Nonsense. Just build a Dyson sphere around it and be the sole owner of the entire star’s energy.
This is idiotic. The fact is your electricity transmission system operator has to pay a lot of money to keep the grid stable at 50 or 60Hz or your electronics would fry. With wind and especially with solar power, the variable output is always pushing the frequency one way or the other, and that creates a great need for costly balancing services. Negative pricing is an example of such a balancing service. Sounds good, but for how long do you think your electricity company can keep on paying you to consume power?
People also don’t realize that too much power is just as bad as too little, worse in fact. There’s always useful power sinks: pumped hydro, batteries, thermal storage, but these are not infinite.
Stupid question but can we not like, make toggleable solar panels? Like if I Just pull the plug extracting power from a solar panel does it explode or break or something?
Why isn’t this as easy as storing some of that excess energy in a home battery and letting the rest down in a wire into the ground? Then if it’s smart enough it could only give back energy when needed.
The easiest solution is to send the power somewhere else where it can offset the use of fossil fuels. This solution is fraught with political hurdles, subject to market forces (due to privatization) and often grid compatability issues(looking at you Texas). It is, however, a time tested and common method for mitigating excess production.
While water in pipes is often a metaphor for electricity, it’s not particularly useful here. You can’t ground out part of a charge. Energy storage is the solution though. Batteries are good, pumping water up back up into dams to be regained from a hydro plant when needed is ideal, as I understand it.
Well, that’s what they’re doing some places. The batteries assets are not in private homes usually though, they’re by themself or run by power-consuming industries. Batteries are expensive though, and they degrade quickly if you use them wrong. In the EU, ENTSO-E defines the market rules, trade systems and messaging systems that energy companies and asset owners play by. Sometimes the revenue-generating asset is a battery, sometimes it’s a hot water boiler, wind park, factory, hydro plant etc.
With wind and especially with solar power, the variable output is always pushing the frequency one way or the other, and that creates a great need for costly balancing services.
Speaking as a flashlight enthusiast…there’s many different ways to get a constant and consistent current. Sure we’d need to scale it up from a pocket-sized device to a whole fucking power grid, but with a big enough driver with the right arrangement of capacitors and all that, you’d easily be able to get a totally consistent current out of wind or solar
Having knowledge in power electronics i can confidently say the DC output of solar is easily and regularly inverted in phase with grid. In fact, DC is often used for undersea cables switching AC to dc then back to AC, All at extremely high voltage and varying demand(up yo 600kV/600MW but varying by installation).
Wind turbines go online after the blades start spinning and connect to the grid in the same way as any other generator, controlled by internal electronics. Power is regulated through blade feathering and can be turned off as supply exceeds demand. This, other than for maintenance reasons, is why you might see one turbine spinning while the next is standing still. This capability actually means the grid is MORE stable with wind power.
Any further fluctuation is managed in the same way as conventional power generation.
To start the frequency of the electricity isn’t the issue. Second all modern electronics use switching power supplies which don’t care about frequency. That’s two incorrect things just in the second sentence that they literally said was fact.
The “problem” of negative energy costs is easy to solve, but quite costly.
Build water desalination/carbon capture and storage/hydrogen generation plants that only run when the price goes below 0; even though these are very energy intensive, they would help stabilize the grid.
Then build more solar; you want to try to have the daytime price stay in the negative as often as possible.
The solution we’re using instead of course, instead of all that environment crap you suggested, is running huge crypto farms only during the hours when the energy is in surplus.
To be fair; this is a valid use case.
If you are a solar power producer; rather than offering your energy at -ve rates; run a crypto farm when the output is too high. This is far better than running the same farm on coal.
But it would be better going into something useful.
I want to pre-empt the argument from the Bitcoin people that while this is a logically sound argument for how Bitcoin mining could potentially help the environment by making renewables more economically feasible, using this argument to describe Bitcoin mining electricity usage is completely invalid—Bitcoin mining as it exists today does not merely use excess renewable energy; it consumes energy even in times of demand when it could be given to residential, commercial, or industrial customers. Without the excess demand from today’s Bitcoin mines, the capacity that is freed up can be used to close fossil fuel power plants.
you want to try to have the daytime price stay in the negative as often as possible.
That’s not exactly conducive towards people building more solar.
The solar isn’t the goal; the energy is enabling the value in other parts of the economy.
In fact; energy supply is so important to the reasonable functioning of the economy. It should be taken out of the profit driven cycle of business.
Look at what happened with WPI in Ohakune and PanPack when energy prices sky rocketed a few months back.
Every time someone mentions “oh no solar is producing too much energy” I think of this deranged Forbes article from a few years back.
alt-text
Microsofts billionaire founder Bill Gates is financially backing the development of sun dimming technology that would potentially…{blahblah global cooling}
This is obviously in the context of attempting to mitigate global warming, which was caused by… you guessed it, mostly fossil fuel use.
Nobody is proposing blocking out the sun like Mr. Burns. More like reflecting a tiny percentage of solar radiation to prevent our oceans from boiling or once-in-a-century superstorms that, oh I don’t know, flood the mountains of Tennessee from becoming yearly occurrences.
it’s long past time we took businessman out of control and replaced them with scientists.
In which case they would choose Nuclear over Solar 9/10 times. I’m onboard
I’m on board with whatever the scientists conclude. I’m not a scientist, so if they say nuclear, I’m behind nuclear. If they say solar, I’m behind solar. If they say wind, I’m behind wind. Trust scientists. If you’re trained in science, definitely verify - there’s some bad science out there for sure. But if you have no expertise in the area, just trust the scientific community.
Nuclear has few advantages over solar.
Solar + batteries.
~$1000/kW vs $6 - 10,000/kW in 2018, it is cheaper today; projected costs to drop to as low as $560/kW in 2050.
Add in the ~$150/kWh of grid scale storage with the associated switchgear to connect it to the grid.
For a 10MW + 20MWh solar system; you are looking at approx $13,000,000 + install costs of probably $2-3,000,000.
