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Solar will get too cheap to connect to the power grid
- ggm 2y agoA reminder pricing in electricity supply is not a good in itself, its a mechanistic approach based on (in my opinion) flawed economics around the "best" way to deliver a public utility function.
- outside1234 2y agoSo we get batteries and sell the power back at night? Sounds like a solution to two problems to me
- jmpman 2y agoWhere I live, the major consumer of power is cooling. I want to build an underground pool, that each day, during solar peak, I use the excess energy to freeze the water. Then during the evening, use that ice block to cool my house - with only grid power (or battery) required to pump the coolant. It seems like this would be a much cheaper solution than tesla power packs, but doesn’t appear that I can buy this system off the shelf.
- maxerickson 2y agoFor small residential, it's probably hard to compete with the capital cost of just running the AC in the afternoon (no additional cost). If the house has any insulation at all the heat gain once the sun isn't participating won't be too bad.
- jmpman 2y agoIn Phoenix, it’s regularly over 100f until past midnight. I expect my AC is running 24x7, but maybe with just a lower duty cycle at night.
- anovikov 2y agoIs SAF produced from electricity alone is a real thing at all, at any significant scale (say is there enough of it produced worldwide to fuel a single 737 once daily)?
- phreeza 2y agoNumbers I found are that global SAF production in 2023 was 6e8 liters, which corresponds to about 4000 transatlantic flights. So not a huge amount but also not nothing. Edit: ah I missed the "electricity alone" part. That I don't know.
- anovikov 2y agoYeah because that's what those guys are advocating for. I know it is technically possible and appears economically approachable. But i'm afraid of it becoming a thing like cellulosic ethanol 15 years ago: no one doubts the possibility and yet no one seems to be able to do it in practice, on scale.
- pfdietz 2y agoIt's not clear SAF needs to be made from electricity alone. The carbon has to come from somewhere, and waste biomass would seem to be a reasonable place (deliberately grown biomass, probably not). There's more than enough waste biomass to provide for the carbon for current aviation fuel consumption. One could add energy from electricity to boost the yield per unit of biomass, for example ensuring that all the carbon in it ends up in SAF, with none wasted to CO2 instead.
- anovikov 2y agoIt can be done through carbon capture, using electricity alone. Question is how to do it in a way that makes money.
- pfdietz 2y agoDirect air capture is quite expensive, and also adds the question: if you can capture CO2 from air, why not just continue to use petroleum-based jet fuel and capture and sequester the CO2?
- roenxi 2y ago> When there’s enough surplus energy supply from renewables, prices can even go negative. That's great news for consumers - who get paid to use energy - but it's bad news for renewable generators. That isn't correct, it is just bad news for everyone. Sure if there was a sustainable deal that offered negative prices that'd be good, but in this case it just means the prices when positive will have to go up to cover the overall profits of the energy producers. Negative prices represent waste and it is quite unusual for waste to be good for consumers. Although this is a minor point. The solar revolution is pretty exciting.
- AndrewDucker 2y agoNegative pricing will lead to people building storage which can make use of it to charge, and then sell back when prices are positive again. It's an excellent signal of opportunity.
- snapplebobapple 2y agoNo it doesnt mean either of those things. It means you built too much solar and made the grid more unstable given the physics constraints on short term supply and demand. Its not waste, it is not good.
- thelastgallon 2y agoThere is a sustainable deal that can work with negative prices. Charge EVs when price is negative and pay the carowners. For this, car owners have to be always plugged in (except the 20m - 1hour) that they drive. When demand peaks, the cars can supply power back to the grid and make even more money! Households can put solar panels, provide the entire energy infrastructure: production and storage. Car batteries are ~6 times larger than powerwalls and powerwalls can make money supplying power back to the grid: https://electrek.co/2023/07/05/tesla-electric-customers-report-making-150-day/ https://electrek.co/2023/07/05/tesla-electric-customers-repo... We don't need peak power infrastructure (natural gas) which runs only a few hours per day. All of it can be replaced by EVs.
