Some quick notes about negative electricity prices:
- The negative prices come from an algorithm essentially begging the renewable to turn off because the transmission lines cannot handle the amount of electricity being generated, so the renewable ends up having to pay up money for its excess generation. This is generally considered a *not* optimal outcome (but can be somewhat fixed in the long term with more investment into the electric grid, and also setting up batteries near the wind farm).
- Electricity prices generally settle at whatever it costs to generate the next MW of electricity at something like a natural gas plant- the renewable collects that money even though its own cost of production is 0. This results in free-ish money. Negative prices, although good for the consumer in the short term, have the adverse effect of making renewables less attractive to invest in. If you have a bunch of wind farms, and the next wind farm you make will induce more negative prices that affect all your existing wind farms, it makes you not want to make more and it also makes you complain to your local politician about making it harder for others to do so.
- Negative electricity prices are more common than you'd think... at least locally. For example, west Texas has a ton of renewable generation- see anything with WEST here https://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_spp.html
West Texas also has stranded gas assets. There is insufficient takeaway capacity to move all gas out of the permian. NG prices in the permian have occasionally turned negative. So of course power plants are going to burn $0 cost gas. That leads to excess power generation - and there is insufficient power take away capacity.
The price signal really says - build storage capacity. And it's happening.
Negative power pricing is interesting - it should not be very rare when there is a fuel component but solars cost structure (capex followed by minimal fuel costs) makes the incremental cost of electricity basically 0.
But you're right - negative power pricing is a barrier to further renewable adoption.
The frustrating thing as someone who works for power companies - there is no such storage capacity. It doesn't exist. It is incredibly expensive - as expensive or more than a power plant itself and they are orders of magnitude too small to modify the grid.
California has 50% of the USA grid storage batteries. All of them combined are less than the one nuclear power plant left in California. They're simply not big enough, not even close.
that's always been my thought: have a water source, wind/solar farm, and a steel/cement plant then the excess electricity -> converts to hydrogen (electricity is free here b/c of the overgeneration), then when the hydrogen storage is half full or whatever the plant kicks over to the hydrogen for their heat source so the excess is used, the fossil fuels are displaced by the renewables, and in theory this would make the steel or cement cheaper.
Possibly use the same idea for lots of different heat-intensive processes such as glass making, paper/pulp making, oil refining, etc.
Also if battery are too heavy for airplanes. in theory they could run on hydrogen made from excess renewables.
Agree airplanes can use hydrogen but it is less energy dense than jet A, still better option than batteries with heavy motors , fuel always get burns up batteries nope weight plays major role
But where? You need 2 nearby lakes separated by a convenient cliff, basically in an uninhabited area because NIMBYism always blocks them, they're very expensive to operate and maintain, and pretty bad for the local ecology. Although you can argue local impacts are insignificant if it lets us use more green energy and lower emissions.
Anyway, there's a reason we have an on-demand power grid. We just haven't figured out a good way to store massive quantities of electrical power yet.
It's actually really surprising that electrical power is so hard to store without a significant loss. You'd think just separating opposite charges would give you what you want, but those goddamn electrons keep sneaking around >:)
You need an area that has not only one large basin but two large basins, but wait, they also need to be separated by a large elevation to make it worth it. It's basically impossible to find area like that naturally.
The anecdote I like to bring up was that recent OL3 nuclear reactor, when built, was one of the most expensive construction projects in human history. If it was replaced with batteries and renewables, and the renewables were entirely free, the construction cost of the plant would purchase only few days worth of storage capacity for the power output of the plant. (~25h when I did the math, probably more now, batteries keep getting cheaper.)
In Finland, to move entirely to using renewables and storage, we would need ~3 months of storage.
You don't need to hold days worth of electricity for a battery plant to be effective. You charge when prices hit negative and discharge later the same night, when prices are highest. That one battery station could service several generation plants.
There are also other methods to store energy than electrical batteries. I've seen gravity storage, water pumped storage, compressed air and h2 electrolysis, all with varying levels of price, efficiency, and technological readiness.
You don't need to hold days worth **if you live in California or Texas**. Notably, a study found that 3 hours worth of peak consumption is enough for California.
I, on the other hand, live in Finland, where in the deep winter there can be less than 1 hour of effective sunlight per month. (Not a month of 1 hour per day, 1 hour per month.) Also, wind power drops to zero during persistent high pressure conditions in winter, which is also precisely when it gets the coldest and when consumption is highest.
