this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
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So what they are saying is that our current financial system is too focused on short term gains to cope with short term losses?
Sigh, when I grew up, I was allways taught to save money so that I have a buffer to fall back on. This concept seems to have completely gone out the window for busniesses lately.
I dislike the talk about how capitalism is bad as a general concept, but when seeing stuff like this I do agree with it in parts.
Ok, so let's solve the issue.
There is too much electricity, so generating power to transmit to the network will cost us money.
This has an easy solution, just don't transmit it to the network.
Build a battery facility where you store the power instead, infact if the price of electricity is negative, use the power on the grid and charge your batteries as well, I mean, when the electricity cost is negative, you are being paid to consume power.
Then when the sun goes down, and the electricity price goes up, you sell the charge you have in the batteries.
Depending on your location you could even set up a pumped storage system, where instead of batteries getting charged, you use the cheap excess energy to pump a resarvoir full of water, and release it when you need the power.
This is exactly what we're gonna see on a large scale in a few years.
I’m very hopeful for flow batteries to improve to a point where they can be very cheaply installed at scale. Seems much better environmentally than lithium ion, and the drawbacks matter less for grid storage.
Flow battery drawbacks aren't drawbacks for home use, let alone grid scale.
What are the drawbacks?
Too heavy, and too big. This is compared to an automotive battery though. They take up the size of something like a fridge. They are also expensive but prices are bound to come down once production is up. But they have claimed zero capacity degradation for decades they say. And the liquid inside is a fire retardant, so if you puncture a battery that would actually put out the fire.
There are number of videos on YouTube, it's an interesting technology.
Absolutely. Home use is what got me interested in them in the first place. I love to DIY stuff (recently I’ve been building planar speakers from scratch) and had the crazy idea of building one for my house.
Snowy Hydro cost overruns would like a word
This is generally the right idea of a solution, but it’s a difficult engineering problem.
It’s not “just an economics problem” despite the headline.
The “cost of power becoming negative” is phrased in an economic way but what it really means is the grid has too much power and that power needs to go somewhere or it will damage infrastructure.
I know that, and to incentivice people to use the power, they pay you to do it.
Yes but there are many solutions already to that problem.
The first one being to shutdown a few stations production when overproducing. The second one being a myriad of storage solutions that already exists and scale them.
It is an economic problem because we already have many ways to skin the cat, but it won't produce shareholder value in the short term.
“Economic problem” isn’t merely short form for “if we had a socialist system we could solve it with free money.” These solutions require us to dig huge amounts of minerals out of the ground and tear the earth apart in the process. And we’re already doing that at a rate exponentially larger than we ever have in history. Plus these are the same materials we need to build the batteries for EVs, so building them for grid storage competes with the EV transition.
And then you factor in the rapidly increasing electric demand we’re producing by switching over to EVs and that means the demand on the grid is even higher. The grid wasn’t built to be able to source power from everywhere so putting solar panels on everyone’s rooftops is making the situation even worse.
It's always funny to me that the first argument is always thinking that socialists want free money.
How many billions are we giving away to big corpos for them to do buy backs and pocket the change?
Being socialist means reusing the tax money for the benefits of the citizens, not the corpos. Trickle down economics are a sham and never worked
I agree that it takes resources, but we could finance the extraction of these resources instead of giving subsidies to fossil and fuel industry, or paying for sports stadium for that matter, or giving money to any corpos really.
And let's not play coy here and think that the fossil industry isn't destroying the earth.
We have the money, and the solutions right now, but the profits are in the way.
The issue with the green energy transition (renewable energy, grid upgrades, grid scale storage, EVs, and elimination of fossil fuel household heating) is that well over 90% of all the critical minerals we need are mined and/or refined in China. No one wants to move any of this stuff to the US because the environmental damage and refining waste are extremely toxic, far more so than any other resource extraction we do here.
Furthermore, all the end-point usage of these resources (making solar panels, capacitors, semiconductors, printed circuit boards, and finished electronics assemblies) is all done in China as well. So if we mined and refined all the minerals we’d end up shipping them all to China to be used in manufacturing.
So now if you want to avoid all that you’re talking about building the entire electronics supply chain inside western countries. But then you face the further issue that there simply aren’t enough electrical engineers in the west to work at these factories. So now you’ve got to retool the entire education system to train a new generation for this critical work.
At the same time, you’re having to deal with the fact that most Americans don’t want to work in these places. TSMC has been very vocal about their struggles to build these chip foundries in the US and hire Americans at the low wages it actually takes to make this stuff competitive against the obscenely cheap products coming from China. Now consider the fact that TSMC is considered a crème de la crème employer in Taiwan, and the factories in China making capacitors and other bulk commodity components pay far less and have far lower margins, and you can begin to see the issue.
Americans want the green energy revolution but they don’t want to give up even an inch of quality of life to get it. Neither the rightest of the far right Republicans nor the leftest of the far left Democrats has expressed any desire to volunteer to lower their own standard of living. The whole story thing is a big fight to try to force other people to lower theirs.
A lot of the issues you describe are directly linked to money. Yes it takes time and investments, but look at situations like the Covid where pretty much every western countries got caught with their pants down when a vaccine needed to be produced, or PPE were short.
I understand that it takes time, efforts and money to get to a point where we will have a renewable grid, but there's always people complaining that it's not the perfect solution, so we should continue on the status quo.
The best time to start was decades ago, the second best time to start is now.
But at this point, this is a political discussion more than a technical one.
We have the means to do it, but not the will.
And yes, our quality of life will definitely be affected, but climate change is already doing that, and the grees that is causing that.
Why are individuals expected to have an emergency fund yet corporations get money from the government?
That's really not an easy solution at all. It's simple, conceptually, but it's a huge series of projects. And expensive.
Early adopters will profit the most, it's a non-issue.
I know that, but with long term planning its fine.
It's the base load providers that don't like this. Coal and nuclear don't like to ramp down. They can't shut down easily and their installation keeps costing money but stops bringing in money in that period. They'll go complain to daddy government how unfair it is.
Until batteries start replacing them by being cheaper.