Solar will get too cheap to connect to the power grid
climate.benjames.io
climate.benjames.io
That isn't correct, it is just bad news for everyone. Sure if there was a sustainable deal that offered negative prices that'd be good, but in this case it just means the prices when positive will have to go up to cover the overall profits of the energy producers. Negative prices represent waste and it is quite unusual for waste to be good for consumers.
Although this is a minor point. The solar revolution is pretty exciting.
But when that happens the average price of power generated from solar panels will probably drop (because less of the power generated by a panel is wasted, so the capital cost/power generated ratio improves) and consumers will be better off. I expect. These market effects are complicated.
It is the opposite of what happened in, say, Germany. They started seeing negative power prices on the wholesale market then they ended up with average electricity prices that were among the most expensive in the world.
It's no different from what the central bank does with its zero lower bound guarantee on interest rates. The market rate on capital is negative? Gotta subsidize private capital holders with infinite QE. The guaranteed minimum price floor is zero, the interest rate is say -3%, the central bank essentially pays 3% interest to keep the house of cards from collapsing. Since negative interest rates cannot be represented in the current system, we have inflation as the band aid.
The thing is, negative prices or interest rates aren't evil or bad on their own, they become dysfunctional the moment there is a guaranteed price floor. It's no different than a price ceiling. The only difference is shortage vs oversupply.
Second, subsidizing once expensive but mostly cleanenergy production technology, allowed renewable energy to thrive to the number 1 energy source worldwide, theoretically allowing to ditch fossil energy production completely by 2050 and stay within low risk climate warming - without significant degrowth, which otherwise would have been required for a certainty.
So no, EEG isn't a joke, but a huge win for humanity.
I'd call it investment
The Wikipedia page on the EEG suggests that it's globally recognised as a success, and even when political pressure was being applied to reduce solar PV feed in tariffs faster than the original plan called for due to better than expected uptake, the merit order effect introduced in the same legislation was reducing the spot price of electricity by more than the cost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Renewable_Energy_Source...
Now, the carbon and nuclear industry preaches the opposite - that the market absolutely cannot handle this "problem" and we need the government to give them money instead.
It was a lie both times, and it was widely believed both times.
It was demonstrated beyond doubt that if governments let the market forces deal with instability in energy prices, then the citizens will vote to kick those politicians out and replace them with someone else.
It's great news for someone who wants to buy a battery and actually reduce that waste by consuming it and making good use of it later.
I have thought for a few years now that solar panels are no longer the best thing to expand - it's batteries instead now, and all the better if they are situated right next to the solar panels.
Having said that, if you're on a fixed price domestic electricity supply, then yes it would make sense to install solar panels without batteries to match your peak power usage during the day, but that is going to be a very small installation in most cases. If you expand beyond that, then you're exporting to the grid and getting paid next to nothing for it.
If we get dynamic pricing, I very well may get home batteries though, especially if these could double as backup in case of grid outage.
Not sure what state you're in, but community solar is very popular in several states, and if it is not in your state, I would encourage you to advocate for it. It is a reasonable alternative for those who do not want to install rooftop solar (or cannot, for whatever reason).
https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/community-solar-basics
https://www.seia.org/initiatives/community-solar
https://www.nrel.gov/state-local-tribal/community-solar.html
If solar installers would default to building out DC -> primary inverter systems, then adding storage would be much less lossy. But as it is, economics drives the industry to strongly prefer microinverters.
I live in the UK where prices go negative during periods of high wind/low demand.
There are also times where demand is so high that the electricity companies will pay a big premium for consumers who cut their consumption for a couple of hours, or who sell back to the grid, to avoid having to start up reserve coal-fired power stations.
I got batteries for my solar without any thought of them being very useful in winter, but in fact they are. I automatically force-charge when prices go negative and when the grid announces there is going to be an emergency need for power (usually a few hours notice), I’ll force charge and then force discharge during the time of need.
https://octopus.energy/blog/farewell-saving-sessions-wrap-up...
A medium electric arc furnace consumes 60MW. 17 of those can draw a GW.
I like to bitch about people that think the free market solves everything but oh noes the price of electricity is negative is one thing I think the free market can totally solve.
It is not bad news or good news in the aggregate, it just shifts things.
By aggregating and networking more energy consuming resources, we can make load dispatchable to deal with intermittent renewables, and respond better to price signals. Cheaper, cleaner, and more reliable energy has the opportunity to be good for everyone. I wrote a book on this!
Car batteries are ~6 times larger than powerwalls and powerwalls can make money supplying power back to the grid: https://electrek.co/2023/07/05/tesla-electric-customers-repo...
We don't need peak power infrastructure (natural gas) which runs only a few hours per day. All of it can be replaced by EVs.
