Having the cost of power go to zero is a bit of a problem if selling power is your business model, so it's not exactly ideal for solar providers.
this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
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yeah that sure is a problem with everything needing to be profitable. I wish some people thought of a different system 100+ years ago
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This is idiotic. The fact is your electricity transmission system operator has to pay a lot of money to keep the grid stable at 50 or 60Hz or your electronics would fry. With wind and especially with solar power, the variable output is always pushing the frequency one way or the other, and that creates a great need for costly balancing services. Negative pricing is an example of such a balancing service. Sounds good, but for how long do you think your electricity company can keep on paying you to consume power?
People also don't realize that too much power is just as bad as too little, worse in fact. There's always useful power sinks: pumped hydro, batteries, thermal storage, but these are not infinite.
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Every time someone mentions "oh no solar is producing too much energy" I think of this deranged Forbes article from a few years back.
alt-text
Microsofts billionaire founder Bill Gates is financially backing the development of sun dimming technology that would potentially......{blahblah global cooling}
This sounds like the start of a sci-fi apocalypse novel
Or Highlander 2 lol (don't watch it, it's horrible)
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The "problem" of negative energy costs is easy to solve, but quite costly.
Build water desalination/carbon capture and storage/hydrogen generation plants that only run when the price goes below 0; even though these are very energy intensive, they would help stabilize the grid.
Then build more solar; you want to try to have the daytime price stay in the negative as often as possible.
you want to try to have the daytime price stay in the negative as often as possible.
That's not exactly conducive towards people building more solar.
The solar isn't the goal; the energy is enabling the value in other parts of the economy.
In fact; energy supply is so important to the reasonable functioning of the economy. It should be taken out of the profit driven cycle of business.
Look at what happened with WPI in Ohakune and PanPack when energy prices sky rocketed a few months back.
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The solution we're using instead of course, instead of all that environment crap you suggested, is running huge crypto farms only during the hours when the energy is in surplus.
To be fair; this is a valid use case.
If you are a solar power producer; rather than offering your energy at -ve rates; run a crypto farm when the output is too high. This is far better than running the same farm on coal.
But it would be better going into something useful.
I want to pre-empt the argument from the Bitcoin people that while this is a logically sound argument for how Bitcoin mining could potentially help the environment by making renewables more economically feasible, using this argument to describe Bitcoin mining electricity usage is completely invalid—Bitcoin mining as it exists today does not merely use excess renewable energy; it consumes energy even in times of demand when it could be given to residential, commercial, or industrial customers. Without the excess demand from today's Bitcoin mines, the capacity that is freed up can be used to close fossil fuel power plants.
CCS would be much better than bitcoin; even though CCS is very inefficient; if the power price is effectively -ve; that means that you are only paying maintenance costs to run your CCS
To be clear, Bitcoin mining will never help the environment. There are ways to reduce it's negative effects though
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