this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2024
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Current peaks are higher than they need to be because people are wasting energy, all you want is to increase demand as if that had no environmental impact. I'm done here.
You do realize we are already using demand shaping, but for the traditional baseload/peaker model, right?
Power companies offer steep discounts to industries like aluminum smelters and iron foundries to move their production to a night shift. Doing this increases the base load, which allows a larger percentage of the total power demand to be met by baseload generators instead of peaker plants.
The problem with this should be obvious: the baseload/peaker model drives demand to hours of the day that solar and wind cannot possibly meet.
Current peaks are not nearly as high as they should be. As much night-time demand as possible should be moved to daytime, where it can be met with solar instead of less efficient coal/oil/nuclear baseload generation, pumped storage, battery storage, etc.
But we can't get to that point while negative rates are limiting solar capacity, and we can't get rid of negative rates without flexible loads.
Hey buddy, no one serious thinks the way you do, the industry is using more fossil fuel to meet the increased demand even if there's subsidies for renewable. You're just recycling crypto bros arguments to justify wasting energy.
I can't believe I'm still answering that bullshit.
The only people serious about widespread implementation of solar are, indeed, thinking the way I am. The general concept is commonly referred to as "demand shaping" in the industry. Anyone still focused on supply shaping in 2024 is supporting coal, gas, and nuclear infrastructure.
The industry already has the solar capacity to meet the kind of demand I am talking about. They already have excess solar production that they can't effectively utilize, and we know that they can't effectively utilize it because it is regularly driving generation rates negative.
We are already producing (or capable of producing) the solar energy in question; we are wasting it due to a lack of demand. We are shutting down solar panels in the middle of the day due to a lack of demand. Solar rollout is stalling due to lack of demand for the specific power that solar is capable of producing.
When we create a demand specifically for solar energy, we increase the profitability of our existing solar infrastructure. We make it feasible and profitable to expand that infrastructure, which makes it pick up a bigger share of our normal load as well.