I can't imagine anything being able to compete with that for speed and scale - or costs, for that matter. Once deployed it's basically free.
that would actually be my preferred solution (if only it was less energy inefficient, sigh).
That ‘negative value’ electricity could also be used to do something else. And actually requires a lot of capital to produce. It isn’t actually free, it’s a side effect of another process that has restraints/restrictions.
For example, Free power for an hour is useless if someone is running an aluminum refinery, because you can’t just start and stop it; and it costs so much capital to make that only operating 1 hour out of 24 is not economic.
And that is for a situation where electrical power costs are one of the most dominant costs!
The cost of CO2 capture, and conversion into usable fuels, is in the cost of the setup of the infrastructure etc (as well as cost to run the pumps once setup, which in this case is where the free electricity goes).
The return on such an investment is likely negative, because the synthesized fuel does not sell for much (compared to the same fuel that is extracted off the ground and refined - look at natural gas as prime example). Therefore, even if electricity is negative (ala, free), you cannot make money from doing it.
Either the cost of the carbon emissions is captured as part of the cost of fossil fuel extraction (and returned to this carbon capture/conversion system) to make it break even, or something else has to happen (like massive efficiency increase in doing such conversions) in order to make it economical.
We don't have enough automatic integration yet to make it happen, but: Residentially, that'd be a great time to charge millions of EVs and raise the temperature of water heaters. It'd be perfect for getting a head start on heating the glass kiln for Monday morning, or to supplement the used railroad ties and other fuels that might be feeding a lime kiln.
It's pretty easy to think of loads that feature scale and/or quantity, and the ability to switch on and off rather quickly. Even if the negative price event only lasts for an hour. (Even if it only lasts 5 minutes.)
Also, once said capex was spent so we could actually use that electricity - it’s marginal cost/value would no longer be negative.
Weird huh?
Notably, if these kinds of situations do keep occurring (aren’t just random), someone almost always ends up spending the capital to capture it, because this is obvious.
You just don’t see all the finance geeks pulling out their calculators and talking about their plans because they know secrecy is an important strategic and tactical advantage when arranging investment and building out capital equipment.
And no, I don't think that's weird at all -- that seems like just a natural path towards the desirable goal of balancing generation and load, and turning a negative into a positive.
In terms of implementation: There's already lot of low-hanging fruit. It only takes software to get connected things like EVs and hybrid, grid-tied battery+solar systems to be centrally commanded to take advantage of negative price opportunities.
The hardware already exists, and more of it is being built every day. And software, once written, can be copied infinitely for free.
We already have sellers who would like to sell surplus energy, but find themselves in situations where they cannot. We also have avid buyers who would like to buy energy cheaper, but who cannot take advantage of the surplus condition when it exists.
That's not a inescapable curse. It is instead an opportunity for a new market optimization.
If I wake up on some hypothetical future day and find my hypothetical EV charged to 90% instead of the 80% I might normally seek to limit it to, and this 10% increase happened for free and without any action on my part, then: I win a little bit, and the generating station with the surplus also wins a little bit, and the distribution/transmission systems still get paid for their part.
I'm happy with my tiny win. The generating station is happy with many thousands of their own tiny wins. It's good stuff.
If this happens often enough (or for long-enough periods) for me in my region, then I might seek a normal limit of 70% or even less and be able to opportunistically absorb even more of the surplus when it happens.
The advantage that participation offers me does decrease over time as things balance (if they can ever become balanced), and that's OK too: The generating station still wins.
(We already have systems that do exactly the opposite of this in the consumer space, and we've had them for a very long time. The oldest I'm aware of are radio-controlled relays for water heaters, and the newest I'm aware of involve smart thermostats. These are utility-controlled systems that are intended to shed load instead of generate load. But if it works in one direction, then it can also work in the other direction.)
In China which recently opened a large off-grid green ammonia plant in Chifeng, they use multiple tiers of energy storage to ensure constant electric power availability.
This is why you see most opportunistic electricity consumption systems doing resistive heating - this equipment is inexpensive.
That is something you can reasonably do, but it's only useful in winter.
> or using high power appliances more during the day
Well, given that people have to work during the day, I doubt that that will work out on a large enough scale. And even if you'd pre-program a laundry machine to run at noon, the laundry would sit and get smelly during summer until you'd get home.
The only change in patterns we will see is more base load during the night from EVs trickle-charging as more and more enter the market.
Dishwasher can also gave a programmed start, so that can also shift from after-dinner to after-breakfast.
