7 ms·

Electricity That's Too Cheap to Meter

57 points by edent 3y ago

sam_goody 3y ago
A bunch of years ago, there was an article about Yellowstone tapping into the supervolcano, which would ease off of the pressure building up, while providing Wyoming with electricity that is "too cheap too meter". If they succeeded, the demand would increase (by new uses people would find for cheap electricity, and by people who would move into Wyoming to take advantage of the price) which would affect production. And the State would use it as a source of income, not start giving it for free or at a fixed price.
- Klaster_1 3y ago
  Is there a framework that helps to reliably determine which side of the two extremes - too cheap to meter (internet access) or induced demand (roads) - the problem will fall into and how to nudge it in the desired direction? Is this even the right framing of the question? Seems like an important management and policy problem for the humanity to get a grip on, so we can prevent negative outcomes.
  - AndrewDucker 3y ago
    The problem with inducing demand for roads is that they take up significant amounts of space and disrupt everything around them. We can provide everyone with terabit internet without taking up more than a tiny amount of surface space, so inducing demand on that front isn't a problem.
  - icegreentea2 3y ago
    Induced demand for roads is a problem because road network improvements (especially in the form of road widenings) are typically marketed to the populace as reducing travel time at peak, but in practice all they can do is improve overall throughput (with the temporary decrease in travel time coming as a bonus). And I think road network improvements are actually quite good at achieving their throughput related goals. From that perspective, there isn't actually a problem at all. Internet traffic absolutely "suffers" from induced demand. It just happens that we've been able to keep ahead of the worst of the congestion problems. a) ISPs traffic shape. ISPs have more control over their traffic than cities/highways typically do. b) ISPs don't guarantee minimal speeds, or even give you a sense of their distribution. The inability to provide a minimal tells you that probably at peak traffic, there is significant contention (induced demand has kicked in). It just happens that... internet usage demand is probably less coupled than traffic on a highway. c) The largest traffic loads on the internet (streaming video) are majority provided by centralized corporations that can provide a 'parallel' service (through CDNs/edge caches... oh and I guess really degrading video quality) that minimize the load onto the 'main internet'. This is like taking the train or public transit or something.
- bell-cot 3y ago
  > ...electricity that is "too cheap to meter". One can write a nifty article by assuming that huge geothermal power plants are somehow free. Similar for assuming that FTL drives are easy to build, or ...
JackMorgan 3y ago
Last week I read a fascinating thesis in HN that steam engines only could have been invented on top of a flooded coal mine, because it was the only place where significant rotational energy could be used to acquire more energy in a virtuous cycle. Those two constraints happened to take place in the UK, starting the industrial revolution. I wonder if we will find another such situation in a future where there might be an abundance of electrical energy due to renewables. Perhaps there's another research area that just isn't worth pursuing unless electricity has a zero or negative cost.
- thelastgallon 3y ago
  We already have an energy sink, bitcoin, just like /dev/null, but for energy. Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, currently consumes an estimated 150 terawatt-hours of electricity annually — more than the entire country of Argentina, population 45 million: https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2022/05/04/cryptocurrency-energy/ https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2022/05/04/cryptocurrency-...
  - jakewins 3y ago
    This was tried in Texas though, and my understanding was the capital costs were too high to not run the units constantly. More likely the sink will be - as it already is in commercial steel projects like Hybrit - electrolysis.
    - thelastgallon 3y ago
      They were paid to use less. Texas Paid a Bitcoin Miner $31.7 Million to Use Less Electricity During the State’s Hottest Month: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texas-bitcoin-miner-riot-31-million-energy-credits/ https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texas-bitcoin-min...
    - maxerickson 3y ago
      As a society with an awful lot of existing infrastructure, it probably makes sense to subsidize the capital cost of methane synthesis plants that agree to consume only excess electricity. Of course such a thing hasn't been done on a industrial scale, but it's a great way to save the energy for later or transport it to another region.
chadash 3y ago
Don't get me wrong, it is great that we can harness wind and solar to generate tons of electricity. But as the article points out, they aren't consistent enough to provide electricity that's always on, which is something our society is built to expect. Last year, Contruction-Physics.com put out a great 3-part article on why nuclear is so expensive. It's worth a read [1]. But long story short, we hardly build them anymore (we last finished a new plant in 2016 and there are two more currently under construction, which takes many years) and regulations change all the time so there are very few people with real expertise at putting them together. And talented people certainly don't want to go into the field, because there's no guarantee of consistent work. [1] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power-construction?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2Fnuclear&utm_medium=reader2 https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power...
- pydry 3y ago
