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consider the implications for a post scarcity future
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this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2024
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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.
Your explanation works very well, but completely falls apart in the last paragraph.
Solar power production clearly is (at least in part) a post-scarsity scenario, given we literally have too much power on the grid.
Furthermore, calling the power market anything like "free" is just plain wrong. A liberal approach to market regulation here would have led to disaster a long time ago, for the reasons you described at the beginning of your comment.
The market "works" because of, not inspite of regulation.
And negative prices are a good thing for consumers, not market failure.
But too much power on the grid isn’t “here, have at it”. It’s fried devices and spontaneous fires breaking out. The grid can’t “hold the power”, only pumped and battery storage can, of which we have nowhere near enough. The grid literally cannot work if other producers put more electricity on to it.
If you have smart meter, you can literally be paid to use power at that point.
wait until you figure out how we solve this problem...
wait for it...
You just don't produce that energy.
lol. Yes, it’s that simple.
that's how we've been doing it for the past 2 centuries, it'll be how we continue to do it for the next 2 centuries.
I think we're quite a long way off from "too much power on the grid", no? Even in America we regularly over-strain our grids. My power provider has even started discouraging folks from using their power as much, and charging more, because they simply decided not to do this work of increasing the amount generated. Like my bill has never once gone down, this paying people to use power concept is completely unheard of in practice.
That said I'm willing to be wrong. If you can show me evidence we have "too much power" I'd be happy to take that to my elected officials, insist I should get paid to heat up my noodles or whatever.
We don't have too much power overall, but there are moments where solar and renewable production in a region exceeds usage in that region.
Where I live at the moment (UK), people with home batteries are regularly paid for storing excess energy from the grid. I haven’t got a clue about the American energy market, but intermittent energy production is causing huge strain on European grids.
Interesting... Can y'all make room for one more over there? The bill for my 3-bedroom home is around $150 per month T_T
Nobody said it can hold power
Regulation of a market by the government is liberal politics. A laize faire approach is conservative lol.
Neo liberalism is the core ideology of modern conservatism. For example, both the republican and democrat parties in the United States adhere to Neo Liberal ideology. They are both conservative.
Neo liberalism is the ideology of deregulated capitalism. Neo liberalism holds that everything should be marketable without government interference, including healthcare, real estate, power generation, water, etc. Pioneered by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, it is the dominant political ideology across Western democracies. Liberals and Conservatives are both adherents of Neo Liberal capitalist ideology. Leftists are those who support regulation, they are definitionally anti-capitalist. When people refer to the democrat party as socialist or democrats as Leftists, they're just misusing those terms. Democrats are Neo liberal conservatives who, by and large, support deregulated capitalism.
Okay, and?? None of that goes against what I said. In the scope of us politics, Deregulation of markets in the US is Republican platform. Regulation of markets is Democrat platform. Democrats in the US are more liberal than Republicans even though, as you said, they are far from real leftists.
Their platform at times advocates regulation, but they don't do much in the way of it. They are largely still in favor less regulation. We have had Democrat presidents since Reagan, quite a few actually and despite that unilaterally regulation had decreased pretty constantly over that time period.
Somehow internet populists have become convinced that liberalism = the government never does anything. Ask literally any economist and they will tell you government intervention and regulation are needed in many things.
For example, read this study on the policy views of practicing economists: https://econfaculty.gmu.edu/klein/PdfPapers/KS_PublCh06.pdf
You will find that most economists strongly support things like environmental, food and drug safety, and occupational safety regulations.
Convincing people liberalism is an evil capitalist ploy to deregulate at all costs is a conservative psyop, and judging from comments like the one to which you're responding, it's working.
ah yes, the classic laissez faire interpretation of libertarian.
Additionally, this has been a known issue for decades. If only there had been investment in handling it...
Like how in Texas's even freer market the power grid is even more stable than in evil communist California.
No idea about the US. My frame of reference is an integrated European market in general and the Nordic integrated spot market in particular, which uses Swedish hydro and Danish wind on top of nuclear, biogas and wood pellet market.
Seems to work well enough: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?tab=chart&time=1961..latest&country=USA~DNK~SWE~NOR
Which I think reinforces my point. The Nordic states are much more highly regulated than the US, and Texas went so far as to disconnect their grid to make it even less regulated. So now it collapses at the drop of a hat, and people get electric bills in the thousands of dollars.
Isn't there any kind of economic activity that could make use of this excess energy, even if it isn't very profitable?
You can pump water uphill back into reservoirs so that you can use it to generate hydro-electricity later https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ffestiniog_Power_Station
Yes. Desalination or hydrogen separation via electrolysis
Both uses are productive, one generates fresh water, the other can be a form of energy storage.
Both are extremely energy intensive for the yield, making them unprofitable, but are extremely useful things to do with a glut of electricity.
There is, but you have to set it up and link it with the central control system of your grid, similarly to how power generators have an automatic generation control to balance the network.
Yes there is. So consumers (with the right kind of smart meters) are paid to use energy and we are slowly moving from pilot plan into small scale production of hydrogen. But there’s nowhere near enough and the grid will literally fry itself unless producers stop pumping more onto the grid (during windy and sunny days, in areas with high penetration of intermittent production.
I don't believe this is true for three reasons.
