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?
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
Relatively easy tech is temporary hydrogen storage. Of course hydrogen has poorer efficiency than batteries, but if all batteries are full, excess energy could be converted to hydrogen, stored, and converted back to electricity when no solar is available, and batteries are empty. Efficiency roundtrip with current tech is roughly 70%.
I hope it doesn’t spill into the water, permeate the air, or leave the land uninhabitable for thousands of years.
I’m not familiar with how power grids work, is an excess of power bad for the grid if it isn’t used?
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.
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.
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…
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.
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)
Yes I’m aware of water storage, and even quite fond of it, but it’s very dependent on geography (as you need a very large body of water so you can’t really just use a water tower) and also incredibly expensive. There are generally more effective and profitable uses for land.
Meanwhile BESS is tiny, something like 30MW per acre.
Storing energy as hydrogen is a fool’s errand, in fact many of the new use cases for hydrogen are snake oil touted by people looking to sell more hydrogen. Even ignoring the fact that hydrogen leaks through and embrittles any container it’s stored in (or that it explodes violently), converting hydrogen to electricity only leaves you about 70% of the energy you put in.
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?
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.
Just disconnect the panel.
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.
Tesla coils?
Capitalism is the problem, here.
This should be a warning: the rich are going to fight the idea of post-scarcity tooth and nail, because not being able to coerce people woth the threat of homelessness or starvation will remove just about the only lever they have.
It’s more that people are confused about what an cost-optimal system looks like — if you’re building around renewables, it means there will inherently be periods of excess production, where we’re forced to curtail production, and spill sunshine or wind, and the price drops to zero or below. In California, that means the springtime, when there’s a lot of sunshine, combined with moderate temperatures. There will also be periods where energy is relatively scarce (nighttime winter heating, hot days with lots of AC running) and the price is high.
props to you OP for understanding the article you posted. 👍
im as critical of capitalism as the next chronically online marxist loser, but even i recognize that this issue is a logistics issue which would present itself under any economic system given the immense rate of growth we are asking of the technology.
We have systems like “gravity batteries.” If there is an excess of power then there should be storage systems like running water up a hill/tower, that can be released at times of greater demand.
Excess power on the grid is a very real problem though. It’s easy enough to shut off photovoltaic solar when not needed (which is probably what should be happening here!), but industrial scale generators cannot all be turned on or off on a whim. Serious damage can result if power production does not match the load.
It’s easy to dump a few kW (just boil some water or turn on a heater), but dumping many MW or even GW is not trivial.
The capitalism that has encouraged people to install lots of rooftop solar capacity?
How is capitalism the problem?
Capitalism is the solution, it’s the cause of this huge deployment of solar.
Market forces have chosen the cheapest cost and that has been deployed. That itself through supply and demand and impacted the price of electricity. This has caused low and even negative prices in the day.
Denholm says that as solar continues to drop in price, installing solar that is curtailed regularly can still be cost-effective. “Throwing away some amount of renewable energy can absolutely make economic sense,” he said.
Those same market forces and causing the huge development of batteries as people can make money buying low selling high in the evening. The issue is that solar is causing excess costs to the grid, as such that cost needs to be recouped or the grid will fail and people won’t have power at all.
This website is very capitalism is bad propaganda and gives no reasoning. I’m surprised you have so many upvotes without explaining your position. Why is capitalism the problem here?
This is only a problem because of money. Maybe California should install some power storage centers in order to hold the excess for later.
There’s already some storage: its the #1 source of electricity during the evening peak, but realistically, we’re going to want enough renewables that we sometimes see curtailment
Way ahead of you. This article is like propaganda against solar panels.
I’m hoping to one day install some solar, and looking forward to setting up non-battery “storage” — e.g., electric water heater that turns on when there’s an excess of power, deep freezer that gets as cold as possible when there’s excess power, that sort of thing. It seems thermodynamics is the relevant discipline for these sorts of “storage” methods :)
As an aside — while smart devices are much maligned, some rudimentary smart features for matching consumption seems like a pretty good idea. (If I ever get around to this stuff it’ll be local control via HomeAssistant.)
Im a fan of gravity based energy storage. Excess energy is used to raise a weight up a slope and it can be reclaimed when the weight is released.
There is a reason why energy based energy storage is not more developed right now (with the exception of Pumped-storage hydroelectricity). It’s not very dense at all.
A 15 tons block of concrete that goes up 100m can only store 4kwh of energy. A 4.5kwh battery cost around 1600€.
Gravity based energy storage seem simple and elegant at first but you go into the details you realized that is far far les efficient than regular chemical battery. Unfortunately.
Absolutely! Living in a city, this gets a bit tricky though. But if I had a giant reservoir on a hill…and another one below it…
Why would you convert electricity into thermal work then back again? Why not consider old school batteries? You’re already taking up space and infrastructure
Oh, I have no intention of converting that back to electricity. The goal would essentially be to maximize usage during times of cheap/marginally free energy.
Ah, that makes sense.
The only problem is they need more of it. Some cost needs to be put onto solar to fix the grid. It needs upgrading because solar is making more work for the grid.