  They're more consistent than people think - especially when anticorrelated solar and wind are paired. Power is cheaper to store than people think. Nuclear power is worse on all dimensions than people think.
  - celeritascelery 3y ago
    How do you store power cheaply? We don’t have the have capability yet. Doesn’t mean we can’t figure it out, but until then we need consistent power. nuclear power is great because the materials are cheap and abundant and the power is very stable. Even the disposal is much safer “than most people think”.
    - pydry 3y ago
      >until then we need consistent power. We get it in the form of gas peakers. So does France, when it's nuclear power stations aren't matching demand. >nuclear power is great because the materials are cheap and abundant It is by far the most expensive form of power humanity produces, nearly all due to capital costs. Its main benefit is that it shares some of the costs of building nukes and preparing for nuke readiness - this being why Iran, Sweden and South Korea build them and why the US military industrial complex keeps trying to greenwash it. One thing the nuclear-military industrial complex hasn't pointed out is that the materials are very Russia dependent. Gas from Russia = bad. Uranium? Peachy. It is cheap though. >the power is very stable. Not worth 5x the cost to have a steady 1GW output when you can pair something 1/5th of the cost with some pumped storage. >Even the disposal is much safer If you do it safely it's much more expensive than people think. The operation of nuclear power plants isn't particularly safe though, which is why the private sector point blank refuses to insure against a Fukushima type event. This is why the government says don't worry if that happens, joe taxpayer will foot the $1 trillion bill. You. Me.
llimos 3y ago
> Shameless Plug I see what you did there.
mytailorisrich 3y ago
>Wind - and other renewables - have done what nuclear couldn't. They have provided such an abundance of electricity that consumers are paid to use it. That's actually a symptom of the current issues with renewables: production is highly variable and unpredictable (to an extent) and cannot be controlled, and electricity produced cannot be stored. Interestingly, if electricity indeed becomes too cheap to meter then why bother with heat pumps, etc. at home? It is much easier and cheaper to just install an electric boiler and electric heaters.
- pydry 3y ago
  It can be stored, it's just that it's currently cheaper to curtail or pay people to use it and to fill in the gaps with cheap gas. Despite intense lobbying against them pumped storage plants like coire glas and snowy 2 are under construction.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  As renewables approach a cost of zero (major projects are already close to $0.01/kwh), the cost of power then becomes storage and distribution. As the cost of storage declines (battery manufacturing capacity ramp), the cost of power continues to decline. Put another way, the cost of power is a function of renewables and battery storage ramp rate. Regarding your last point, we should not sacrifice efficiency when we still need incredible amounts of power to sequester excessive atmospheric CO2 with carbon capture (paying back the energy debt), and HVAC system lives are measured in decades. As the post mentions, a component of the story is energy efficiency, and we shouldn’t throw that away going forward.
  - mytailorisrich 3y ago
    Sure. The thing is that in the real world if people get essentially free electricity they are not going to invest in energy efficiency because there is no benefit in doing so. I don't think this will happen anytime soon, though. Renewables are still expensive and in many cases rely on price guarantees by the government, and we're still in a phase when production has to increase significantly to keep up with demand. So overall the market reality and incentive is to push for efficiency while prices remain relatively high (at least in the UK)
bell-cot 3y ago
IF one has some cheap & convenient way to efficiently store MWh-scale quantities of electrical power, then spot-market electricity prices <= 0 are extremely interesting. Otherwise...not so much. All the electrical infrastructure, from the wind turbines to your electrical meter, still has to be planned, built, and maintained. If there's isn't some perpetual* government subsidy involved, then the cost of doing all that still has to be paid from selling the power, and your ability to "play the market" - without sinking a metric buttload of money into energy storage equipment - is gonna be limited. And the more popular such market-playing becomes, the lower the spot price fluctuations will become. *Yes, I know that "perpetual" never really lasts in this context.
- jonstewart 3y ago
  Sure, thank you for providing the standard contrarian disclaimer to absolutely every article ever written about renewable energy. But in a historical lens, that the -UK-, i.e. His Majesty’s Coal Fire, has such abundant wind generation that it can be free every once in a while when The Great Smog was only ~71 years ago is an incredible feat. * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London
- huppeldepup 3y ago
  MWh-scale quantities of electrical power Doesn't have to be electrical. I was part of a "demand response" study a decade back where a cold store was provided a prediction of electricity prices. When electricity prices were low or negative, the infrastructure would drive the temperatures to the lowest point to shift future energy consumption to the present. This shift in time is also a form of storage.
  - bell-cot 3y ago
    Sure, there are cases. Imagine if quick-response aluminum smelters were a thing. But for household electrical use...maybe you could get your well-insulated electrical water heater extra hot, and your freezer extra cold? But all such cases suffer from the "only if it doesn't get popular" problem.
KaiserPro 3y ago
