We need water and we need to save energy from renewable sources.
Surplus electricity can be used to make hydrogen from salt water, and when hydrogen is burned to generate energy it releases desalinated water.
It is inefficient yes, but solar is so cheap I think there is an opportunity for a twofer here.
Private enterprises and individuals will deploy solar panels equivalent to several new nuclear plants every year. IMO governments should invest massively in hydrogen infrastructure. Plants, distribution and storage.
>I don't understand why it always has to be one or the other? Why can't we have both?
I basically agree with you but I think the other point here is valid too. Solar (and some other renewables) are so cheap they basically make it impossible to operate expensive powerplants, and then it kinda becomes a "one thing or the other".
To me it seems that this is a problem with the current business model, which should be adjusted. We should not expect to make money from producing electricity, but instead from consuming electricity.
Basically electricity should eventually be free, since we are in fact being sent orders of magnitude more energy than we need every day.
We have recently discovered how to harness this free energy very cheaply, but are stuck in business models from the time when producing energy was expensive.
Solar can be deployed by hundreds of thousands of individual efforts and financing at the same time, with almost no bureaucracy. It starts to produce electricity basically the same day.
I can't imagine anything being able to compete with that for speed and scale - or costs, for that matter. Once deployed it's basically free.
The issue is that works perfectly well when solar is a small % of the grid, but when that number grows, then you need grid scale solutions and coordination for things to continue working well. And that requires both technical skill and political will.
This isn’t remotely true. Solar / wind / nuclear / coal / gas / any electrical source including from neighboring grids can be inbound or outbound from your grid using, the grid. There are capacitors and transformers, relays and transmission lines. Any energy source can provide power. Solar used to give money back to its owners by selling power back to the grid but they killed that initiative quickly and will just use your energy you provide.
The issues you describe are from coal, oil, and gas lobbyists saying solar isn’t viable because of nighttime. When the grid is made up of batteries…
If every house had solar and some LiFePo batteries on site, high demand can be pulled from the grid while during low demand and high production, it can be given to the grid. The energy companies can store it, hydropower or batteries, for later. We have the ability. The political will is simply the lobbyists giving people money so they won’t. But we can just do it anyway. Start with your own home.
Not all prime movers are the same with regard to grid dynamics and their impact.
Solar, wind, etc., almost universally rely on some form of inverter. This implies the need for solid state synthetic inertia to provide frequency response service to the grid.
Nuclear, coal, gas, hydropower, geothermal, etc., rely on synchronous machines to talk to the grid. The frequency response capability is built in and physically ideal.
Both can work, but one is more complicated. There are also factors like fault current handling that HN might think is trivial or to be glossed over, but without the ability to eat 10x+ rated load for a brief duration, faults on the grid cannot be addressed and the entire system would collapse into pointlessness. A tree crashing into a power line should result in the power line and tree being fully vaporized if nothing upstream were present to stop the flow of current. A gigantic mass of spinning metal in a turbine hall can eat this up like it's nothing. Semiconductors on a PCB in someone's shed are a different story.
Large solar sites are required to be able to provide reactive power as well as maintain a power factor of 0.95 to avoid all of the issues you mentioned.
> There are also factors like fault current handling that HN might think is trivial or to be glossed over, but without the ability to eat 10x+ rated load for a brief duration, faults on the grid cannot be addressed and the entire system would collapse into pointlessness.
I don’t understand what you are talking about here. I don’t work in the utility world, I sell and run commercial electrical work, but handling available fault current in my world is as simple as calculating it and providing overcurrent protection with a high enough AIC rating or current limiting fuses. I don’t see why the utility side would be any different.
The utility side has found that vaporising short circuits is a useful feature, as that includes e.g. twigs hitting a power line.
There are breakers, of course, but they react slowly enough that there will absolutely be a massive overdraw first. Then the breaker will open. Then, some small number of seconds later, it will automatically close.
It will attempt this two to four times before locking out, in case it just needs multiple bursts. It’s called “burning clear”, and it looks just as scary as you’d think… but it does work.
The lack of rotating mass in a solar site means the rest of the spinning mass of the generators needs to compensate to maintain frequency and voltage, right? So when clouds roll in and the solar field output drops quickly, it’s a challenge for the rest of the system to compensate since any other generator that spins will slow down much more slowly, giving the grid more time to react.
Also, I was not aware that inverters can only handle fault current that is 1.1x the nameplate capacity, that’s a big limitation. I can buy a 20A breaker with 200kaic, which is 10,000x higher than the breaker ampacity, which is extremely helpful for handling fault current.
These do not address the concern of fault current handling. This is a much more localized and severe condition than frequency deviation. Think about dropping a literal crowbar across the output of a solar inverter. This is a situation the grid has to deal with constantly.
