The fun bit here, for those who missed it, is the spot price being negative - ie there's so much solar being generated that industrial consumers are being paid to consume electricity!
IMHO, not enough attention has been paid to how important better insulation + workplace EV charging are to the energy transition. If homes were insulated like they are in Northern Europe (where you can go a week without heat and your home will still be tolerable when you get home) rather than Northern California (where your furnace cycles on after an hour despite it being 55F out), you could run basically all residential HVAC during daylight hours, when solar is producing abundantly, and turn the housing stock into a giant thermal battery. And similarly, if everybody charged at work rather than at night, you power transportation on solar rather than on natural gas.
I have solar, a powerwall battery, a high efficiency heat pump, and... a poorly insulated 70-year old home in Silicon Valley.
It can be wildly expensive to properly mitigate poor insulation: you need good air sealing, insulation around the entire building envelope, double or triple paned windows, and a different HVAC setup with dedicated fresh air ventilation. In other words, it requires a major remodel in some cases. Homes need to be built with energy efficiency as a top concern, and I wonder sometimes if that is going to require re-training and incentivizing the entire construction industry. Fewer than 1 in 10 contractors I talked to even knew what I was talking about when I asked for how they would do my project. "What's an ERV?" is a common question I heard. Many still think that gaps are good because "a house needs to breathe."
Perfect is the enemy of good enough. You are not going to eliminate all gaps.
Workers might start demanding WFH or that their leisure hours be during the day and we can't have that.
I'm not sure "throw out your major appliances that run on electricity and don't even look at plug-in EVs" is the direction we want to go when being able to cheaply meet evening demand at the grid level with renewables is the eventual goal.
Disclaimer: I work for Octopus Energy Group.
The last thing a politician wants to do is lose an election, and losing an election is usually what happens when you suggest that the electorate bear the consequences of their behavior. As a result, we usually drive straight off a cliff, have a war or societal collapse, and then whoever survives it can go build a new system out of the rubble.
While the daytime rates are less expensive than the evening peak rates, both are very expensive compared to just about anywhere else.
For example, placing solar downstream of a transformer nearly at capacity could allow for deferral of capital upgrades that would only be needed for a few hours a day.
Similar responses happened then, including night storage heaters, variable tariffs and pumped hydro storage.
I remember people being upset about potential time of use meters around 2000. Of course then we wanted to move consumption away from daytime when peak loads were higher than supply. Now we want to move consumption towards daytime when peak supply is higher than demand.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/federal-solar-tax-credits-...
Makes sense.
I don't think that what I'm seeing suggests a bug with labeling.
Gas plants can respond quickly to changes in load, but they need to be up and running to do that. In the future this will be done with batteries but we don’t have enough of those yet. California does have about 20x more batteries than it did a few years ago, check out the Record Tracker link. There was a new record for battery discharging 5 days ago.
On one hand it might create a new market, hopefully H2 electrolysis that replaces coal or gas in industrial processes rather than Bitcoin farms. On the other it also signals that any additional Solar is going to evict about as much capacity into such curtailments.
Anyway, California is the record-breaking market and all eyes are on it to helps us guide the global energy future.
So once there’s enough of this excess energy you’ll start to see industry soaking up as much of it as they can get.
If you “only” need ~200°C there’s some very powerful heat pumps entering the market that can give you more than 100% efficiency.
Yes I have solar, and it does not seem to help.
Meanwhile in Texas with the AC running 24/7 never had a bill over 300.
So we get paid very little per watt now, and it no longer balances out if you say use 20kWH from the grid and feed 20kWH to the grid (like it used to).
As mentioned in other comment, moved here recently and exploring the situation.
Should it balance though? One would presumably feed into the grid when sun is shining, meaning there's a lot of supply (not just from you), and consume during the opposite.
The NEM 3 policy reduces a lot what you get paid unless you contribute back during the peak use hours, they say it's "avoided cost" pricing. On the surface it seems fair, you're paying for more than generation when you use energy so you generating and contributing back during huge surplus isn't as valuable as you using during night time.
Another way to spin it: renewable electricity (except hydro) is literally worthless. You get it when you don't need it, but you don't have any guarantee it'll be available when you do.
There is zero solar power at night, you know, the time when you need the lights on.