I also work some days from home, so other activities can be moved from night to day. We use a bore-hole for irrigation, laundry in the morning etc. Even cooking can often be done earlier in the day.
Aircon is the least problematic- when we need it, the sun is shining.
So yes, habits can shift. Obviously though each situation is different.
We have our heat pump water heater running during the cheap hours, and also change our use of air conditioning/heating to accommodate.
It would probably not work in our favor if we didn't work from home and were out of the home all day.
We simply don't have the transmission and storage for significantly more grid tied solar. It's pointless to build more for purposes of grid supply, we need to build transmission and storage first.
Refinements on ways to sell it to neighbours / recharge various EV's / use it for new purposes are all up to you.
There are lots of analogies to self hosting or concepts around owning and controlling your own data, when it's owned by you, you retain soverignty and full rights on what happens.
I'd expect most tech people will value the distributed nature of solar over equivilents, that by design require centralisation and commerical/state ownership and control.
Get your solar, back increasingly distributed approaches, let those pushing centralised agendas be the ones to pay for their grid. Eventually they are forced to change.
As we're finding in Australia, our high solar uptake by citizens.. is pressuring governments to respond, lest their centralised options become redundant. What we found is that as more people moved to solar, the power companies lumped the costs for grid maintenance onto those who hadnt moved yet, actually contributing to even further accelerated solar adoption and pressure to rework the system. Big corporates can lobby for themselves you dont owe them your custom.
Then, subsides are drying up. Systems have a useful life, your panels can be damaged by storms, for maximizing battery life you need to ensure you don't discharge it below 20%, and neither charge it over 100%.
So, in the end, the grid needs to be there anyway, but as most grid costs are fixed, whenever you use it now, it is going to be more expensive.
I have a relatively big battery (12kWh) which is enough to see me through the evening during the summer months. We do not get quite enough sunshine where I live to be off-grid during the winter, but I can use the battery to hedge against grid outages which are common here in the winter due to storms (eg heavy ice taking down power lines).
Batteries have come down a lot in cost, at least the raw ones:
Without the tariffs it would be even cheaper I guess.
There seem to be a few sweet spots in solar - a tiny array that you use all of without having to grid tie it is really cost effective. (The cost of grid tied solar adds 5-10k to the system cost). Otherwise go big. :)
That and they can be cold booted and stand much more temperature diversity bitter and into frozen temps too.
Just saying, the tech and solar expansion is at run away global growth right now, despite American centric machinations.
Add a bit of extra capacity to the wind/solar installations and the battery figures usually plummet.
This is not the problem. The problem is that everyone moves to solar for most of the year not using or paying for the infrastructure, then in cold winter nights everyone expects the grid to be able to supply as normal.
I do, but I do not find value in rich folks who can afford solar wanting their cake and eating it too.
If you get a solar setup, get batteries. Then disconnect from the grid entirely. You should not be able to use the grid as a free backup energy source for the last 5% of the time you'll need it. Those last digits of reliability are the expensive hard problem to solve. That, or be charged appropriately for adding your potential usage to the capacity market. I understand that this is not legal in many places, and that folks disconnecting from the grid also cause the grid to collapse at some point as well. But at least there would be less of an individual perverse incentive involved.
Home solar folks seem to love their free battery though. Or even worse - getting paid to dump power to the grid when it's value is the smallest. Net metering is not the way to go - home solar should be being paid something around instantaneous wholesale pricing at best, plus fees to manage the more complex management of the grid they cause via being thousands of kilowatt-scale install vs. a single 50MW solar farm.
So far in the US at least, many solar programs have simply been a handout to relatively rich folks subsidized by poorer grid consumers. It's really put a sour taste on something that should be for the greater good. I don't mind that those subsidies were used to jump-start the industry, but that time has long since passed.
tldr; if your total system cost to be fully off-grid and never have to worry about a power outage is not substantially more expensive than being grid-connected, you are likely being highly subsidized by other electricity consumers.
Singling out solar and continuing to not prioritize it will inevitably lead to ongoing grid issues. Whereas this has been mostly solved for other sources, due to lobbying and legacy. Thus my confusion about the OPs half-baked point.
"Solar can be deployed by hundreds of thousands of individual efforts and financing at the same time, with almost no bureaucracy."
N>100000 is a lot harder to coordinate than the ~15,000 established power plants, which have come online over the last hundred or so years.
