Microblog Memes

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).

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.

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.

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:

The opportunity is that solar panels create lots of electricity in the middle of sunny days, frequently more than what's currently required, so it is necessary to develop new flexible sources of demand so that the excess energy doesn't damage the power grid.

That's pretty vastly different, isn't it?

It's a very capitalist way of thinking about the problem, but what "negative prices" actually means in this case is that the grid is over-energised. That's a genuine engineering issue which would take considerable effort to deal with without exploding transformers or setting fire to power stations

But it doesn't say "it can generate too much energy and damage infrastructure", they said "it can drive the price down". The words they chose aren't, like, an accident waiting for someone to explain post-hoc. Like, absolutely we need storage for exactly the reason you say, but they are directly saying the issue is driving the price down, which is only an issue if your not able to imagine a way to create this infrastructure without profit motive.

Except the grid overload thing isn't even an issue with renewables, since wind can be shut down in a matter of 1-5 minutes (move them out of the wind) and solar literally just be disabled. Any overload they produce would be due to mechanical failure, where you can cut them off the grid since they're in the process of destroying themselves anyway (like in those videos where wind turbines fail spectacularly). Otherwise renewables are perfect to regulate the grid if available.

In a hypothetical grid with an absolute majority of many badly adjustable power sources (like nuclear) you'd have to work with negative prices to entice building large on-demand consumers or battery solutions. So far nobody was stupid enough to build a grid like this though.

tl;dr, this whole problem indeed is about economics and therefore may very well be a "capitalism thing". Renewables do not overload the grid.

The capitalist class?