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Comment by cosmic_quanta | Hacker News Reader

Electricity markets are completely inelastic in the absence of storage ability. Negative prices are an indication that the grid needs the ability to absorb surpluses from sources with effectively free fuel (solar, wind).

Note that "absorbing surpluses" does NOT require energy storage in the form of batteries, which is expensive and not necessarily green. Another option is grid-interactive buildings, that can harness energy surpluses in near-real-time when they arise [0]. Hopefully we seem more of these buildings.

[0]: https://edoenergy.com/

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We are going to see a toooooon of battery storage too. Building HVAC is great, water heaters are great, because thermal storage is easy and present in all of existing infrastructure.

I hope that we can have enough vehicle chargers at workplaces that help absorb excess supply too.

It won't be long until during seasonal peaks we will have multiples of demand available to be dispatched on the grid, during the sunny hours.

I've been trying to think of applications that will benefit from this coming future for about a decade, but have not yet hit upon the sort of application where capex is low enough that this sort of big swing is easy to use.

Global BESS deployments soared 53% in 2024 - https://www.energy-storage.news/global-bess-deployments-soar... - January 14, 2025 ("Storage installations in 2024 beat expectations with 205GWh installed globally, a staggering y-o-y increase of 53%. The grid market has once again been the driver of growth, with more than 160GWh deployed globally, of which 98% was lithium-ion.")

China’s Batteries Are Now Cheap Enough to Power Huge Shifts - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-07-09/china-... | https://archive.today/DklaA - July 9, 2024

China Already Makes as Many Batteries as the Entire World Wants - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-04-12/china-... | https://archive.today/8Dy4D - April 12, 2024

The WWPG is the answer! World Wide Power Grid...

Its not a market that in not elastic. It is physics, you can't just close the pipe and electricity stops flowing. Deal with this. There are ways to handle the problem, like pumped storage power plants, but they require very particular terrain (a mountain next to the big lake). "grid-interactive buildings" are fun, but this is not the scale that can make any substantial difference. So far we do not have effective, long-term energy storage and no amount of hand waving is going to change that. So, let's be realistic and build nuclear power plants.

> you can't just close the pipe and electricity stops flowing

You can if it's solar panels! You can just turn the inverter off! The surplus is not in itself a problem, only the dark winter months.

This.

There will be spikes for demand and supply, and the grid is a real time market. There are already spikes and drops in usage as humans wake and sleep.

> It is physics, you can't just close the pipe and electricity stops flowing.

Rooftop solar power plants are physically able to stop producing, this requires some firmware changes so that they stop putting power into grid when someone orders them to. But there is no market or political will for such solution.

Indeed, the inelasticity is because of the physics. Nonetheless, common terminology in the industry is that the market is inelastic.

Regarding nuclear power: it is a great technology for the base load (edit: I mean firm power), but there's always going to be fluctuations in consumption, which needs to be met with fluctuations in generation. Grid interactive buildings can help mitigate this fluctuation.

Due to how much renewables many western grids today have the traditional ”baseload” is effectively zero nowadays.

As shown by nuclear plants bidding negative so they don’t have to shut down.

> the traditional ”baseload” is effectively zero nowadays

Baseload is about the electrical demand, not the generation. The minimum demand across a period of time.

Right I get it backwards all the time. I meant firm power

Exactly. And then OP goes and talks about ”baseload nuclear” like they can force us consumers to buy horrifically expensive nuclear power when renewables deliver said ”baseload”.

Which is why I said ”traditional baseload”. In other words: our need for 100% uptime coal or nuclear plants.

Really it's the other way round: all the generators have safety trips and can disappear from the grid in a short time if required, but it's uneconomic to do so. Which is why you get things like wind farm curtailment payouts; they're part of the weird set of compromises between spot market and long-term (necessarily central!) capacity planning.

> you can't just close the pipe and electricity stops flowing

We can. Solar panels can be disconnected. Wind turbines can be stopped. Dams can be stopped and dump water without energy production.

Some dams can store water in reservoirs. Actually, if there is a surplus of energy, some dams can use it pump water up from their lower to upper reservoir (a reservoir is effectively a less efficient battery).

> It is physics, you can't just close the pipe and electricity stops flowing. Deal with this.

This is so wrong I can't resist ... I turn off the electricity pipe multiple times a day with a light switch, and as far as I can tell in my 6 decades of existence the electricity has stopped flowing every time with no ill effects.

What are are perhaps trying to say is you can't just shut of some sorts of power generation - like coal and nuclear. But as another poster pointed out, that's a limitation of those technologies. Wind, solar, gas and even diesel generators can be turned of near instantaneously.

Build nuclear like France, one of the four countries named in the article as having negative prices?

The nuclear that random posters here believe in is magical and mysterious and not at all related to the nuclear plants that exist in the real world.

For some figures on demand reponse Kraken energy manage devices across Europe and the US:

"And today, to give you the exact numbers, we manage close to 400,000 devices in real time. That's about 1.6 gigawatt of power that can be turned up or down at any moment in time and space. And that's where consumer devices become really powerful." [1]

1. https://www.volts.wtf/p/making-sure-smart-devices-can-talk

While true I suspect that the future of energy storage is overwhelmingly dominated by large scale battery storage. A lot of the alternatives fall in the "cute, but complicated, situational, and/or doesn't scale" category.

It depends on what you mean by future. The next couple of years certainly. But once you start looking for technology that can store weeks worth of energy over several months, batteries don’t look like the clear winner.

Depends how much need there is for long term energy storage.

Off grid users have this problem currently when building solar+battery systems. They can pretty reasonably afford to install enough battery to cover a couple of cloudy days in winter, but if you think about two weeks of solid cloud cover the battery planner goes nuts. The solution is to install a sane amount of battery, enough for 2 to 3 cloudy days, and a small backup fuel generator for those few days a year when the solar falls short.

Does this solution scale to the grid? It involves a fuel plant that sits idle for the vast majority of the year which is not great for paying off its construction costs. It would almost certainly have to be subsidized by the ratepayers, but since they're otherwise getting almost free solar power maybe this can still work. It's also bad news for the fossil fuel extraction industry. There isn't much need to drill baby drill when you're only burning fuel for like two weeks out of the year.

pumped water storage and compressed gas are also great

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