The issues you describe are from coal, oil, and gas lobbyists saying solar isn’t viable because of nighttime. When the grid is made up of batteries…
If every house had solar and some LiFePo batteries on site, high demand can be pulled from the grid while during low demand and high production, it can be given to the grid. The energy companies can store it, hydropower or batteries, for later. We have the ability. The political will is simply the lobbyists giving people money so they won’t. But we can just do it anyway. Start with your own home.
In MA and a few other states, polluters are also required to buy “renewable energy credits.” Since I have a solar array I can sell my RECs whether I export energy or not. It’s my first year with a solar array, so I’m not sure how much to expect, but neighbors tell me that they earn between $500-$1000 a year.
Rules and regulations could solve that problem (meter not allowed to go backwards, solar companies are forced to pay some kind of battery credit, etc), but the free market will always outcompete.
Therefore, I forsee the future lies in 'smart' electricity meters which can charge different rates at different times of day - perhaps with minute by minute live pricing.
It’s called TOU pricing.
> I forsee the future lies in 'smart' electricity meters which can charge different rates at different times of day - perhaps with minute by minute live pricing.
That's what I was responding to, not the day/night predetermined pricing.
A max price guarantee would also give the supplier an incentive to have their planning in order.
In turn, that means that at times of crisis, prices will be high, but not 1000x high.
Gasoline is another resource with live pricing, and suggesting "I want a subscription where I pay $3 per gallon fixed for a year, no matter how much I use and no matter what happens to the price of oil" wouldn't be something a fuel station would entertain, because they know that when the price was under $3 you'd buy elsewhere, and when the price was over $3 you'd buy millions of gallons and resell at a profit.
It's not latency free to act on price changes. If they spike while people are asleep, what do you expect would happen? And would people get a notification everytime the price changed at all. The logistics are hard.
Minute by minute pricing is not crazy to expect and integration with HVAC, battery systems, and inverters isn’t crazy to expect to occur.
Now every device in your home knows the price. For this to work, everyone must get the same price across the whole grid, and there must be sufficient grid capacity for energy to flow freely which isn't always the case. It will also cause issues with some very old (ie. 60+ year old) clocks with mechanical timers.
All of these issues can be fixed by updating the formula:
price_per_kwh = tan(min(max((-60 + system_frequency + published_offset) * 1000, -pi/2), pi/2))
The published_offset would be unique to each district and adjusted from time to time to keep old clocks working properly, and sometimes to deal with limited transfer properties of the grid...
But the neat thing is that even if you don't take into account the published_offset, you still make nearly optimal economic decisions.
People will choose it based on claims in the shop like "Smart timing cuts energy bills by 25% on average!".
It only takes a smallish percentage of demand to be reactive like that and really big price swings won't really happen.
Somewhere they'll still be grandad manually putting the dishwasher on at a cheap hour or turning the hot tub off whenever he sees the price is high, but I expect most to be automatic.
Seriously though this was a huge issue a couple years ago with the freezing and blizzards that hit Texas.
I’m happy enough that a battery will serve me equally well in both modes, but there’s definitely going to be a period where all it does is support self-consumption.
Not all prime movers are the same with regard to grid dynamics and their impact.
Solar, wind, etc., almost universally rely on some form of inverter. This implies the need for solid state synthetic inertia to provide frequency response service to the grid.
Nuclear, coal, gas, hydropower, geothermal, etc., rely on synchronous machines to talk to the grid. The frequency response capability is built in and physically ideal.
Both can work, but one is more complicated. There are also factors like fault current handling that HN might think is trivial or to be glossed over, but without the ability to eat 10x+ rated load for a brief duration, faults on the grid cannot be addressed and the entire system would collapse into pointlessness. A tree crashing into a power line should result in the power line and tree being fully vaporized if nothing upstream were present to stop the flow of current. A gigantic mass of spinning metal in a turbine hall can eat this up like it's nothing. Semiconductors on a PCB in someone's shed are a different story.
One way to think about this problem is that our electrical grids are giant machines—in many ways, the largest machines that humanity has every constructed. The enormous machine of the grid is comprised of many smaller connected machines, and many of those have spinning loads with enormous mechanical inertia. Some of those spinning machines are generators (prime movers), and some are loads (like large electric motors at industrial facilities). All of those real, physical machines—in addition to other non-inertia generators and loads—are coupled together through the grid.