I have the same supplier, but, I suspect a different tariff. I am on the "agile" price, which means that I have a different price per kwh every 30 mins. Pros: I get negative pricing, ie, they pay me to take away power. Cons: I can also get "surge" pricing upto to £1 a kwh. It only really makes sense for me personally because I have both an electric car (second hand) and a house battery (with solar) about 2-4 times a month, I get paid to charge my car. edit you can see what my prices are here: https://agileprices.co.uk/?region=C https://agileprices.co.uk/?region=C they are published daily at 16:00 for the next day, more or less.
- n2d4 3y ago
  Could you just intentionally waste a lot of energy when the price is negative to make a lot of money? Is there a limit on how much you can use? Of course you shouldn't do that, but I wonder how their business model looks like. I assume the negative price comes from subsidies, and those probably are limited? edit: with "wasting", I mean literal wasting, basically discharging the grid without using the energy for anything (say, by putting a heater outside)
  - xboxnolifes 3y ago
    Negative price can come from too much grid load which must be removed. This can be financially recovered through the non-negative prices.
  - cmrx64 3y ago
    The negative rates phenomenon is fascinating. Little to do with subsidies, lots to do with load balancing / matching generation to demand. Hugenormous generation capacity tends to move slowly (just for the mental model, imagine a steam turbine that can only generate less power by _waiting to cool down_). In order to maintain stable grid frequency, the market steps in with some behavioral adjustment via pricing. There’s no reason you _shouldn’t_ do the behavior you describe: the more power you can sink during negative pricing, the better the efficiency of the grid! You’d rather any kind of productive use.
    - 3y ago
ekianjo 3y ago
> (Renewables) They have provided such an abundance of electricity that consumers are paid to use it. in one place. Once. And the author is making it sounds like it's valid everywhere. Well, no.
- sergiosgc 3y ago
  Just wait a couple more years: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-energy-consumption?tab=chart&time=2000..latest&country=~OWID_WRL https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-energy-consumption?... We are in the middle of an energy technological leap. It'll take a decade to unfurl, but it's nothing short of astounding.
  - credit_guy 3y ago
    It is, but ... If prices become negative on average, then there is no financial incentive for anyone to build a new power plant. Except if that plant can follow the load and generate only during the times when the prices are positive, and are above its breakeven generation cost. Natural gas power plants fall in that category. Battery storage too, twice better actually, as they can charge when prices are low or even negative, and discharge when prices are high. One could claim that solar plus batteries is fine. Except that whoever plans to build solar plus batteries can quickly figure out that the ROI is even better if they do battery only and no solar at all. The same goes for wind. The Economist ran a fairly informative article about this in September [1]. [1] https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/09/21/renewable-energy-has-hidden-costs https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/09/21/r...
    - ViewTrick1002 3y ago
      Which is self correcting. 1. Negative/low/volatile prices => Storage is worth constructing to arbitrage the price rather than new generation. 2. Prices smooth out. 3. More power generation get built to take advantage of smoothed out prices. 4. And the cycle repeats. Looking at the market as frozen in time will never match reality.
- 3y ago
k310 3y ago
I was offered time of day pricing. Bottom line, my main electrical usage is air conditioning in the summer. So, charge a higher rate at the exact times that I use the most. "It's cheap except when you use it." Even PG&E's estimate says stick with flat rate. It's cheaper.
- jakewins 3y ago
  Our customers use their HVAC to “pre-cool” or (more often, pre-heat) their homes when rates are low.. but you need a house with enough thermal mass and insulation that it can go 4-5 hours just “coasting”, which I guess is more common in cold climates with water-borne heat and masonry buildings..
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    Heat also works because snow is insulating.
- ZeroGravitas 3y ago
  > So, charge a higher rate at the exact times that I use the most. More accurately, charge a higher rate when everyone is using it, and increasing supply would be expensive (roughly late afternoon to early evening in places that use solar PV and air conditioning) so incentivize the shiftable demand (charging EVs for example) to move to low demand and/or high supply times.
- maccard 3y ago
  The trick is that you need to shift your consumption to when it's cheap. EV charging, hot water cylinders, battery systems can all be charged overnight when the usage is low, which reduced the demand at the times you need it for AC.
  - k310 3y ago
    I have none of the above! That's the problem with a simple life. Without the A/C running, PG&E rates my home better than "energy efficient" homes. I just don't use much electricity except in summer, and the savings from heat pumps, solar cells and batteries would never pay back. I suppose that I could afford a vacation at the coast if I just took off and didn't cool the home in the heat. I'll run the numbers.
sgjohnson 3y ago
> wind power genuinely became too cheap to meter. No, it didn’t. The grid must always be in balance. Wind power production can’t be ramped up or down as needed. Overproduction could cause a surge on the grid, that would in fact be a massive liability for the power company. Power became free for those periods because it was the cheapest option for the producer. Kind of how it happened when crude oil was trading at negative $57 per bbl. The contracts came with an obligation that was impossible to meet, thus it was easier to pay someone to take them off your hands.
