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Sometimes we create our own problems.
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
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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.
Also, fwiw, you can curtail wind turbines incredibly quickly. They're the quickest moving assets on an electrical grid typically. So you are using them to balance the grid quite often. You can just pitch the blades a bit and they slow or stop. it's not really a tech problem, but a financial one like you said.
I'm not sure much about solar curtailment, other than the fact that they receive curtailment requests and comply quite quickly as well.
Wind turbines like solar and BESSs are inverter-based resources (IBRs), so any of them can curtail quickly.
Here in the EU, the DC-AC transformers are mandated to shut down if the grid frequency is out of bounds.
The framing of it as the problem being that the price is going down rather than that excess power is feeding into the grid is what makes it an issue with capitalism. The thing you should be questioning is why MIT Technology Review is talking about some consequence of the problem that only exists because of capitalism instead of talking about the problem itself.
And before you downvote/object with some knee-jerk reaction that I'm being pedantic, consider this alternative way of framing it:
That's pretty vastly different, isn't it?
they did talk about this many years ago. This is a very old screenshot that has been around the internet for probably a decade at a guess. You might notice the check mark because this was from a time that twitter actually vetted sources. There's nothing wrong with a publication having bad takes on occasion. That does happen now and again.
The telling part is the fact that this one single tweet keeps being reposted repeatedly, with the reply as if this is a substantive criticism of capitalism.
I don't like using the term capitalism because it is too vague. Political corruption protecting oligarchy/big corporations is the problem.
Inflation resulting from start of full war on Russia and resulting oil/diesel price spike forced the wrong policy of higher interest rates. The theory in the past is that increasing austerity on consumers reduce their driving, and preventing business investment also reduces expanded demand for scarce FFs.
In the dynamics of energy disruption, high interest rates are the biggest cost obstacle for renewables and less new renewables is more oil/FF extortion power. At 2000 sun hours/year, $1/watt solar installation, could get a 16 year payback = 100% overall profit at 3c/kwh price. 2c/kwh at 3000 sun hours/year. Every 2% in interest costs, increases required price by 1c/kwh.
Protection of existing assets/supply scarcity is not affected by higher interest rates. New oil wells do have a big upfront cost, but they also have a huge power and maintenance requirement that is paid for with the product taken out of the ground, with ROI protections if renewables can be suppressed, including with high interest rates.
Political corruption favouring scarcity over abundance is the problem. Cheap energy or steel is a huge competitive and life quality advantage. Use cheap inputs for more productivity and happier life with cheaper cost.
Not really. It's like saying toast falls butter side down, vs toast falls non-buttered side up?
Perhaps some are conditioned for an emotional response, rather than a rational one, upon hearing certain words? That's why you suggest to avoid them, even to describe the same issue?
People are emotionally driven animals at the end of the day. As much as we try to argue otherwise, it's our default state. It's not conditioning, it's nature. If you believe yourself to be otherwise, then you're susceptible to being emotionally exploited without even realizing it. I had a coworker rant in circles for 2 hours the other week about how he's very rational and how people need to stop reacting emotionally to things, while also going on about how Democrats are snowflakes and Republicans use facts and logic in their arguments, and how despite having trans friends, he'll never see them as their actual gender because "basic biology" and people shouldn't expect others to accommodate things like calling them by the right name.
That said, how you frame a problem can vastly affect how people consider solving it. A great example is one that somebody else posted in this thread talking about how sime companies that see electricity as an expense rather than something that reduces profits are actually moving towards building their own renewable energy infrastructure because it'll drive their expenses down in the long run.
I think you're excluding a large group of people (1). The nature vs nurture debate on that one isn't clearly solved, but it seems one both needs the genetics and conditioning to arrive at an emotion based, rather than cognitive based, thinking system. Let alone to develop those specific triggers.
An expense is something that reduces profit. They're the same :)
Nice comment! Thanks.
I can't ragebait if you people are being logical ๐
Something catches fire lol what, as if they can't just disconnect the solar cells if they run out of batteries
You can do. If you don't that's when you get the fire, or more likely a whole bunch of breakers flip and you are in a black start situation.
true. thing is, they've seen it coming for a decade, and knew it needed to happen. It shames me that we're just now trying to pick up the storage side when we've had ample evidence the need was growing rapidly.
batteries were (are) expensive and have been decreasing in cost partially because of electric vehicles investing in batteries earlier than necessary would give money to research that would otherwise be funded by others (a bad idea in capitalism unless you need the research quickly) and loans were cheap.
there are loads of way to store energy that don't involve batteries. pumped hydro is excellent, for example. but there's also flywheels, thermal salt, and a dozen other ways.
trust me, if we'd had a visionary in the white house instead of trump, we could have figured out some possible solutions to pursue.
instead we're gonna waste more than a decade playing fuckaround while china builds thorium reactors, fusion, high speed rail to mongolia etc
Then tell me why the mechanism to control production via the solar panels themselves hasn't been implemented? I've seen several viable options, including covers that are manual or even automated and powered by the excess energy...
South Australia has run into this problem and implemented a solution.
When the solar exports in a section of the grid exceeds the local transformer's limits, a signal is sent to all of the inverters in that section to limit the export rate. The same signal can be send to all solar inverters in South Australia if the entire grid has too much renewable energy.
This signal only limits the export to the grid, so the homeowner can always use their own solar power first. The permitted export is guaranteed to be between 1.5kW and 10kW per phase.
The was a minor oversight during implementation. Homeowners on wholesale pricing would often curtail or switch off their solar inverters if the prices went negative. If the grid operator sent a signal to reduce the export rate, it would override the homeowner's command and force a 1.5kW export during negative pricing (costing the homeowner to export). No-one considered that anyone might not want to export solar all of the time.
Why would you want people to tell you things that are untrue?
Capitalism does solve it. Eventually. It takes the information in steps and gets to a solution that experts were talking about decades before. This is not a good way to do things.
It tends to overinvest in the thing that has the most immediate ROI. That's been solar. Wind/water/storage/long distance distribution are all important pieces of this, too, and this has been known in climate and civil engineering fields for a while. Solar can't do it all by itself.
A sensible system would even out the investment in each. The wind often blows when the sun isn't shining, so you don't need as much storage to do the in between parts. Water not only provides an easily adjustable baseload (nuclear does not adjust very well), but it also doubles as storage. In fact, if we could link up all the hydro dams we already have to long distance transmission, we wouldn't need any other storage. Though that isn't necessarily the most efficient method, either.
What capitalism does is invest in solar, find that causes negative prices, and then invest in the next best ROI to solve that. Perhaps it's storage. That results in a lot more storage than would otherwise be needed than if wind/water/long distance distribution were done alongside it. Or maybe the next best ROI is wind, but there are still lulls lacking in both sun and wind--as well as periods where you have too much of both--so you still need storage.
And what capitalism really doesn't want to do long distance transmission. It's not just big, but it's horizontal construction. That means rights to the whole route have to be purchased. It means environmental concerns along the entire route have to be thought out. It means soil has to be tested for stability and footings made to suit for the entire route. Capitalism almost has to be beaten into submission for anyone to build anything horizontally. (See also: trains and highway systems, both of which came with substantial government investment and incentives).