I'd argue that nothing that uses semiconductors would be suitable for the task. They get you to maybe 2x rated current capacity for a meaningful duration. A spinning turbine can easily handle 10x or more for a much longer duration.
We could put so many redundant transistors in parallel that we have equivalent fault handling, but then we are into some strong economic issues. There's also no room for error with semiconductors. Once you start to disintegrate, it's all over ~instantly. There is no way to control this. A synchronous machine can trade downstream maintenance schedule for more current right now. The failure is much more gradual over time. A human operator can respond quickly enough if the machine is big enough.
Grid forming inverters provide 1/3 to 1/4 the fault current of a similarly sized generator.
The other trivial solution are synchronous condensers. Or just let the generators and maybe even turbines of future emergency reserve thermal plants spin with the grid without consuming any fuel.
Just ensure the proper margins exist in the grid and call in ancillary services as needed.
Yeah, DC vs AC power. 12v vs 120v or 240v. This isn’t a limitation. All energy sources must be converted to useable energy to the grid somehow. So every power source requires an inverter or a down stepper or a really advanced rectifier or all of the above.
The people you're replying to aren't talking about converting from AC to DC or stepping voltage up or down. Rather, they're talking about grid stability. You can have mechanisms to convert from AC to DC and to step voltage up or down, but still have a unstable grid. We had a notable example of that last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackou....
One way to think about this problem is that our electrical grids are giant machines—in many ways, the largest machines that humanity has every constructed. The enormous machine of the grid is comprised of many smaller connected machines, and many of those have spinning loads with enormous mechanical inertia. Some of those spinning machines are generators (prime movers), and some are loads (like large electric motors at industrial facilities). All of those real, physical machines—in addition to other non-inertia generators and loads—are coupled together through the grid.
In the giant machine of the grid, electricity supply and demand have to be almost perfectly in sync, microsecond to microsecond. If they're not, the frequency of the grid changes. Abrupt changes in frequency translate into not only electrical/electronic problems for devices that assume 60 Hz (or 50, depending on where you are), but into physical problems for the machines connected to the grid. If the grid frequency suddenly drops (due to a sudden drop in generation capacity or sudden drop in load), the spinning masses connected to the grid will suddenly be under enormous mechanical stress that can destroy them.
It's obviously not possible to instantaneously increase or decrease explicit generation in response to spikes or drops in load (or alternatively, instantaneously increase or decrease load in response to spikes or drops in generation). But we don't need to: all of the spinning mass connected to the grid acts as a metaphorical (and literal) flywheel that serves as a buffer to smooth out spikes.
As the generation mix on the grid moves away from things with physical inertia (huge spinning turbines) and toward non-inertial sources (like solar), we need to use other mechanisms to ensure that the grid can smoothly absorb spikes. One way to do that is via spinning reserves (e.g. https://www.sysotechnologies.com/spinning-reserves/). Another way to do it is via sophisticated power electronics that mimic inertia (such as grid-forming inverters, which contrast with the much more common grid-following inverters).
Great explanation about the grid being a giant machine that couple smaller machines with each other. About your last point, the buffer, I think batteries (chemical and also physical) seems to be the main key going forward.
I actually have a patent in this space for demand response. I know. I was being a bit cheeky. Stability is still a concern as unstable loads and generation needs to be mitigated as well as properly phased.
Also, power companies did not necessarily kill energy export incentives. Here in Massachusetts my meter “runs backward” when I export to the grid. This does not earn me money but it does earn me kWh credits, which means that if I am net negative for energy import in the summer and net positive for import in the winter, I can be net zero (or close to it) for the year.
In MA and a few other states, polluters are also required to buy “renewable energy credits.” Since I have a solar array I can sell my RECs whether I export energy or not. It’s my first year with a solar array, so I’m not sure how much to expect, but neighbors tell me that they earn between $500-$1000 a year.
In a future with solar and batteries, daytime and nighttime electricity pricing cannot be equal - else nobody would bother to have a battery (grid scale or at home).
Rules and regulations could solve that problem (meter not allowed to go backwards, solar companies are forced to pay some kind of battery credit, etc), but the free market will always outcompete.
Therefore, I forsee the future lies in 'smart' electricity meters which can charge different rates at different times of day - perhaps with minute by minute live pricing.
Here in Ireland, night-time power prices are much lower than daytime.
I’m happy enough that a battery will serve me equally well in both modes, but there’s definitely going to be a period where all it does is support self-consumption.
This only happens if a small percentage of people have live pricing. If most people have live pricing, most people have an incentive to act on price changes - for example by turning the heating off in unused rooms to save money.
In turn, that means that at times of crisis, prices will be high, but not 1000x high.
