Does this mean that solar generates power when no one is willing to pay for it?
I can't figure out these charts... probably because I am too stupid.
I can't wrap my head around the consequences of having a power supply that doesn't follow demand.
I can't figure out these charts... probably because I am too stupid.
I can't wrap my head around the consequences of having a power supply that doesn't follow demand.
Because of that they sell electricity at a discount at night. Large industrial users will schedule their entire operations around this. For example ski mountains do their snowmaking at night because the power is the greatest expense (even more than labor) and the discount is enormous. I also believe that aluminum and steel foundries do some form of this.
The renewables change this dynamic a bit, but there are many loads that can be time shifted. I could imagine an electric car connected to the internet and plugged in all night at home and all day at work could optimize its charging cycle to match the lowest energy prices of the day. Of course this requires major changes to metering and billing, but there is no technical reason why it couldn't happen, it is all a business and infrastructure problem.
I wonder if we could do the same with legacy power plants as they do with solar thermal - shove some of the excess heat into molten salt heat storage when renewables are reaching their maximum output, then use that as a finer throttling mechanism. That would mean you wouldn't have to run the coal plants as heavily non-stop. It could buy us some time as we figure out how best to store the energy from photovoltaics and wind (it's pretty much solved for solar thermal).
Not to mention that such geography frequently tends to cover farmland and rural communities who are less than likely to want their land flooded.. they may also tend to vote on the conservative-side of the spectrum which cares less for renewable generation such as hydro.
The construction cost of dams isn't insignificant either!
http://rt.com/news/belgium-battery-island-renewable-319/
(P.S. I couldn't immediately find any more reputable English speaking news source for this. Oh well, on this sort of fairly neutral subject, rt.con seem to do quite well.)
If you take for instance an elevation of 100m, to produce 1000MW of electricity it would take about 1000m^3 of water per second (before losses). In other words a pipe of a diameter of 6ft would need to need to move 20.8ft of water through it per second, which would be enough water to fill an Olympic sized swimming pool in about 2.5sec. That's 5760 pools for 4hrs of 1000MWh of electricity, not an insignificant amount of space.
Well, also, it's usually colder at night, which also helps the snowmaking. b^)
It is mainly a political problem. Utilities want you to be their customers not suppliers - if you're a supplier you're destroying their profit margins.
Thus any attempt to upgrade metering and billing capabilities of the system and to let households sell surplus electricity at a fair spot price will be met with resistance from the monopoly-utilities.
E.g. consider a washer-dryer or dishwasher with a "wash within X hours, or at predicted best price point" option. Most of the time I don't care when it runs when I put something in at the evening, just that it's done before I'm home from work the following day.
Or aforementioned electric car with a similar option.
Or water heaters with a storage tank and logic to optimise heating.
Or a data centre that tries to optimise air con settings depending on predicted cost (e.g. pushing temperatures down further than necessary when the power is cheaper to allow running at lower power for a period when power is more expensive while the temperature rises again).
With access to spot priced supply, there'd potentially be a massive market for adding intelligence to various devices where part of the energy usage could be time shifted.
Spot price for retail doesn't fluctuate (as far as I'm aware). It'll get more expensive during mid-summer at certain times of day, but you'll know when.
It think this is a pricing problem. I run my dishwasher in the middle of the night because I get charged the least for electricity then. If I got charged less I would run the dishwasher in the middle of the day.
If a timer could turn my freezer down in the middle of the day, then used the stored coldness for both the freezer and fridge the rest of the day that would be cool too.
> Solar usually generates the most supply when there is the
> most demand, when the air conditioners are on in summer.