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The negative rates phenomenon is fascinating. Little to do with subsidies, lots to do with load balancing / matching generation to demand. Hugenormous generatio
by 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.
- n2d4 3y agoSo what you're saying is that there is no free/cheap way to waste/get rid of energy? If there were, surely the energy companies would do that instead of paying consumers to use it?
- cmrx64 3y agoUltimately you turn it back to heat, but then you need to put the heat somewhere. One possibility is to just dump it into the earth via a grounding system. You don’t really want to be doing that except in emergency: the soil resistivity isn’t well controlled and in general it’s an extremely crude method. This is the boundary of my ignorance, though: I don’t know what the actual equilibrium system dynamics are. But I believe that using the market to induce demand is ~always going to be more (globally) efficient than curtailing generation or providing grid-scale radiators: the economy has almost certainly got a more productive use for marginally cheaper power than simply returning it to heat. In this margin, only the transmission costs matter.