- ikekkdcjkfke 2y agoLet the market forces deal with it?
- kapsteur 2y agoBitcoin mining could be the solution
- Lucasoato 2y ago...to create wasted heat and warm our houses during winter :)
- Ekaros 2y agoYou probably want heat pumps instead for heating...
- consp 2y agoI cannot tell if this is sarcastic or not so the assumption is it isn't. In which case: WTF? There are many solutions for cheap energy but a pointless digest algorithm isn't one. While I do not agree with the AI craze it would still be a better solution.
- tosl567 2y ago[flagged]
- greesil 2y agoBitcoins as grid energy storage? Just install my BitWall box next to the pv junction box. I'd be surprised if the economics math works out but that's a fun idea.
- d1sxeyes 2y agoIt is hard to tell if you are joking here or not, but in case you are not: if the cost of mining is low, the value of mining is also low. The reason for having 'mining' in Bitcoin is to artificially create scarcity in order to simulate blocks having real-world value. If you can mine blocks for free, the value of each block plummets.
- tosl567 2y ago
- api 2y agoA wild thought just hit me: if batteries and solar get cheap enough, could the power grid as we know it become at least partially obsolete? The power grid is the greatest machine ever built by humans. It's gigantic, elaborate, amazingly reliable, and civilization as we know it would collapse without it. It's so ubiquitous that it's hard to imagine it not being here save in a "Mad Max" or "The Road" type collapse scenario. It makes me think of this link that was posted here a bit ago: http://cityinfrastructure.com/single.php?d=RuralOutsidePlant&t=Rural%20Outside%20Plant http://cityinfrastructure.com/single.php?d=RuralOutsidePlant... The analog "POTS" (plain old telephone system) would have seemed like the power grid to me as a kid and a teenager. It seemed that way up until the 2000s when the runaway growth of packet switching digital networks and cellular rendered it completely obsolete. It's been a while since I've even seen a POTS phone line. Could the power grid be reduced to something you only see in big cities and industrial areas where you have tons of demand? Could it eventually go away entirely, or go away "as we know it" in favor of a bunch of lateral load-sharing links between independent mini power plants? It's interesting to think about.
- realusername 2y agoFor that to happen, you would need an order of magnitude better batteries than we already have. I'm not saying it's impossible but it's off the cards with the current technology.
- jl6 2y agoThe copper cables that POTS ran on are still in widespread use, and their replacement is mostly wired cable/fiber, not wireless-only. Power will probably follow a similar pattern: gridless renewables for some use cases, wired power for others.
- danw1979 2y agoMicrogrids have been making a lot of noise for a few years now. I think it’ll still be common to get your electricity from the grid in most towns and cities in the future, especially in northern Europe; we just don’t have the levels of insolation to generate all the energy we need from the small plots of land we live on in the UK in winter.
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- danw1979 2y agoNearly choked on my cornflakes at this: > The solar panel is wizardry manifest. It literally prints energy from free shit that falls out of the sky.
- api 2y agoWhat's amazing about it is that it's many times more efficient than plants' leaves at converting sunlight to usable energy. Of course it's not really an apples/apples comparison. The form usable energy has to take is different in living organisms, and 100% of a leaf is not dedicated to solar collection. Only the chloroplasts do that. Still it's cool that we "beat nature" here.
- gitanovic 2y agoWell... hold your horses, when you make solar panel self replicating and self-healing nano-machines that span all over the planet you would have beaten nature. So far we have beaten nature on the aspect of sheer efficiency
- agilob 2y agoI need solar panels that can be recycled into wine
- thefz 2y ago> Still it's cool that we "beat nature" here. Can solar panels grow to be meters and meters tall with just water and sun? :)
- imtringued 2y agoWhat's amazing is that human and animal muscle power used to be the primary source of mechanical power in human civilization with plants as the energy source. If you were to power an electric generator using a human, you would at most get 200W of sustained power. Today you can buy a tiny solar panel that costs less than such a generator and it will produce power expending zero human effort. Meanwhile the competing energy source, fossil fuels, is maybe 10 times cheaper than generating fossil fuels directly with the help of solar power, except the former took millions of years to form and will be depleted within a millenium, whereas the latter could, at least in theory, produce the same quantity we consume per day today, every day.