- ViewTrick1002 3y ago
  Wind power can of course be ramped down, the problem in this case is CFD contracts causing over supply since they are guaranteed to get paid. In better functioning markets negative prices generally stem from large thermal producers, nuclear and coal, being unable to ramp fast enough and thus bid negative so they can produce at 100% when prices are expected to increase again.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  Wind power certainly can be ramped down or up. At least on level of individual turbines. Otherwise they could not lock them in storms when wind speeds are too high. If it can be done with higher wind speeds, nothing prevents doing it at lower. Issue is that they got insane contracts that pay beyond market rates.
  - 7thaccount 3y ago
    You can feather the blades or stuff like that, but you can't just ramp them up or down like a natural gas plant and keep them there. It's still weather dependent without some source of fuel.
snapplebobapple 3y ago
This utterly misses the point. Renewables are not so cheap that they are profitable at negative prices by themselves. Pricing is this way because renewables are largely not demand resources and run when wind, sun, etc is there, not when they are needed. In some situations they are still profitable at negative prices because subsidy is worth more than zero making breakeven pricing some negative number. Pricing is negative because the grid is in crisis from overproductiin and needs prices that low to get the renewables to shut off, its not a sign of a healthy, sustainable grid, its a sign of a grid in crisis trying to avert a collapse.
hefferbub 3y ago
Look at the work of Tony Seba, who has analyzed the properties of a possible fully-renewable grid. In his models, you over-provision PV and wind (doable because it is so cheap, and getting cheaper) so it can cover peak loads. Then during the 90+ percent of non-peak time there is super-cheap excess power available which he dubs “super power”. Using pricing signals, this can be used to enable activities which would normally be cost-prohibitive under current models. When power is cheap, crank up the desalinators, electric steel and aluminum mills, pumped storage, hydrogen converters, bitcoin miners, and anything else smart people can devise to do with inexhaustible, inexpensive clean power on a somewhat intermittent basis. His model also shows that you can choose trade offs between how much battery you invest in and how much generation you build, allowing you to optimize costs depending on how much or little of this “super power” you want to generate. More batteries = less generation and less excess power, and vice versa. I think many find this unintuitive because they formed their opinions of renewable energy during the early, high cost parts of its ramp and have not adjusted their thinking to the current part of the S-curve. But renewable energy is already the least expensive source of electricity in most markets. It is our amazing good fortune that it is also environmentally fairly benign, extremely safe, has very low maintenance costs, can be geographically distributed to reduce grid distribution costs, and is able to scale with few limits aside from simple land availability. And its Wright’s law cost declines appear unconstrained for the foreseeable future.
- epistasis 3y ago
  This is the key part that most people are missing. Standard thermal electricity generation is a very mature technology, no matter the heat source. Turbine-based combined cycle natural gas generation was a bit of a step up, but it used already mature tech: jet turbines. Solar and wind and batteries are fundamentally different, and more like integrated circuit technology or DNA sequencing: falling in cost at a tremendous rate. Looking at current prices or current installed bases of solar or wind or batteries is not very informative for assessing the technologies. You really need to see the history of prices to project their future, then you need to start seeing that for each application, adoption is non-linear once the tech becomes the cheapest option for that application. What I'm most surprised about on HN is how few commenters here seem to understand tech curves. The HN audience, of all audiences, should have the clearest view of how traditional energy industry assumptions are about to be disrupted in the coming decades. We don't know the full extent of the disruption, but views like Seba's of huge amounts of surplus energy, seem inevitable. Arbitrage in time and geography will be the money making opportunities.
helf 3y ago
[dead]
specialist 3y ago
> We'll always need something to be able to provide a base-load of electricity. Correct. Advanced geothermal and thermal batteries will be a large part of the solution. Those nascent markets today are where PV and Li-ion were in the 2000s: proven technologies that have climbed onto the cost-learning curve ladder, now just need capital and time. We're so close to having all the necessary solutions we need to achieve net zero, and then push forward to net negative (to get CO2 back down to 350ppm).
vfclists 3y ago
When you de-industrialize and shift all your needs for sustained high levels of energy to China, you can always wax lyrical about the benefits of renewable energy. Lets see you provide jobs in factories which depend on renewable energy. Yup. Even the jobs that will be created by switching to renewable industry depend on products and materials created by Chinese heavy industry that cannot depend on renewable energy. The wishful fancy self-congratulatory thinking of Westerners on renewable energy knows no bounds.
dogmatism 3y ago
*cries in my location where energy is like 70% from imported LNG and there's only flat rate pricing at $0.30/kWh...and it's windy AF but for political reasons no one's built the wind farms Oh and there's a nuc plant I'm in meltdown range of, but don't get any pricing benefit