Put together, this means that do go full renewables+storage, we would need several months worth of storage, which is simply not feasible.
This is precisely why the long term solution is *residential* battery storage and microgrids. Centralized battery storage does not scale well, but if you heavily subsidize the installation of these backup systems (say, to the tune of $10k per household or so), then you will end up with massive capacity and hyper-local load balancing while also reducing transmission line losses.
Power companies don't like that because they lose a lot of control, but it really is the answer for a lot of reasons. I'd even argue vehicle to home capabilities could fulfill a part of that role as EVs continue to become more common. But these power companies are all a bunch of corrupt dinosaurs, so trying to incentivize them to do something like this is hard. Here in Ohio where we have the almost supervillain level corrupt First Energy, it's hard to even get net metering.
And in many places those power companies are properly regulated utilities which don't have much say in the matter. We are about to get a big lesson in the difference between regulated and deregulated energy markets in the next couple of decades. In places where there is a strong regulation tradition, this kind of architecture will take shape much more quickly, and we will see regional electricity in these markets prices trend literally towards zero, as they will be subsidized by inefficient, deregulated peer grids using them for load balancing.
I hope you're right. Just based on my experience where there is heavy regulation there is also a ton of regulatory capture which kind of cancels it out.
Yep. The utilities themselves have been involved in testing these sorts of things out.
In California, the "[Virtual Power Plant](https://www.tesla.com/support/energy/virtual-power-plant/pge)" program with PG&E. In exchange for giving the utility some control over your battery and letting them tap your supply during high load periods, they pay you back $2 per kWh. A hefty profit for the homeowner.
Or Green Mountain Power in Vermont [has been installing](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/09/business/energy-environment/green-mountain-home-batteries.html) Tesla Powerwalls at customers' homes, after determining that it was cheaper to give customers battery backups than it was to improve grid reliability in rural areas. They can either overbuild the grid to improve uptime in the middle of nowhere, or they can spend a fraction for people to simply be able to ride it out until power is restored, meanwhile saving them from having to install/run home backup generators.
Why don’t electric utilities embrace gravity batteries ? Not sure thats the correct term, but mechanical devices that move water or weights with the excess power during peak times and then lower them to generate power when needed. These seem like ridiculously cheap alternatives to chemical batteries and can be scaled up to any size.
They are. Every place where you can cheaply build pumped hydro, probably has a project ongoing for it.
But they are very expensive, not because of the capital costs of equipment, but because of land costs. In general, people who own land near a lake shore are not happy for the shoreline to frequently go up and down. Understandably so, if only because of how it makes the place smell.
Weights are generally not worth it because the amount of energy stored by moving mass up and down is actually not that high for the amount of mass that's reasonable when you are not talking about water.
Couldn't we just pump all excess electricity into hydrogen production? It takes energy to produce hydrogen, but then you have approximately that amount of energy locked in hydrogen and usable to power hydrogen cars, for example. Seems like a much better way to store and use excess power than batteries.
No, because hydrolysis facilities on such a massive scale do not exist not to mention the hydrogen storage and turbines you would need to burn it. All this would cost massive amounts of money to build. And because hydrolysis is really inefficient it would take a really long time to make back that money.
Not hydrogen cars, that would be really stupid. You'd mostly use that hydrogen in power plants for grid stabilisation. At least that's the plan of the current German government for the phase-out of natural gas power plants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_cycle_hydrogen_power_plant
> Not hydrogen cars, that would be really stupid.
The worlds largest car manufacturer doesn't seem to think so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Mirai
Are there not non battery types? I’ve heard of ideas like dams and large blocks being stored at the top of a hill or grade to be rolled down to generate energy. I’m sure these are also expensive and hard to get done.
2.6 GW (article doesn't state capacity, like 4 hour storage for 10.4 GwHr) are coming online this year.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61202#:~:text=The%20five%20largest%20new%20U.S.,Storage%20(Texas%2C%20500%20MW
Those cheap batteries are coming and California's grid is evolving incredibly quickly and benefitting very significantly from the batteries.
It's not a 1-1 improvement because the grid has dynamic variables so it's a 'low hanging fruit' situation adding early batteries provides a very large benefit.
California is now in the sweet spot for battery additions and it's meaningfully adjusting the supply curve in a fantastic way now as they're adding batteries. Give it a year and it'll be so neat.
