Solarpunk

I saw some context for this, and the short of it is that headline writers want you to hate click on articles.

What the article is actually about is that there's tons of solar panels now but not enough infrastructure to effectively limit/store/use the power at peak production, and the extra energy in the grid can cause damage. Damage to the extent of people being without power for months.

California had a tax incentive program for solar panels, but not batteries, and because batteries are expensive, they're in a situation now where so many people put panels on their houses but no batteries to store excess power that they can't store the power when it surpasses demand, so the state is literally paying companies to run their industrial stoves and stuff just to burn off the excess power to keep the grid from being destroyed.

To be fair, having a mismatch between when energy is available and when it is needed is going to be a problem under any economic system, since it's a fundamental inefficiency that must be worked around with additional effort and resources

If the excess energy cannot be stored, it should be used for something energy intensive like desalination or carbon capture.

Both of the statements in that screenshot are just so inane.

Frequency has to be maintained on the grid. It’s the sole place where we have to match production and consumption EXACTLY. If there’s no battery or pumped storage storage available to store excess energy, the grid operators have to issue charges to the producers, in line with their contracts, to stop them dumping more onto the grid (increasing the frequency). The producers then start paying others to absorb this energy, often on the interconnectors.

It’s a marketplace that works (but is under HEAVY strain because there’s so much intermittent production coming online). When was the last time you had a device burning out because the frequency was too high?

Turning the electricity grid into some kind of allegory about post-scarcity and the ills of capitalism (when in fact it’s a free market that keeps the grid operating well) is just “I is very smart” from some kid sitting in mom and dads basement.

Well, you have to handle excess power produced, you can't just dump it on the ground.

If the grid produces too much power in excess of what's being consumed, parts of it need to shutdown to prevent damage.

That's why the price can go negative. They'll actively pay you to use the power so they don't have to hit emergency shutdowns.

As we build more solar plants, the problem gets exacerbated since all the solar plants produce power at the same time until it's in excess of what anyone needs. Unlimited free power isn't very helpful if when it's producing it's producing so much that it has to be cut from the grid, and when demand rises it's not producing and they have to spin up gas turbines.

That's before the money part of it, where people don't want to spend a million dollars to make a plant that they need to pay people to use power from.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/14/1028461/solar-value-deflation-california-climate-change/

They go on to talk about how getting consumption to be shifted to those high production times can help, as can building power storage systems or just ways to better share power with places further away.

My favorite solution for storage of excess power is closed loop pumped hydro. Two bodies of water of different elevations are connected by a generator/pump. When there is too much power, the pump moves the water to the higher lake. When the power is needed, the water flows through the generator to the lower lake.

I get the sentiment in here, but the poster is missing an important point: there is a reason some group of lunatics (called the TSO or Transport System Operator or in some cases other power producers) are willing to pay for people to consume electricity when there is too much of it; They are not doing it for the sake of being lunatics, the electrical system cannot handle over or underproduction. Perfectly balanced (as all things should be) is the only way the grid can exist.

The production capacity in the grid needs to be as big as peak demand. The challenge we face with most renewables is that their production is fickly. For a true solarpunk future, the demand side needs to be flexible and there need to be energy storages to balance the production (and still, in cold and dark environments other solutions are needed).

In off-grid, local usages we usually see this happen naturally. We conserve power on cloudy low-wind days to make sure we have enough to run during the night (demand side flexibility) and almost everyone has a suitably sized battery to last the night. The price variability is one (flawed) mechanism to make this happen on a grid or bidding zone level.

Actually there is a good amount of credible economic theory which backs the idea that localized post-scarcity markets do cause capitalist influences to wither away, and that power generation is a big fucking domino in that equation. The simple version is that maintenance of artificial scarcity is modeled as capital overhead, so there will always be an inflection point where that overhead actually exceeds the value of all other inputs. The same way eg, marketing cannot create infinite or arbitrary demand.

The other angle here is how there is often incentive for alternative commodification of abundance, which in turn incentives that abundance. This is another common model for various forms of post-scarcity capitalism. Take a YouTube video for example. The commodification of content takes the form of advertising, which effectively transfers the scarcity of one market onto another. Content is basically infinite compared to viewership time inputs. The key here is that there will always exist some forms of scarcity - and time is the big one. Art, company, leisure, physical space, etc. the model here is that eventually something like energy and physical resources might be completely abundant and effectively free, but enabled by competition over attention or leisure or aesthetic experience. You can make a strong argument that this is already happening in the post-industrial world to some degree.

The final issue is that this equation isn't unique to capitalism. Socialism mediates scarcity in more or less the same way - by transferring and meditating it across various markets using labor as the quanta of scarcity instead of capital. Indeed, many economists will argue that regulated, democratic, liberal forms of capitalism theoretically reduces to the same core basis, since "free [as in speech] labor" itself both creates the market regulation as well as provides the consumption which mediates access to capital. This is, in fact, the core thesis of "third way" market socialism, though it is obviously contentious among orthodox Marxists.

Just use the extra energy to shoot random laser beams into space... Make sure the aliens know we're armed

This is a real problem but you can only have so many words in a tweet. Note that the price isn't zero but instead negative. It means there is literally too much power in the grid and it would need to be used. If a grid has too much power then it is bad. It can damage it. There are things we can build that essentially amount to batteries (or natural variants like a dam) that get charged during times of higher supply than demand and discharged during times of higher demand than supply.

Scarcity is artifically created in the modern age

Unfettered capitalism will be the end of us.

We need natural batteries like solar power lifting water from a lake into a reservoir so that when we need that energy and the sun isn't making it, released water does

Am I the only one noticing a lot of conservative economic priests in here? Is this normal?

This BULLSHIT comes up every so often, and I'm kinda tired so I'll to someone else to try and explain how the electricity grid actually works.

Nikola Tesla was a radical anarchist then, I guess? :-P