Microblog Memes

Capitalism makes abundance problematic.

They've got economist-brain and view everything as a money thing, which is fucked up and a problem.

But negative net demand (the thing "negative cost" is signaling) is a pain in the ass, because you either need to shut off the panels from the grid, find some very high-capacity and high-throughput storage, or blow out your power grid.

Like some hydroelectric dams in Germany get run backwards, pumping water back up behind the wall. I think there are pilot projects to pump air into old mines to build up a pressure buffer. Grid-scale batteries just aren't there yet.

Solar is good for things where the power demand is cumulative and relatively insensitive to variation over time (like, say, salt pond evaporation, but you don't actually need panels for that). It's also good for insolation-sensitive demand (like air conditioning).

Turns out distributed rooftop solar makes more sense given our current grid than big solar farms out in the desert (California built one, it was not a good use of money).

It's not great, but we need to bite the bullet and use fission+reprocessing in a big way for the near future.

If you're describing nearly free and unlimited electricity as a problem, you may want to reconsider some things.

I see this posted a lot as if this is an issue with capitalism. No, this is what happens when you have to deal with maintaining the power grid using capitalism as a tool.

Power generation needs to match consumption. Always constantly the power grid must be balanced. If you consume more than you can generate, you get a blackout. If you generate more than you use, something catches fire.

Renewables generate power on their own schedule. This is a problem that can be solved with storage. But storage is expensive and takes time to construct.

Negative prices are done to try and balance the load. Its not a problem, its an opportunity. If you want to do something that needs a lot of power, you can make money by consuming energy when more consumption is needed. And if you buy a utility scale battery, you can make money when both charging and discharging it if you schedule it right.

That's not renewables being a problem, that's just what happens when the engineering realities of the power grid come into contact with the economic system that is prevalent for now.

The answer is batteries. And dismantling capitalism, but batteries first

We have such a stupid fucking system for running society. We go out of our fucking way to block better options simply because they don't maximize profit. Not even "are actually unprofitable," just that they don't maximize profit.

oh no the power is too cheap. God forbid our trillions of tax dollars go to something actually useful and good for the people oh well looks like we will get the F-47 instead and pay it to private military contracts 😂

It's funny how capitalist apologists in this thread attack the format of a tweet and people not reading the actual article, when they clearly haven't read the original article.

Negative prices are only mentioned in passing, as a very rare phenomenon, while most of it is dedicated to value deflation of energy (mentioned 4 times), aka private sector investors not earning enough profits to justify expanding the grid. Basically a cautionary tale of leaving such a critical component of society up to a privatized market.

Context: This was a tweet thread from 2021:

https://xcancel.com/techreview/status/1415359221168709636

Here is the full article: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/14/1028461/solar-value-deflation-california-climate-change/

TL;DR: The issue is Capitalism.

A system of disturbing goods and services that can't handle negative value is not a system that should be maintained. Our collect pursuit as a species should be the abundance of these things, not the artificially managed scarcity of them.

Ughh, no, negative prices aren't some weird "capitalism" thing. When the grid gets over loaded with too much power it can hurt it. So negative prices means that there is too much power in the system that needs to go somewhere.

There are things you can do like batteries and pump water up a hill then let it be hydroelectric power at night.

Capitalism has always been the problem, nothing new here.

But we can start rejecting late stage capitalism. Unfortunately, that’s not what is happening people are voting for right wing nut jobs who will enforce capitalism through oppression, poverty, mass surveillance and militarized police.

Wasn't there a town in China that produced such a glut of surplus electricity that they didn't know what to do with it? And it was 100% solar?

I would post that passage from Grapes of Wrath about oranges. But copy-paste doesn't work on my phone

You can read the Technology Review article here discussing why this is problematic beyond a JPEG-artifacted screenshot of a snappy quip from a furry porn Twitter account that may or may not have read the article beyond the caption. We need solar power plants to reach net zero emissions, but even despite their decreasing costs and subsidies offered for them, developers are increasingly declining to build them because solar is so oversaturated at peak hours that it becomes worthless or less than worthless. The amount of energy pumped into the grid and the amount being used need to match to keep the grid at a stable ~60 Hz (or equivalent where you live, e.g. 50 Hz for the PAL region), so at some point you need to literally pay people money to take the electricity you're producing to keep the grid stable or to somehow dump the energy before it makes its way onto the grid.

One of the major ways this problem is being offset is via storage so that the electricity can be distributed at a profit during off-peak production hours. Even if the government were to nationalize energy production and build their own solar farms (god, please), they would still run up against this same problem where it becomes unviable to keep building farms without the storage to accommodate them. At that point it becomes a problem not of profit but of "how much fossil fuel generation can we reduce per unit of currency spent?" and "are these farms redundant to each other?".

This is framed through a capitalist lens, but in reality, it's a pressing issue for solar production even if capitalism is removed from the picture entirely. At some point, solar production has to be in large part decoupled from solar distribution, or solar distribution becomes far too saturated in the middle of the day making putting resources toward its production nearly unviable.

Why not do something with all that power? 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. Or make hydrogen (I think it was hydrogen). Or do AI stuff

I also seen energie waste machines that basically use a lot of power to do nothing. Only the get rid of all that extra energy so the power grid won't go down/burn.

I dream of humans one day building a Dyson swarm around the Sun and becoming a Kardashev type 2 civilization. It's a magnificent dream that we probably must one day accomplish or accept extinction.

But that is one serious problem with it. Unless it's managed democratically, if one psycho gets to control all of it, yeah, they could literally block out the Sun for anyone who won't pay for protection.

The question comes down to this. How do you incentivize work other than with money?

Just install a bunch of spotlights that point back at the Sun so when power prices go negative you can return all that excess energy! Come on MIT, I thought you were supposed to be smart.