- gadders 2y agoI'd like to know how much space all these battery and solar farms are going to take up. Where I live in SE England they seem to be trying to take productive agricultural fields out of use to cover them with solar panels. How does space usage compare against nuclear plants? [And yes I realise some portion of solar will be domestic, but that's not always allowed if your house is listed].
- Hikikomori 2y agoListed where?
- nlnn 2y agoIf it's in the UK, they likely mean "listed" in this sense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Listed_building https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Listed_building
- jl6 2y agoDensely populated small countries like England probably won't have many giga-scale solar farms, but England is blessed with offshore wind.
- pjc50 2y agoWe can import food, and we kind of have to anyway, but we can't import electricity. Well, not on quite the same scale; total interconnector capacity is a few percent of demand, and often used for export. At some point we'll see more agrivoltaics; there's nothing stopping people from planting between/under panels, and for some crops the partial shade actually increases yield. Nuclear plants of course consume way less space, but cost way more and encounter way more planning objections and cost overruns. I take a "you can have your dessert when you finish your vegetables" policy on this: UK can start another nuclear plant if it wants once Hinkley Point C is actually finished and working. At some point we're also going to have to have the "listed building mafia vs. energy efficiency" argument, too. I think the most egregious example was someone trying to block a grid connection for offshore renewables using the presence of "grade 2 listed concrete anti-tank cubes".
- voidUpdate 2y ago> Solar PV is the only way to make electricity with no moving parts RTG
- mfa1999 2y agoWhat cost is involved in moving electricity around? The sun is always shining somewhere.
- precommunicator 2y agoTransmission line losses, which are pretty high.
- pjc50 2y agoGrid building is fairly expensive and people hate seeing pylons. You can bury the cable, but that makes it even more expensive. Still, it's going to have to happen. (At some point we might get a cheap flow battery or CO2-to-fuels system going, which lets you literally put electricity in pipes and tanks)
- BjoernKW 2y agoThis is where superconductors come into play, i.e. materials that allow you to move electricity at no loss due to electrical resistance. The problem with those (traditionally, at least) has been that they usually operate at very low temperatures, which of course again require energy to be maintained. A room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor would be the breakthrough required for doing this at scale. This of course would still require significant infrastructure investment.
- imtringued 2y agoA room-temperature, ambient-pressure, non-ceramic superconductor would be the breakthrough, because you need your superconductor cable to be transportable, repairable and not be a kilometer long piece of ceramic with zero tolerance for defects.
- Tade0 2y agoA kilometre of a 1GW HVDC ground line costs $0.7-1mln. Double or triple that for sea lines[0]. China has had 2000km+ lines online for years now, so there's precedent. Not for solar specifically, but plainly to connect distant grids. We have huge fiber optic connectors wrapping the planet, so there's precedent here as well. Overall a global solar grid is technically feasible and actually not terribly expensive, but we need to solve the political issues preventing it first. EDIT [0] for comparison highways cost $4mln per kilometre in the US and double to triple that in the EU.
- hcfman 2y agoSo how are we going to get to that lovely dream when the power companies are now charging you to deliver your power bank. It's nice buying batteries, but if you are not making savings with solar then there's not a lot of money left over to spend even more on batteries. Likely then, there will be some new tax that the government doesn't curve. In the Netherlands, they have a law that means that what you generate has to be offset against what you produce (In high level), but the energy companies simply started charging for delivering back, which is in effect simply bypassing the law. The obvious response from this would be to ban it because it's an obvious flaunting of the law. But no, the politicians allow it. And then we have that Belgium politician a few years ago who, despite the urgency from global warming, thought it would be smart to put extra taxes on buying solar from China. What did he achieve? At best a little more destruction for the planet.