Gasoline is another resource with live pricing, and suggesting "I want a subscription where I pay $3 per gallon fixed for a year, no matter how much I use and no matter what happens to the price of oil" wouldn't be something a fuel station would entertain, because they know that when the price was under $3 you'd buy elsewhere, and when the price was over $3 you'd buy millions of gallons and resell at a profit.
> If most people have live pricing, most people have an incentive to act on price changes
It's not latency free to act on price changes. If they spike while people are asleep, what do you expect would happen?
And would people get a notification everytime the price changed at all. The logistics are hard.
Some solar inverter systems already have a data connection to get live pricing information from the grid operator. It’s not that big of a problem to implement, although it definitely isn’t pervasive yet.
Minute by minute pricing is not crazy to expect and integration with HVAC, battery systems, and inverters isn’t crazy to expect to occur.
There's a neat way to do this that is super simple... The electricity company publishes an equation that determines the price based on the AC frequency. Ie. price_per_kwh = tan(min(max((-60 + system_frequency) * 1000, -pi/2), pi/2)).
Now every device in your home knows the price. For this to work, everyone must get the same price across the whole grid, and there must be sufficient grid capacity for energy to flow freely which isn't always the case. It will also cause issues with some very old (ie. 60+ year old) clocks with mechanical timers.
All of these issues can be fixed by updating the formula:
The published_offset would be unique to each district and adjusted from time to time to keep old clocks working properly, and sometimes to deal with limited transfer properties of the grid...
But the neat thing is that even if you don't take into account the published_offset, you still make nearly optimal economic decisions.
In reality most people will buy "smart" appliances which turn on and off based on price - eg. a water heater which picks the cheapest hour to reheat the tank for the day, or a fridge/freezer which cools everything more in cheap hours, an EV charger which starts selling rather than buying power at the highest priced hours, etc. It's all fairly simple software as soon as energy companies do live pricing, so pretty much every wifi gadget will do it.
People will choose it based on claims in the shop like "Smart timing cuts energy bills by 25% on average!".
It only takes a smallish percentage of demand to be reactive like that and really big price swings won't really happen.
Somewhere they'll still be grandad manually putting the dishwasher on at a cheap hour or turning the hot tub off whenever he sees the price is high, but I expect most to be automatic.
The whole gimmick with that supplier was that they exposed their customers more or less directly to grid pricing. You don't need to do that to charge different prices during different parts of the day.
My (very-)local utility will give you an overall rate discount if you send them a screen shot of your car charging app showing it's only charging in a certain range of hours. Surprisingly, this works fine, though supposedly they've got eventual integration plans, "nah, we'll trust you for now" is a viable MVP...
> I forsee the future lies in 'smart' electricity meters which can charge different rates at different times of day - perhaps with minute by minute live pricing.
That's what I was responding to, not the day/night predetermined pricing.
They could still have a price limit, paid for by charging a bit more when prices are lower, it doesn't have to be priced directly to the grid to have impact on usage.
A max price guarantee would also give the supplier an incentive to have their planning in order.
It's hard for people to really understand this because utilities and grid operators are using this is a headline justification for electric capital projects. In New York, they've deferred capital projects for decades and we're absorbing a massive distribution charge increase. I think my electric delivery portion of the bill is up 40%.
Well there are real challenges here. Generators which rely on massive spinning things naturally provide the grid with inertia; they resist changes to grid frequency. Power sources which rely on inverters or otherwise dynamically adapt to grid frequency don't naturally provide the same inertia.
This is a solvable problem, but it requires a solution nonetheless.
That too can be replicated. There are a few centrifuges out there. Not batteries, but spinning masses meant to keep the frequency stable. Some are looking at using air conditioning motors, of which we have millions, as such a spinning mass.
The frequency (50hz or 60hz) comes from those rotational forces from the generators and until we can eliminate them, we have to play nice with them.
Luckily, we have GFMI’s. Grid-forming inverters that can emulate 60hz push pull but you’re right that it’s more than just voltage since we are dealing with high voltage alternating current.
Solar is highly distributed. At the most basic level with a solar & battery system the production and consumption and CONTROL are all yours. You own it and it's literally on your property.
Refinements on ways to sell it to neighbours / recharge various EV's / use it for new purposes are all up to you.
There are lots of analogies to self hosting or concepts around owning and controlling your own data, when it's owned by you, you retain soverignty and full rights on what happens.
I'd expect most tech people will value the distributed nature of solar over equivilents, that by design require centralisation and commerical/state ownership and control.
Get your solar, back increasingly distributed approaches, let those pushing centralised agendas be the ones to pay for their grid. Eventually they are forced to change.
As we're finding in Australia, our high solar uptake by citizens.. is pressuring governments to respond, lest their centralised options become redundant. What we found is that as more people moved to solar, the power companies lumped the costs for grid maintenance onto those who hadnt moved yet, actually contributing to even further accelerated solar adoption and pressure to rework the system. Big corporates can lobby for themselves you dont owe them your custom.