It's sad that this scientific/engineering fact has been lost in the race to make dramatic headlines and climate denial propaganda.
Here we see it repeated by someone who seems genuinely positive about solar PV.
Basically, you need to shut off energy supply quickly and efficiently when demand drops. Anything with a giant spinning mass involved fails this test. If they have to keep steam hot they fail it even more. (Not to go on a tangent but this fast response is what the initial grid batteries have been getting paid for)
Of course, demand response systems have for decades paid people to shift demand towards the periods of cheap and/or clean energy because it is financially beneficial to the system. Any need that is met slightly earlier or later does not need to be met with more expensive and/or dirtier fuels. A simple system optimisation.
Apply that to a predictable supply of cheap clean energy in a market based system and suddenly you have the "problem" of people being incentivised with money to use energy when it is available.
What a tragedy, who will save us from this cheap clean energy that is going to destroy the grid with the evil magic of negative numbers.
The electricity generators could in theory be used as motors speeding up the wind or go I to reverse mode and consume electricity
PV panels are LEDs run in reverse. I believe part of the QA process for some panels is to run them in reverse and take an IR photograph of the output to check for defects.
Im interested, why would you not want that when prices are negative?
If the house has any insulation at all the heat gain once the sun isn't participating won't be too bad.
Why would prices go negative, when you can just cut off the solar plant from the grid if prices go <= 0?
In the Netherlands, they have a law that means that what you generate has to be offset against what you produce (In high level), but the energy companies simply started charging for delivering back, which is in effect simply bypassing the law. The obvious response from this would be to ban it because it's an obvious flaunting of the law. But no, the politicians allow it.
And then we have that Belgium politician a few years ago who, despite the urgency from global warming, thought it would be smart to put extra taxes on buying solar from China. What did he achieve? At best a little more destruction for the planet.
RTG
An other big part of government funded energy sector is the reserve energy strategy, generally made by paying natural gas power plants to be on stand-by. A major part of "connection grid" taxes goes directly to pay for those fossil fueled power plants. Rather than expanding the capacity and building new such fossil fueled thermal power plants, existing ones should be under planned obsolescence and be demolished when they reach their end of life. The increased dependency on natural gas is also having an impossible to ignore effect on the geopolitical climate in Europe.
https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/32d...
Renewables like solar that can not be modulated are a PITA for grid safety as those plants that instead can, such as coal and gas, then need to scale for solar suddenly dumping energy into the grid.
Day-before markets exists for this sole reason.
You can easily disconnect solar plants from the grid - even remotely if the situation requires it (technically even gradually if it is supported by the specific plant). This is required by law in e.g. Germany: the higher the peak power the higher the requirements in flexibility generally speaking
> On–off keying (OOK) denotes the simplest form of amplitude-shift keying (ASK) modulation that represents digital data as the presence or absence of a carrier wave.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On%E2%80%93off_keying
Idk how you define modulation. Note that on/off isn't a worldwide switch, but only one for tiny units with respect to the whole energy grid
The page you googled has nothing to do with how the power grid operates.
It's through a smart inverter, of course it can be modulated.
Now, random consumer solar can't easily be modulated - yet. But nor can random consumer demand. If you've got a big solar farm then not only can you precisely control the output, you can also control the phase response of the output.
(if you turn the inverter off, what happens is the panel voltage floats up to the breakdown voltage of the photodiode that is the solar cell, and the energy vanishes into electron/hole recombination and slightly warmer panels)
Non-dispatchable renewables like wind and solar can only be curtailed when their supply is not wanted.
Solar panel farms with advanced inverters in some markets actually make a significant portion of their revenue from the frequency control ancillary services, and Solar+storage is extremely dispatchable.
That is exactly what I meant, and renewables introduce uncertainty as the output can vary (think of a cloudy day).
How does space usage compare against nuclear plants?
[And yes I realise some portion of solar will be domestic, but that's not always allowed if your house is listed].
At some point we'll see more agrivoltaics; there's nothing stopping people from planting between/under panels, and for some crops the partial shade actually increases yield.
Nuclear plants of course consume way less space, but cost way more and encounter way more planning objections and cost overruns. I take a "you can have your dessert when you finish your vegetables" policy on this: UK can start another nuclear plant if it wants once Hinkley Point C is actually finished and working.
At some point we're also going to have to have the "listed building mafia vs. energy efficiency" argument, too. I think the most egregious example was someone trying to block a grid connection for offshore renewables using the presence of "grade 2 listed concrete anti-tank cubes".
Probably not in England though, I expect
The UK regularly imports electricity from the French who generate too much due to mass building nuclear power stations.
You are contradicting yourself. If it is used for export, it means someone is importing it.