- tcfhgj 2y ago> When there’s enough surplus energy supply from renewables, prices can even go negative. Why would prices go negative, when you can just cut off the solar plant from the grid if prices go <= 0?
- imtringued 2y agoBecause coal plants need x amount of time to ramp down and low carbon energy sources have priority to reduce emissions. It's technically not the solar power producers that are feeding in electricity, they are being paid to wait.
- thefz 2y agoIn all its excitement this post just glosses over one major point that grid operators know very well: demand == supply for every 50th or 60th of each second of every day. Renewables like solar that can not be modulated are a PITA for grid safety as those plants that instead can, such as coal and gas, then need to scale for solar suddenly dumping energy into the grid. Day-before markets exists for this sole reason.
- tcfhgj 2y agoHow can solar production not be modulated technically (in practice they won't as long as there's fossil power in the grid which solarhas priority over)? You can easily disconnect solar plants from the grid - even remotely if the situation requires it (technically even gradually if it is supported by the specific plant). This is required by law in e.g. Germany: the higher the peak power the higher the requirements in flexibility generally speaking
- thefz 2y agoOn/off is exactly the opposite of modulation
- tcfhgj 2y agoWikipedia: > On–off keying (OOK) denotes the simplest form of amplitude-shift keying (ASK) modulation that represents digital data as the presence or absence of a carrier wave. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On%E2%80%93off_keying https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On%E2%80%93off_keying Idk how you define modulation. Note that on/off isn't a worldwide switch, but only one for tiny units with respect to the whole energy grid
- thefz 2y agoI mean the ability to regulate the power output, dispatch. The page you googled has nothing to do with how the power grid operates.
- ZeroGravitas 2y agoSolar PV is probably the technology best suited to avoiding negative grid prices, if that is your goal. It's sad that this scientific/engineering fact has been lost in the race to make dramatic headlines and climate denial propaganda. Here we see it repeated by someone who seems genuinely positive about solar PV. Basically, you need to shut off energy supply quickly and efficiently when demand drops. Anything with a giant spinning mass involved fails this test. If they have to keep steam hot they fail it even more. (Not to go on a tangent but this fast response is what the initial grid batteries have been getting paid for) Of course, demand response systems have for decades paid people to shift demand towards the periods of cheap and/or clean energy because it is financially beneficial to the system. Any need that is met slightly earlier or later does not need to be met with more expensive and/or dirtier fuels. A simple system optimisation. Apply that to a predictable supply of cheap clean energy in a market based system and suddenly you have the "problem" of people being incentivised with money to use energy when it is available. What a tragedy, who will save us from this cheap clean energy that is going to destroy the grid with the evil magic of negative numbers.
- tcfhgj 2y agoIsn't wind power even better suited in theory? The electricity generators could in theory be used as motors speeding up the wind or go I to reverse mode and consume electricity
- ZeroGravitas 2y agoIf you wanted to use solar PV as an energy sink, which you don't, that would also work. PV panels are LEDs run in reverse. I believe part of the QA process for some panels is to run them in reverse and take an IR photograph of the output to check for defects.
- c-fe 2y ago> which you don't Im interested, why would you not want that when prices are negative?
- belorn 2y agoOptimistic articles like this makes gives me a bit of hope that maybe we can start cutting down on current trend of increased total subsidies for the energy sector. Taking a European perspective like the article, subsidies are around €200 billions per year, and €400 billions in 2022 if we account for interventions during the energy crisis of that year. As much as the trend of solar prices is going downwards, the trend of subsidies are pointing upwards with an alarming speed and consistency. An other big part of government funded energy sector is the reserve energy strategy, generally made by paying natural gas power plants to be on stand-by. A major part of "connection grid" taxes goes directly to pay for those fossil fueled power plants. Rather than expanding the capacity and building new such fossil fueled thermal power plants, existing ones should be under planned obsolescence and be demolished when they reach their end of life. The increased dependency on natural gas is also having an impossible to ignore effect on the geopolitical climate in Europe. https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/32d284d1-747f-11ee-99ba-01aa75ed71a1/language-en?WT_mc_id=Searchresult&WT_ria_c=37085&WT_ria_f=3608&WT_ria_ev=search&WT_URL=https%3A//energy.ec.europa.eu/ https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/32d...