In the giant machine of the grid, electricity supply and demand have to be almost perfectly in sync, microsecond to microsecond. If they're not, the frequency of the grid changes. Abrupt changes in frequency translate into not only electrical/electronic problems for devices that assume 60 Hz (or 50, depending on where you are), but into physical problems for the machines connected to the grid. If the grid frequency suddenly drops (due to a sudden drop in generation capacity or sudden drop in load), the spinning masses connected to the grid will suddenly be under enormous mechanical stress that can destroy them.
It's obviously not possible to instantaneously increase or decrease explicit generation in response to spikes or drops in load (or alternatively, instantaneously increase or decrease load in response to spikes or drops in generation). But we don't need to: all of the spinning mass connected to the grid acts as a metaphorical (and literal) flywheel that serves as a buffer to smooth out spikes.
As the generation mix on the grid moves away from things with physical inertia (huge spinning turbines) and toward non-inertial sources (like solar), we need to use other mechanisms to ensure that the grid can smoothly absorb spikes. One way to do that is via spinning reserves (e.g. https://www.sysotechnologies.com/spinning-reserves/). Another way to do it is via sophisticated power electronics that mimic inertia (such as grid-forming inverters, which contrast with the much more common grid-following inverters).
To learn more about this topic, look up ancillary services (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_services). This Shift Key podcast episode is also a great introduction: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/spains-blackout-and-th...
Reddit post by an EE explaining it better than I can: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/qhear9/commen...
> There are also factors like fault current handling that HN might think is trivial or to be glossed over, but without the ability to eat 10x+ rated load for a brief duration, faults on the grid cannot be addressed and the entire system would collapse into pointlessness.
I don’t understand what you are talking about here. I don’t work in the utility world, I sell and run commercial electrical work, but handling available fault current in my world is as simple as calculating it and providing overcurrent protection with a high enough AIC rating or current limiting fuses. I don’t see why the utility side would be any different.
The lack of rotating mass in a solar site means the rest of the spinning mass of the generators needs to compensate to maintain frequency and voltage, right? So when clouds roll in and the solar field output drops quickly, it’s a challenge for the rest of the system to compensate since any other generator that spins will slow down much more slowly, giving the grid more time to react.
Also, I was not aware that inverters can only handle fault current that is 1.1x the nameplate capacity, that’s a big limitation. I can buy a 20A breaker with 200kaic, which is 10,000x higher than the breaker ampacity, which is extremely helpful for handling fault current.
There are breakers, of course, but they react slowly enough that there will absolutely be a massive overdraw first. Then the breaker will open. Then, some small number of seconds later, it will automatically close.
It will attempt this two to four times before locking out, in case it just needs multiple bursts. It’s called “burning clear”, and it looks just as scary as you’d think… but it does work.
So, solar suppliers need to also survive this.
I'd argue that nothing that uses semiconductors would be suitable for the task. They get you to maybe 2x rated current capacity for a meaningful duration. A spinning turbine can easily handle 10x or more for a much longer duration.
We could put so many redundant transistors in parallel that we have equivalent fault handling, but then we are into some strong economic issues. There's also no room for error with semiconductors. Once you start to disintegrate, it's all over ~instantly. There is no way to control this. A synchronous machine can trade downstream maintenance schedule for more current right now. The failure is much more gradual over time. A human operator can respond quickly enough if the machine is big enough.
The other trivial solution are synchronous condensers. Or just let the generators and maybe even turbines of future emergency reserve thermal plants spin with the grid without consuming any fuel.
Just ensure the proper margins exist in the grid and call in ancillary services as needed.
No need to make it harder than it needs to be.
This is a solvable problem, but it requires a solution nonetheless.
https://www.energy-storage.news/batteries-are-number-one-at-...
https://arena.gov.au/blog/australias-grid-forming-battery-re...
The frequency (50hz or 60hz) comes from those rotational forces from the generators and until we can eliminate them, we have to play nice with them.
Luckily, we have GFMI’s. Grid-forming inverters that can emulate 60hz push pull but you’re right that it’s more than just voltage since we are dealing with high voltage alternating current.
The Australian grid shows that when solar is the dominant part of the grid, it can still work pretty well. But you need to plan for when the sun is not shining and adapt to the notion that base load translates as "expensive power that you can't turn off when you need to" rather than "essential power that is always there when needed". The notion of having more than that when a lot of renewables are going to come online by the tens of GW is not necessarily wise from a financial point of view.
That's why coal plants are disappearing rapidly. And gas plants are increasingly operating in peaker plant mode (i.e. not providing base load). Also battery (domestic and grid) is being deployed rapidly and actively incentivized. And there are a lot of investments in things like grid forming inverters so that small communities aren't dependent on a long cable to some coal plant far away.
