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‘Unlimited’ and ‘free’ are blasphemous to capitalists. To start off a gaslight post with them is just ensuring your pilot light remains unlit
My favorite solution for storage of excess power is closed loop pumped hydro. Two bodies of water of different elevations are connected by a generator/pump. When there is too much power, the pump moves the water to the higher lake. When the power is needed, the water flows through the generator to the lower lake.
pumped hydro is pretty slick but incredibly dependent on geology and ecosystem.
Thermal storage is a similar vein, you can even use water, we do use water for this even. Compressed air as suggested, i believe there’s a mine somewhere in the US that’s used a compressed air storage plant. And of course, motion, flywheels go hard i hear, but i find those to be less preferable, even if high energy density. I imagine those would work better at scale.
That was a very cool read!
The only problem is that it is inefficient
It’s more efficient than just dumping the energy, at least some is being stored
depends a bit on how much energy it costs to build it all, how many decades it should be used how often, and if it’s then durable enough to actually earn back the extra energy it costs. It might, just sayin’
We use gravity batteries in the UK. They work well and are pretty good at their efficiency. When you are creating massive systems they are made to last decades. There is always upkeep but it is the same with coal, gas and nuclear plants. All these renewables are far cheaper and far more cost effective than these power stations and for years the main problem has been that wind and solar cannot be used as base load, but with battery storage on a mass scale, thermal and hydrogen storage, we are now at a place where building out far more solar and wind than we need is viable and mixing in these technologies to provide base load and grid stability.
That’s true
This could also be made more “local” with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed-air_energy_storage or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage and not reliant on the difference of elevations.
Hydrogen fuel cells also. Use the excess to make hydrogen which is simple to store and then use it as a fuel to burn when you have demand. These have started to be put at the bottom of wind turbines so they don’t need to be stopped when the wind is blowing but there is no grid demand.
All these systems help balance the grid too meaning these renewables can be used as base loads instead of dirtier base load generators like coal or gas fire stations.
hydrogen which is simple to store
Hydrogen is famously not simple to store. This is part of the reason that SpaceX rockets use kerosene instead of hydrogen despite the better performance.
i mean, conceptually it’s simple to store, you put it in a container, the tricky part is doing it effectively, in a way that won’t create a massive bomb. And also at density.
Conceptually, yes, it’s like putting it into a container. But it’s also made up of the smallest atoms possible, which means it leaks out through a lot of materials. It also reacts with other materials - which makes it a good rocket fuel - but it also corrodes materials it comes in contact with in innovative and frustrating ways.
Be careful that other rockets run on liquid hydrogen, which should be kept extremely cold. That is the main problem for them. That being said, hydrogen is indeed not easy to store and transport.
True. Liquid hydrogen takes something that’s already difficult to work with and adds even more complexity to the system.
I was talking with an engineer about using a closed loop hydro system at home, maybe in a tower. He said the water wouldn’t have enough head to generate electricity. But that compressed energy storage just might be the solution I was looking for.
the other arguably more effective option for home use is dumping it into heat. Heating up water is a great heat storage solution for radiant heating for instance. Getting that energy back out is arguably harder, but hot water is also pretty useful, so.
This is like the gravity generators they’re looking to use old mines for.
It’s exactly like gravity batteries, but do get fooled with fancy renders and inspirational music.
Lol that’s great, and I was more talking about the ones for mines that already have deep holes, this one is hilariously stupid though. Water does make a lot more sense though, only issue I can see with it would be evaporation.
You may be interested in gravity storage. Giant crane picking up giant concrete legos. Neat concept, there’s been some pilots.
Post scarcity has been true since the dawn of the agricultural revolution.
I saw some context for this, and the short of it is that headline writers want you to hate click on articles.
What the article is actually about is that there’s tons of solar panels now but not enough infrastructure to effectively limit/store/use the power at peak production, and the extra energy in the grid can cause damage. Damage to the extent of people being without power for months.
California had a tax incentive program for solar panels, but not batteries, and because batteries are expensive, they’re in a situation now where so many people put panels on their houses but no batteries to store excess power that they can’t store the power when it surpasses demand, so the state is literally paying companies to run their industrial stoves and stuff just to burn off the excess power to keep the grid from being destroyed.
