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Negative electricity prices are not a crisis but a great business opportunity. There is a lot of money to be made from free energy, or even better energy that s
by hristov 6y ago
Negative electricity prices are not a crisis but a great business opportunity. There is a lot of money to be made from free energy, or even better energy that someone is paying you to take.
There are, for example aluminum plants, whose major cost is electricity. There is steel, which can be made by electric arc furnaces (this is not the only way to make steel, but it certainly the more environmentally friendly). There is cement. Cement is currently not made by electricity and it is currently one of the most polluting and carbon intensive industries out there. But, as the major power input in cement is heat, I am sure there is a way to make it profitably from electricity given low enough electricity prices.
There will also be electric cars. One can choose when to charge an electric car, and if the power companies decide to pass on some of the savings on consumers, consumers can choose to charge up their cars when there is plentiful wind power.
So no, this will not be a "crisis" for long. And really if things get very bad, one can always slam the brakes on the windmills so you won't have power you don't want. But I expect there will be a lot of businesses that will pop up to use intermittent cheap electric power.
Just because some change is required, we shouldn't call it a crisis or put negative connotations about it. And of all the crisises that could happen, having cheap or free energy is not the worst crisis one could have, to put it mildly.
Say you had a rare meterological condition in your town, where it started raining little nuggets of gold. Would that be a crisis. It would certainly require action. You'd have to improvise a protective hat of some sort, and then you would have to drop everything and run out and gather all the gold. But I would not call it a crisis.
- ThomPete 6y agoAs long as the powersource isn't reliable it's a problem. A problem that doesn't have any solutions in sight that are closer than something like fusion which would be the preferable solution rather than unreliables like wind and solar.
- Reason077 6y ago> "something like fusion which would be the preferable solution" The preferable solutions are ones that actually exist.
- sliken 6y agoSure, power cars (any car with a 300 mile range is likely on average to use 300 miles per day). Make ice (in the summer) to help with off peak cooling, pump water uphill above any hydro plant. Even pull carbon out of the air and sell carbon credits and then sell the fuel you make as a result.
- DennisP 6y agoThe trouble is that the factory costs something too. If you're only running half the time, now you need to spend twice as much on factory to make the same amount of stuff each month. So if we build a wind/solar grid without enough storage, this sort of demand management isn't a free lunch. It's just that instead of the power company paying the cost of intermittency, it'd be externalizing that cost to everybody else, who pay in higher capital costs. (For aluminum in particular you have another problem: if you shut down more than about six hours, the molten aluminum freezes and you spend a lot of money on repairs.)
- heavenlyblue 6y agoYou could have a car charger that is remotely controlled by the power companies and can be disabled to shed/elevate electricity consumption in the country.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoTesla already supports this in some Scandinavian countries, where vehicles are controlled as distributed aggregate load. It’s no different than Google getting paid when utilities send a signal to Nest saying, “power is going to be expensive shortly, precool everyone’s home in this geobound and then raise the temp so we don’t have to start gas peakers up.”
- bartimus 6y agoThis reminds me of a certain quote: "Talk is cheap. Show me the code." It seems a bit reckless to already be transitioning into a situation expecting those solutions to magically come to be.