California has so much solar power that increasingly it goes to waste
latimes.com
latimes.com
1) More storage is required to spread the solar/wind power out over the day. Most countries are well behind on grid storage. Its more common in domestic solar installs and that depends significantly on policies on import/exports.
2) Green power will always require over provisioning. For example in Australia they get about 1.5x the Solar power daily in Summer compared to Winter and the system needs to be designed for the winter which involves more storage and more production. In the summer this means there is excess power.
What I think will happen is that there will be periods of almost free power when there is excess and there will be periods of very expensive power where grids pay for people to reduce their usage, we are seeing this in the UK already at ~50% renewables.
There will be businesses that will make sense to run when power is cheap in the near future, ideally I would hope maybe energy intensive hydrocarbon fuel creation from CO2 in the atmosphere and desalination but a lot of business will become competitive is power is nearly or actually free.
The future looks very different and curtailment is a sign the market and systems haven't yet caught up to the reality of renewable energy.
Which is more likely? That excess transmission and storage infrastructure gets built out before excess generation gets built out? Or that the demand for better transmission and storage infrastructure is preceded by an oversupply of solar power?
3 million megawatt hours per year.
Assuming 2200 hours of sun per years that's 1.4GW average. Total solar is 15-18GW maybe. So what 10% gets curtailed.
Maybe throw some more containerized batteries at it.
LA Times always feels like The Wall Street Journal of the west. Your go to source for reactionary negativism.
I've never worked anywhere that had significant servers and managed to load the production server CPUs anywhere near 90%. 9% perhaps.
Yes I think that's a fair comparison. Both are about choosing the appropriate capacity and the solution involves electronics without any moving parts.
The light falling on a solar panel is free.
Yeah there's theoretical lost revenue, but that's a theoretical loss versus a real loss from operating costs.
(Pedantry is fun, of course. I love it.)
I was more taking umbrage with referring to curtailed solar and wind as "waste". It isn't waste any more than the sunlight falling on a plot of land without a solar panel is waste; neither have a real marginal cost associated with them.
Unlike say the coal plant that chooses to go into negative prices rather than turn down its output.
Anyway, it doesn't matter. In terms of money, the LA Times is complaining that the investment in solar is close to 100% efficient, just not 100%. 0.x% of panels break every year because of hail or other random wear and tear, so if they produce saleable power 90% of the time that's an investment where 0.0x% of the money is wasted. Like, wow. I wish my biggest problem could be that small.
But yeah oh noes efficiency isn't 100% stop everything, I wish I had such problems. What if I told you my car sits completely idle 98% of the times. Seriously I drive it for half an hour per day.
Aside from the fact that California produces far more solar power than it can effectively use, solar projects "have cleared thousands of acres of pristine land in the Mojave Desert, where it has angered local residents worried about declining property values and environmentalists concerned about the loss of wildlife habitat."
As the final graph of the article notes, the people who live in the California desert regions are not deceived.
"We have this planet to save and they are throwing away power?" said Mark Carrington, a resident of Desert Center, a town east of Joshua Tree National Park, which has been nearly surrounded by solar projects.
This article is light on exact details. When prices go negative, who is paying that and how, exactly? It sounds like it's at least partially effectively a government subsidy through credits. Is that necessary to compel the amount of building? The article doesn't even ask that question. They talk about trades making large profits by buying electricity when it's cheap and selling it when it's expensive. How are they doing that? Either they're actually storing the energy somehow (which is something that likely should be rewarded), or they're predicting electricity demand and supply and trading derivatives, in which case what inefficiencies are driving that market to be very lucrative for pure traders? And finally, are the high electricity prices in California at all related to the wholesale pricing? From what I could quickly find online, California's wholesale prices are not particularly high (lower than Texas, in fact). But that's usually only part of a household's electricity bill.
> Either they're actually storing the energy somehow (which is something that likely should be rewarded), or ...
Storing it is the big problem. You can't just overbuild solar power and put the energy in the network. You need to meet the demand. ND that is problematic if you must mix and match different energy sources across the network.
I think the problem is that the US grid is also not well set up for this to be viable though, but I don't know the specifics (I think the east coast is on a different grid from the west coast, and Texas has its own grid?)
Love this grid map for stats on transmission: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-CAL-CISO
Please note, I am not advocating for Bitcoin mining as a productive means of consuming electricity that could have gone to something else (either industrial or commercial or residential) -- I'm specially talking about what the article is covering, aka EXCESS generation that truly has nowhere else to go... Might as well convert that electricity into Bitcoin, to capture something (better than nothing) from the generated electricity.
For my purposes, I assumed a reasonable allocation towards storage was already going to happen, and that there would still be excess unused capacity beyond that level.
My person idea would be a 1,000ft tesla coil to have it look cool.
The issue with both is that hardware is expensive, so it's a tough sell for stuff that intends to sit idle half the time.
Every 1 hr of mining at X hash rate will yield a fairly predictable (though fluctuating) $Y of output, but every 1 hr of protein folding will not necessarily yield any direct or predictable income. From the perspective of profit-maximizing energy producers, I suspect they will prefer the former, unless someone can quantify or monetize the latter more easily and directly.
Bitcoin's entire value prop is based on proof of work. At the end of the day, for something to be work, it must have some type of use. The usefulness is philosophically part of the definition.
So, if this power is actually indeed excess, if it actually has nowhere else to go, it cannot provide value to the bitcoin network. Think about it: if bitcoin were entirely run on "free" electricity, where would the value come from? If it doesn't take value to prove work, no value is provided. The "value" of bitcoin comes from its using useful electricity, electricity that would (not just could -- would!) otherwise go towards useful purposes.
Someone who puts a bitcoin miner e.g. next to a solar plant to capture power that is otherwise curtailed is performing an arbitrage. They are trading their worthless power for valuable power elsewhere and pocketing the difference -- and hence extracting value from the other parts of the network which utilize useful power.
Even if tomorrow we switched to bitcoin mining with only "free" power, one of two things would happen: (1) the power actually is truly "free" and hence it does not function as "work" for value purposes and hence the the underlying asset is worthless. Or, much more likely, (2) the power is not "free," the bitcoin is not worthless; it is a drain on our resources.
- Bitcoin becomes immediately worthless, because suddenly many actors could afford to tap infinite energy to mount a 51% attack and destroy the security of the network
- Or, self-interested miners would try to "corner" the market, nearly infinite though it may be... Industrial players might try to outrace each other in terms of bringing more fusion power plants online that are dedicated towards mining -- "white hats" trying to preserve Bitcoin, vs "black hats" trying to destroy, and it's just an arms race... Maybe the end result is actually that, humanity only has productive need for 5% of the total energy that fusion generates (hey it's my thought experiment, just go with it), so what do you do with the other 95% that is otherwise pure excess? ... Maybe it all goes back into Bitcoin mining anyways, because maybe God loves a recursive joke
aluminum smelting is very energy intensive and can be run on-demand.
Also, lots of other areas have figured out how to pump water UP a dam to store energy for later.
Is there some electrical engineering reason this cannot be done?
Curtailment is part of running a low cost grid. If you have zero curtailment you're wasting money.
But it's great for propagandists. Instead of explaining like a journalist would, you can exploit that ignorance.
It's not too much solar if we still have to burn fossil fuels for power generation.
As long as there is gas in the mix in my opinion it is not a "too much solar" but a distribution and storage problem.
the grid status folks published a blog entry talking about batteries are reducing CA’s reliance of nat gas.