9 ms·

The issue is that works perfectly well when solar is a small % of the grid, but when that number grows, then you need grid scale solutions and coordination for

The issue is that works perfectly well when solar is a small % of the grid, but when that number grows, then you need grid scale solutions and coordination for things to continue working well. And that requires both technical skill and political will.

taminka 9mo ago
i wonder if ppl's electricity consumption habits will change in response to this, idk like turning the heat way up during the day or using high power appliances more during the day
- mschuster91 9mo ago
  > idk like turning the heat way up during the day That is something you can reasonably do, but it's only useful in winter. > or using high power appliances more during the day Well, given that people have to work during the day, I doubt that that will work out on a large enough scale. And even if you'd pre-program a laundry machine to run at noon, the laundry would sit and get smelly during summer until you'd get home. The only change in patterns we will see is more base load during the night from EVs trickle-charging as more and more enter the market.
  - infecto 9mo ago
    At least in the US there is a push to make electric appliances smarter already. So for example, the electric hot water heater responding to the strain on the grid. The same could happen for AC, heat, EVs and other higher load appliances. At scale that can help out the grid immensely either in times of peak load or dip in demand.
    - elzbardico 9mo ago
      This is good for water heaters for example. I wonder if storing chilled water for air conditioning would be a feasible strategy to do the same.
    - fpoling 9mo ago
      I do not see a point of smart appliances besides electrical car. 10 KWt-hour battery will cover all the needs to smooth the demand from all home appliances and costs below 1K usd. It will allow also to significantly reduce maximum power that has to be supplied to a house while allow to increase peak consumption while heavy cooking/AC/heating.
      - infecto 9mo ago
        At least in the US most of this is still on the research phase but if you can get a standard adopted for all new equipment you can easily adjust these high draw appliances to act as a virtual power plant. It would be a trivial implementation compared to getting batteries in homes.
  - bruce511 9mo ago
    I've got solar. We switched things like pool pump, hot water and so on (things already on timers) from night to day. Dishwasher can also gave a programmed start, so that can also shift from after-dinner to after-breakfast. I also work some days from home, so other activities can be moved from night to day. We use a bore-hole for irrigation, laundry in the morning etc. Even cooking can often be done earlier in the day. Aircon is the least problematic- when we need it, the sun is shining. So yes, habits can shift. Obviously though each situation is different.
- fgkramer 9mo ago
  This is already a reality with smart chargers in the UK. Your electric car can be charged when the electricity rates are lower (night usually)
- kalleboo 9mo ago
  We have a solar electric plan - the price per kWh is much higher during the duck curve in return for cheap rates during sunshine hours. The rates are something like 1x during night, 0.5x during sunshine, 4x during the morning and afternoon peaks. We have our heat pump water heater running during the cheap hours, and also change our use of air conditioning/heating to accommodate. It would probably not work in our favor if we didn't work from home and were out of the home all day.
Fronzie 9mo ago
(Home) batteries are quickly becoming cheap and per-hour electricity rates can be implemented at a reasonable time. With that, the grid owner can influence the grid stability without having to build capacity or generation itself.
- DrewADesign 9mo ago
  My goal is to do wholly owned solar and batteries at home, only using the grid as backup, if I move out of the city. But I think the big problem with this new demand is that it’s for data centers. I can’t see that working for them.
consp 9mo ago
We see that quite often here in the summer as the energy price sometimes drops to minus 60ct/kWh (more often it hovers around -5 to -10). It is pretty much "please use everything now" to avoid grid issues. It often happens on very clear days with lots of wind.
- JuniperMesos 9mo ago
  Mine bitcoin, run LLM inference, smelt aluminum, make synthetic fossil fuels from atmospheric CO2.
  - chii 9mo ago
    > make synthetic fossil fuels from atmospheric CO2. that would actually be my preferred solution (if only it was less energy inefficient, sigh).
    - elzbardico 9mo ago
      If the marginal value of electricity is negative, what matters if it is energy inefficient?
      - lazide 9mo ago
        Scale/quantity. That ‘negative value’ electricity could also be used to do something else. And actually requires a lot of capital to produce. It isn’t actually free, it’s a side effect of another process that has restraints/restrictions.
        chithanh 9mo ago
        It has a negative price precisely because at that given moment, nobody can use it for anything else.
        lazide 9mo ago