Solar is absoultely good, but it doesn’t come without costs to the grid and that money needs to be raised to upgrade it.
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if you had read the article, you’d know that they are.
To cope, CAISO is selling some excess power to nearby states; California is also planning to install additional storage and batteries to hold solar power until later in the afternoon.
don’t just read the headlines y’all. not a good look.
Yeah, sorry I missed that single sentence in the article that is so plastered with ads that my phone has trouble displaying the page. I’ll be sure to do better next time.
lmao “too much work to read”
upvotedThe site is serious crap on mobile. Between all the poppins and the ads reloading to make it jump around as you read. It’s damn hard to read a full article on a lot of these news sites.
cool. still not really an excuse to make an uninformed comment. get an ad blocker or a browser with a reader mode before spreading misinformation like that lol.
I mean, it’s a pretty good excuse. The sites job is to inform people and they do a shit job of it. I’m literally checking lemmy on my phone while taking a break so when some link leads to a site that’s damn near unreadable I’m not spending my entire break futzing with settings to make it readable. Like I said, I’ll do better next time.
oops sorry i read “i’ll do better next time” as sarcasm at first. that’s on me, totally my fault.
idk what app you use but Voyager has a setting that lets me open all links in reader mode. i believe other apps i have tried also have this option. and adblock plus works great 👍
Selling the power to other regions is alright, but what I’d really like to see is pumped storage. Even just two grey water reservoirs- massive, probably underground. “Spend” all that free electricity during the solar day. Release that energy as hydropower during the mornings and evenings to reduce surge pricing and demand on the grid. Sell additional power as needed, but don’t let solar go to waste.
Batteries are…okay… but lithium ion cells will last 10 or 15 years before needing to be replaced, which seems wasteful when we have perfectly reusable options like pumped storage, which involves a few pumps, a hydroelectric turbine, and two cement or dirt reservoirs, one higher than the other.
I’m sure whatever we do, it will fix itself in time. I just hope CA doesn’t permanently cut incentives over this “problem”, haha.
A few pumps, a hydroelectric turbine, and two reservoirs 30 to 530 times larger than an equivalent lithium ion battery storage site, according to the energy densities listed here: https://cleanenergywiki.org/index.php?title=Storage_Basics
Someone should show this to that guy in Texas who was complaining about the 8 minutes of power generation solar loses every few decades during an eclipse.
texas needed power and im sure they are connected to the national grid…wait
I’ve got a pretty easy fix, just pass those negative rates on to the consumer. I’d be happy to teach my car to charge when the price goes negative, but noooo, utilities are the ones double dipping on negative power rates.
In Finland that’s what we do (if you have a ‘market priced’ contract). I have my heating set up so that it will ‘overheat’ my apartment when power is very cheap, effectively using the interior space as a rudimentary thermal battery.
There was an incident a few months ago, that caused power price to became absurdly negative, someone made a wrong bid and people used 90M€ worth of power in a few hours as a result.
Allow the free market to behave like it’s supposed to when it benefits the little guys? You must be joking, we don’t do that here.
article:
“california is having this problem because solar grew faster than we expected but we are building storage systems to hold power for later.”
commenters who didn’t read the article:
“this is so stupid why don’t they just build storage systems to hold power for later 😡😡😡”
Why would we read an article when the headline is so much shorter?
You know it may speak poorly on the commentors, but you have to some faith in humanity restored when the common sense solution is what is already in the works, right?
absolutely a fair point.
my only fear is that maybe ppl may come away from this post with some kind of disdain for california, like they are “doing it wrong” or something just because they are encountering growing pains. unsure how big of a problem that is so i’m not going too hard on commenters.
just wish more people read stuff before chucking their opinions in the ring.
No disagreements. People trivializing hard and complex problems doesn’t help us fix them.
Oh no, the sun is free power? What ever will we do! We must protect the profits of our monopolies!!!
Probably should read the article. Nah. Fuck that. Much better to just express outraged, regardless if it makes sense.
I don’t make sense, I make dollars! To be fair, negative prices and an over abundance of solar energy are standard complaints of conservatives.
they are right though. if you look into this at all, you will quickly find that negative prices are not a problem because of profits, but because non-renewable energy sources start to undergo damage when the power they create is unused due to an overfilled power grid. negative prices exist because they are willing to pay folks to use the power that is threatening infrastructure.
as the article outlines, the solution is storage, but storage capacity has not yet caught up to solar capacity.
believe me, i too am highly critical of capitalism. but for once, this isn’t an instance of that. and by failing to read and understand the article you have entered this thread in pretty bad faith, more or less spreading misinformation because it’s what you assume to be true.
Yep, this is sadly a physical problem in the essence, not created virtually by capitalist economy. The negative price is just how the capitalist economy reacts at it.
glad mine was a helpful comment and thanks for your further comment adding detail :) was getting down over all the misunderstanding going on in the comments. cheers!
It is though. The entire reason we’re still using obsolete inflexible technology is capitalism. Might not be able to buy that 4th yacht if we pay to upgrade our LNG plant.