Also, let’s be real here. The Lion battery farms, defeat any sort of environmental benefit. It is a total shot in the foot, which is why governments, and solar companies don’t advertise the concept.
For a moment I was thinking that lion battery is some brand, until it clicked in that you are talking about lithium ion batteries
Sorry, I should have put a dash in :D Li-ion. Also another i.
Rawr!
Lol
I just love when large organizations (governments included) skimp on something for monetary reasons, and get fucked down the line.
Too bad citizens pay the damages.
Batteries are more than likely another type of pollution. I’m sure they can and will be recycled but just like the problem with our current capacity to recycle things it probably becomes untenable (guessing).
The state just needs to find ways to convert that energy into something else. I suggest desalinating sea water and pumping it up stream.
You gotta say what kind of battery when you make a comment like that. A bottle of pressurized gas is a battery. Not very polluting though.
Sure you can buy a compressor and some air tanks. I imagine the turbine you need to purchase might be midly expensive. The real issue I think would be the size of the pressure vessel you would need to make it worth it.
You can’t just say battery. There’s tons of energy storage that isn’t chemical based. Thermal sand batteries, pumping hydro up a hill, flywheel energy storage, etc.
Energy storage doesn’t inherently mean pollution
I can only assume op meant a lithium ion battery. Based on context.
Yeah, the cobalt and lithium is quite nasty to mine
Wish there was just a faster way to get citizen input.
“Hey folks, this is going to be a cost overrun for this very very good reason, please vote yay or nay in the weekly election”.
Don’t see how it could work now though, given that half the citizens are deeply committed to destroying everything to prove gov doesn’t work.
Just send the electricity to a neighbouring state. Sure, it’ll be really inefficient to pass it through that massive length of cable, but that’s fine, we don’t care about that. If the interstate power infrastructure doesn’t have enough capacity then first priority should be to upgrade it.
That’s one of the options they mention as a solution.
Basically store it, use it, ship it, subsidize it or pay someone to waste it are the options.
Right now they pay someone to waste it, which is the option that makes adoption the most difficult, so it’s a problem.
America is severly lacking in UHVDC.
The peak of power demand is behind the peak of production. So sending power east makes so much sense.
That’s not what I got from the article. (Link for anyone who wants to check it out.)
My interpretation was that decreasing solar/wind electricity prices slows the adoption of renewables, as it becomes increasingly unlikely that you will fully recoup your initial investment over the lifetime of the panel/turbine.
In my mind, this will likely lead to either (a) renewable energy being (nearly) free to use and exclusively state-funded, or (b) state-regulated price fixing of renewable energy.
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Scarcity is artifically created in the modern age
My local library can only lend out x copies of each ebook at a time, so sometimes I’m in a queue for the last lenders loan time to run out
Surely just pirate it so you can read it on your timetable, and take the book from the library when it’s your turn to give that author the lending stats?
cough Anna’s cough archive cough
There is never surplus power with a network of a few “turn it on as needed” intensive industrial uses like haber-bosch reactors for ammonia, dessalination plants and electrolysis for aluminium or other metals…right?
I hate to be the akshully guy but the big problem isn’t economics but usage. We can’t store electricity at any kind of meaningful scale so generation needs to be balanced to meet demand. Unused excess power needs to go somewhere, hence the negative prices (the market way of saying, “please somebody take this electricity it’s doing more harm than good on the grid”).
I like the system where the excess power is used to pump water into a reservoir up a mountain and when power is needed it runs it down a turbine into a lower reservoir.
Most places where this can be done, it is already being done. The low hanging fruit for pumped hydro was all picked decades ago, and at great cost to the ecosystems it destroyed in the process - turns out that drowning thousands of acres in massive man-made lakes had a bit of an impact on the plants and animals that lived there.
Not saying that the benefits weren’t worth the cost, that’s a whole different debate. But there’s little to no opportunity to scale this energy storage tech beyond it’s current footprint.
Just make a tall and really skinny lake.
What if we filled space elevator shaft with water :o
/s just in case
Yea there are plenty of ways to store energy using things like gravity as a battery. The crap saying we can’t handle the extra energy is BS. We won’t, cuz money before planet, but we 100% can.
