solutions for very short fluctuations). In the North Europe there is possibility of using Norvegian hydropower to compensate for wind power as long as the grid capacity keeps up.
- cesis 8y ago
  Just pass those negative prices to customers and they will solve the problem.
  - nabla9 8y ago
    Your solution would require massive increase in carbon tax without loopholes. That would be a good and simple solution, but it's not happening. Consumers (especially 24/7 industry) wants to solve the cost, not the problem of CO2 emissions. Steady supply contract from non-renewables is cheaper. Letting markets to decide means that industry is not going to use renewable at all.
  - adrianN 8y ago
    That requires "smart" meters everywhere.
    - TeeWEE 8y ago
      In the Netherlands smart meters are the default now.
WalterBright 8y ago
Much stabilization could be done by varying the price of electricity on a minute-by-minute basis according to the supply. Then, electricity users can correspondingly adjust their usage for things like electric car battery charging and heating the hot water.
quicon 8y ago
Ten Years of Analyzing the Duck Chart https://www.nrel.gov/news/program/2018/10-years-duck-curve.html https://www.nrel.gov/news/program/2018/10-years-duck-curve.h...
perilunar 8y ago
The ABC had a story today on pumped hydro storage: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-07/how-does-pumped-hydro-power-work/9843804 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-07/how-does-pumped-hydro-... The Snowy 2.0 scheme looks promising: 2 GW max power, 350 GWh max storage, A$3.8-4.5 billion. Online ~2024. Just approve the bloody thing already. For comparison, Tesla's 'world biggest battery' aka the Hornsdale Power Reserve, is 100 MW max power, 129 MWh storage, and cost ~A$100 million. (cheaper per Watt, but about 60 times more expensive per Wh) Built in 4 months!
tappaseater 8y ago
I am in my 5th year of a 9.8MW system. I have generated about 45MW of power and approximately 1/3 stays in my home and the rest is sold to local power company. A couple of years after installation I started to see negative press for solar and eventually some action by my local power company. "Solar is no use to me", to quote the manager. Their actions finally killed new solar in our town. They used arguments like this, but we all suspected they were worried about revenue protection. There are 7 solar customers, a gnat's cock, so-to-speak, but they are/were scared. Local newspapers echo sentiments that solar customers have their hands in the pockets of non-solar and provide no balance. My goal is to get a 10-15kWh storage (Tesla Powerwall probably) and then keep most or all of my power and pay the grid like a very low usage customer. I believed we could do better, but I don't see it happening.
- antisthenes 8y ago
  > I am in my 5th year of a 9.8MW system Do you run a power plant?

55 points by prostoalex 8y ago

So solar power is irregular and has a peak production (mid day) far from peak consumption (start and end of business day)? News at eleven, water is wet and all that... edit: I should have said irregular through the day.

aligibbs 8y ago
Solar power is not irregular at all, and is entirely predictable with a weather forecast. Unless Australia has an entirely different usage pattern to the rest of the developed world- businesses are perfectly aligned to use the solar power generated during the peak.
- baud147258 8y ago
  From the article: "the growing peak demand that comes at the end of the day, as the sun sets.". So the solar production of electricity peaks earlier than the end-of-day consumption peak.
  - c12 8y ago
    There is a company in Australia that have improved flow batteries technology to the point where it can be miniaturised down to the size of a fridge freezer (previously they were the size of shipping containers) ten shipping containers full of them are able to store 3.2 megawatt-hours of energy and discharge a megawatt of power for over three to four hours which is roughly enough to keep 500-600 average homes going for the afternoon during the end of day consumption peak. They are perfectly suited to be paired with solar/wind/etc where they can store up the days usage and discharge at a regular rate throughout the evening peak when generation is reduced. And as for reliability, unlike lithium-ion, flow batteries can last for 20+ years with unlimited cycles.
    - robkop 8y ago
      I assume you are taking about red-flow? I head about them several years ago but haven't seen much since. Do they have the scale/ pricing to sell to the average consumer yet?
      - c12 8y ago
        I am indeed. I think they got some press coverage three or four years ago. I personally discovered them by watching a documentary on YouTube that featured their technology and discussed its future. I know that they recently raised some capital to invest in increasing sales. However I think a large proportion of their target market are grid scale and remote outposts for telecommunications/industrial applications. That could be because their residential solution still cant beat something like the Tesla powerwall on price. However, I believe when investing in something that you expect to have longevity in the 20-30 years range it's better to go with something a little more pricey that is proven to last that long without degrading of performance, so on that point the flow battery wins. It's like with solar panels, you can pay a premium upfront and get panels that will be producing the same output in ten years time like my parents did, or skimp on price and end up with a 30-40% reduction over the same time period like their neighbour.
  - aligibbs 8y ago
    Sure, there is an evening peak when people get home and start cooking/turning on their homes etc- which can't really be offset with solar (without using storage, battery/hydro). Doesn't negate the fact that solar generation pretty much perfectly matches business usage.
usrusr 8y ago
"water is wet and all that..." ...and it's a very good energy store when much of your energy demand is for heating/cooling with target temperatures in the "habitable zone". The only real challenge (but a big one) is getting the incentive structures right so that they are not "hacked" (e.g. pretending to be a dispatchable consumer at high supply but actually just switching to the conventionally billed socket at times of high demand) and keep inevitable oversteering/pork cycle within a reasonable margin.