I think this is an unfair characterisation. Many farmers in the UK _want_ to build solar installations on their fields as it is a fantastic way to get guaranteed income while keeping other land for agriculture. Additionally, you can graze animals with solar panels. And also the solar panel installations are usually temporary (land is leased for x amount of years), they can be removed and used as farmland after.
> how much space all these battery and solar farms
Chris Hewett, head of Solar Energy UK says this:
"We need less than half a percent of UK land, for a fully decarbonised energy grid. That is the amount of land we use for golf courses – and less than we use for airports."
With any luck they’ll be built o top of all the AI data centers and there’ll be enough leftover energy to power your meek human needs. Only half joking, half cynical :(
Further solar plants can be combined with efforts to give nature back some space, since solar farms produce energy without agricultural use of the land, perhaps even the use of pesticides and other poisons.
You don't even have to mowe really, since the modules are usually further in the air than natural grass.
Though you probably have to prevent trees and bushes to grow in areas which used to be forest (hundreds of years ago before humans made farmland out of everything)
Off-shore wind is growing rapidly. Even floating off-shore is gaining traction. These could eventually be co-located with the growing of seaweed for food, animal feed and bio-matter. The ocean out there is basically a desert, not much is growing there, and creating structures where things can grow will essentially act like a "greening" of the ocean, turning more of it into a CO2-sink.
> How does space usage compare against nuclear plants?
Obviously nuclear power plants use significantly less. How much depends if you include uranium mining, which generally happens in other countries.
But nuclear power plants just isn't renewable, and their growth is fundamentally unsustainable. Thermal power plants also contribute to global warming by direct heating. It's not going to take more than a 10x increase in power production with thermal power plants before that becomes a significant concern. With renewables there is at least a theoretical path to full sustainability. All we have to do is to recycle the materials used to build them.
The pinnacle of solar power sustainability is projects like the one to build huge solar power plants in Morocco and transfer the power to UK. You absorb solar energy from a place that has too much of it, and plenty of arid land, providing shade and cooling for a significant area where you could then potentially do agrovoltaics to grow food. Win-win.
Not that I oppose nuclear. We should build what we can, as long as it's economically feasible. It's just that it gets way more attention online than it deserves. It's just not going to be as important as people think.
Still, it's going to have to happen.
(At some point we might get a cheap flow battery or CO2-to-fuels system going, which lets you literally put electricity in pipes and tanks)
A room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor would be the breakthrough required for doing this at scale. This of course would still require significant infrastructure investment.
China has had 2000km+ lines online for years now, so there's precedent. Not for solar specifically, but plainly to connect distant grids.
We have huge fiber optic connectors wrapping the planet, so there's precedent here as well.
Overall a global solar grid is technically feasible and actually not terribly expensive, but we need to solve the political issues preventing it first.
EDIT [0] for comparison highways cost $4mln per kilometre in the US and double to triple that in the EU.
The project is reported as costing $30 billion (22.6 billion USD) - but I think that also includes a 12,000 hectare solar farm and a bias battery as well.
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/12/27/the-future-of-...
Storage is the only answer to an abundance of solar and wind. We can't just bitch and moan that there's too too much at peak gen because we need all this power. We just sinks to catch up with generation. Install more in-home batteries, more water heaters, and make EV charging omnipresent (and more reflective of wholesale prices). Early adopters get more beneficial rates to offset higher outlays. The market is working as it should.
Edit: ah I missed the "electricity alone" part. That I don't know.
One could add energy from electricity to boost the yield per unit of biomass, for example ensuring that all the carbon in it ends up in SAF, with none wasted to CO2 instead.
Seems like there is a startup trying to do this: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/air-travel/this-new-fac...
The power grid is the greatest machine ever built by humans. It's gigantic, elaborate, amazingly reliable, and civilization as we know it would collapse without it. It's so ubiquitous that it's hard to imagine it not being here save in a "Mad Max" or "The Road" type collapse scenario.
It makes me think of this link that was posted here a bit ago:
http://cityinfrastructure.com/single.php?d=RuralOutsidePlant...
The analog "POTS" (plain old telephone system) would have seemed like the power grid to me as a kid and a teenager. It seemed that way up until the 2000s when the runaway growth of packet switching digital networks and cellular rendered it completely obsolete. It's been a while since I've even seen a POTS phone line.
Could the power grid be reduced to something you only see in big cities and industrial areas where you have tons of demand? Could it eventually go away entirely, or go away "as we know it" in favor of a bunch of lateral load-sharing links between independent mini power plants?
It's interesting to think about.
I think it’ll still be common to get your electricity from the grid in most towns and cities in the future, especially in northern Europe; we just don’t have the levels of insolation to generate all the energy we need from the small plots of land we live on in the UK in winter.
