Ughh, no, negative prices aren’t some weird “capitalism” thing. When the grid gets over loaded with too much power it can hurt it. So negative prices means that there is too much power in the system that needs to go somewhere.
There are things you can do like batteries and pump water up a hill then let it be hydroelectric power at night.
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.
First of all, you can indeed shut of the renewables easily. But that means that adding renewables to the grid is even less profitable, making renewables less desired to be built.
Hence in for example Germany a law was passed that prevented renewables being shut down in favor of worse energy sources, but that then leads to the issue we mention here.
It’s a tricky situation with renewables. But on the other hand, society is slowly adapting to using them & improving the infrastructure to handle such issues, so we’ll get there eventually :).
Ughh, no, negative prices aren’t some weird “capitalism” thing. When the grid gets over loaded with too much power it can hurt it. So negative prices means that there is too much power in the system that needs to go somewhere.
There are things you can do like batteries and pump water up a hill then let it be hydroelectric power at night.
I feel like having a colossal battery pack could help with that problem.
It can, but people need to build it.
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.
That’s also a pretty naive take on it.
First of all, you can indeed shut of the renewables easily. But that means that adding renewables to the grid is even less profitable, making renewables less desired to be built.
Hence in for example Germany a law was passed that prevented renewables being shut down in favor of worse energy sources, but that then leads to the issue we mention here.
It’s a tricky situation with renewables. But on the other hand, society is slowly adapting to using them & improving the infrastructure to handle such issues, so we’ll get there eventually :).