This is not the problem. The problem is that everyone moves to solar for most of the year not using or paying for the infrastructure, then in cold winter nights everyone expects the grid to be able to supply as normal.
Cost. Useful life.
I thought about an off grid system. Batteries are expensive. Also, unless you live in a dry place in the equator, You'll need to account for things like winter, long rainy spells, so either you add more batteries to account for multiple days (weeks? months?) of low generation, or you'll need a diesel/gas generator, or have a hybrid system instead, which basically means you're using the utilities gas generator instead.
Then, subsides are drying up. Systems have a useful life, your panels can be damaged by storms, for maximizing battery life you need to ensure you don't discharge it below 20%, and neither charge it over 100%.
So, in the end, the grid needs to be there anyway, but as most grid costs are fixed, whenever you use it now, it is going to be more expensive.
Generating your own power does not necessarily mean cutting ties with the grid. I think for most people in most places being off-grid would be a real challenge. I’m not sure how Australia does it but in my neck of the woods (northeast US) staying grid-tied is the norm.
I have a relatively big battery (12kWh) which is enough to see me through the evening during the summer months. We do not get quite enough sunshine where I live to be off-grid during the winter, but I can use the battery to hedge against grid outages which are common here in the winter due to storms (eg heavy ice taking down power lines).
The battery in the winter could be used to charge during low cost time periods, assuming your have time of use energy prices. I see people in the UK doing that all the time because the peak prices are very high. I think California is the same.
Batteries have come down a lot in cost, at least the raw ones:
We do the same in Pennsylvania - I have about 10 kwh of battery. I can't put solar on my roof, so I only have a very small 800w array on top of my garden. I run it as an off grid system that can recharge from shore power, so I have to use all of the energy it produces or it goes to waste. But it saves some money and is enough battery to let me time shift to take advantage of time of use power rates, and it gives me very good run time for refrigerators and internet during outages.
There seem to be a few sweet spots in solar - a tiny array that you use all of without having to grid tie it is really cost effective. (The cost of grid tied solar adds 5-10k to the system cost). Otherwise go big. :)
There was an article that described that in UK one needs 1 megawhat-hour battery over the winter to be grid independent. Judging by current trends in few years that will be below 40K USD. While this is indeed very expensive in most of US due to much more sun available the required battery would cost below 20k. One can also have a backup generator that can run constantly at maximum efficiency to replenish the battery. Then the whole system can already be below 20K. While expensive, it provides true independence and I suspect grid cost and centralized power is more expensive for society.
This is for a single home off-grid, meaning solar over-production is already implied. You need enough solar available to charge that 1MW battery in time for it to be useful during those seasonal differences which is going to be multiples of your peak summer generation.
No need to go off grid. You getting solar and battery already positions you to be able to ‘exit the grid’. The experience in Australia has been that the major retailers keep charging infrastructure costs to those who still rely on them. The mass of solar adoption grid and off-grid shifts the playing field.
That appears to be true in places in the US that have time-of-use rates. Sadly where I live, there are no time-of-use rates for residential customers, otherwise I would absolutely do this.
> I'd expect most tech people will value the distributed nature of solar over equivilents, that by design require centralisation and commerical/state ownership and control.
I do, but I do not find value in rich folks who can afford solar wanting their cake and eating it too.
If you get a solar setup, get batteries. Then disconnect from the grid entirely. You should not be able to use the grid as a free backup energy source for the last 5% of the time you'll need it. Those last digits of reliability are the expensive hard problem to solve. That, or be charged appropriately for adding your potential usage to the capacity market. I understand that this is not legal in many places, and that folks disconnecting from the grid also cause the grid to collapse at some point as well. But at least there would be less of an individual perverse incentive involved.
Home solar folks seem to love their free battery though. Or even worse - getting paid to dump power to the grid when it's value is the smallest. Net metering is not the way to go - home solar should be being paid something around instantaneous wholesale pricing at best, plus fees to manage the more complex management of the grid they cause via being thousands of kilowatt-scale install vs. a single 50MW solar farm.
So far in the US at least, many solar programs have simply been a handout to relatively rich folks subsidized by poorer grid consumers. It's really put a sour taste on something that should be for the greater good. I don't mind that those subsidies were used to jump-start the industry, but that time has long since passed.
tldr; if your total system cost to be fully off-grid and never have to worry about a power outage is not substantially more expensive than being grid-connected, you are likely being highly subsidized by other electricity consumers.
While many rich are benefiting, they are still driving demand, that is funding continuous improvements that funding further efficiencies innovation and driving down the cost per kWh. In a very really way this makes solar cheaper and cheaper, the benefits of this one, unlike the debunked economic namesake do infact trickle down.
