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.
Logistical problems are still financial problems though. That’s my point. Hire enough people/develop the appropriate automation and the issue is no more.
We have the technology to solve this, the problem is the money.
In fact, you could just buy enough batteries and the problem will also go away. Still a financial problem, not a technology one.
EDIT: just to clarify, if at some point energy prices go negative, it means that it is cheaper to buy energy usage than a solution. Unless the energy company is dumb enough to just lose money for the lazyness of considering other options.
Really? I’m seriously asking, because I thought solar farms already had automated ways of cleaning off the panels, surely an automated way to cover the panels wouldn’t be any more complex than that. It would add maintenance costs for sure, but calling it a logistical nightmare seems like an exaggeration.
“Damaging equipment” is just nonsense. I’ve got an off-grid solar system. When the battery is fully charged the solar panels simply stops producing. It has potential (voltage) but no current until you draw power. Just like a battery is full of energy but it just sits there until you draw power from it.
All solar systems could have smart switches to intelligently disconnect from the grid as needed, some inverter already do this automatically. So it’s not a technical problem. It’s a political problem.
This can cause degradation of the PN junction on the panel shortening life. The plans I’ve seen all have a resistive heater some place to dump the excess when full. Smart equipment does help mitigate most issues like moving the resistance point on the panel for lower efficiency when signaled to do so but less is not the same as none.
How does it damage the PN junction of the panel is open circuit or barely loaded? It doesn’t seem logical that this would damage the panel, but I’m open to being proven wrong.
There are all kinds of follow up questions to ask as well, but I think the main one is how big an effect are we talking?
It is a technical problem of how can you convince electrical companies to overcome a problem they have no financial incentive to solve.
that’s not a technical problem. that’s a weakness of the people’s resolve problem. we can, at any time, force them to do the right thing.
I’m aware its not a technical problem, I was using the word ironically to point out the person I was responding to was wrong to say it…
Also saying we can at any time fix a problem is just being ignorant of the many near impossible steps needed to fix the problem. In this case the problem is capitalism. We could come up with ways to end capitalism or make capitalism work in the interest of humanity, but will it realistically ever happen? No it wont, private money won, look at the topics discussed for presidential debate, never a mention of doing something about private capital owning Washington. Just super effective wedge issues.
Sounds like energy companies or independent entities should invest in energy storage so they can get paid to draw from the grid.
But then you’ve got cities like Morro Bay, CA that are trying to stop a plan to replace a coal plant with a battery storage facility because batteries are supposedly dangerous.
No, unfortunately, you can’t.
Ground doesn’t typically dissipate power, rather, power is dissipated in the circuit/load — so if you just hook a wire to ground, you’re dumping gobs of power into the wire. If you do this in your home (DON’T), best case it will trip the breaker, worst case it will melt and catch something on fire.
It’s easy enough to burn a kilowatt — just boil some water. But it’s entirely something else to burn megawatt, or yikes, gigawatt scale power.
It seems braindead simple to me to work some controls into an industrial scale solar array to manage its output by regulating its input. Like, rotating the panels to put them out of their optimal alignment with the sun or mechanically partially covering them with shutters.
Didnt Nikola Tesla try to sell Westinghouse on providing free unmetered electricity to everyone on earth and got laughed out of the room?