Just send all that extra power for free over to the tech companies training AI to fix the problem of how much energy it consumes.
Shutting down solar is super easy. You just need a switch. Wind is a bit more complicated, but it is basically stopping the rotor. The reason for negative prices are subsidies. So they can sell to the government or get some extra money as to be able to operate them properly.
Also we do not need to store insane amounts of electricity. As soon as your grid is large enough weather balances itself out fairly well. For the EU the worst production of solar and wind combined was still 897GWh in a day last year. The average was 1770GWh per day. So worst case it was half the average prodcution. If you go weekly it is 9335GWh and 12423GWh respectivly so even less. So you really only need a good enough grid and something like a days worth of storage. That actually ends up being pretty reasonable, as soon as you consider stored hydro and other flexible electricity generation.
I mean it is a problem, not because of capitalism but because of reality, while there can be a lot of overlap between sunny day and lots of solar energy for all the ACs running our energy usave is also significant in the afternoon when solar is winding down and the evening where its non existent and we need to balance that and transfer all the energy, copper prices are going through the roof, there are shortages in electric grid components, its nice that solar is cheap but you need to distribute that energy and at some point we will have to bite the bullet and deploy a lot of nuclear energy, last time I checked the wind/solar installations didnt even offset the energy demand increase happening that year.
Remember what Conservatives said about “not enough power”? I think that might be a lie
No, it’s not. It’s a practical problem, not an economic one, but leave it to the tankies here to take it as an opportunity to show how many slogans they have learned.
Unlimited free energy of any sort is unsustainable. Our planet is a balanced system that has evolved over eons, simply adding energy upsets this balance and probably not in ways that will ultimately be beneficial for us. We can see many negative effects already from adding massive amounts of fossil energy to the system (besides the greenhouse effect and pollution) such as population growth beyond the bounds of the planet.
Solar panels are capturing energy that would otherwise just heat the ground. It won’t upset the planet’s energy balance. If anything, we can use the excess to capture CO2.
The Earth has an energy balance, energy comes from the sun, and much of it is reflected back out into space. .
Here’s a super simple video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zE3x2wjslt0
If we capture a non-trivial amount of the energy that would’ve returned to space and use it in industry, that adds energy to our system and causes it to heat up – climate change. This is not an issue currently with intentional solar capture (greenhouse effect is unintentional solar capture).
I was simply refuting a claim that clearly violates the laws of thermodynamics - that unlimited free energy is without problems.
I want to be clear, I’m not anti-solar panel. I have them on my house and it’s awesome.
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If it helps you understand complex systems and thermodynamics, you needs some.
Both of the statements in that screenshot are just so inane.
Frequency has to be maintained on the grid. It’s the sole place where we have to match production and consumption EXACTLY. If there’s no battery or pumped storage storage available to store excess energy, the grid operators have to issue charges to the producers, in line with their contracts, to stop them dumping more onto the grid (increasing the frequency). The producers then start paying others to absorb this energy, often on the interconnectors.
It’s a marketplace that works (but is under HEAVY strain because there’s so much intermittent production coming online). When was the last time you had a device burning out because the frequency was too high?
Turning the electricity grid into some kind of allegory about post-scarcity and the ills of capitalism (when in fact it’s a free market that keeps the grid operating well) is just “I is very smart” from some kid sitting in mom and dads basement.
in fact it’s a free market that keeps the grid operating well
Like how in Texas’s even freer market the power grid is even more stable than in evil communist California.
No idea about the US. My frame of reference is an integrated European market in general and the Nordic integrated spot market in particular, which uses Swedish hydro and Danish wind on top of nuclear, biogas and wood pellet market.
Seems to work well enough: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?tab=chart&time=1961..latest&country=USA~DNK~SWE~NOR
Which I think reinforces my point. The Nordic states are much more highly regulated than the US, and Texas went so far as to disconnect their grid to make it even less regulated. So now it collapses at the drop of a hat, and people get electric bills in the thousands of dollars.
Usually too low frequency is issue, I can’t imagine why even double frequency can damage PSU.