I think this was the case when solar panels were much more expensive. But home solar in the US has long ceased to be a useful driver of funding efficiencies and innovation. The cost of panels is now tiny and you are mostly paying for extremely overpriced installation and permitting. The 30% federal subsidy alone is enough to pay for an equivalent amount of utility scale solar outright. Australia has similar labor costs to the US but home solar is 1/3rd the cost to install.
The Australian grid shows that when solar is the dominant part of the grid, it can still work pretty well. But you need to plan for when the sun is not shining and adapt to the notion that base load translates as "expensive power that you can't turn off when you need to" rather than "essential power that is always there when needed". The notion of having more than that when a lot of renewables are going to come online by the tens of GW is not necessarily wise from a financial point of view.
That's why coal plants are disappearing rapidly. And gas plants are increasingly operating in peaker plant mode (i.e. not providing base load). Also battery (domestic and grid) is being deployed rapidly and actively incentivized. And there are a lot of investments in things like grid forming inverters so that small communities aren't dependent on a long cable to some coal plant far away.
The economics of all this are adding up. Solar is the cheapest source of energy. Batteries are getting cheap as well. And the rest is just stuff you need to maintain a reliable energy system. None of this is cheap but it's cheaper than the alternative which would be burning coal and gas. And of course home owners figuring out that solar + batteries earn themselves back in a few short years is kind of forcing the issue.
Australian grid prices are coming down a lot because they are spending less and less on gas and coal. The evening peak is now flattened because of batteries. They actually have negative rates for power during the day. You can charge your car or battery for free for a few hours when there's so much solar on the grid that they prefer to not charge you than to shut down the base load of coal/gas at great cost. Gas plants are still there for bridging any gaps in supply.
Australia is lucky, we get hot summers and mild winters, which means our electricity demand is highest precisely when we get the most solar.
That's why something like 30% of Australian houses have solar.
That said, grid prices spiked recently. Both a combination of subsidies expiring, and fewer people buying grid power (because of solar) causing fixed costs to be shouldered by fewer people.
It should be pointed out that while electricity prices went up on paper, a lot of people aren't paying those higher prices because they are on solar!
Temperature has nothing to do with the performance of solar. Solar panels perform better when they are cooled.
Also worth pointing out that much of the US is below 49 degrees latitude. Which is south of most of Europe. Washington DC and San Francisco are at a similar latitude (38) as Melbourne (-37). Most of the US is perfectly situated for getting pretty decent solar power around the year. Yes it gets cloudy sometimes. It's usually not continent wide. You can compensate with cables and batteries. The US is far behind because of policy and their local energy monopolists blocking progress. Not because of anything to do with the weather or geography.
Prices have a lot to do with scarcity. Which with monopolists has more to do with the lack of a free market than with a scarcity of resources. Installing solar is about 3-5x more as expensive in the US as in Australia. The permitting process in the US is more expensive than the total cost of buying and installing in Australia. That's a policy problem in the US. All the hand wringing around that topic isn't helping a lot. A bit of pragmatism could improve things a lot and probably very quickly. Australia is showing how to do that. And yes, they have rain there too and you can go skiing pretty close to Melbourne. That isn't stopping them.
I wasn't talking about the performance of solar, only the demand for electricity.
Someone pointed out that the big problem with solar isn't how do we store daytime solar for nighttime use - this is easily solved with batteries. The real unsolved problem is how do we store summer solar for winter use.
Australia doesn't have this problem, not to the extent of other colder places, because we don't need a lot of heating in the winter.
When you say 'Australian grid prices are coming down a lot' I don't think you're talking consumer prices.
I don't have the exact 'before' numbers on me, but our peak electricity costs went up from around 42c/kWh to 56c/kWh around 18 months ago.
At the same time that feed-in was halved from 4c/kWh to 2c. Having said that, I'm pretty sure 'Shoulder' and 'Off-Peak' went down slightly.
(I'll update this when I can access my spreadsheet with the actual numbers and dates)
I should also say that I'm fairly insulated from this price rise having recently gotten a battery installed, plus moving to a special EV plan, so I charge the car and the house battery at the very cheap off peak rate (special for EV owners) and run the house entirely off battery, topped up with solar.
It's a privileged setup, but one that I planned and worked towards for a fair while, having seen ever increasing electricity prices always on the horizon (even before AI started eating all the resources).
But it's not happening in areas that keep coal on their grid - Wyoming, Texas, Utah, China, etc.
It's primarily the places that try do both solar an fossil fuel retirement that are experiencing high energy prices - California, UK, Europe, Australia, etc.
To be clear: Australia has always had fairly high electricity prices, and Australia is also not specifically doing 'fossil fuel retirement', although there are coal plants closing they're closing because they're reaching the expected end of their natural life.