It's not going to happen in 10 years, but it will slowly happen until the power grid and gas/diesel are relics from the past, much like landline phones and faxes now. They'll still exist, but only used in very odd ball cases for specific reasons. In 100 years they'll be gone, or so small as to be mostly forgotten about.
The distributed nature of the grid is just too useful. It's like having a computer that's not connected to the Internet: it's certainly possible but inconvenient compared to the default.
The US has >100,000 square miles of cities. Estimates are that ~20,000 square miles of solar panels would be needed to power the US.
Solar is cheap enough.
Batteries are never going to be cheap enough (unless, of course, some disruptive technology emerges.)
The answer to that is use a different (typically less efficient) way to store energy in that case. Cost savings can be dramatic at scale.
The strawman argument that storage isn't feasible because batteries by themselves don't cut it is regularly seen from nuclear bros. Even MIT came out with a study doing this, a study that very carefully avoided the word "hydrogen".
Until you actually have to pay for someone to install it and connect it to the grid - real prices in a lot of markets haven’t really come down much at all over the past 10 years, the cheaper panel costs are offset by higher labor, interconnect, and other material costs.
No. Its definitely part of the solution but there are some issues that make it impractical as a full replacement.
In summer my panels make more power than I know what to do with and my batteries are full by about 10am. In winter only about 30% of my power comes from my solar. Heavy cloud cover typically takes my solar down to about 80% of what I get on a sunny day.
Falling battery prices will help to cope with rainy days but the winter drop is hard to avoid and running your own generator is VERY inefficient (i.e expensive) compared to a power station.
Any idea how China is solving this, if at all? Guess their problem will be even bigger?
https://www.ft.com/content/2c0fa0d1-2902-440e-8677-d9f087c2e...
But money isn't the primary problem. The primary problem in the US and Europe is that NIMBY's can delay the construction of an interconnect by ~10 years. China generally doesn't have this problem.
https://www.bostonherald.com/2024/07/03/work-resumes-on-powe...
The main reason NV and AZ don’t have significantly larger data center foot prints is mainly just from lack of cheap energy (data centers run 24/7 at a pretty constant load so solar isn’t a good fit).
When I last looked into it, CoLo space in Vegas and Phoenix at small scale has prices competitive with other locations. The biggest downside is distances to major IXPs. So using them is contingent on latency goals.
Sounds like a solution to two problems to me
> The solar panel is wizardry manifest. It literally prints energy from free shit that falls out of the sky.
Of course it's not really an apples/apples comparison. The form usable energy has to take is different in living organisms, and 100% of a leaf is not dedicated to solar collection. Only the chloroplasts do that. Still it's cool that we "beat nature" here.
So far we have beaten nature on the aspect of sheer efficiency
Can solar panels grow to be meters and meters tall with just water and sun? :)
Meanwhile the competing energy source, fossil fuels, is maybe 10 times cheaper than generating fossil fuels directly with the help of solar power, except the former took millions of years to form and will be depleted within a millenium, whereas the latter could, at least in theory, produce the same quantity we consume per day today, every day.
It's enough it sends my thoughts down the path of what if instead of green ammonia based fertilizer you start talking synthetic amino acids.
But yeah plants are 2% efficient or something and most crops require a lot of energy input. And we've got maybe 100 years of topsoil left in a lot of places.
Fun fact: on a perfectly still day, photosynthesis of a corn field will be curtailed because the plants strip all the CO2 out of the available air, and do so remarkably quickly (IIRC in about five minutes in full sun.)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...
If you can mine blocks for free, the value of each block plummets.
There's a hundred other things we can dump energy on before deciding to waste it ; pumping water uphill, gravity batteries, regular batteries, electrolyzing hydrogen to use for later, ...
Fuel, "Storage", Ammonia etc
Hydrogen is likely to become the default go to once we start hitting these "fee energy" zones in big enough numbers.
If energy is expensive than it's makes more sense to store it in batteries than hydrogen since batteries are about 3X as efficient as the hydrogen cycle.
If energy is cheap it makes more sense to use about twice as much energy to capture and attach carbon molecules to that hydrogen to create a hydrocarbon resulting in something that's easy to store and transport, and that uses existing infrastructure.
If we follow your 3rd paragraph and turn the hydrogen into hydrocarbons, not only do you lose efficiency in that process, you make CO2 as a byproduct of combustion again
Nobody is interested in storage that turns your carbon-free green energy back into greenhousing energy
The reason you might want hydrogen instead of batteries is just cost, I guess.
If you make your hydro-carbons with captured carbon, the process is slightly carbon-negative. ~10% of hydrocarbons are not burned, they're turned into plastic or lubricants etc. So for every 10 carbons you take from the air, only 9 are released back.