Okay, I went and read it because I have more time today and excess electricity causing physical damage is a compelling narrative. But this article doesn’t support that. It’s just plant operators having to pay for people to take their electricity because their plant is obsolete technology and can’t idle. I did check a few other articles too. It seems the damage is financial and a problem because we’ve turned a public good into a for profit capitalist system.
The solution is many things but also to just have modern natural gas plants that are more than capable of flexible output. Of course the profit motive means updates like that only come when forced and boards like the CPUC have been hopelessly captured for my entire lifetime. So instead they shit on their consumers.
Their inability to modernize the grid is not solar’s problem.
California could provide credits for people to install in-home batteries. That could level out the wild swings in supply and demand, while letting people enjoy continuous, cheap power.
Add a car charger transformer and a lot of EV demand on the grid can be handled by in-home batteries.
People don’t seem to have read the article or seem to understand anything at all.
“These are not insurmountable challenges,” said Michelle Davis, head of global solar at the energy research and consulting firm Wood Mackenzie Power and Renewables. “But they are challenges that a lot of grid operators have never had to deal with.”
And
Solar can still grow in California. In the summer, when high air conditioning use strains the grid, solar can be useful even in the middle of the day. Denholm says that as solar continues to drop in price, installing solar that is curtailed regularly can still be cost-effective. “Throwing away some amount of renewable energy can absolutely make economic sense,” he said.
People want to eat their cake and have it too. The grid is old as fuck and is built for a easy system where plants can reliably come online and run all day. They have inertia and can balance the grid. The value of a traditional plant is higher than that of a solar plant. Solar absolutely has additional costs to the grid and that shouldn’t be ignored. So the only way for solar to compete is to be cheaper, which it is. But those added costs need to be recouped for investment. That’s all that the article is saying.
This amout of solar is absoultely causing the grid problems that no grid in the world has ever seen before solar became a thing. But it can be fixed, it just takes investment.
on the internet everyone is their own expert and reading is below oneself. i get all my opinions from the headlines and the top two upvoted snarky comments ✨🧚♀️
Clearly under a capitalist vision “””smart”””appliances like your dish washer could be set to run at some point in the next X hours, and they would optimally wait until there was a local excess of solar energy in the grid to run. What would make the device “smart” is just that your device would be watching the price of electricity and have some basic rules of how long to wait before needing to run no matter what (you need your clothes clean by tomorrow).
I don’t know if that is the future I am most confident in being the best, but clearly this is VERY possible with current technology it just takes the structuring of appliance companies and software in a way that makes this not impossible for dizzyingly insane reasons.
Also, here’s an idea, use the spare electricity to charge public bicycles and put a free amount of power into them so the next random person who uses them gets a subsidized ride? Like why not have some kind of publicly owned power bank in the vicinity of surplus alternative energy sources that is known to occasionally have a lot of very cheap power that could be used to power cars, power banks or other large batteries?
Surely people are doing this right??? Right??
This is exactly what Octopus Energy are doing in the UK. You tell them when you need your car charged by and they schedule it to happen (usually overnight) so that it’s done by then.
Rather than laying 30p/kwh you pay 7p/kwh.
You can of course tell it to just charge, and pay the usual rate.
Yes, and some people on Octopus Agile have been seeing negative electricity prices as consumers recently, although that was due to high winds hitting the offshore farms rather than solar.
The App for my Bosch washing machine does have links to a couple of proprietary ‘smart home’ solutions that can synchronise start times with solar output, but none of them are compatible with my other kit so I never looked further. It does also support IFTTT so I guess I could set something up myself if I had the skill.
Start times are better than nothing, but what would really be useful is the ability to modulate the heater output to say 1 or 0.5kW over a longer period if there’s thin clouds reducing the output from the inverter. Also cross talk between appliances that allows you to turn them all on at once, and they can introduce pauses in their programmes, so they don’t overlap high power tasks.
I do think that this is a good solution. Not the best, but yeah, when there’s an excess of electricity automatically using it for tasks that aren’t time dependent is wonderful
Battery power and transferring power across the entire nation. When is sunny one place it’s not sunny elsewhere. As things get connected together this is useful. We can all use cheap as free electricity
… and domestic batteries to grab that lovely more-than free energy
Exactly. Batteries to hold it when its free
I have batteries that I use for my solar - but here in the UK electricity pricing frequently goes negative in the winter at night to due to a surplus of wind power. a few simple automations make sure when that happens my batteries start charging and my electric water tank heater turns on. My energy company now has a scheme where they will do it all for you if you opt in - automagically getting your batteries to charge when it makes financial sense for you.
It’s a simple system if you have the supplies
Well it runs on a Raspberry Pi 4 about £50 all in.
That’s what storage is about
Yeah, California’s utility-scale storage can only absorb 6GW for about four hours. Will probably be double that by end of year, but still needs a fair bit more to handle the full daily cycle. You can see what that looks like in practice on the CAISO web site showing how electricity was supplied on April 21, 2024