#1 it's glossing over the mechanics of how equipment will get damaged
#2 the people that own the equipment have ways of managing excess capacity.
#3 minuscule increases in grid frequency result in devices using power less efficiently, so they use more power. There's time to adjust power generation in surplus events.
Central heating
Frequency has to be maintained, and it is trivial to do so when you have excess renewables because inverters are instantly throttle-able. The reason why you’ve never heard about devices failing because frequency is too high is because it is and has always been such a non issue to shutter unneeded generating capacity.
Typically with fossil fuel plants, when the price drops below the cost of fuel for the least efficient plants they drop offline because they are no longer making a profit on fuel and the price holds. Because renewables have upfront cost to build but are free to run on a day to day basis, when there are a lot of renewables the price signal has to drop all the way to nothing before it is no longer profitable to run them.
All this means that all that happened was that for a few hours, solar production was actually enough to satisfy demand for that region. Along term, if low wholesale prices can be counted on midday then people will build industry, storage, or HVDC transfer capacity to take advantage of it.
If these prices are sustained for enough of the day that it is no longer profitable to add more solar farms, then they will stop being built in that area in favor of was to generate power at night such as wind, hydro, and pumped hydro while the panels will instead go to places that still don’t have enough solar to meet demand.
Also as an aside, the wholesale electricity market in north america is by definition about as far from a free market as it is possible for a free market to be without having exact outside price controls. It is a market built solely out of regulation that only exists at all because the government forced it to exist by making it illegal to not use it, either by making contracts off market or by transmission companies in-houseing production, or use it in any way other than as precisely prescribed by the government.
Now we can argue whether or not the wholesale electricity market is well or poorly set up or even if it should exist in the first place, but I don’t think that anyone can argue that it is a free market. At least not without defining the term free market so broad that even most of the markets in the USSR qualify as free markets.
Also, free markets and capitalism are very distinct concepts with no real relation between each other. You might argue that free markets tend to lead towards a capitalist system, but given free markets existed thousands of years before capitalism was invented I don’t think many people would say it was a very strong relationship.
Usually too low frequency is issue, I can't imagine why even double frequency can damage PSU.
There's a reason why the frequency is exactly 50hz or 60hz, and it's not "at least 50hz or 60hz". You can't just have 55hz on the grid, you'll destroy half a country.
That's why I say low frequency is problem, but high is not as much.
I don't think you said why?
It's not just about frequency - though that is important for devices that synchronize using the grid. When your frequency is going up because of too much power so will voltage. Think about that for a minute.
Not necessarily(see field windings), but higher voltage is indeed a problem
Not everything on the grid is a motor. Even if it was you would still need to rebuild the motor to change field windings.
some clocks are bound to grid frequency. It's the easiest most accessible way to clock time semi accurately.
Ok, your particular device may handle a wide band of frequencies. Congrats.
But do we agree that not all devices can? What about sensitive devices keeping patients alive in hospitals?
Those would not be plugged straight into the grid but with a power conditioner inbetween
Oh ok, I guess frequency maintenance on the grid isn’t a problem then and all the pumped storage and battery installations can shut and all the grid planners can go home and the spots markets can close and we can just dump as current as we see fit onto the grid and you’re right and I’m wrong.
All of that matters, but I think the parent post was only calling out the hospital equipment as a bad example. Like how your keyboard and your SSD don’t care what the grid is doing as long as the PSU can handle it.
But back to maintaining the frequency on the grid, along with keeping it within tolerance don’t they also have to make sure that the average frequency over time is VERY close to the target? I believe there are devices that use the frequency for timekeeping as well, like some old plug-in alarm clocks.
Fair enough. I was getting frustrated because I was trying to make a larger point about the fact that the grid can’t endlessly handle production. At some point the grid has to say “it will cost you to dump this onto the grid”. And suddenly I found myself discussing PSUs. I mean, yes, I’m aware there’s equipment on the grid that can handle different frequencies better than others but I felt we were discussing the bark of a single tree when I was trying to talk about the forest.
Also fair enough!
It really is a good point you make though. There’s a large balancing act to produce the right amount of power at exactly the time it’s needed. I think in our daily lives, and especially for non-tech/STEM folks, electricity is just taken for granted as always available and unlimited on an individual scale. I think people don’t envision giant spinning turbines when they plug something in, just like they don’t think of racks of computers in a data center when they open Amazon or Facebook.
Maybe it will be less like that in a couple decades when there is distributed energy storage all over the grid, including individual homes & vehicles.
I mean I envision the data centers. I also envision the turbines. Am I doing it right?
lol If you think hospitals don't have managed power systems you shouldn't be contributing.
Also lol if you think medical equipment isn't required to be robust, have you ever read a supply tender spec for a hospital?
By not all you mean motors with windings connected to grid? Well, they still will work on higher frequencies, but on higher speed. Real problem is low frequency, not high. Well, 0.5kHz not all devices can handle, but most consumers(even conumer electronics, no pun intended) even rated to 50-60Hz range. So 46-64Hz should be fine for them.
Sensetive devices that can't handle range bigger than ±0.4Hz? Are you kiddding me? How does that even pass certification?
Most frequency-sencetive devices are not consumers, but transformers and turbines.
Transformers are very important for the grid though. You also have large synchronized motors connected to the grid.