Where is this graphic from? It’s awesome!
Comment on The Amount of Electricity Generated From Solar Is Suddenly Unbelievable
keepthepace@slrpnk.net 3 days ago
I’ll give another factoid:
In a sunny day, around noon, many EU countries have below-zero prices for electricity exports:
It comes with a different set of issues, but this is not prospective or a hypothetical: this is the world we are living in, with the operator of the French grid warning that we are currently at solar saturation.
Now we need the other part of the puzzle: energy storage. On a HUGE scale.
ravenaspiring@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
keepthepace@slrpnk.net 3 days ago
RTE (French national grid operator)'s realtime data. It is indeed awesome to have realtime trackers of that!
Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
China is already on it.
Tobberone@slrpnk.net 2 days ago
Yes, and that is good. Now we need to be able to do it in Europe as well and in much larger quantities, both for heating and electricity.
Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
First commercial heat batteries have already been built. Hopefully, the technology will become more widespread, as heat is such a nice form of energy. My guess is, it’s mostly a political and financial problem at this point.
Storing energy in other forms is a lot trickier, but at least there’s no shortage of potential technologies to try. It’s just that most of them tend to be in lab or pilot scale at the moment. That Chinese RFB facility was a notable exception though.
Tobberone@slrpnk.net 14 hours ago
Yeah, I know. Unfortunately Polar Night are hard to reach, which is why we’ve had to go to others to develop heat batteries.
The Chinese example was great to see, though! I wish we could get something similar going here, to be able to store energy. Extracting hydrogen is step 1, but also finding a good way to store it is crucial! There has been a lot of innovation in that regard lately, though.
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
If energy has a negative cost wouldn’t this make it worth doing things that take a lot of energy at that point
like mine bitcoin?Not sure how much would fit that though, industry that can use a lot of power and is ok with irregular running times. Hydrogen production through water electrolysis is a popular idea but not sure if it’s at a point of being useful at scale.
keepthepace@slrpnk.net 2 days ago
Careful: negative price ≠ negative cost. Below zero prices are a market artifact usually.
The fact that this happens during peak HVAC use is a nice thing though.
And yes, we need intermittent industries, but the problem is, when you invest money in hardware, even to mine bitcoin (I would rather sell GPU time to train deep learning models personally) or to produce hydrogen, every hour not spent running your capital-intensive hardware is considered a cost that is not really compensated by energy price unless you run on donated hardware.
DaPorkchop_@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
Where are these negative prices? I’m in Switzerland and my electricity price just keeps going up.
keepthepace@slrpnk.net 3 days ago
These are the prices on the European market for electricity exchange between countries. It has a whole can of worms when it comes to problematic incentives, but it is indeed not consumer prices and (IMO) designed to enrich useless intermediaries.
vaionko@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
We pay for our electricity based on the market price, and it indeed goes negative. Although the separate transfer fee means we still pay.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 3 days ago
negative prices only exist because the operators of big solar parks have not considered implementing circuit breakers into their solar parks in the past.
with these breakers, whenever the energy prices are about to go negative, the breaker disables the solar park and it stops feeding into the grid. it’s a very simple measure but very effective. in theory, negative energy prices should not exist that way.
Tiresia@slrpnk.net 2 days ago
Circuit breakers cost money and provide no benefit to the park operator, so it makes sense that they would prefer to sell the electricity for a negative price instead as long as that negative price costs them less than the circuit breaker.
Also, solar parks in Europe are subsidized, so beholden to government demands. From the perspective of the government and the public good, it’s better if the electricity is sold for a negative price than if the capacity to produce it for free is wasted, because it can still be used for productive ends. The value for buyers is positive, but because it’s a buyer’s market the electricity is still sold at a loss because the buyers can threaten to go to a different solar park operator.
keepthepace@slrpnk.net 2 days ago
Circuits breakers are an obvious solution and there seems to be reasons why these are not implemented. I am not knowledgeable enough about the question but there seems to be a lot of counter-intuitive incentives that makes the energy market drop sub-zero occasionally. It is more of a market artifact than the absence of circuit breakers.
I have seen people in France explain that this is Germany undercutting prices to ensure France can’t have profitable private solar power companies but this sounds a bit conspiracy-theory to me, as Germany is not the only one doing it (but the biggest one in terms of volume)