57 points by edent 3y ago

A bunch of years ago, there was an article about Yellowstone tapping into the supervolcano, which would ease off of the pressure building up, while providing Wyoming with electricity that is "too cheap too meter". If they succeeded, the demand would increase (by new uses people would find for cheap electricity, and by people who would move into Wyoming to take advantage of the price) which would affect production. And the State would use it as a source of income, not start giving it for free or at a fixed price.

Klaster_1 3y ago
Is there a framework that helps to reliably determine which side of the two extremes - too cheap to meter (internet access) or induced demand (roads) - the problem will fall into and how to nudge it in the desired direction? Is this even the right framing of the question? Seems like an important management and policy problem for the humanity to get a grip on, so we can prevent negative outcomes.
- AndrewDucker 3y ago
  The problem with inducing demand for roads is that they take up significant amounts of space and disrupt everything around them. We can provide everyone with terabit internet without taking up more than a tiny amount of surface space, so inducing demand on that front isn't a problem.
- icegreentea2 3y ago
  Induced demand for roads is a problem because road network improvements (especially in the form of road widenings) are typically marketed to the populace as reducing travel time at peak, but in practice all they can do is improve overall throughput (with the temporary decrease in travel time coming as a bonus). And I think road network improvements are actually quite good at achieving their throughput related goals. From that perspective, there isn't actually a problem at all. Internet traffic absolutely "suffers" from induced demand. It just happens that we've been able to keep ahead of the worst of the congestion problems. a) ISPs traffic shape. ISPs have more control over their traffic than cities/highways typically do. b) ISPs don't guarantee minimal speeds, or even give you a sense of their distribution. The inability to provide a minimal tells you that probably at peak traffic, there is significant contention (induced demand has kicked in). It just happens that... internet usage demand is probably less coupled than traffic on a highway. c) The largest traffic loads on the internet (streaming video) are majority provided by centralized corporations that can provide a 'parallel' service (through CDNs/edge caches... oh and I guess really degrading video quality) that minimize the load onto the 'main internet'. This is like taking the train or public transit or something.
bell-cot 3y ago
> ...electricity that is "too cheap to meter". One can write a nifty article by assuming that huge geothermal power plants are somehow free. Similar for assuming that FTL drives are easy to build, or ...

JackMorgan 3y ago

Last week I read a fascinating thesis in HN that steam engines only could have been invented on top of a flooded coal mine, because it was the only place where significant rotational energy could be used to acquire more energy in a virtuous cycle. Those two constraints happened to take place in the UK, starting the industrial revolution. I wonder if we will find another such situation in a future where there might be an abundance of electrical energy due to renewables. Perhaps there's another research area that just isn't worth pursuing unless electricity has a zero or negative cost.

thelastgallon 3y ago
We already have an energy sink, bitcoin, just like /dev/null, but for energy. Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, currently consumes an estimated 150 terawatt-hours of electricity annually — more than the entire country of Argentina, population 45 million: https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2022/05/04/cryptocurrency-energy/ https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2022/05/04/cryptocurrency-...
- jakewins 3y ago
  This was tried in Texas though, and my understanding was the capital costs were too high to not run the units constantly. More likely the sink will be - as it already is in commercial steel projects like Hybrit - electrolysis.
  - thelastgallon 3y ago
    They were paid to use less. Texas Paid a Bitcoin Miner $31.7 Million to Use Less Electricity During the State’s Hottest Month: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texas-bitcoin-miner-riot-31-million-energy-credits/ https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texas-bitcoin-min...
  - maxerickson 3y ago
    As a society with an awful lot of existing infrastructure, it probably makes sense to subsidize the capital cost of methane synthesis plants that agree to consume only excess electricity. Of course such a thing hasn't been done on a industrial scale, but it's a great way to save the energy for later or transport it to another region.

chadash 3y ago

Don't get me wrong, it is great that we can harness wind and solar to generate tons of electricity. But as the article points out, they aren't consistent enough to provide electricity that's always on, which is something our society is built to expect. Last year, Contruction-Physics.com put out a great 3-part article on why nuclear is so expensive. It's worth a read [1]. But long story short, we hardly build them anymore (we last finished a new plant in 2016 and there are two more currently under construction, which takes many years) and regulations change all the time so there are very few people with real expertise at putting them together. And talented people certainly don't want to go into the field, because there's no guarantee of consistent work. [1] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power-construction?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2Fnuclear&utm_medium=reader2 https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power...