High energy prices happen when you don't do the basics to be ready for a change before making it. Or when you skip basic maintenance until everything falls apart. I'm sure there are many other complex factors I don't know about.
Texas also has the most coal power of any state. As with China, success with renewables appears to depend on a policy of compatibility with fossil fuels rather than opposition.
(Home) batteries are quickly becoming cheap and per-hour electricity rates can be implemented at a reasonable time. With that, the grid owner can influence the grid stability without having to build capacity or generation itself.
My goal is to do wholly owned solar and batteries at home, only using the grid as backup, if I move out of the city. But I think the big problem with this new demand is that it’s for data centers. I can’t see that working for them.
We see that quite often here in the summer as the energy price sometimes drops to minus 60ct/kWh (more often it hovers around -5 to -10). It is pretty much "please use everything now" to avoid grid issues. It often happens on very clear days with lots of wind.
This ignores capital and opportunity cost. Building a GPU data center or chemical plant costs a lot. If you only use it 20% of the time, you're effectively paying 5x more for that capital equipment.
The problem is the capital cost of any of that type of equipment sitting around idle or under-capacity, ready to go when the electricity price goes down. It's likely more profitable to run them most of the time, even with positive electric rates, and then only stop using them when rates are exceptionally high ("load shedding").
This is why you see most opportunistic electricity consumption systems doing resistive heating - this equipment is inexpensive.
That ‘negative value’ electricity could also be used to do something else. And actually requires a lot of capital to produce. It isn’t actually free, it’s a side effect of another process that has restraints/restrictions.
Yes…. And capital costs to capture that ‘moment’ productively are likely not in favor, if this situation exists long term.
For example, Free power for an hour is useless if someone is running an aluminum refinery, because you can’t just start and stop it; and it costs so much capital to make that only operating 1 hour out of 24 is not economic.
And that is for a situation where electrical power costs are one of the most dominant costs!
The cost of CO2 capture, and conversion into usable fuels, is in the cost of the setup of the infrastructure etc (as well as cost to run the pumps once setup, which in this case is where the free electricity goes).
The return on such an investment is likely negative, because the synthesized fuel does not sell for much (compared to the same fuel that is extracted off the ground and refined - look at natural gas as prime example). Therefore, even if electricity is negative (ala, free), you cannot make money from doing it.
Either the cost of the carbon emissions is captured as part of the cost of fossil fuel extraction (and returned to this carbon capture/conversion system) to make it break even, or something else has to happen (like massive efficiency increase in doing such conversions) in order to make it economical.
When the price of a thing is negative, the entity facing the negative price is being paid to consume it.
We don't have enough automatic integration yet to make it happen, but: Residentially, that'd be a great time to charge millions of EVs and raise the temperature of water heaters. It'd be perfect for getting a head start on heating the glass kiln for Monday morning, or to supplement the used railroad ties and other fuels that might be feeding a lime kiln.
It's pretty easy to think of loads that feature scale and/or quantity, and the ability to switch on and off rather quickly. Even if the negative price event only lasts for an hour. (Even if it only lasts 5 minutes.)
The CapEx (and planning/timing) required to actually use it would almost certainly dwarf any actual gains - notably, because we’d already be selling the electricity for a profit if we could use it productively, the negative price is precisely because the equipment just isn’t there yet.
Also, once said capex was spent so we could actually use that electricity - it’s marginal cost/value would no longer be negative.
Weird huh?
Notably, if these kinds of situations do keep occurring (aren’t just random), someone almost always ends up spending the capital to capture it, because this is obvious.
You just don’t see all the finance geeks pulling out their calculators and talking about their plans because they know secrecy is an important strategic and tactical advantage when arranging investment and building out capital equipment.
It does tend to level itself out, yes. With sufficient adoption of cost-oriented controls, negative price conditions cease to exist and money flows in the normal direction.
And no, I don't think that's weird at all -- that seems like just a natural path towards the desirable goal of balancing generation and load, and turning a negative into a positive.
In terms of implementation: There's already lot of low-hanging fruit. It only takes software to get connected things like EVs and hybrid, grid-tied battery+solar systems to be centrally commanded to take advantage of negative price opportunities.
The hardware already exists, and more of it is being built every day. And software, once written, can be copied infinitely for free.
We already have sellers who would like to sell surplus energy, but find themselves in situations where they cannot. We also have avid buyers who would like to buy energy cheaper, but who cannot take advantage of the surplus condition when it exists.
That's not a inescapable curse. It is instead an opportunity for a new market optimization.
If I wake up on some hypothetical future day and find my hypothetical EV charged to 90% instead of the 80% I might normally seek to limit it to, and this 10% increase happened for free and without any action on my part, then: I win a little bit, and the generating station with the surplus also wins a little bit, and the distribution/transmission systems still get paid for their part.
