Hacker News Reader

Comment by g82918 | Hacker News Reader

It seems almost silly that we can generate more energy than we can use some, but not all of, the time.

Inconsistency has been the known challenge of renewable for decades.

You also need to duplicate the entire energy production infrastructure so that we can operate on 100% fossil fuels if the wind isnt blowing and the sun isnt shining.

What's more annoying is we can provide that energy for virtually free, but because it doesn't make someone else profits it gets switched off.

EDIT: just to clarify: I mean I wish that solar could be socialised and made into a social commodity.

We're becoming increasing dependent on electricity as time passes, almost to the point it'll be difficult to live well without it. If that ever becomes the case, I would want to see a social effort to ensure electricity becomes available to all, just like health care and drinking water.

I also understand that there are costs involved with providing these services, but again: social commodity. That means taxes and everyone chips in to ensure we have these resources available to all so that all can benefit and live equally.

Overloading the grid isn't a good idea, generally speaking

If the grid were smarter it could schedule demand for the excessive production times. It could be used, for example, in render farms or other non-time-critical high load batch operations.

Some places have flexible pricing, where electricity costs more at certain times, which allows users of electricity to do this. I don't think it should be the grids responsability to do that kind of scheduling. It would be nice if everywhere we had some kind of hourly pricing adjustment that would fluxuate within some predefined price range, then you could hook into the grids api to determine when to run your appliances.

Some kind of real time pricing api would do wonders. I wonder how we would solve the issue of having a bunch of devices waiting for the price to drop under $x and as soon as it does all of these scheduled devices kick in to action causing the price to immediately shoot up. Probably need some way to distribute price cheap times so not everyone gets it at the same hour.

Something similar already happens with natural gas in manufacturing. You can either sign a contract to lock in a rate, or pay as the price changes. If you are a factory that makes a good that you can stockpile (like sand), it makes sense to run more in cheaper parts of the year.

(Same thing also happens with iron / steel. I would assume electricity is the same, but I don’t have much knowledge. )

At a wholesale there is flexible pricing. The grid has to do that sort of scheduling because if more power is put into the network then is consumed then systems get damaged.

This is also why the turbine based systems that coal and hydro systems are so important to the stability of the grid. The physical momentum of the spinning metal stores considerable energy and can smooth over short lived inbalences in power consumption.

They perform that role right now, but you could replace them with much much cheaper flywheels.

That's exactly what this is, but at the wholesale level. The price is so flexible that it sometimes goes negative.

why would they pay for someone else to use their energy? It just eats into their profits and means that their normal customers have to pay more for the solar energy.

I think the power grid should be socialised and electricity handed out for free, especially given our increasing dependency on it. Solar is technically "free" energy given there's nothing to setup and maintain except the infrastructure, versus coal/oil/gas which requires mining, refining and transportation of materials before you get to the generating and delivery parts of the process.

It may be almost free to produce the energy with the infrastructure you have, but it's still limited: there's only so much power available. So how would you allocate it?

> We're becoming increasing dependent on electricity as time passes, almost to the point it'll be difficult to live well without it. If that ever becomes the case, I would want to see a social effort to ensure electricity becomes available to all, just like health care and drinking water.

I think we're already at that point, which is why many countries have subsidized electricity rates for low-income households.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com