• @Rooskie91@discuss.online
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    2792 months ago

    If you’re describing nearly free and unlimited electricity as a problem, you may want to reconsider some things.

    • @MartianSands@sh.itjust.works
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      1802 months ago

      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

      • dohpaz42
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        102 months ago

        Nothing an open/close gate couldn’t fix. The real problem is how overly complicated we feel we need to make things.

        • @EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          72 months ago

          This is some real “basic biology” level thinking here. Even if it were as simple as “Pull the lever Krunk!” then you’ve just turned all that solar infrastructure into junk for the majority of the time that we need power.

          People use the vast majority of electricity in a day in the afternoon and at night - times that are noticeably after the peak solar production time. So you have all that energy going into the system with nowhere to go because battery technology and infrastructure isn’t there, and then no energy to fulfill the peak demand. This is an issue nuclear runs into as well because a nuclear plant is either on or off and isn’t capable of scaling its power to the current demand.

          There are times where power companies have to pay industrial manufacturing facilities to run their most energy consuming machines just to bleed extra energy out of the grid to keep it from overloading and turning into a multi-million dollar disaster that could take years to get people back on the grid.

      • LostXOR
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        102 months ago

        Couldn’t solar farms just strategically disconnect some of their panels from the grid to avoid that? Solar panels are always collecting energy, but if you disconnect them that energy just goes into making them a bit warmer rather than overloading the grid.

      • @blarth@thelemmy.club
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        2 months ago

        The grid is always over energized. That’s not a problem. Large solar and wind farms connect to the grid with great specificity about the maximum amount of energy they will put on the lines. The problem would be not enough energy. Batteries are beginning to solve the dispatch energy issue with renewables. As long as republicans don’t get their way and ruin renewable energy with unfair fossil fuel mandates, the grid will continue to modernize in this way and we’ll be fairly independent of fossil fuels in the future for electricity.

      • @wizzim@infosec.pub
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        2 months ago

        Sorry for the naive question, but is it not possible to send the excess electricity to the ground (in the electrical sense)?

        • @SuperNovaStar@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          52 months ago

          It would definitely need to be ground in a literal sense.

          And even the earth has its limits. Soil is only so conductive, pump enough energy into it and you’ll turn it to glass (which won’t conduct anymore).

      • skulblaka
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        12 months ago

        Not an engineer but I sometimes watch them on YouTube.

        Could you not just set up a breakout point and have it arc to ground? If the power source is renewable then wasting a little when you have a full grid shouldn’t be a big issue. I’m thinking something along the lines of StyroPyro’s arcing plasma flamethrower should chew up plenty of excess power if you scale it up. As you ramp your total storage up toward 100% capacity I’d start shutting off inputs (disconnecting solars, etc) and then have what’s basically a big old Tesla coil to vent excess power over 95% capacity.

        • @Warl0k3@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          There’s obviously a lot of issues with that idea, but I’d like to throw my wholehearted support behind it anyways, just to see the expressions my FCC/Radio buddies would make when they realize someone’s running a MW-scale tesla coil as some kind of electrical blowoff valve. I can’t easily tell you the exact size of the area you’d utterly obliterate all radio communications in, but it’d be hilariously large.

          • skulblaka
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            12 months ago

            Faraday cage should cover that no? Styro even mentions in the linked video that he needed to encapsulate his workshop in one in order to not get angry visits from the FCC. I’m sure for something scaled up like this you might want to nest a couple of them together.

            Again, not an engineer, I could be (and likely am) wildly off base here. Not sure what makes it such a terrible idea though. I am pretty certain that a MW-scale Tesla coil probably wouldn’t blow out a larger area of communications than, say, nuclear testing would, and we do that all the time in the Midwest.

      • @unwarlikeExtortion@lemmy.ml
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        12 months ago

        Oh, look! A challenge. And a business opportunity! Just get a mortgage, buy some land in the middle of nowhere and make a reverse hydro plant.

        Oh, I forgot. Banks don’t loan money for stuff not already existing or net-harmful hyped-up bullshit like AI and crypto.

    • @UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      In fairness, capitalist expansion is predicated on generating and reinvesting profit. If you build an array of solar panels and generate a revenue less than the installation+maintenance cost of the panels, you don’t have any more money to buy new panels and expand the grid.

      That is, under a privatized system, anyway. If you’re a public utility and your goal is to meet a demand quota rather than raise revenue for the next round of expansion, profit isn’t your concern. You’re looking for the lowest possible installation/maintenance/replacement cost over the lifetime of the system, not the high margins per unit installed.

      Incidentally, this is why vertically integrated private firms that consider electricity an expense rather than a profit center have been aggressively rolling out their own privately managed solar/wind arrays. When the concern is minimizing cost rather than maximizing revenue, and you can adjust your rate of consumption to match the peak productive capacity of your grid, then solar/wind is incredibly efficient.

    • @technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 months ago

      It’s how capitalists think about land, water, air, etc.

      … And violently attacking people by depriving them of these needs.