I get the sentiment but…
When sun isn’t shining the negative prices cause problem for baseline power producers who need to turn off their power plants to avoid the zero to negative power prices.
This causes the power prices to become volatile, since the investments for the power plants that run during the night need to be covered during the night only.
Eventually though the higher price volatility will encourage investments into either demand side adjustability or energy storage systems. This will play out in energy only markets.
The other alternative is to implement a capacity market, which will divide the cost of the baseline production across different production hours by paying producers more for guaranteed production capacity.
Ya I’m not an engineer at all so I’m not sure how hard it is to store that much power but that always seemed like a good idea. Even for electric cars, if we designed a universal battery pack good for a few hundred kilometres that we could swap out at recharge stations I feel like that would be a smart way to do things. But again I have no idea if thats feasible or how it would be implemented.
We didn’t really have good batteries at that scale. I believe the large scale power storage is still done using water and gravity. Which is honestly pretty neat, but requires lots of land and a high location.
The problem with batteries is that they are costly to produce if we’re talking about ones that reverse chemical reactions. This is why I rolled my eyes at Elon suggesting we connect batteries to all our renewables. (The cost I learned from Factorio). Other types of batteries, like potential energy buffers are more practical, but also extremely location specific. There is a Technology Connections video about it. Also for example, some rollercoasters have flywheels to slowly build up rotational inertia and then release it all at once. So if we were to store the excess energy, it would probably be done so this way, but baseline power obviously just seems more practical
It’s a problem today, but in 50 years we’re projected to run out of non renewable sources. AI and EVs have the potential to skyrocket energy consumption well beyond our current capacity.
I get the sentiment but… When sun isn’t shining the negative prices cause problem for baseline power producers who need to turn off their power plants to avoid the zero to negative power prices.
This causes the power prices to become volatile, since the investments for the power plants that run during the night need to be covered during the night only.
Eventually though the higher price volatility will encourage investments into either demand side adjustability or energy storage systems. This will play out in energy only markets.
The other alternative is to implement a capacity market, which will divide the cost of the baseline production across different production hours by paying producers more for guaranteed production capacity.
Ya I’m not an engineer at all so I’m not sure how hard it is to store that much power but that always seemed like a good idea. Even for electric cars, if we designed a universal battery pack good for a few hundred kilometres that we could swap out at recharge stations I feel like that would be a smart way to do things. But again I have no idea if thats feasible or how it would be implemented.
We didn’t really have good batteries at that scale. I believe the large scale power storage is still done using water and gravity. Which is honestly pretty neat, but requires lots of land and a high location.
The problem with batteries is that they are costly to produce if we’re talking about ones that reverse chemical reactions. This is why I rolled my eyes at Elon suggesting we connect batteries to all our renewables. (The cost I learned from Factorio). Other types of batteries, like potential energy buffers are more practical, but also extremely location specific. There is a Technology Connections video about it. Also for example, some rollercoasters have flywheels to slowly build up rotational inertia and then release it all at once. So if we were to store the excess energy, it would probably be done so this way, but baseline power obviously just seems more practical
Link https://uwaterloo.ca/waterloo-institute-sustainable-energy/sites/default/files/uploads/documents/magdy_salama_research_spotlight_poster_120716.pdf
It’s a problem today, but in 50 years we’re projected to run out of non renewable sources. AI and EVs have the potential to skyrocket energy consumption well beyond our current capacity.