I'm happy with my tiny win. The generating station is happy with many thousands of their own tiny wins. It's good stuff.
If this happens often enough (or for long-enough periods) for me in my region, then I might seek a normal limit of 70% or even less and be able to opportunistically absorb even more of the surplus when it happens.
The advantage that participation offers me does decrease over time as things balance (if they can ever become balanced), and that's OK too: The generating station still wins.
(We already have systems that do exactly the opposite of this in the consumer space, and we've had them for a very long time. The oldest I'm aware of are radio-controlled relays for water heaters, and the newest I'm aware of involve smart thermostats. These are utility-controlled systems that are intended to shed load instead of generate load. But if it works in one direction, then it can also work in the other direction.)
The problem here is that the production of hydrocarbons, ammonia, etc. from electricity can only make back its high upfront investment when it runs basically 24/7. This is a challenge for renewables.
In China which recently opened a large off-grid green ammonia plant in Chifeng, they use multiple tiers of energy storage to ensure constant electric power availability.
Well as we all know the political will in this country seems to generally be "let's all commit suicide together", but perhaps mass installations of solar will provide material reason to improve conditions somewhat.
The bigger issue, at least in the US, is that there is a huge lack of supply in the equipment to connect to the grid at the moment. Backlogs are still 1-3 years after order, not terrible but still an issue deploying.
That is definitely not the bigger issue. If we had faster grid tie completions the problem would be even worse. If you don't believe me look at the very nearly daily negative power pricing inany areas of California.
We simply don't have the transmission and storage for significantly more grid tied solar. It's pointless to build more for purposes of grid supply, we need to build transmission and storage first.
i wonder if ppl's electricity consumption habits will change in response to this, idk like turning the heat way up during the day or using high power appliances more during the day
We have a solar electric plan - the price per kWh is much higher during the duck curve in return for cheap rates during sunshine hours. The rates are something like 1x during night, 0.5x during sunshine, 4x during the morning and afternoon peaks.
We have our heat pump water heater running during the cheap hours, and also change our use of air conditioning/heating to accommodate.
It would probably not work in our favor if we didn't work from home and were out of the home all day.
That is something you can reasonably do, but it's only useful in winter.
> or using high power appliances more during the day
Well, given that people have to work during the day, I doubt that that will work out on a large enough scale. And even if you'd pre-program a laundry machine to run at noon, the laundry would sit and get smelly during summer until you'd get home.
The only change in patterns we will see is more base load during the night from EVs trickle-charging as more and more enter the market.
I've got solar. We switched things like pool pump, hot water and so on (things already on timers) from night to day.
Dishwasher can also gave a programmed start, so that can also shift from after-dinner to after-breakfast.
I also work some days from home, so other activities can be moved from night to day. We use a bore-hole for irrigation, laundry in the morning etc. Even cooking can often be done earlier in the day.
Aircon is the least problematic- when we need it, the sun is shining.
So yes, habits can shift. Obviously though each situation is different.
At least in the US there is a push to make electric appliances smarter already. So for example, the electric hot water heater responding to the strain on the grid. The same could happen for AC, heat, EVs and other higher load appliances. At scale that can help out the grid immensely either in times of peak load or dip in demand.
I do not see a point of smart appliances besides electrical car. 10 KWt-hour battery will cover all the needs to smooth the demand from all home appliances and costs below 1K usd. It will allow also to significantly reduce maximum power that has to be supplied to a house while allow to increase peak consumption while heavy cooking/AC/heating.
At least in the US most of this is still on the research phase but if you can get a standard adopted for all new equipment you can easily adjust these high draw appliances to act as a virtual power plant. It would be a trivial implementation compared to getting batteries in homes.
So your implication that other sources of energy currently do not need scaling coordination somehow? I fail to see how that is true, maybe you can provide some insights?
Wind and solar are not in ur control. I can turn on a generator and get power. Some plants might need weeks to start up - but this is in my control. I have no idea how windy it will be in five days.
My point is that scaling coordination issues exist for everything, including all sources of energy production.
Singling out solar and continuing to not prioritize it will inevitably lead to ongoing grid issues. Whereas this has been mostly solved for other sources, due to lobbying and legacy. Thus my confusion about the OPs half-baked point.
Solar can't produce electricity at night, it's hardly a a credible sole competitor if the power surge requires a constant power supply. Renewables are most of the time coupled with gas power plants to handle this.
Can you point me to a country-scale implementation of solar+batteries where electricity is affordable? If every country tries to do the same, what do you think will happen with the battery costs given the sheer size of the manufacturing and natural ressources extraction required?
It’s too bad solar degrades over time. I think it’d be more of a no-brainer if we could actually manufacture it at scale domestically without it losing its efficiency over a 15 year period.