Angostura 8y ago

An interesting alternative to battery storage opened in the UK this week - liquified air energy storage. I wonder if this may be helpful. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jun/05/pioneering-liquid-air-project-can-help-store-excess-electricity https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jun/05/pioneering-...

CaliforniaKarl 8y ago
There’s also places like Dinorwig: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/16/geeks_guide_electric_mountain/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/16/geeks_guide_electri...
- Angostura 8y ago
  Absolutely. The advantage of the liquified air approach is that you don't need a handy mountain. You could pop storage into city infrastructure quite easily.
- Arnt 8y ago
  You may have seen some of these balloons appear here and there, too: https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=Biogasanlage https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=Biogasanlage Having now read the wikipedia article, I see that my answer to my youngest daughter was much too simple. "Daddy, what's that?" "That white balloon next to the barn? It's full of cow fart. The cows in the barn fart, the farmer keeps the fart in the balloon and then burns it to make electricity when people need lots of electricity". According to Wikpedia it's a little more complex. But I like the simple version better. Whatever the source, it's gas the farmer can burn whenever the spot price for electricity is high.
D_Alex 8y ago
>liquified air energy storage. I wonder if this may be helpful. Let me answer this: No, it would not be helpful, because on pretty much all metrics (capital and operating costs, efficiency, flexibility, size etc) this technology is way worse than battery storage. Unfortunately - today - a lot of money which could be sensibly used deploying cost effective technology such as solar and wind power (and to a lesser extent battery storage) is wasted pursuing fundamentally flawed concepts (such as compressed air energy storage, and now this liquified air), which have no chance of being competitive .

CaliforniaKarl 8y ago

Reading this article, the first thing I wondered was, what does Australia have in terms of peaking power plants, which can come online—and, just as important, safely go offline—quickly to stabilize grid voltage? The second thing I was wondering is, where are the bitcoin miners? Assuming electricity prices are not being held artificially high, then when they start to come down, miners will start coming in. In fact, I could envision a two-tier pricing model, similar to what is used for EV charging. Combine that with something like Zellweger ripple signaling, and the grid would have a way to tell miners (et al) “Hey, we have excess, were reducing the rate so start mining!”

ImaCake 8y ago
Australia has some of the most expensive electricity in the world. There are no bitcoin miners of any size here. The electricity problems we are facing are pure corruption and negligence. Solar isn't the problem, its the lack of funding and poorly weighted energy markets that are crippling Australia's grid.
- roenxi 8y ago
  Solar isn't the problem, but the renewables situation is related. We had a Labor government with the Greens holding a balance of power from ~2010 to ~2013. The Labor party had, I believe, been opposed to a carbon tax up until that point. Then, likely because of pressure from the Greens, introduced a carbon tax. The lesson there will not have been lost on big investors. If anyone invests in fossil fuel generation (ie, the economic option) then the Greens will find a way to destroy their profit margins at some point in the next decade. And so, little serious investment in the energy sector seems to be taking place. I'm not aware of any big developments planned except an interesting hydropower project by the current government and creeping smaller-scale wind and solar as prices rise and justify their existence.
  - henearkr 8y ago
    Following your reasonning, there is no reason why investors should shy away from renewables. The Greens would not harm any project of additional large scale batteries, for example.

pixelpoet 8y ago

Use the power for crypto mining (while it's still based on hashing), use returns for energy storage infrastructure.

stephen_g 8y ago
Better just to use it for aluminium smelting or some other productive purpose instead...