        Yes…. And capital costs to capture that ‘moment’ productively are likely not in favor, if this situation exists long term. For example, Free power for an hour is useless if someone is running an aluminum refinery, because you can’t just start and stop it; and it costs so much capital to make that only operating 1 hour out of 24 is not economic. And that is for a situation where electrical power costs are one of the most dominant costs!
infecto 9mo ago
The bigger issue, at least in the US, is that there is a huge lack of supply in the equipment to connect to the grid at the moment. Backlogs are still 1-3 years after order, not terrible but still an issue deploying.
- idiotsecant 9mo ago
  That is definitely not the bigger issue. If we had faster grid tie completions the problem would be even worse. If you don't believe me look at the very nearly daily negative power pricing inany areas of California. We simply don't have the transmission and storage for significantly more grid tied solar. It's pointless to build more for purposes of grid supply, we need to build transmission and storage first.
  - infecto 9mo ago
    Disagree. Taking 3-5 years to get new plants online is a huge issue, renewable or otherwise
GrowingSideways 9mo ago
Well as we all know the political will in this country seems to generally be "let's all commit suicide together", but perhaps mass installations of solar will provide material reason to improve conditions somewhat.
evolve2k 9mo ago
Solar is highly distributed. At the most basic level with a solar & battery system the production and consumption and CONTROL are all yours. You own it and it's literally on your property. Refinements on ways to sell it to neighbours / recharge various EV's / use it for new purposes are all up to you. There are lots of analogies to self hosting or concepts around owning and controlling your own data, when it's owned by you, you retain soverignty and full rights on what happens. I'd expect most tech people will value the distributed nature of solar over equivilents, that by design require centralisation and commerical/state ownership and control. Get your solar, back increasingly distributed approaches, let those pushing centralised agendas be the ones to pay for their grid. Eventually they are forced to change. As we're finding in Australia, our high solar uptake by citizens.. is pressuring governments to respond, lest their centralised options become redundant. What we found is that as more people moved to solar, the power companies lumped the costs for grid maintenance onto those who hadnt moved yet, actually contributing to even further accelerated solar adoption and pressure to rework the system. Big corporates can lobby for themselves you dont owe them your custom.
- elzbardico 9mo ago
  Cost. Useful life. I thought about an off grid system. Batteries are expensive. Also, unless you live in a dry place in the equator, You'll need to account for things like winter, long rainy spells, so either you add more batteries to account for multiple days (weeks? months?) of low generation, or you'll need a diesel/gas generator, or have a hybrid system instead, which basically means you're using the utilities gas generator instead. Then, subsides are drying up. Systems have a useful life, your panels can be damaged by storms, for maximizing battery life you need to ensure you don't discharge it below 20%, and neither charge it over 100%. So, in the end, the grid needs to be there anyway, but as most grid costs are fixed, whenever you use it now, it is going to be more expensive.
  - raddan 9mo ago
    Generating your own power does not necessarily mean cutting ties with the grid. I think for most people in most places being off-grid would be a real challenge. I’m not sure how Australia does it but in my neck of the woods (northeast US) staying grid-tied is the norm. I have a relatively big battery (12kWh) which is enough to see me through the evening during the summer months. We do not get quite enough sunshine where I live to be off-grid during the winter, but I can use the battery to hedge against grid outages which are common here in the winter due to storms (eg heavy ice taking down power lines).
yunohn 9mo ago
So your implication that other sources of energy currently do not need scaling coordination somehow? I fail to see how that is true, maybe you can provide some insights?
- fwip 9mo ago
  It's easier to coordinate N electricity suppliers when N is small.
  - yunohn 9mo ago
    My point is that scaling coordination issues exist for everything, including all sources of energy production. Singling out solar and continuing to not prioritize it will inevitably lead to ongoing grid issues. Whereas this has been mostly solved for other sources, due to lobbying and legacy. Thus my confusion about the OPs half-baked point.
    - fwip 9mo ago
      If you go up the thread, this is the context we're in: "Solar can be deployed by hundreds of thousands of individual efforts and financing at the same time, with almost no bureaucracy." N>100000 is a lot harder to coordinate than the ~15,000 established power plants, which have come online over the last hundred or so years.
- bluGill 9mo ago
  Wind and solar are not in ur control. I can turn on a generator and get power. Some plants might need weeks to start up - but this is in my control. I have no idea how windy it will be in five days.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