pydry 3y ago
They're more consistent than people think - especially when anticorrelated solar and wind are paired. Power is cheaper to store than people think. Nuclear power is worse on all dimensions than people think.
- celeritascelery 3y ago
  How do you store power cheaply? We don’t have the have capability yet. Doesn’t mean we can’t figure it out, but until then we need consistent power. nuclear power is great because the materials are cheap and abundant and the power is very stable. Even the disposal is much safer “than most people think”.
  - pydry 3y ago
    >until then we need consistent power. We get it in the form of gas peakers. So does France, when it's nuclear power stations aren't matching demand. >nuclear power is great because the materials are cheap and abundant It is by far the most expensive form of power humanity produces, nearly all due to capital costs. Its main benefit is that it shares some of the costs of building nukes and preparing for nuke readiness - this being why Iran, Sweden and South Korea build them and why the US military industrial complex keeps trying to greenwash it. One thing the nuclear-military industrial complex hasn't pointed out is that the materials are very Russia dependent. Gas from Russia = bad. Uranium? Peachy. It is cheap though. >the power is very stable. Not worth 5x the cost to have a steady 1GW output when you can pair something 1/5th of the cost with some pumped storage. >Even the disposal is much safer If you do it safely it's much more expensive than people think. The operation of nuclear power plants isn't particularly safe though, which is why the private sector point blank refuses to insure against a Fukushima type event. This is why the government says don't worry if that happens, joe taxpayer will foot the $1 trillion bill. You. Me.

llimos 3y ago

> Shameless Plug I see what you did there.

mytailorisrich 3y ago

>Wind - and other renewables - have done what nuclear couldn't. They have provided such an abundance of electricity that consumers are paid to use it. That's actually a symptom of the current issues with renewables: production is highly variable and unpredictable (to an extent) and cannot be controlled, and electricity produced cannot be stored. Interestingly, if electricity indeed becomes too cheap to meter then why bother with heat pumps, etc. at home? It is much easier and cheaper to just install an electric boiler and electric heaters.

pydry 3y ago
It can be stored, it's just that it's currently cheaper to curtail or pay people to use it and to fill in the gaps with cheap gas. Despite intense lobbying against them pumped storage plants like coire glas and snowy 2 are under construction.
toomuchtodo 3y ago
As renewables approach a cost of zero (major projects are already close to $0.01/kwh), the cost of power then becomes storage and distribution. As the cost of storage declines (battery manufacturing capacity ramp), the cost of power continues to decline. Put another way, the cost of power is a function of renewables and battery storage ramp rate. Regarding your last point, we should not sacrifice efficiency when we still need incredible amounts of power to sequester excessive atmospheric CO2 with carbon capture (paying back the energy debt), and HVAC system lives are measured in decades. As the post mentions, a component of the story is energy efficiency, and we shouldn’t throw that away going forward.
- mytailorisrich 3y ago
  Sure. The thing is that in the real world if people get essentially free electricity they are not going to invest in energy efficiency because there is no benefit in doing so. I don't think this will happen anytime soon, though. Renewables are still expensive and in many cases rely on price guarantees by the government, and we're still in a phase when production has to increase significantly to keep up with demand. So overall the market reality and incentive is to push for efficiency while prices remain relatively high (at least in the UK)

bell-cot 3y ago

IF one has some cheap & convenient way to efficiently store MWh-scale quantities of electrical power, then spot-market electricity prices <= 0 are extremely interesting. Otherwise...not so much. All the electrical infrastructure, from the wind turbines to your electrical meter, still has to be planned, built, and maintained. If there's isn't some perpetual* government subsidy involved, then the cost of doing all that still has to be paid from selling the power, and your ability to "play the market" - without sinking a metric buttload of money into energy storage equipment - is gonna be limited. And the more popular such market-playing becomes, the lower the spot price fluctuations will become. *Yes, I know that "perpetual" never really lasts in this context.

jonstewart 3y ago
Sure, thank you for providing the standard contrarian disclaimer to absolutely every article ever written about renewable energy. But in a historical lens, that the -UK-, i.e. His Majesty’s Coal Fire, has such abundant wind generation that it can be free every once in a while when The Great Smog was only ~71 years ago is an incredible feat. * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London
huppeldepup 3y ago
MWh-scale quantities of electrical power Doesn't have to be electrical. I was part of a "demand response" study a decade back where a cold store was provided a prediction of electricity prices. When electricity prices were low or negative, the infrastructure would drive the temperatures to the lowest point to shift future energy consumption to the present. This shift in time is also a form of storage.
- bell-cot 3y ago
  Sure, there are cases. Imagine if quick-response aluminum smelters were a thing. But for household electrical use...maybe you could get your well-insulated electrical water heater extra hot, and your freezer extra cold? But all such cases suffer from the "only if it doesn't get popular" problem.