> It’s too bad solar degrades over time... without it losing its efficiency over a 15 year period.
Google says they degrade to 80-90% capacity over 25-30 years, which is ~double your 15 year time period. I've also previously seen people claiming that they then stabilise around the 80% level, and that we don't really know how long their total possible lifespan is because many extant solar panels are outliving their 25 year rated lifespans.
Capacity reduced to 80% won't work for some high-performance use cases, but is pretty decent for most.
>without it losing its efficiency over a 15 year period.
Why is this such a dealbreaker like you make it out to be? It's easily fixed by over-provisioning to account for future losses. Not to mention that power grids almost always have more capacity than what's needed, to account for future growth and maintenance downtime.
Everyone I know can immediately see a clear difference between 120 ppi and 200 ppi, but I've yet to encounter anyone who can reliably tell 120hz from 200hz. We have monitors that render lego-sized pixels at 500+ hz now, it's enough.
Gamers have been gaslit to believe they have the reflexes of spider-man and are a lost cause, but their preferences have been listened to by monitor makers for 30 years. Enough already!
Millions of office workers are working all day reading text on screens optimized for playing games at low resolutions. It's just sad.
Steve Jobs showed a decade ago that 4x resolution could be sold at great profit for normal prices. Text on screens can be as crisp as on paper.
Sadly it only became the standard on phones, not on productivity desktop monitors. It so easily could be, and it should be.
I've recently gone from 60hz to 240hz to 480hz. Refresh rate in games is not just about what it looks like. It completely changes game mechanics, like movement, recoil etc. It is such a big difference between 60hz and 240hz that you're not really playing the same game. There are things you can do at 240hz that are impossible at 60hz. At 480hz, there's also so much more time to react, so you really don't need fast reflexes to take advantage of it.
I'm guessing you play FPS competitively and are in your 20s, and for you it might be true, I won't argue that.
The issue for me is that even if your experience was true for all gamers in the world, that would still be a tiny minority compared to all people in the world who use monitors to read text, day in and day out.
A low-res monitor cannot show a high-res image, but a high-res monitor can show a low-res picture, so both sides can get what they want here.
I run 8k/60 but my screen can also do 4k/120. If it could also do 1440 at 240hz or 1080 at 480hz wouldn't bother me, but that the industry spends all effort on making 1080/480 and basically NO effort on 8k does.
The industry should throw everything below say 200ppi on the scrap-heap of history where it belongs. It would harm nobody and benefit everybody.
Right, that should be imperceptible. The 240hz monitor was also 15" while the 480hz monitor is 27". I'm sure that contributes as well. My subjective experience is that I now just have a lot of more time to react.
Max Payne 1 is a fun playthrough during xmas, kinda like watching Die Hard. Takes place during a blizzard.
A remake/remaster of Max Payne 1&2 is in the works by the original developer (Remedy). Stated to be financed by Rockstar (who own the IP) to normal Rockstar AAA levels.
I agree with the OP that I can get LLM's to do things now that I wouldn't even attempt a year ago, but I feel it has more to do with my own experience using LLM's (and the surrounding tools) than the actual models themselves.
I use copilot and change models often, and haven't really noticed any major differences between them, except some of the newer ones are very slow.
I generally feel the smaller and faster ones are more useful since they will let me discover problems with my prompt or context faster.
Maybe I'm simply not using LLM's in a way that lets the superiority of newer models reveal itself properly, but there is a huge financial incentive for LLM makers to pretend that their model has game-changing "special sauce" even if it doesn't.
It's kind of a meme within the photography community though. People will spend many thousands of dollars on a camera that's supposedly "the best" (pick your fave reasons, ideally as obscure as possible) and then not actually shoot with it. Looking at yall, Leica fans.
There's a saying about how typical people use their audio system to listen to music, but audiophiles use music to listen to their audio system. An equivalent should be made for photography.
Authors and publishers have written on this topic extensively. Blog posts about it periodically gets posted to HN.
Most of the cost to publish a book is upfront. Editing, laying, cover art, diagrams, etc.
It costs less than $2 to print a book in bulk quantities.
Margins suck. That is why publishers go out of business all the time. Margins aren't any better on ebooks. It costs money to maintain a digital store front.
For an example of the costs of digital distribution in another field, look at Good Old Games. They are a digital distribution platform and they barely break even / turn a profit. (A bit more complicated since they also do some of the porting work)
Digital distribution has super low per unit costs but huge upfront costs.
Surplus electricity can be used to make hydrogen from salt water, and when hydrogen is burned to generate energy it releases desalinated water.
It is inefficient yes, but solar is so cheap I think there is an opportunity for a twofer here.
Private enterprises and individuals will deploy solar panels equivalent to several new nuclear plants every year. IMO governments should invest massively in hydrogen infrastructure. Plants, distribution and storage.
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