reactordev 9mo ago
This isn’t remotely true. Solar / wind / nuclear / coal / gas / any electrical source including from neighboring grids can be inbound or outbound from your grid using, the grid. There are capacitors and transformers, relays and transmission lines. Any energy source can provide power. Solar used to give money back to its owners by selling power back to the grid but they killed that initiative quickly and will just use your energy you provide. The issues you describe are from coal, oil, and gas lobbyists saying solar isn’t viable because of nighttime. When the grid is made up of batteries… If every house had solar and some LiFePo batteries on site, high demand can be pulled from the grid while during low demand and high production, it can be given to the grid. The energy companies can store it, hydropower or batteries, for later. We have the ability. The political will is simply the lobbyists giving people money so they won’t. But we can just do it anyway. Start with your own home.
- raddan 9mo ago
  Also, power companies did not necessarily kill energy export incentives. Here in Massachusetts my meter “runs backward” when I export to the grid. This does not earn me money but it does earn me kWh credits, which means that if I am net negative for energy import in the summer and net positive for import in the winter, I can be net zero (or close to it) for the year. In MA and a few other states, polluters are also required to buy “renewable energy credits.” Since I have a solar array I can sell my RECs whether I export energy or not. It’s my first year with a solar array, so I’m not sure how much to expect, but neighbors tell me that they earn between $500-$1000 a year.
  - londons_explore 9mo ago
    In a future with solar and batteries, daytime and nighttime electricity pricing cannot be equal - else nobody would bother to have a battery (grid scale or at home). Rules and regulations could solve that problem (meter not allowed to go backwards, solar companies are forced to pay some kind of battery credit, etc), but the free market will always outcompete. Therefore, I forsee the future lies in 'smart' electricity meters which can charge different rates at different times of day - perhaps with minute by minute live pricing.
jillesvangurp 9mo ago
You are not wrong. The Australian grid shows that when solar is the dominant part of the grid, it can still work pretty well. But you need to plan for when the sun is not shining and adapt to the notion that base load translates as "expensive power that you can't turn off when you need to" rather than "essential power that is always there when needed". The notion of having more than that when a lot of renewables are going to come online by the tens of GW is not necessarily wise from a financial point of view. That's why coal plants are disappearing rapidly. And gas plants are increasingly operating in peaker plant mode (i.e. not providing base load). Also battery (domestic and grid) is being deployed rapidly and actively incentivized. And there are a lot of investments in things like grid forming inverters so that small communities aren't dependent on a long cable to some coal plant far away. The economics of all this are adding up. Solar is the cheapest source of energy. Batteries are getting cheap as well. And the rest is just stuff you need to maintain a reliable energy system. None of this is cheap but it's cheaper than the alternative which would be burning coal and gas. And of course home owners figuring out that solar + batteries earn themselves back in a few short years is kind of forcing the issue. Australian grid prices are coming down a lot because they are spending less and less on gas and coal. The evening peak is now flattened because of batteries. They actually have negative rates for power during the day. You can charge your car or battery for free for a few hours when there's so much solar on the grid that they prefer to not charge you than to shut down the base load of coal/gas at great cost. Gas plants are still there for bridging any gaps in supply.
- BLKNSLVR 9mo ago
  When you say 'Australian grid prices are coming down a lot' I don't think you're talking consumer prices. I don't have the exact 'before' numbers on me, but our peak electricity costs went up from around 42c/kWh to 56c/kWh around 18 months ago. At the same time that feed-in was halved from 4c/kWh to 2c. Having said that, I'm pretty sure 'Shoulder' and 'Off-Peak' went down slightly. (I'll update this when I can access my spreadsheet with the actual numbers and dates) I should also say that I'm fairly insulated from this price rise having recently gotten a battery installed, plus moving to a special EV plan, so I charge the car and the house battery at the very cheap off peak rate (special for EV owners) and run the house entirely off battery, topped up with solar. It's a privileged setup, but one that I planned and worked towards for a fair while, having seen ever increasing electricity prices always on the horizon (even before AI started eating all the resources).
ViewTrick1002 9mo ago
Storage exists? Now down to $50/kWh. Same method. Massive scale, trivial to deploy, works with barely any maintenance.

