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This is the future of all energy grids. Solar is by far the cheapest source of power and dropping every day. If we don't build our systems to take advantage of
by epistasis 2y ago
This is the future of all energy grids. Solar is by far the cheapest source of power and dropping every day.
If we don't build our systems to take advantage of the cheap prices, we are leaving tons of money on the table. Or rather, we are shoving money into the pockets of utilities unnecessarily.
Negative prices come from lots of places: bad predictions fo fossil fuel operators that can't adjust their thermal plants in time, subsidies that incentivize solar prices up to that subsidy price, congestion on the grid driving some of these poor decisions, etc. But zero-marginal-cost power sources like solar and wind will change the market for the better.
- 1970-01-01 2y agoAdditionally, cost is no longer a problem for choosing solar. Safe and scalable energy storage is the new bottleneck.
- epistasis 2y agoAt residential pricing, storage has just now become cheap and scalable with current LFP tech. $200/kWh for DIY install is not hard, and you get thousands of cycles from that. Prices are continuing to fall, and we will see where sodium batteries end up on the cost/safety side too as they start to be scaled up over the next few years. Last century's energy tech is pretty much fully baked and complete; but solar and storage are like computer tech in their cost behavior and always getting cheaper. Places in the developing world will build microgrids that are cheaper than possible with natural gas and big transmission grids.