There’s a reason why the frequency is exactly 50hz or 60hz, and it’s not “at least 50hz or 60hz”. You can’t just have 55hz on the grid, you’ll destroy half a country.
That’s why I say low frequency is problem, but high is not as much.
some clocks are bound to grid frequency. It’s the easiest most accessible way to clock time semi accurately.
I don’t think you said why?
It’s not just about frequency - though that is important for devices that synchronize using the grid. When your frequency is going up because of too much power so will voltage. Think about that for a minute.
Not necessarily(see field windings), but higher voltage is indeed a problem
Not everything on the grid is a motor. Even if it was you would still need to rebuild the motor to change field windings.
Ok, your particular device may handle a wide band of frequencies. Congrats.
But do we agree that not all devices can? What about sensitive devices keeping patients alive in hospitals?
But do we agree that not all devices can?
By not all you mean motors with windings connected to grid? Well, they still will work on higher frequencies, but on higher speed. Real problem is low frequency, not high. Well, 0.5kHz not all devices can handle, but most consumers(even conumer electronics, no pun intended) even rated to 50-60Hz range. So 46-64Hz should be fine for them.
What about sensitive devices keeping patients alive in hospitals?
Sensetive devices that can’t handle range bigger than ±0.4Hz? Are you kiddding me? How does that even pass certification?
Most frequency-sencetive devices are not consumers, but transformers and turbines.
Those would not be plugged straight into the grid but with a power conditioner inbetween
Oh ok, I guess frequency maintenance on the grid isn’t a problem then and all the pumped storage and battery installations can shut and all the grid planners can go home and the spots markets can close and we can just dump as current as we see fit onto the grid and you’re right and I’m wrong.
All of that matters, but I think the parent post was only calling out the hospital equipment as a bad example. Like how your keyboard and your SSD don’t care what the grid is doing as long as the PSU can handle it.
But back to maintaining the frequency on the grid, along with keeping it within tolerance don’t they also have to make sure that the average frequency over time is VERY close to the target? I believe there are devices that use the frequency for timekeeping as well, like some old plug-in alarm clocks.
Fair enough. I was getting frustrated because I was trying to make a larger point about the fact that the grid can’t endlessly handle production. At some point the grid has to say “it will cost you to dump this onto the grid”. And suddenly I found myself discussing PSUs. I mean, yes, I’m aware there’s equipment on the grid that can handle different frequencies better than others but I felt we were discussing the bark of a single tree when I was trying to talk about the forest.
Also fair enough!
It really is a good point you make though. There’s a large balancing act to produce the right amount of power at exactly the time it’s needed. I think in our daily lives, and especially for non-tech/STEM folks, electricity is just taken for granted as always available and unlimited on an individual scale. I think people don’t envision giant spinning turbines when they plug something in, just like they don’t think of racks of computers in a data center when they open Amazon or Facebook.
Maybe it will be less like that in a couple decades when there is distributed energy storage all over the grid, including individual homes & vehicles.
lol If you think hospitals don’t have managed power systems you shouldn’t be contributing.
Also lol if you think medical equipment isn’t required to be robust, have you ever read a supply tender spec for a hospital?
Isn’t there any kind of economic activity that could make use of this excess energy, even if it isn’t very profitable?
Yes. Desalination or hydrogen separation via electrolysis
Both uses are productive, one generates fresh water, the other can be a form of energy storage.
Both are extremely energy intensive for the yield, making them unprofitable, but are extremely useful things to do with a glut of electricity.
Central heating
There is, but you have to set it up and link it with the central control system of your grid, similarly to how power generators have an automatic generation control to balance the network.
Yes there is. So consumers (with the right kind of smart meters) are paid to use energy and we are slowly moving from pilot plan into small scale production of hydrogen. But there’s nowhere near enough and the grid will literally fry itself unless producers stop pumping more onto the grid (during windy and sunny days, in areas with high penetration of intermittent production.
the grid will literally fry itself
I don’t believe this is true for three reasons.
#1 it’s glossing over the mechanics of how equipment will get damaged
#2 the people that own the equipment have ways of managing excess capacity.
#3 minuscule increases in grid frequency result in devices using power less efficiently, so they use more power. There’s time to adjust power generation in surplus events.
