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The fun bit here, for those who missed it, is the spot price being negative - ie there's so much solar being generated that industrial consumers are being paid
by nippoo 2y ago
The fun bit here, for those who missed it, is the spot price being negative - ie there's so much solar being generated that industrial consumers are being paid to consume electricity!
- gpm 2y agoWhy is there still a gigawatt of natural gas based energy being produced when energy costs are negative? Is pricing regional so some power is still valuable or something?
- calgarymicro 2y agoI'd guess it maybe takes time and money to ramp up/down natural gas capacity, so it makes financial sense to maintain capacity at a loss for now to better/more rapidly profit when solar capacity drops and prices go positive again? If I'm reading the day ahead chart on that page correctly, prices should go positive again around 5PM.
- gpm 2y agoI'm definitely under the impression that that's the case for nuclear (which is famously bad at reacting to changing demand), but I would have thought that even slow gas plants could turn off for hours profitably. Could be wrong.
- remus 2y agoPlants will typically have a normal operating range (where the minimum is >0). A gas plant can respond fairly quickly within that range, but a cold start requires more time.
- ssl-3 2y agoSo they're paying money (or at least, producing little income) to keep the plants working when it is not needed, so that things are ready to go when it inevitably becomes possible for the plants to spool up and make money when their need increases. Makes sense.
- remus 2y agoExactly. They can do this (i.e. keep producing power when the spot price is negative) because a plant that can respond rapidly to increased demand can charge a large premium in times of need.
- bombcar 2y agoIt could be that solar or wind can “shut down” much faster than offline natural gas can be brought online, so it’s better to run them at some sort of “idling” power than to turn them off entirely.
- giantrobot 2y agoKeep in mind it's not just generation that needs to shut down but also re-routing that power. Transmission lines and substations have certain capacities. Shutting down a gas plant for a few hours can mean transferring power from elsewhere in the grid over lines not really designed for that load. It could be easier/cheaper to keep the plant running than to build out higher capacity transmission to power that part of the grid.
- adrianN 2y agoAt least here in Germany transmission is the bottleneck.
- aspanu 2y agoI thought that too on the graph, but I think that's a bug in labeling. When I look at the actual scale, that colour appears to be nuclear (and the other straight line is geothermal). This also makes more sense as they are sources that actually cannot be turned down to respond to electricity demand the way in which natural gas can.
- gpm 2y agoI see 1.14 GW nuclear, and 1.1 GW natural gas at 12:20 PM PST, the nuclear is a flat line at the bottom of the graph (and I agree it makes sense), the natural gas is a dark blue section in the middle-ish, which shrunk from ~3GW overnight and does vary with time. I don't think that what I'm seeing suggests a bug with labeling.
- mlwiese 2y agoNote you can toggle off sources in the chart by tapping on them in the legend. Gas plants can respond quickly to changes in load, but they need to be up and running to do that. In the future this will be done with batteries but we don’t have enough of those yet. California does have about 20x more batteries than it did a few years ago, check out the Record Tracker link. There was a new record for battery discharging 5 days ago.
- jonatron 2y agoIt could be inertia, solar doesn't have any spinning mass to maintain the frequency. https://www.nationalgrideso.com/electricity-explained/how-do-we-balance-grid/what-inertia https://www.nationalgrideso.com/electricity-explained/how-do...
- gpm 2y agoWould the 2.5 GW of nuclear/geothermal/hydro not do that? Maybe not enough (or geographically distributed properly)?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- wiredfool 2y agoThere's a blog post on net ramps, which covers a lot of it: https://blog.gridstatus.io/net-load-ramps/ https://blog.gridstatus.io/net-load-ramps/
- nostrademons 2y agoIt's interesting how renewables have suddenly made time-of-day critical in energy consumption. IMHO, not enough attention has been paid to how important better insulation + workplace EV charging are to the energy transition. If homes were insulated like they are in Northern Europe (where you can go a week without heat and your home will still be tolerable when you get home) rather than Northern California (where your furnace cycles on after an hour despite it being 55F out), you could run basically all residential HVAC during daylight hours, when solar is producing abundantly, and turn the housing stock into a giant thermal battery. And similarly, if everybody charged at work rather than at night, you power transportation on solar rather than on natural gas.