The economics of all this are adding up. Solar is the cheapest source of energy. Batteries are getting cheap as well. And the rest is just stuff you need to maintain a reliable energy system. None of this is cheap but it's cheaper than the alternative which would be burning coal and gas. And of course home owners figuring out that solar + batteries earn themselves back in a few short years is kind of forcing the issue.
Australian grid prices are coming down a lot because they are spending less and less on gas and coal. The evening peak is now flattened because of batteries. They actually have negative rates for power during the day. You can charge your car or battery for free for a few hours when there's so much solar on the grid that they prefer to not charge you than to shut down the base load of coal/gas at great cost. Gas plants are still there for bridging any gaps in supply.
I don't have the exact 'before' numbers on me, but our peak electricity costs went up from around 42c/kWh to 56c/kWh around 18 months ago.
At the same time that feed-in was halved from 4c/kWh to 2c. Having said that, I'm pretty sure 'Shoulder' and 'Off-Peak' went down slightly.
(I'll update this when I can access my spreadsheet with the actual numbers and dates)
I should also say that I'm fairly insulated from this price rise having recently gotten a battery installed, plus moving to a special EV plan, so I charge the car and the house battery at the very cheap off peak rate (special for EV owners) and run the house entirely off battery, topped up with solar.
It's a privileged setup, but one that I planned and worked towards for a fair while, having seen ever increasing electricity prices always on the horizon (even before AI started eating all the resources).
Inflationary money is basically an ugly hack to allow prices to fall without falling.
It's primarily the places that try do both solar an fossil fuel retirement that are experiencing high energy prices - California, UK, Europe, Australia, etc.
High energy prices happen when you don't do the basics to be ready for a change before making it. Or when you skip basic maintenance until everything falls apart. I'm sure there are many other complex factors I don't know about.
That's why something like 30% of Australian houses have solar.
That said, grid prices spiked recently. Both a combination of subsidies expiring, and fewer people buying grid power (because of solar) causing fixed costs to be shouldered by fewer people.
It should be pointed out that while electricity prices went up on paper, a lot of people aren't paying those higher prices because they are on solar!
Also worth pointing out that much of the US is below 49 degrees latitude. Which is south of most of Europe. Washington DC and San Francisco are at a similar latitude (38) as Melbourne (-37). Most of the US is perfectly situated for getting pretty decent solar power around the year. Yes it gets cloudy sometimes. It's usually not continent wide. You can compensate with cables and batteries. The US is far behind because of policy and their local energy monopolists blocking progress. Not because of anything to do with the weather or geography.
Prices have a lot to do with scarcity. Which with monopolists has more to do with the lack of a free market than with a scarcity of resources. Installing solar is about 3-5x more as expensive in the US as in Australia. The permitting process in the US is more expensive than the total cost of buying and installing in Australia. That's a policy problem in the US. All the hand wringing around that topic isn't helping a lot. A bit of pragmatism could improve things a lot and probably very quickly. Australia is showing how to do that. And yes, they have rain there too and you can go skiing pretty close to Melbourne. That isn't stopping them.
Someone pointed out that the big problem with solar isn't how do we store daytime solar for nighttime use - this is easily solved with batteries. The real unsolved problem is how do we store summer solar for winter use.
Australia doesn't have this problem, not to the extent of other colder places, because we don't need a lot of heating in the winter.
Same method. Massive scale, trivial to deploy, works with barely any maintenance.
It can be.
Unless existing bureaucracy doesn't want that.
Why is this any different than the sheer size of manufacturing and natural resources to extract other forms of energy?
Oil, natural gas, coal also all take vast amounts of capital investment and resource extraction to implement.
And California has the most expensive electricity prices in the US.
Big industrial projects. Big power plants. Big finance. Real men.
It’s silly. If you want a real men trip get into body building and MMA or something and use solar power.
Google says they degrade to 80-90% capacity over 25-30 years, which is ~double your 15 year time period. I've also previously seen people claiming that they then stabilise around the 80% level, and that we don't really know how long their total possible lifespan is because many extant solar panels are outliving their 25 year rated lifespans.
Capacity reduced to 80% won't work for some high-performance use cases, but is pretty decent for most.
Why is this such a dealbreaker like you make it out to be? It's easily fixed by over-provisioning to account for future losses. Not to mention that power grids almost always have more capacity than what's needed, to account for future growth and maintenance downtime.