KaiserPro 3y ago

I have the same supplier, but, I suspect a different tariff. I am on the "agile" price, which means that I have a different price per kwh every 30 mins. Pros: I get negative pricing, ie, they pay me to take away power. Cons: I can also get "surge" pricing upto to £1 a kwh. It only really makes sense for me personally because I have both an electric car (second hand) and a house battery (with solar) about 2-4 times a month, I get paid to charge my car. edit you can see what my prices are here: https://agileprices.co.uk/?region=C https://agileprices.co.uk/?region=C they are published daily at 16:00 for the next day, more or less.

n2d4 3y ago
Could you just intentionally waste a lot of energy when the price is negative to make a lot of money? Is there a limit on how much you can use? Of course you shouldn't do that, but I wonder how their business model looks like. I assume the negative price comes from subsidies, and those probably are limited? edit: with "wasting", I mean literal wasting, basically discharging the grid without using the energy for anything (say, by putting a heater outside)
- xboxnolifes 3y ago
  Negative price can come from too much grid load which must be removed. This can be financially recovered through the non-negative prices.
- cmrx64 3y ago
  The negative rates phenomenon is fascinating. Little to do with subsidies, lots to do with load balancing / matching generation to demand. Hugenormous generation capacity tends to move slowly (just for the mental model, imagine a steam turbine that can only generate less power by _waiting to cool down_). In order to maintain stable grid frequency, the market steps in with some behavioral adjustment via pricing. There’s no reason you _shouldn’t_ do the behavior you describe: the more power you can sink during negative pricing, the better the efficiency of the grid! You’d rather any kind of productive use.
  - 3y ago

ekianjo 3y ago

> (Renewables) They have provided such an abundance of electricity that consumers are paid to use it. in one place. Once. And the author is making it sounds like it's valid everywhere. Well, no.

sergiosgc 3y ago
Just wait a couple more years: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-energy-consumption?tab=chart&time=2000..latest&country=~OWID_WRL https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-energy-consumption?... We are in the middle of an energy technological leap. It'll take a decade to unfurl, but it's nothing short of astounding.
- credit_guy 3y ago
  It is, but ... If prices become negative on average, then there is no financial incentive for anyone to build a new power plant. Except if that plant can follow the load and generate only during the times when the prices are positive, and are above its breakeven generation cost. Natural gas power plants fall in that category. Battery storage too, twice better actually, as they can charge when prices are low or even negative, and discharge when prices are high. One could claim that solar plus batteries is fine. Except that whoever plans to build solar plus batteries can quickly figure out that the ROI is even better if they do battery only and no solar at all. The same goes for wind. The Economist ran a fairly informative article about this in September [1]. [1] https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/09/21/renewable-energy-has-hidden-costs https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/09/21/r...
  - ViewTrick1002 3y ago
    Which is self correcting. 1. Negative/low/volatile prices => Storage is worth constructing to arbitrage the price rather than new generation. 2. Prices smooth out. 3. More power generation get built to take advantage of smoothed out prices. 4. And the cycle repeats. Looking at the market as frozen in time will never match reality.
3y ago

k310 3y ago

I was offered time of day pricing. Bottom line, my main electrical usage is air conditioning in the summer. So, charge a higher rate at the exact times that I use the most. "It's cheap except when you use it." Even PG&E's estimate says stick with flat rate. It's cheaper.

jakewins 3y ago
Our customers use their HVAC to “pre-cool” or (more often, pre-heat) their homes when rates are low.. but you need a house with enough thermal mass and insulation that it can go 4-5 hours just “coasting”, which I guess is more common in cold climates with water-borne heat and masonry buildings..
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  Heat also works because snow is insulating.
ZeroGravitas 3y ago
> So, charge a higher rate at the exact times that I use the most. More accurately, charge a higher rate when everyone is using it, and increasing supply would be expensive (roughly late afternoon to early evening in places that use solar PV and air conditioning) so incentivize the shiftable demand (charging EVs for example) to move to low demand and/or high supply times.
maccard 3y ago
The trick is that you need to shift your consumption to when it's cheap. EV charging, hot water cylinders, battery systems can all be charged overnight when the usage is low, which reduced the demand at the times you need it for AC.
- k310 3y ago
  I have none of the above! That's the problem with a simple life. Without the A/C running, PG&E rates my home better than "energy efficient" homes. I just don't use much electricity except in summer, and the savings from heat pumps, solar cells and batteries would never pay back. I suppose that I could afford a vacation at the coast if I just took off and didn't cool the home in the heat. I'll run the numbers.

sgjohnson 3y ago

> wind power genuinely became too cheap to meter. No, it didn’t. The grid must always be in balance. Wind power production can’t be ramped up or down as needed. Overproduction could cause a surge on the grid, that would in fact be a massive liability for the power company. Power became free for those periods because it was the cheapest option for the producer. Kind of how it happened when crude oil was trading at negative $57 per bbl. The contracts came with an obligation that was impossible to meet, thus it was easier to pay someone to take them off your hands.