TangoTrotFox 8y ago

Interesting. In Australia do people regularly install rooftop solar installations without also installing battery units? What's the logic there? Just selling it to the grid?

stephen_g 8y ago
Yeah, we had extremely generous feed-in tariffs for a while. It's generally net-metering too so pretty good value, even as the prices have come down. We have no shortage of sun most places, so it's pretty easy to almost wipe out your entire bill (except for the service/distribution fees, which have gone up a lot over the last few years, I guess to combat that).
- sjwright 8y ago
  A very relevant YouTube video from Dave at EEVBlog, where he goes through the numbers for his five year old solar installation, to see whether it has paid for itself. He also does hypothetical modelling of adding a battery, which proves to not be financially compelling at all. https://youtu.be/aQQE8V9NBXw https://youtu.be/aQQE8V9NBXw
  - John_KZ 8y ago
    This is because those "environmentalist" laws weren't created to satisfying national energy demand, but only the people's desire to roleplay environment-savers and get paid for it. Similar government schemes played out in much of Europe. Install subsidized solar panels, and the government/electricity companies have to buy your electricity at unsustainably high prices whenever you produce it, regardless if they need it/can handle it. Obviously, as far as I know, this didn't last very long, especially in the countries with more limited budgets. Eventually the sale prices dropped close to normal wholesale electricity prices and the subsidies were dropped. Those who installed the panels late in the bubble probably got out with a loss. It was just a terrible idea all around. The grid isn't made for distributed production, energy storage isn't solved, and solar electricity is just not sustainable as rooftop photovoltaics.
8y ago

Vino21 8y ago

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decentralised 8y ago

Good opportunity to mine cryptocurrencies. edit: https://cointelegraph.com/news/even-with-energy-surplus-canada-unable-to-meet-electricity-demands-of-bitcoin-miners https://cointelegraph.com/news/even-with-energy-surplus-cana...

jlebrech 8y ago

home appliances should be aware of the home's solar panels somehow. you could fill a washing machine and have it wait a few days and turn on if the solar panels are at full usage. other things could operate at peak hours (dishwasher) you could also pump water into a silo when it's bright outside.

t0liman 8y ago
>home appliances should be aware You mean IoT installed into wallplugs and whitegoods appliances, pool pumps, heaters, washers, heat pumps/air conditioners, hot water systems, etc. Yeah. If there was only an IoT standard that worked to allow for usage to be monitored and devices to be switched on/off in a standard way ... sure. There are "appliances" like HomeAssistant.io and OpenHAB and Domoticz out there to micro-manage these peripheral home devices and monitor consumption/excess/PV generation, and rulesets that can trigger responses and excess/egress of energy, but it's too complex for the Inverter/Solar managers to take care of usually.
- jlebrech 8y ago
  it's better to spend the energy directly than to sell it cheap now and buy it expensive later.
- usrusr 8y ago
  As long as feed-in tariffs are artificially high (e.g. anything not noticeably below 1:1), neither xkcd:927 nor total absence of standards are what is keeping solar-aware consumption from happening. PS: I absolutely don't want the subsidies to go away, I want them restructured into better subsidies that do not nullify other important incentives.

carreau 8y ago

"Monitor electricity 3600 times a second" in the video seem wrong, as AC is usually 50 to 60 HZ that would be measuring the consumption 60 to 72 times per period which does not really make sens. It's likely 3600/hour or 1/seconds. Immediately make me doubt the quality of the research. Edit: DC -> AC. was tired.

rabidrat 8y ago
*AC is 50 to 60Hz (DC does not alternate). Also I can see how it's possible that electrical fluctuations could happen at a higher rate than the utility frequency. 3600 Hz does seem like a lot though.
- carreau 8y ago
  Oops. Fixed AC/DC. I know better. 3600Hz seem also quite a weird number while 3600 time an hour ends up being exactly once a second.
0ld 8y ago
> DC is usually 50 to 60 HZ Immediately make me doubt the quality of the comment
- carreau 8y ago
  Sorry meant AC, got things mixed up in my head with solar beeing DC.
setquk 8y ago
3600 times a second is reasonable if you want to calculate true RMS values at 50/60Hz. This is almost required as well as most inverter and supply waveforms are far from sinusoids.
donquichotte 8y ago
If you have distorted currents and voltages, you need to do this. 3.6kHz sampling captures harmonics up to 1.8kHz, which is the 36th harmonic. Power is 1/T \int_0^T U(t)*I(t)dt for periodic signals with period T, and if current and voltage cannot be assumed to be sinusoidal, faster sampling is needed.

