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[-] gratux 227 points 2 weeks ago

From a grid stability point, you can't produce more than is used, else you get higher frequencies and/or voltages until the automatics shut down. It's already a somewhat frequent occurence in germany for the grid operator to shut down big solar plants during peak hours because they produce way more power than they can dump (because of low demand or the infrastructure limiting transfer to somewhere else)

Negative prices are the grid operator encouraging more demand so it can balance out the increased production.

[-] Mobilityfuture@lemmy.world 10 points 2 weeks ago

As someone with a technical background this is the stupidest problem with solar that I don’t get… just turn off the panels in groups until generation is closer to demand… how have engineers not figured that out. And if they have why does this still get written about.

Someone is an idiot. Maybe it’s me?

[-] antimongo@lemmy.world 9 points 2 weeks ago

I’m adjacent to this problem, so I have a little context, but am not an expert at all.

To my knowledge, we don’t have granular control over panels. So we can shut off legs of a plant, but that’s a lot of power to be moving all at once.

Instead, prices are set to encourage commercial customers to intake more power incrementally. This has a smoother result on the grid, less chance of destabilizing.

A customer like a data center could wait to perform defragmentation or a backup or something until the price of power hits a cheap or negative number.

[-] Mobilityfuture@lemmy.world 4 points 2 weeks ago

Thanks that’s helpful.

But right…?

Solar plants can be reduced to rationalize supply.

To my understanding. The bigger issue is you can’t as effectively do this with other non-renewables like coal/gas… so this not a solar problem but a problem of legacy power plants.

So stupid. The narrative as well.

[-] antimongo@lemmy.world 3 points 2 weeks ago

Yea, more control over the panels will help with the overgeneration issue.

But there’s other issues like ramping supply to meet peak demand and general generation during non-solar hours that still have to be addressed.

Each have interesting proposals on how to solve them, but they haven’t been developed to the point that they’re ready to be put onto the grid at a large scale.

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this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
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