taminka 9mo ago

i wonder if ppl's electricity consumption habits will change in response to this, idk like turning the heat way up during the day or using high power appliances more during the day

mschuster91 9mo ago
> idk like turning the heat way up during the day That is something you can reasonably do, but it's only useful in winter. > or using high power appliances more during the day Well, given that people have to work during the day, I doubt that that will work out on a large enough scale. And even if you'd pre-program a laundry machine to run at noon, the laundry would sit and get smelly during summer until you'd get home. The only change in patterns we will see is more base load during the night from EVs trickle-charging as more and more enter the market.
- infecto 9mo ago
  At least in the US there is a push to make electric appliances smarter already. So for example, the electric hot water heater responding to the strain on the grid. The same could happen for AC, heat, EVs and other higher load appliances. At scale that can help out the grid immensely either in times of peak load or dip in demand.
  - elzbardico 9mo ago
    This is good for water heaters for example. I wonder if storing chilled water for air conditioning would be a feasible strategy to do the same.
  - fpoling 9mo ago
    I do not see a point of smart appliances besides electrical car. 10 KWt-hour battery will cover all the needs to smooth the demand from all home appliances and costs below 1K usd. It will allow also to significantly reduce maximum power that has to be supplied to a house while allow to increase peak consumption while heavy cooking/AC/heating.
    - infecto 9mo ago
      At least in the US most of this is still on the research phase but if you can get a standard adopted for all new equipment you can easily adjust these high draw appliances to act as a virtual power plant. It would be a trivial implementation compared to getting batteries in homes.
- bruce511 9mo ago
  I've got solar. We switched things like pool pump, hot water and so on (things already on timers) from night to day. Dishwasher can also gave a programmed start, so that can also shift from after-dinner to after-breakfast. I also work some days from home, so other activities can be moved from night to day. We use a bore-hole for irrigation, laundry in the morning etc. Even cooking can often be done earlier in the day. Aircon is the least problematic- when we need it, the sun is shining. So yes, habits can shift. Obviously though each situation is different.
fgkramer 9mo ago
This is already a reality with smart chargers in the UK. Your electric car can be charged when the electricity rates are lower (night usually)
kalleboo 9mo ago
We have a solar electric plan - the price per kWh is much higher during the duck curve in return for cheap rates during sunshine hours. The rates are something like 1x during night, 0.5x during sunshine, 4x during the morning and afternoon peaks. We have our heat pump water heater running during the cheap hours, and also change our use of air conditioning/heating to accommodate. It would probably not work in our favor if we didn't work from home and were out of the home all day.

Fronzie 9mo ago

(Home) batteries are quickly becoming cheap and per-hour electricity rates can be implemented at a reasonable time. With that, the grid owner can influence the grid stability without having to build capacity or generation itself.

DrewADesign 9mo ago
My goal is to do wholly owned solar and batteries at home, only using the grid as backup, if I move out of the city. But I think the big problem with this new demand is that it’s for data centers. I can’t see that working for them.

consp 9mo ago

We see that quite often here in the summer as the energy price sometimes drops to minus 60ct/kWh (more often it hovers around -5 to -10). It is pretty much "please use everything now" to avoid grid issues. It often happens on very clear days with lots of wind.

JuniperMesos 9mo ago
Mine bitcoin, run LLM inference, smelt aluminum, make synthetic fossil fuels from atmospheric CO2.
- chii 9mo ago
  > make synthetic fossil fuels from atmospheric CO2. that would actually be my preferred solution (if only it was less energy inefficient, sigh).
  - elzbardico 9mo ago
    If the marginal value of electricity is negative, what matters if it is energy inefficient?
    - lazide 9mo ago
      Scale/quantity. That ‘negative value’ electricity could also be used to do something else. And actually requires a lot of capital to produce. It isn’t actually free, it’s a side effect of another process that has restraints/restrictions.
      - chithanh 9mo ago
        It has a negative price precisely because at that given moment, nobody can use it for anything else.
        lazide 9mo ago
        Yes…. And capital costs to capture that ‘moment’ productively are likely not in favor, if this situation exists long term. For example, Free power for an hour is useless if someone is running an aluminum refinery, because you can’t just start and stop it; and it costs so much capital to make that only operating 1 hour out of 24 is not economic. And that is for a situation where electrical power costs are one of the most dominant costs!