D_Alex 8y ago

Please note that there are powerful lobby groups in Australia that have interests in fossil fuel businesses and promote journalism that exaggerates problems with renewable energy. Eg see this: http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/climate-change-communication/files/2013/09/Newspaper-reporting-of-South-Australian-mid-latitude-cyclone-2016.pdf http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/climate-change-communication...

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
theshadowknows 8y ago
I thought exactly the same thing. It looks like the power companies want to have more control over individual homes’ solar panels and they are inventing a “crisis” as a way to do it.
ThomPete 8y ago
Just as there are powerful interest in solar and wind. Edit: To the downvoters. What are you disagreeing with? Are you claiming that the wind and solar industry doesn't have special interest and that they aren't powerful especially when you look at the support it has politically?
- pjc50 8y ago
  People are generally familiar with the self-interest of the fossil industry, but you seem to be saying that everyone who supports renewables is also in it for the money? Without evidence?
  - ThomPete 8y ago
    What do you want evidence for? Are you saying that those who invest in solar or wind do not have a self-interest in what they invested in. That seems to be a much bigger claim that the very obvious that any investment you make you have a self interest in. Climate gate should have made it quite obvious that no one is excempt from bias. Thomas Kuhn wrote a whole book about it.

StreamBright 8y ago

People finally starting to realise that energy systems and grids are more complex than just put a solar cell to your roof. There is minimum level of service has to be provided (even over night) and the balance of production and consumption has to be kept in balance otherwise very bad things happen.

terminatax 8y ago
It’s called battery storage of excess energy

gregoriol 8y ago

Renewable energy is quite predictable: there is sun during the day, and no sun during the night. Wind is a bit less but could be too. Why not organise accordingly? First, there are batteries: solar roofs should come with batteries, than will power the house during the night. Authorities could enforce that, and could also build larger energy storages with batteries at a region level (see recent examples from Tesla). Then, this is mostly communication: why not make the grid and the roof "talk" to each other and the roof be turned off from the grid when there is no need for it? Is it because subsidies or some kind of mandatory buy from the grid that this could be an issue? otherwise there could be incentive to have this better integration with the whole system. Otherwise, use bitcoin miners, during the day!

llukas 8y ago
We're trying to fit square peg into round hole - after 50 years of centralized grid with one type of predictable demand curve now we got all those people that dare to install their own solar. I'd wish that utilities would stop fighting and accept inevitable.
- slavik81 8y ago
  What's the inevitable?
  - js8 8y ago
    I would think move to renewables and more decentralization (more choices for individual consumers, as it happened with almost any other industry).
    - gregoriol 8y ago
      Decentralized is not really the problem here: it's more about the links between each installation and the surplus. It's harder to see it with electricity, but think as if it was water for example: if people were pumping water at home and pushing it into pipes to others, and not that many water was actually needed, where would it go?

Double_a_92 8y ago

Couldn't the problem be solved my publicly registering your solar panels (location and power output)? The utilities could access that data and actual weather data and predict the demand curve in a better way.

pjc50 8y ago
Those on feed-in tariffs will be registered in order to pay them. Mine certainly are in the UK.

niftich 8y ago

This is a tough and awkward problem, because accounting for the externalities of a "good thing" would curtail progress towards a good thing. Meanwhile, the externalities of bad things get a free pass. Ouch. The solutions are either very expensive, very counterproductive, or very unfair. The expensive solution is grid energy storage, where the utility installs a bunch of storage to time-shift some of the generation to better match the demand. The unfortunate aspect is that this is capital intensive, and most utilities are already loaded full of debt to pay for capex. This will probably result in the increase of rates billed to consumers, which is ironic, even if the grid is now providing a more complex service. The unfair solution is to legislate that onsite storage must accompany all residential distributed solar generation. This pushes the costs significantly higher, and forces homeowners to locally account for the added complexities of their green energy generation. But full suite of complications around other energy sources isn't priced into their cost. One counterproductive solution is to force market pricing on all consumption and generation. The revenue on residential solar generation would free-fall, because all of it in a particular area gets generated at a time when it's most plentiful. It wouldn't be worthwhile for a small player to generate it anymore. Another counterproductive, but simple solution, is to dump excess solar at the inverters at peak time, then run a bunch of natgas peakers in the evening once solar drops off. This is an environmentalist's nightmare, but takes no effort to execute.

Ibai0tha 8y ago
A better solution is to find a way to use the excess energy. If it gets cheap enough (zero or negative spot prices) you can just run any inefficient process once you have built the facilities to run that process. A common example is hydrogen production. It's far less efficient as a form of storage than batteries or pumped hydro. But it has other uses beyond storage. Desalination, electric heating for heavy industry as alternative to heating with fuels, etc. are other ways. Basically, we need consumer-side technology that can take advantage of fluctuating availability, not just producer-side adjustments.

