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Comment by konjin | Hacker News Reader

I work as a quant for a power company.

I have very much looked at what the prices are doing and the answer is "making my employer filthy rich and making the grid unsustainable over the next decade".

Solar and batteries are eating the profit from base load and peak generators. Yet are unable to provide the sustained power requirements to keep the grid going on a day that gets over 35C.

If you like having power in hospitals at all hours you can't let solar and battery storage invade the grid without regulating it such that the grid survives.

Nationalization of the grid assets and a massive nuclear building spree is the only solution if we want children to grow up in a world where brownouts are the exception.

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Seems like an American problem. You got more renewable usage in Europe and more stable grids than the US. Problem is more likely due to poor management and low investment and maintenance of grids in the US. When I travel around the US I notice infrastructure in general is in very poor condition . While people drive big cars and live in McMansions. Public poverty and private opulence.

Yeah he tells you the answer why it's an American problem in the first sentence.

And bizarrely tells you what the non-American answer is in the second last paragraph (sensible regulation of the grid), and then dismisses this out of hand and supports a weird socialist planned-economy solution that only seems popular with American libertarians.

Regulation on electricity works no where. Germany being the best "European" example of how a government has managed to destroy a market to the point that the only reason Germany has power for half the year because France is next door.

Isn’t French electricity dominated by Electricité de France, which is 85% state-owned?

Yes, and look, France has the only working energy market in Europe.

Turns out telling businesses what they can and can't do just means they hire smarter people to do what they want in more convoluted ways.

You aren’t giving me (software nerd, not quant) enough to latch onto to either agree, to disagree, or even to learn something new.

If you have time, I’d suggest reading the following, and — if you feel like it — rephrasing your argument: https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Inferential_distance

Quite frankly teaching the average person about how the grid works is as hard as teaching the average astrologer about astronomy and even less worth while. The number of times I've been downvoted to invisibility and flagged makes it completely not worth my time unless I'm talking to someone interesting who has an idea already.

Unfortunately you tick neither box.

If you're interested my hourly rate for this type of work is $300, you're welcome to commission a report on the country of your choice.

> The number of times I've been downvoted to invisibility and flagged makes it completely not worth my time unless I'm talking to someone interesting who has an idea already.

I totally understand the sentiment; thing is, this isn’t a quant forum, it’s mostly tech, and even then more software than hardware — either you should take the downvotes as a hint to simplify, or as a hint to not bother with that topic here.

Again, I really do sympathise with your frustration: no matter how I try, I can’t get non-programmers to understand even the basics of cryptography and why police master-keys/backdoors are a bad idea.

I had to go back and check that you were the same person who suggested:

> Nationalization of the grid assets and a massive nuclear building spree is the only solution

I'm not sure even you know what you want.

Regulation and nationalization are two different things.

Only in America could the two be conflated.

A market does not work for a natural monopoly.

> You got more renewable usage in Europe and more stable grids than the US.

Usage and production are two different things. You can produce more energy than you need and have a stable grid by just throwing money at the problem. In 2016, you had EEX spot prices around 2-3 ct/kWh, below the production cost of any technology. This signals waste and it's also a major reason why renewables rollouts stalled in Europe.

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