- Apreche 2y agoHow many gallons of water can you desalinate and pump if you only operate during the magic lump? How much sewage can you treat?
- kopirgan 2y agoWhat does it mean when he says there's huge grid connection queue? Capacity built but cannot be used at all?! Any idea how China is solving this, if at all? Guess their problem will be even bigger?
- bryanlarsen 2y agoChina is spending 600 billion over 6 years to mitigate this problem. https://www.ft.com/content/2c0fa0d1-2902-440e-8677-d9f087c2e943 https://www.ft.com/content/2c0fa0d1-2902-440e-8677-d9f087c2e... But money isn't the primary problem. The primary problem in the US and Europe is that NIMBY's can delay the construction of an interconnect by ~10 years. China generally doesn't have this problem. https://www.bostonherald.com/2024/07/03/work-resumes-on-power-line-through-maine-to-bring-quebec-hydro-power-onto-new-england-grid/ https://www.bostonherald.com/2024/07/03/work-resumes-on-powe...
- eqvinox 2y agoFor some types of e.g. compute heavy workloads, you could also move jobs to wherever the sun shines. I wonder if anyone is already doing this...
- caeril 2y agoMost places with high solar insolation values also tend to come with high cooling costs. Arizona and Southern Nevada are perfect for this application, but my first approximate guess is that HVAC would eat all of, if not more than, the benefits.
- kortilla 2y agoThis isn’t really true. HVAC in a dry hot desert isn’t that bad. The main reason NV and AZ don’t have significantly larger data center foot prints is mainly just from lack of cheap energy (data centers run 24/7 at a pretty constant load so solar isn’t a good fit). When I last looked into it, CoLo space in Vegas and Phoenix at small scale has prices competitive with other locations. The biggest downside is distances to major IXPs. So using them is contingent on latency goals.
- ccozan 2y agoThe best place is where is hot (geotermal) and cold(way up in higher lattitudes) in the same time = Iceland
- bryanlarsen 2y agoSolar power is an order of magnitude cheaper than geothermal power.
- eqvinox 2y agoGood point, though I don't think the non-energy costs of HVAC are that high. And the energy costs of HVAC benefit from the same cheap electricity… I don't have any numbers though :/
- senectus1 2y agothis is why nuclear doesnt add up.. the cheapness of solar power during the day makes the investment in nuvlear just so much more expensive and harder to justify.
- Krssst 2y agoIn the meantime: France has been having very low carbon electricity for decades while all large industrialized countries trying renewables are still far from reaching the same average gCO2/kWh per year. Still much better than doing nothing though, I hope they manage it someday. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electricity?time=latest https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...
- aitchnyu 2y agoDo we have storage AC for homes yet?
- oliwarner 2y agoThe negative prices also encourage grid- and home-scale storage. Buy low, sell peak. We make a pile of cash more than we spend in summer on energy and really take the edge off winter. Storage is the only answer to an abundance of solar and wind. We can't just bitch and moan that there's too too much at peak gen because we need all this power. We just sinks to catch up with generation. Install more in-home batteries, more water heaters, and make EV charging omnipresent (and more reflective of wholesale prices). Early adopters get more beneficial rates to offset higher outlays. The market is working as it should.
- more_corn 2y agoBro. Batteries.
- bryanlarsen 2y agoBro. Read the article.
- bilsbie 2y agoIt’s weird to think about if solar is cheaper than building materials like fence panels or pavers.
- tim333 2y agoYou'd think there would be a way to use solar panels as roofing tiles, rather than mounting them above the tiles. Roofing tiles are quite expensive.
- bryanlarsen 2y agoSolar roofing tiles are made by Tesla, CertainTeed, SunTegram, Luma and TimberLine Energy and probably more.
- bilsbie 2y agoSeems like there would be a big demand to let EV’s connect to the grid. They can buy and sell electricity to even out demand.