Oh no! Not an excess of available power! How will the state ever recover from such a catastrophe?
this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2024
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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
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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…
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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!
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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.
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.
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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
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
texas needed power and im sure they are connected to the national grid........wait
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 😡😡😡”
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.
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Why would we read an article when the headline is so much shorter?
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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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
Let's make a cheap battery.
Connect pump to body of water. Pump up when electricity is cheap. Let water run thru turbine when electricity is expensive.
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