You can pump water uphill back into reservoirs so that you can use it to generate hydro-electricity later https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ffestiniog_Power_Station
Additionally, this has been a known issue for decades. If only there had been investment in handling it…
Your explanation works very well, bit completely falls apart in the last paragraph.
Solar power production clearly is (at least on part) a post-scarcity scenario, given we literally have too much power on the grid.
Furthermore, calling the power market anything like “free” is just plain wrong. A liberal approach to market regulation here would have led to disaster a long time ago, for the reasons you described at the beginning of your comment.
The market “works” because of, not inspite of regulation.
And negative prices are a good thing for consumers, not market failure.
But too much power on the grid isn’t “here, have at it”. It’s fried devices and spontaneous fires breaking out. The grid can’t “hold the power”, only pumped and battery storage can, of which we have nowhere near enough. The grid literally cannot work if other producers put more electricity on to it.
If you have smart meter, you can literally be paid to use power at that point.
I think we’re quite a long way off from “too much power on the grid”, no? Even in America we regularly over-strain our grids. My power provider has even started discouraging folks from using their power as much, and charging more, because they simply decided not to do this work of increasing the amount generated. Like my bill has never once gone down, this paying people to use power concept is completely unheard of in practice.
That said I’m willing to be wrong. If you can show me evidence we have “too much power” I’d be happy to take that to my elected officials, insist I should get paid to heat up my noodles or whatever.
Where I live at the moment, people with home batteries are regularly paid for storing excess energy from the grid. I haven’t got a clue about the American energy market, but intermittent energy production is causing huge strain on European grids.
We don’t have too much power overall, but there are moments where solar and renewable production in a region exceeds usage in that region.
wait until you figure out how we solve this problem…
wait for it…
You just don’t produce that energy.
lol. Yes, it’s that simple.
A liberal approach to market regulation here would have led to disaster a long time ago, for the reasons you described at the beginning of your comment. The market “works” because of, not inspite of regulation. And negative prices are a good thing for consumers, not market failure.
Regulation of a market by the government is liberal politics. A laize faire approach is conservative lol.
Neo liberalism is the core ideology of modern conservatism. For example, both the republican and democrat parties in the United States adhere to Neo Liberal ideology. They are both conservative.
Neo liberalism is the ideology of deregulated capitalism. Neo liberalism holds that everything should be marketable without government interference, including healthcare, real estate, power generation, water, etc. Pioneered by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, it is the dominant political ideology across Western democracies. Liberals and Conservatives are both adherents of Neo Liberal capitalist ideology. Leftists are those who support regulation, they are definitionally anti-capitalist. When people refer to the democrat party as socialist or democrats as Leftists, they’re just misusing those terms. Democrats are Neo liberal conservatives who, by and large, support deregulated capitalism.
Okay, and?? None of that goes against what I said. In the scope of us politics, Deregulation of markets in the US is Republican platform. Regulation of markets is Democrat platform. Democrats in the US are more liberal than Republicans even though, as you said, they are far from real leftists.
Their platform at times advocates regulation, but they don’t do much in the way of it. They are largely still in favor less regulation. We have had Democrat presidents since Reagan, quite a few actually and despite that unilaterally regulation had decreased pretty constantly over that time period.
Somehow internet populists have become convinced that liberalism = the government never does anything. Ask literally any economist and they will tell you government intervention and regulation are needed in many things.
For example, read this study on the policy views of practicing economists: https://econfaculty.gmu.edu/klein/PdfPapers/KS_PublCh06.pdf
You will find that most economists strongly support things like environmental, food and drug safety, and occupational safety regulations.
Convincing people liberalism is an evil capitalist ploy to deregulate at all costs is a conservative psyop, and judging from comments like the one to which you’re responding, it’s working.
There’s no post scarcity. The power available on the grid must always equal the power consumed. Or all the hell will break loose.
That’s wrong and it’s simple to explain why.
If the grid allows negative prices, grid storage becomes a profitable business opportunity.
The power consumption will always go up or production will go down if prices go negative.
We are missing a key piece of the puzzle to decarbonise the grid and that’s storage of the abundant renewable power we could easily create.
