It’s a very capitalist way of thinking about the problem, but what “negative prices” actually means in this case is that the grid is over-energised. That’s a genuine engineering issue which would take considerable effort to deal with without exploding transformers or setting fire to power stations

In fairness, capitalist expansion is predicated on generating and reinvesting profit. If you build an array of solar panels and generate a revenue less than the installation+maintenance cost of the panels, you don’t have any more money to buy new panels and expand the grid.

That is, under a privatized system, anyway. If you’re a public utility and your goal is to meet a demand quota rather than raise revenue for the next round of expansion, profit isn’t your concern. You’re looking for the lowest possible installation/maintenance/replacement cost over the lifetime of the system, not the high margins per unit installed.

Incidentally, this is why vertically integrated private firms that consider electricity an expense rather than a profit center have been aggressively rolling out their own privately managed solar/wind arrays. When the concern is minimizing cost rather than maximizing revenue, and you can adjust your rate of consumption to match the peak productive capacity of your grid, then solar/wind is incredibly efficient.

It’s how capitalists think about land, water, air, etc.

… And violently attacking people by depriving them of these needs.

thats why Westinghouse had to crush Nikolai Tesla. you can’t meter wireless power.

Supply side Jesus says put your faith in the wisdom of the CEO.

A big flaw in German energy policy that has done a great job in expanding renewables, includes not giving its industry variable rates, that lets them invest in batteries, and schedule production more seasonally, or if they have reduced demand due to high product prices from high energy costs, just have work on the good days.

Using EVs as grid balancers can be an extra profit center for EV owners with or without home solar. Ultra cheap retail daytime rates is the best path to demand shifting. Home solar best path to removing transmission bottlenecks for other customers. Containerized batteries and hydrogen electrolysis as a service is a tariff exempt path at moving storage/surplus management throughout the world for seasonal variations, but significantly expanding renewables capacity without risking negative pricing, and making evening/night energy cheaper to boot.

Nah, lets squash capitalism first.

We need more military! Cut social security!

See also: Solutions for capitalism are problems for humanity

Negative prices are only mentioned in passing, as a very rare phenomenon

Negative prices are occurring more and more frequently. The cause is baseload generation: it can’t be dialed back as quickly as solar increases during the day, and it can’t be ramped up as fast as solar falls off in the evening. The baseload generators have to stay on line to meet overnight demand. Because they can’t be adjusted fast enough to match the demand curve, they have to stay online during the day as well.

The immediate solution is to back down the baseload generators, and rely more on peaker plants, which can match the curve.

The longer term solution is to remove the incentives that drive overnight consumption. Stop incentivizing “off peak” consumption, and instead push large industrial consumers to daytime operation.

Without reading the article, I could already see what the problem was.

Unless you have capital to invest, you can’t expand or improve the power grid. That capital can either come from the gov’t–through taxation–or from private industry. If you, personally, have enough capital to do so, you can build a fully off-grid system, so that you aren’t dependent on anyone else. But then if shit happens, you also can’t get help from anyone else. (Also, most houses in urban areas do not have enough square feet of exposure to the sun to generate all of their own power.)

Fundamentally, this is a problem that can only be solved by regulation, and regulation is being gutted across the board in the US.

But it doesn’t say “it can generate too much energy and damage infrastructure”, they said “it can drive the price down”. The words they chose aren’t, like, an accident waiting for someone to explain post-hoc. Like, absolutely we need storage for exactly the reason you say, but they are directly saying the issue is driving the price down, which is only an issue if your not able to imagine a way to create this infrastructure without profit motive.

Except the grid overload thing isn’t even an issue with renewables, since wind can be shut down in a matter of 1-5 minutes (move them out of the wind) and solar literally just be disabled. Any overload they produce would be due to mechanical failure, where you can cut them off the grid since they’re in the process of destroying themselves anyway (like in those videos where wind turbines fail spectacularly). Otherwise renewables are perfect to regulate the grid if available.

In a hypothetical grid with an absolute majority of many badly adjustable power sources (like nuclear) you’d have to work with negative prices to entice building large on-demand consumers or battery solutions. So far nobody was stupid enough to build a grid like this though.

tl;dr, this whole problem indeed is about economics and therefore may very well be a “capitalism thing”. Renewables do not overload the grid.

I feel like having a colossal battery pack could help with that problem.

Yep, and the cost difference between those times should make this very cost effective.

negative prices aren’t some weird “capitalism” thing.

lmao.

I guess the biggest bottleneck for renewables is energy storage.

Story of 2010s Germany as well.

In other words… Maybe 29 word Twitter captions aren’t a great way to discuss issues?

I do like how this Twitter account, in the rush to blame capitalism, overlooked the fact that the sun rises and sets every day.

I’ve known about the issue with a lack of ways to store the energy produced for about 5 years now, does it seem like we’re making any steps in it recently? Also how does it work in a “green” fashion to produce all of the batteries necessary for that sorts of energy storage, I feel like that’s going to be one of the next discussions about how “pure” this method is.

Why not do something with all that power?

This is a relatively new problem, so it will take awhile for the market to respond to make industries optimized to take advantage of this.

I saw an article a few months ago (couldn’t find it quickly just now) about a small manufacturing company (metals maybe?) that set up shop specifically to run during the excess power events. So its starting to happen, but its not going to be a perfect fit. It means spending lots up front for infra, but only being able to use it a few hours a day cost effectively.

In the past there were some projects where they pumped water upstream when there was too much power on the grid. Then on low energy times, the water was released making energy again.

This is already done with pump hydro. But this needs existing hydroelectric infrastructure to take advantage of. Even then there are usually holding ponds upstream and they themselves have limited capacity.

Or make hydrogen (I think it was hydrogen).

This is being done too at small scales right now. There’s difficulties with it. Hydrogen really sucks to try store and transport. The H2 molecule is so small it leaks out through valves and gaskets that are fine for containing nearly all other gases and liquids. So this means the gear needed is hugely more expensive up front. What a few are doing is using the hydrogen to quickly make Ammonia (NH3), which is much easier to store and contain. However, the efforts doing this are still fairly small.

Or do AI stuff

AI aside, this is one place I haven’t seen develop yet. That being: cheaper compute costs during excess power events.

I suspect its the same problem for the manufacturing. It means spending money on expensive compute infrastructure but only able to use it during the excess power events. As in, the compute in place is already running flat out at full capacity all the time. There’s no spare hardware to use the excess power. If you had spare hardware, you’d add it to your fleet and run it 24/7 making more money.

We still have hydroelectric turbines that can reverse themselves to pump water to a higher elevation reservoir to store surplus energy. We call them pump-gens at my job. The problem is that, as nearby areas develop, that water gets reserved for other things, so they can’t pump it back up because it’s needed further downstream for irrigation or communities or whatever.

Why not do something with all that power?

Because profits are a result of deprivation not progress.

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I got you.

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.