infecto 9mo ago

The bigger issue, at least in the US, is that there is a huge lack of supply in the equipment to connect to the grid at the moment. Backlogs are still 1-3 years after order, not terrible but still an issue deploying.

idiotsecant 9mo ago
That is definitely not the bigger issue. If we had faster grid tie completions the problem would be even worse. If you don't believe me look at the very nearly daily negative power pricing inany areas of California. We simply don't have the transmission and storage for significantly more grid tied solar. It's pointless to build more for purposes of grid supply, we need to build transmission and storage first.
- infecto 9mo ago
  Disagree. Taking 3-5 years to get new plants online is a huge issue, renewable or otherwise

GrowingSideways 9mo ago

Well as we all know the political will in this country seems to generally be "let's all commit suicide together", but perhaps mass installations of solar will provide material reason to improve conditions somewhat.

evolve2k 9mo ago

Solar is highly distributed. At the most basic level with a solar & battery system the production and consumption and CONTROL are all yours. You own it and it's literally on your property. Refinements on ways to sell it to neighbours / recharge various EV's / use it for new purposes are all up to you. There are lots of analogies to self hosting or concepts around owning and controlling your own data, when it's owned by you, you retain soverignty and full rights on what happens. I'd expect most tech people will value the distributed nature of solar over equivilents, that by design require centralisation and commerical/state ownership and control. Get your solar, back increasingly distributed approaches, let those pushing centralised agendas be the ones to pay for their grid. Eventually they are forced to change. As we're finding in Australia, our high solar uptake by citizens.. is pressuring governments to respond, lest their centralised options become redundant. What we found is that as more people moved to solar, the power companies lumped the costs for grid maintenance onto those who hadnt moved yet, actually contributing to even further accelerated solar adoption and pressure to rework the system. Big corporates can lobby for themselves you dont owe them your custom.

elzbardico 9mo ago
Cost. Useful life. I thought about an off grid system. Batteries are expensive. Also, unless you live in a dry place in the equator, You'll need to account for things like winter, long rainy spells, so either you add more batteries to account for multiple days (weeks? months?) of low generation, or you'll need a diesel/gas generator, or have a hybrid system instead, which basically means you're using the utilities gas generator instead. Then, subsides are drying up. Systems have a useful life, your panels can be damaged by storms, for maximizing battery life you need to ensure you don't discharge it below 20%, and neither charge it over 100%. So, in the end, the grid needs to be there anyway, but as most grid costs are fixed, whenever you use it now, it is going to be more expensive.
- raddan 9mo ago
  Generating your own power does not necessarily mean cutting ties with the grid. I think for most people in most places being off-grid would be a real challenge. I’m not sure how Australia does it but in my neck of the woods (northeast US) staying grid-tied is the norm. I have a relatively big battery (12kWh) which is enough to see me through the evening during the summer months. We do not get quite enough sunshine where I live to be off-grid during the winter, but I can use the battery to hedge against grid outages which are common here in the winter due to storms (eg heavy ice taking down power lines).

yunohn 9mo ago

So your implication that other sources of energy currently do not need scaling coordination somehow? I fail to see how that is true, maybe you can provide some insights?

fwip 9mo ago
It's easier to coordinate N electricity suppliers when N is small.
- yunohn 9mo ago
  My point is that scaling coordination issues exist for everything, including all sources of energy production. Singling out solar and continuing to not prioritize it will inevitably lead to ongoing grid issues. Whereas this has been mostly solved for other sources, due to lobbying and legacy. Thus my confusion about the OPs half-baked point.
  - fwip 9mo ago
    If you go up the thread, this is the context we're in: "Solar can be deployed by hundreds of thousands of individual efforts and financing at the same time, with almost no bureaucracy." N>100000 is a lot harder to coordinate than the ~15,000 established power plants, which have come online over the last hundred or so years.
bluGill 9mo ago
Wind and solar are not in ur control. I can turn on a generator and get power. Some plants might need weeks to start up - but this is in my control. I have no idea how windy it will be in five days.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]