This is a sign the market is ready for investment in storage.
The person you’re responding to is talking about physics, not economics.
There’s no point about talking about the physics of the grid without the economics.
The story of the New York blackouts is not one of groundbreaking physics.
It’s the story of two lightning strikes, some very basic physics, and a systemic failure.
Understanding the systemic failure is not a physics question. Electricity is already well understood and that physics isn’t changing.
A renewable grid is not a physics question either. It’s one of regulation, redundancies and the end goal hasn’t changed.
Saying “production and consumption on the grid must match” might as well be put in the pile with statements like “wires must be made of conductive material”. They’re just 2 things that haven’t changed.
They’re mixing the two to attempt to make a point. “Post-scarcity” is an economic concept, and I’ve never heard that term used in physics.
It’s two separate statements. We don’t live in a post scarcity world. Power grids have physical limitations regarding power in and power out.
Ah then it’s just two non sequiturs that don’t relate to each other
ah yes the physics concept of “post scarcity”
Power plant operators are known to have dreaded this inevitability. There will be no more electrons.
Question: Who do you think is paying these “negative prices”. Spoiler: It’s the TSOs. They can’t do that for long, or simply go bankrupt.
Yes, “storage of the abundant renewable power” is a key piece of the puzzle, but “The power available on the grid must always equal the power consumed” is something that can not be broken. If it does, equipment will break, people will be without power, and it’ll cost the TSO tons of money to repair.
There’s post scarcity, but only during a short time of the day, when power consumption is relatively lower (it spikes when people come home, because everyone turns their lights and machines on around the same time).
Oh, and I don’t know about the USA, but the Dutch grid is pretty much overloaded, so there is no space to move the power to the storage units (whether the storage exists or not doesn’t matter ATM). We’re working on it, but here’s we’re kinda fucked ATM.
Frequency has to be maintained, and it is trivial to do so when you have excess renewables because inverters are instantly throttle-able. The reason why you’ve never heard about devices failing because frequency is too high is because it is and has always been such a non issue to shutter unneeded generating capacity.
Typically with fossil fuel plants, when the price drops below the cost of fuel for the least efficient plants they drop offline because they are no longer making a profit on fuel and the price holds. Because renewables have upfront cost to build but are free to run on a day to day basis, when there are a lot of renewables the price signal has to drop all the way to nothing before it is no longer profitable to run them.
All this means that all that happened was that for a few hours, solar production was actually enough to satisfy demand for that region. Along term, if low wholesale prices can be counted on midday then people will build industry, storage, or HVDC transfer capacity to take advantage of it.
If these prices are sustained for enough of the day that it is no longer profitable to add more solar farms, then they will stop being built in that area in favor of was to generate power at night such as wind, hydro, and pumped hydro while the panels will instead go to places that still don’t have enough solar to meet demand.
Also as an aside, the wholesale electricity market in north america is by definition about as far from a free market as it is possible for a free market to be without having exact outside price controls. It is a market built solely out of regulation that only exists at all because the government forced it to exist by making it illegal to not use it, either by making contracts off market or by transmission companies in-houseing production, or use it in any way other than as precisely prescribed by the government.
Now we can argue whether or not the wholesale electricity market is well or poorly set up or even if it should exist in the first place, but I don’t think that anyone can argue that it is a free market. At least not without defining the term free market so broad that even most of the markets in the USSR qualify as free markets.
Also, free markets and capitalism are very distinct concepts with no real relation between each other. You might argue that free markets tend to lead towards a capitalist system, but given free markets existed thousands of years before capitalism was invented I don’t think many people would say it was a very strong relationship.
Just use the extra energy to shoot random laser beams into space… Make sure the aliens know we’re armed
The surplus should be returned to the sun. It’s called investing in your future.
Adding a tiny bit of energy to the sun so it will have burned-up in 4bln minus 5 years instead of in 4 bln years? Genius.
The joke is that it wouldn’t work. God damn it lmfao
YOU DON’T KNOW THAT WE’VE NEVER TRIED
THAT SPEEDS UP THE RATE OF FUEL CONSUMPTION negligibly
Not with that attitude.
run pumps, move water