John_KZ 8y ago

Why don't Australians use Solar water heaters? It's the best ROI you can get from solar, Mediterranean countries and the sunny parts of China have absolutely massive capacities installed. It's direct thermal, so it's not a cool high-tech gadget, but if you're worried about the environment, it's "better" than solar panels when applicable. It also essentially includes on-site thermal storage, so no grid instabilities.

stephen_g 8y ago
Lots of them around (especially in my state, Queensland, which has hot summers and mostly fairly warm days in winter), but you need to use a gas or electric booster to have hot water all the time. So in a lot of places it actually turns out to be fairly similar energy use to put in a high-efficiency heat-pump hot water heater. I've just evaluated this because I want to replace the hot water system at my house, and I was initially thinking of solar because my parents have had one for years and it generally works well but the heat pump will be cheaper and I'll eventually get some PV anyway. So all in all it should be a bit cheaper and more efficient per square metre of roof space.
- John_KZ 8y ago
  Solar panels mix well with heat pumps in hot and dry climates indeed, because of the happy coincidence that peak solar radiation=peak demand for cooling. In that case it's not a bad combo, especially if you have mild winters without temps deep in the freezing (which ruins the COP for heat pumps, assuming you use them for heating too).

ianai 8y ago

If you’re going to replace something and keep uptime then you’re going to have situations where you have more than you need.

nabla9 8y ago

The same thing is happening in Europe. Energy markets need large reorganization for the transition and energy grid and storage technology needs to catch up big time. This takes lots of money. Wind and solar turn spot prices negative when it's sunny and windy. Existing nuclear, coal can't be easily turned off for just a part of day. In free spot energy markets, the price of electricity must jump sky-high during low supply to pay for the rest of the time. What is needed is load following power plants and large scale energy storage (flywheels and lithium ion are only solutions for very short fluctuations). In the North Europe there is possibility of using Norvegian hydropower to compensate for wind power as long as the grid capacity keeps up.

cesis 8y ago
Just pass those negative prices to customers and they will solve the problem.
- nabla9 8y ago
  Your solution would require massive increase in carbon tax without loopholes. That would be a good and simple solution, but it's not happening. Consumers (especially 24/7 industry) wants to solve the cost, not the problem of CO2 emissions. Steady supply contract from non-renewables is cheaper. Letting markets to decide means that industry is not going to use renewable at all.
- adrianN 8y ago
  That requires "smart" meters everywhere.
  - TeeWEE 8y ago
    In the Netherlands smart meters are the default now.

WalterBright 8y ago

Much stabilization could be done by varying the price of electricity on a minute-by-minute basis according to the supply. Then, electricity users can correspondingly adjust their usage for things like electric car battery charging and heating the hot water.

quicon 8y ago

Ten Years of Analyzing the Duck Chart https://www.nrel.gov/news/program/2018/10-years-duck-curve.html https://www.nrel.gov/news/program/2018/10-years-duck-curve.h...

perilunar 8y ago

The ABC had a story today on pumped hydro storage: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-07/how-does-pumped-hydro-power-work/9843804 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-07/how-does-pumped-hydro-... The Snowy 2.0 scheme looks promising: 2 GW max power, 350 GWh max storage, A$3.8-4.5 billion. Online ~2024. Just approve the bloody thing already. For comparison, Tesla's 'world biggest battery' aka the Hornsdale Power Reserve, is 100 MW max power, 129 MWh storage, and cost ~A$100 million. (cheaper per Watt, but about 60 times more expensive per Wh) Built in 4 months!

tappaseater 8y ago

I am in my 5th year of a 9.8MW system. I have generated about 45MW of power and approximately 1/3 stays in my home and the rest is sold to local power company. A couple of years after installation I started to see negative press for solar and eventually some action by my local power company. "Solar is no use to me", to quote the manager. Their actions finally killed new solar in our town. They used arguments like this, but we all suspected they were worried about revenue protection. There are 7 solar customers, a gnat's cock, so-to-speak, but they are/were scared. Local newspapers echo sentiments that solar customers have their hands in the pockets of non-solar and provide no balance. My goal is to get a 10-15kWh storage (Tesla Powerwall probably) and then keep most or all of my power and pay the grid like a very low usage customer. I believed we could do better, but I don't see it happening.

antisthenes 8y ago
> I am in my 5th year of a 9.8MW system Do you run a power plant?