reactordev 9mo ago

This isn’t remotely true. Solar / wind / nuclear / coal / gas / any electrical source including from neighboring grids can be inbound or outbound from your grid using, the grid. There are capacitors and transformers, relays and transmission lines. Any energy source can provide power. Solar used to give money back to its owners by selling power back to the grid but they killed that initiative quickly and will just use your energy you provide. The issues you describe are from coal, oil, and gas lobbyists saying solar isn’t viable because of nighttime. When the grid is made up of batteries… If every house had solar and some LiFePo batteries on site, high demand can be pulled from the grid while during low demand and high production, it can be given to the grid. The energy companies can store it, hydropower or batteries, for later. We have the ability. The political will is simply the lobbyists giving people money so they won’t. But we can just do it anyway. Start with your own home.

raddan 9mo ago
Also, power companies did not necessarily kill energy export incentives. Here in Massachusetts my meter “runs backward” when I export to the grid. This does not earn me money but it does earn me kWh credits, which means that if I am net negative for energy import in the summer and net positive for import in the winter, I can be net zero (or close to it) for the year. In MA and a few other states, polluters are also required to buy “renewable energy credits.” Since I have a solar array I can sell my RECs whether I export energy or not. It’s my first year with a solar array, so I’m not sure how much to expect, but neighbors tell me that they earn between $500-$1000 a year.
- londons_explore 9mo ago
  In a future with solar and batteries, daytime and nighttime electricity pricing cannot be equal - else nobody would bother to have a battery (grid scale or at home). Rules and regulations could solve that problem (meter not allowed to go backwards, solar companies are forced to pay some kind of battery credit, etc), but the free market will always outcompete. Therefore, I forsee the future lies in 'smart' electricity meters which can charge different rates at different times of day - perhaps with minute by minute live pricing.

jillesvangurp 9mo ago

You are not wrong. The Australian grid shows that when solar is the dominant part of the grid, it can still work pretty well. But you need to plan for when the sun is not shining and adapt to the notion that base load translates as "expensive power that you can't turn off when you need to" rather than "essential power that is always there when needed". The notion of having more than that when a lot of renewables are going to come online by the tens of GW is not necessarily wise from a financial point of view. That's why coal plants are disappearing rapidly. And gas plants are increasingly operating in peaker plant mode (i.e. not providing base load). Also battery (domestic and grid) is being deployed rapidly and actively incentivized. And there are a lot of investments in things like grid forming inverters so that small communities aren't dependent on a long cable to some coal plant far away. The economics of all this are adding up. Solar is the cheapest source of energy. Batteries are getting cheap as well. And the rest is just stuff you need to maintain a reliable energy system. None of this is cheap but it's cheaper than the alternative which would be burning coal and gas. And of course home owners figuring out that solar + batteries earn themselves back in a few short years is kind of forcing the issue. Australian grid prices are coming down a lot because they are spending less and less on gas and coal. The evening peak is now flattened because of batteries. They actually have negative rates for power during the day. You can charge your car or battery for free for a few hours when there's so much solar on the grid that they prefer to not charge you than to shut down the base load of coal/gas at great cost. Gas plants are still there for bridging any gaps in supply.

BLKNSLVR 9mo ago
When you say 'Australian grid prices are coming down a lot' I don't think you're talking consumer prices. I don't have the exact 'before' numbers on me, but our peak electricity costs went up from around 42c/kWh to 56c/kWh around 18 months ago. At the same time that feed-in was halved from 4c/kWh to 2c. Having said that, I'm pretty sure 'Shoulder' and 'Off-Peak' went down slightly. (I'll update this when I can access my spreadsheet with the actual numbers and dates) I should also say that I'm fairly insulated from this price rise having recently gotten a battery installed, plus moving to a special EV plan, so I charge the car and the house battery at the very cheap off peak rate (special for EV owners) and run the house entirely off battery, topped up with solar. It's a privileged setup, but one that I planned and worked towards for a fair while, having seen ever increasing electricity prices always on the horizon (even before AI started eating all the resources).

ViewTrick1002 9mo ago

Storage exists? Now down to $50/kWh. Same method. Massive scale, trivial to deploy, works with barely any maintenance.