ViewTrick1002 3y ago
Wind power can of course be ramped down, the problem in this case is CFD contracts causing over supply since they are guaranteed to get paid. In better functioning markets negative prices generally stem from large thermal producers, nuclear and coal, being unable to ramp fast enough and thus bid negative so they can produce at 100% when prices are expected to increase again.
Ekaros 3y ago
Wind power certainly can be ramped down or up. At least on level of individual turbines. Otherwise they could not lock them in storms when wind speeds are too high. If it can be done with higher wind speeds, nothing prevents doing it at lower. Issue is that they got insane contracts that pay beyond market rates.
- 7thaccount 3y ago
  You can feather the blades or stuff like that, but you can't just ramp them up or down like a natural gas plant and keep them there. It's still weather dependent without some source of fuel.

snapplebobapple 3y ago

This utterly misses the point. Renewables are not so cheap that they are profitable at negative prices by themselves. Pricing is this way because renewables are largely not demand resources and run when wind, sun, etc is there, not when they are needed. In some situations they are still profitable at negative prices because subsidy is worth more than zero making breakeven pricing some negative number. Pricing is negative because the grid is in crisis from overproductiin and needs prices that low to get the renewables to shut off, its not a sign of a healthy, sustainable grid, its a sign of a grid in crisis trying to avert a collapse.

hefferbub 3y ago

Look at the work of Tony Seba, who has analyzed the properties of a possible fully-renewable grid. In his models, you over-provision PV and wind (doable because it is so cheap, and getting cheaper) so it can cover peak loads. Then during the 90+ percent of non-peak time there is super-cheap excess power available which he dubs “super power”. Using pricing signals, this can be used to enable activities which would normally be cost-prohibitive under current models. When power is cheap, crank up the desalinators, electric steel and aluminum mills, pumped storage, hydrogen converters, bitcoin miners, and anything else smart people can devise to do with inexhaustible, inexpensive clean power on a somewhat intermittent basis. His model also shows that you can choose trade offs between how much battery you invest in and how much generation you build, allowing you to optimize costs depending on how much or little of this “super power” you want to generate. More batteries = less generation and less excess power, and vice versa. I think many find this unintuitive because they formed their opinions of renewable energy during the early, high cost parts of its ramp and have not adjusted their thinking to the current part of the S-curve. But renewable energy is already the least expensive source of electricity in most markets. It is our amazing good fortune that it is also environmentally fairly benign, extremely safe, has very low maintenance costs, can be geographically distributed to reduce grid distribution costs, and is able to scale with few limits aside from simple land availability. And its Wright’s law cost declines appear unconstrained for the foreseeable future.

epistasis 3y ago
This is the key part that most people are missing. Standard thermal electricity generation is a very mature technology, no matter the heat source. Turbine-based combined cycle natural gas generation was a bit of a step up, but it used already mature tech: jet turbines. Solar and wind and batteries are fundamentally different, and more like integrated circuit technology or DNA sequencing: falling in cost at a tremendous rate. Looking at current prices or current installed bases of solar or wind or batteries is not very informative for assessing the technologies. You really need to see the history of prices to project their future, then you need to start seeing that for each application, adoption is non-linear once the tech becomes the cheapest option for that application. What I'm most surprised about on HN is how few commenters here seem to understand tech curves. The HN audience, of all audiences, should have the clearest view of how traditional energy industry assumptions are about to be disrupted in the coming decades. We don't know the full extent of the disruption, but views like Seba's of huge amounts of surplus energy, seem inevitable. Arbitrage in time and geography will be the money making opportunities.

helf 3y ago

[dead]

specialist 3y ago

> We'll always need something to be able to provide a base-load of electricity. Correct. Advanced geothermal and thermal batteries will be a large part of the solution. Those nascent markets today are where PV and Li-ion were in the 2000s: proven technologies that have climbed onto the cost-learning curve ladder, now just need capital and time. We're so close to having all the necessary solutions we need to achieve net zero, and then push forward to net negative (to get CO2 back down to 350ppm).

vfclists 3y ago

When you de-industrialize and shift all your needs for sustained high levels of energy to China, you can always wax lyrical about the benefits of renewable energy. Lets see you provide jobs in factories which depend on renewable energy. Yup. Even the jobs that will be created by switching to renewable industry depend on products and materials created by Chinese heavy industry that cannot depend on renewable energy. The wishful fancy self-congratulatory thinking of Westerners on renewable energy knows no bounds.

dogmatism 3y ago

*cries in my location where energy is like 70% from imported LNG and there's only flat rate pricing at $0.30/kWh...and it's windy AF but for political reasons no one's built the wind farms Oh and there's a nuc plant I'm in meltdown range of, but don't get any pricing benefit