I’ll note that right now, this is a seasonal issue, associated with moderate springtime temperatures when there is a lot of sunshine available.
I’ll note that right now, this is a seasonal issue, associated with moderate springtime temperatures when there is a lot of sunshine available.
Oh no! Not an excess of available power! How will the state ever recover from such a catastrophe?
I’m not familiar with how power grids work, is an excess of power bad for the grid if it isn’t used?
Yeah, various power generation techniques (e.g., big industrial power plants) do not want to run without a load. And switching them off temporarily isn’t really feasible (shutting them for good would ultimately be nice, but that’s another topic…).
And you can’t just “dump” huge amounts of excess of power — it needs to go somewhere.
No. They constantly monitor it and keep it in line. The power grid itself is totally fine. Completely.
The only “problem” is they cannot easily turn on or off huge old power plants, so if the sun is blazing, they might have to direct excess old generation power to batteries or other grids.
The only “problem” is the power companies don’t get to charge much for simply managing the grid. They charge mostly for power generation, so it ends up costing them money. If they were simply a government paid service, they wouldn’t have to care what so ever which direction power is flowing as long as it has somewhere to go.
They keep it in line by curtailing or switching off generation. The generator typically still gets paid as if it were generating whatever it has available, which is perhaps an issue, but the total generation is reduced to meet the demand.
This is why there is negative pricing, it’s cheaper to sell electricity in the negative than to pay a generator to be offline.
They can’t direct excess generation to batteries if the batteries aren’t there yet. They’re being installed, but the overall capacity is still relatively low. Transferring it to other grids also has limits, and in particular if there’s an excess of solar in one region the neighbouring regions also probably have an excess, so there really is no other option but to curtail.
Jeeze it almost seems like the 21st century might take some sort of smart grid, and having a bunch of big dumb plants that cannot be turned on and off without great expense should be a relic of the past!
There is a cost to that. Everyone complains about that.
That’s why for example China are building new coal plants. The new ones turn on and off quicker.
“Batteries” don’t need to be what we commonly think of as storing electricity. They can very much be a different way of storing energy instead. For instance, pumping water up to a tower (or upstream), or splitting water into hydrogen + oxygen (for consumption/combustion later)
The main power company in CA (PG&E) has built tons of other things into the bills aside from power generation, so I expect my bill (which has gone up 300% since 2018) to continue to climb despite this.
PG&E charges me more to deliver power ($0.18/kWh) than it does to generate ($0.12/kWh) that power. That’s f’ed up.
my utility charges $25 a month just to be hooked up. then there’s taxes and some community bullshit fees on top of the actual electricity usage. so even though my usage has dropped quite a bit over the years, and the base rate hasn’t really gone up that much (about 10-12% total, over two decades)… my bill is still more than double what it used to be.
Seriously, i found an old bill from a decade ago, it was like $54 for my 1 BR apartment. It’s now usually over triple that…
Kind of, yeah. But excess solar can be turned off almost instantly so it isn’t like it’s an impossible problem.
Sorry for asking all these questions, but how do you turn off solar? Doesn’t it keep generating while there’s sunlight?
Just disconnect the panel.
If it’s turned off, it’s like a battery that isn’t connected to anything. You have a voltage across the positive and negative terminals, but power can’t actually flow unless there’s somewhere for it to go.
I hope it doesn’t spill into the water, permeate the air, or leave the land uninhabitable for thousands of years.
Yeah, it’s not like it can’t be saved in the brand new storage facility that happens to be one of the biggest in the world. This article reads like propaganda against solar.
It’s existence highlights the need for more, and more distributed storage. That’s a good discussion to be having