Microblog Memes

Yeah yeah down with capitalism rah rah but if the electric company makes no money, how do they afford infrastructure maintenance?

Ok so we nationalize the electric company. Now taxes pay to keep up the electric grid?

I'm down for all of that, by the way. It's a great solution. But there is absolutely, indisputably, 100% a problem here, and it's childish to pretend that if evil corporations would stop being so greedy everything would magically fix itself. It's completely valid to discuss this issue in terms of problems and solutions.

From a grid stability point, you can't produce more than is used, else you get higher frequencies and/or voltages until the automatics shut down. It's already a somewhat frequent occurence in germany for the grid operator to shut down big solar plants during peak hours because they produce way more power than they can dump (because of low demand or the infrastructure limiting transfer to somewhere else)

Negative prices are the grid operator encouraging more demand so it can balance out the increased production.

So what they are saying is that our current financial system is too focused on short term gains to cope with short term losses?

Sigh, when I grew up, I was allways taught to save money so that I have a buffer to fall back on. This concept seems to have completely gone out the window for busniesses lately.

I dislike the talk about how capitalism is bad as a general concept, but when seeing stuff like this I do agree with it in parts.

Ok, so let's solve the issue.

There is too much electricity, so generating power to transmit to the network will cost us money.

This has an easy solution, just don't transmit it to the network.

Build a battery facility where you store the power instead, infact if the price of electricity is negative, use the power on the grid and charge your batteries as well, I mean, when the electricity cost is negative, you are being paid to consume power.

Then when the sun goes down, and the electricity price goes up, you sell the charge you have in the batteries.

Depending on your location you could even set up a pumped storage system, where instead of batteries getting charged, you use the cheap excess energy to pump a resarvoir full of water, and release it when you need the power.