- trunnell 2y agoThis is the way... I have solar, a powerwall battery, a high efficiency heat pump, and... a poorly insulated 70-year old home in Silicon Valley. It can be wildly expensive to properly mitigate poor insulation: you need good air sealing, insulation around the entire building envelope, double or triple paned windows, and a different HVAC setup with dedicated fresh air ventilation. In other words, it requires a major remodel in some cases. Homes need to be built with energy efficiency as a top concern, and I wonder sometimes if that is going to require re-training and incentivizing the entire construction industry. Fewer than 1 in 10 contractors I talked to even knew what I was talking about when I asked for how they would do my project. "What's an ERV?" is a common question I heard. Many still think that gaps are good because "a house needs to breathe."
- r00fus 2y agoI have a 60 year old home and have made a huge dent in my winter therms and summer AC usage by simply adding some roof insulation and double-layer windows/sliding doors a few years ago. Perfect is the enemy of good enough. You are not going to eliminate all gaps.
- jvm 2y agoIf consumers paid close to wholesale rates for their home energy they would be highly incentivized to do these sorts of things: they'd pay almost nothing (or maybe even less than nothing) in the day and big bucks from 5 PM to 8 PM. There would be whole industries helping people shift consumption to daylight hours. Unfortunately legislatures have consistently been acting to shield consumers from variable time of day costs, preventing behavior adjustment.
- mbrumlow 2y agoYet I am charged 40+ cents a kWh and have a bill of about 1k a month and still have a true up bill that adds about another 900 a month. Yes I have solar, and it does not seem to help. Meanwhile in Texas with the AC running 24/7 never had a bill over 300.
- gedy 2y agoPeople balk at it, but I've decided to avoid back feeding solar to the grid, and only consume/charge my property.
- janpieterz 2y agoWhy did you choose not to feed it back?
- bagels 2y agoBecause our electric utilities are ripping us off.
- gedy 2y agoLong story, but basically there is a push in California gov't to deemphasize rooftop solar, in favor of big solar farms. (I've heard this is a favor to construction unions). So we get paid very little per watt now, and it no longer balances out if you say use 20kWH from the grid and feed 20kWH to the grid (like it used to).
- mbrumlow 2y agoWhat is worse, is they seem to want to change it so they can charge you for solar you generate and use.
- gedy 2y agoYeah it's really ridiculous and leaves me very cynical that California gov't cares anything about climate change aside from scaring people into more bureaucracy and power for themselves.
- wolpoli 2y agoThat's really confusing: If there is so much solar generated that they have to pay industrial user to consume electricity, why don't the solar companies just stop sending power to the grid instead of paying money? Are the solar companies unable to turn off their system due to a limitation in their system?
- rnrn 2y agoi suspect this could be related to the renewable production tax credit. I think maybe it works out that the US government is paying, not the solar companies. https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/federal-solar-tax-credits-businesses https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/federal-solar-tax-credits-...
- himinlomax 2y agoThat's not a positive thing. Another way to spin it: renewable electricity (except hydro) is literally worthless. You get it when you don't need it, but you don't have any guarantee it'll be available when you do.
- peddling-brink 2y agoPeople don’t use electricity during the day?
- himinlomax 2y agoThere is a glut of solar power during the day, hence the spot price goes down to zero. There is zero solar power at night, you know, the time when you need the lights on.
- acidburnNSA 2y agoPaid to consume...by whom? Rate payers?
- Cerium 2y agoNegative rates are paid by power plants that cannot reduce production.
- BenoitP 2y agoThat'd be great if it could absorb the surplus, but right now at 12GW production it is curtailed at 0.29 GW. This means neither pumped storage, nor batteries, nor exports can deal with it. On one hand it might create a new market, hopefully H2 electrolysis that replaces coal or gas in industrial processes rather than Bitcoin farms. On the other it also signals that any additional Solar is going to evict about as much capacity into such curtailments. Anyway, California is the record-breaking market and all eyes are on it to helps us guide the global energy future.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- audunw 2y agoI think this will be solved by decarbonisation of heat intensive industries. There’s some very good thermal storage battery solutions now, that can store thermal energy at hundreds of degrees C for a very long time. So once there’s enough of this excess energy you’ll start to see industry soaking up as much of it as they can get. If you “only” need ~200°C there’s some very powerful heat pumps entering the market that can give you more than 100% efficiency.