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From a grid stability point, you can’t produce more than is used, else you get higher frequencies and/or voltages until the automatics shut down. It’s already a somewhat frequent occurence in germany for the grid operator to shut down big solar plants during peak hours because they produce way more power than they can dump (because of low demand or the infrastructure limiting transfer to somewhere else)
Negative prices are the grid operator encouraging more demand so it can balance out the increased production.
Spot on! I hoped this comment would be higher! The main problem isn’t corps not making money, but grid stability due to unreliability of renewables.
To be fair, the original tweet is kinda shit to begin with. They’ve unnecessarily assigned monetary value to a purely engineering (physics?) problem.
As someone with a technical background this is the stupidest problem with solar that I don’t get… just turn off the panels in groups until generation is closer to demand… how have engineers not figured that out. And if they have why does this still get written about.
Someone is an idiot. Maybe it’s me?
I’m in solar/BESS, and I mean more and more DER sites are making use of string inverters which break out arrays into greater chunks than with central inverters. With those, you have more granularity of control where you can drop entire blocks/strings at a time to fall to your curtailed export rate.
You might ask yourself though why DERs can’t just ramp inverter outputs up or down to match curtailment automatically across a whole site. You can absolutely do that, but what happens is your solar or wind resource stays high on the DC or low frequency (LF) AC side, respectively, while power frequency AC is low on the other side of the inverters. This is referred to as DC:AC ratio in the biz, and the higher that ratio, the more losses your inverters experience and less efficient they are. This also puts a huge strain on your inverters and can lessen their operational lifetime.
But really, DERs tie into the grid at distribution level and so they don’t fall under the regulations of FERC & NERC (at least in North America). This means that smaller producers don’t have the same requirements for control as do utility-scale players, so the incentive to control these string inverters at that granular level isn’t there. It’s much easier to just trip the main breaker and wait until the utility gives you the go ahead to turn back on.
I suspect that at lot of producers may want to look into greater control capabilities in the future, but this also depends on inverter OEMs too allowing that control.
If only there were some way to take energy made from sunshine and store it in some form for later. Like in a battery. Or as heat. Or in a flywheel. Or just use the energy for something we’d really like to do as cheaply as possible. Like sequester CO2. Or desalinate water. Or run industries that would otherwise use natural gas.
Or use it to generate hydrogen for simpler, cheaper, more reliable, sustainable hydrogen powered cars.
We don’t even have enough lithium to replace the average country’s existing cars, let alone all of them, or literally anything else that requires lithium.
Isn’t one the issues with hydrogen motors that they are a bit explodey? Genuine question, haven’t looked into it in a long time.
Pure hydrogen doesn’t explode. It’s only if you mix it with oxygen. The Hindenberg glowed red not blue
Seriously if it was free for me to run a hot tub I would be a more relaxed person…but somehow these negative power prices never seem to trickle down to the consumer 🤔.
It still costs real money to maintain the infrastructure; so even if the power was always free; you would still have to pay something to cover the maintenance costs.
Literal free goddamn energy from the sky and these greedy fucks are going to burn the world down because they can’t flip it for a buck
It sounds dumb, but because you can’t turn off solar power, if it produces more then you need, you have to use it somehow or it can damage equipment. Hence the driving prices into negative territory. It’s a technical problem more than it is a financial one.
It is a financial problem. Technically you can just cover the solar panels. But that’s not good financially.
Your “technically you can” is actually a huge logistical nightmare to implement.
Having electricity rates go really low is intended to incentivize people or companies to sink the excess energy to wherever they can. And also to discourage producers to produce more at that hour, if they are able to.