THe new batteries coming online are of a different type and getting very cheap - and large. THey're not lithium Ion but other types. And things like compressed air storage could be even cheaper still.
I think you are wrong. I just found a source that says there is 8000mw of storage in California. Thats roughly 4x bigger than diablo canyon.
https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/california-electricity-data/california-energy-storage-system-survey
This is not true at all, though. Look at [the California ISO supply page](https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/supply) for any recent evening: batteries routinely supply 7 GW at the peak, which is three times nuclear’s 2.3 GW. And the number of hours per day that they supply more than double the nuclear output is increasing every month.
The reality is the exact opposite of what you said: the storage capacity is already online and is making a huge difference to California’s grid in the evening, which is when power is needed.
We've actually been having this debate in Australia, and the government finally contracted the CSIRO to do a feasibility study for it.
Turns out nuclear is by far an inferior alternative to solar and other renewables with the current technology we have available, that costs a shit ton more and takes dozens of years we don't have to setup with net zero targets looming (and by which point renewables and energy storage technology will be even more efficient).
Nuclear used to be the best technology, but the fact that you need to burn so much money making sure they don't explode, digging out uranium and then containing it mean it's starting to fall behind.
Obviously it's possible the economics are different in the US - we're very spread out here, and don't have the same pre-existing nuclear infrastructure the US does. But I suspect it's probably a similar prognosis.
yep, would have been great if we started at least 1 plant 60 years ago, it might have actually been operational by now. even though Britain nuked the fuck out of OUR outback for their own bombs, their own strategic security, their own research, for entirely their benefits, 70 years later we finally have extremely limited access to the fruits of the testing we were made to endure.
> Turns out nuclear is by far an inferior alternative to solar and other renewables with the current technology we have available,
I just can't see how that would be true, both have upsides and downsides. The downside to renewables like wind and solar is that it's supply varies and it's peak production doesn't reliably sync up with peak usage times. The only way to offset this is to store that energy in batteries, which is prohibitively expensive.
Nuclear energy you control energy output and can crank it up and down to meet demand.
If you want to see how it's true there just so happens to be a cisro research document detailing why its inferior.
Edit: since some people don't believe this report exists or apparently can't google.
[https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/GenCost](https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/GenCost)
Here is one from the IESO, independent electrical operator of Ontario, that highlights the pathways to decarbonization. Complete opposite of what you are proposing and highlights the absurd amount of solar and wind you need to build to ensure grid reliability.
https://www.ieso.ca/en/Learn/The-Evolving-Grid/Pathways-to-Decarbonization
That's also touched on in the report that old mate posted (referring to base line share variability and reliability) and accounted for at each increment (50% renewables, 90% renewables etc) and renewables are still more feasible. The report also takes into account SMRs and classic nuclear powerplant schemes.
This report concerns Australia, which has massive amounts of coast and open land for solar, and literally one medical reactor in the entire country. Nuclear is not an industry here unless you include exporting uranium.
Gencost has a lot of issues to put it mildly.
For example it omits the cost of several large expensive projects (Snowy 2.0, several HVDC lines) that renewables need to scale up. It also majorly overfits generation based on weather data which results in the model adding and removing generation assets from year to year. [This video goes into the details if you're interested.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-GwnPWTwmU)
Nuclear and renewables are apples and oranges. Nuclear can run 24/7. Solar and wind are entirely subject to time of day and climate that they will never be able to replace nuclear. Before you say “but muh batteries” they are unbelievably expensive for the scale of deployment needed and incredibly wasteful when it comes to needing replacement every 10 or so years.
Nuclear first, renewables to supplement nuclear when the weather allows.
Batteries used for this kind of thing have longer lives than 10 years. Grid scale batteries do not scale well, but creating microgrids via residential battery backups does, and there is a very viable subsidy path to incentivize installing them.
> they are unbelievably expensive for the scale of deployment needed and incredibly wasteful when it comes to needing replacement every 10 or so years.
even compared to nuclear?
Yes. The fact is you need a stable baseline of electricity generation. That's gonna be hydro, coal or nuclear. Hydro is obviously best but it is limited by geography and most countries have built as much as they can. So, for the rest the choice is coal or nuclear.
Most places don’t have gas, not a lot of gas in China or India for example.
The U.S. converting from coal to gas is mostly due to the fact that we have **a lot** of it right now. But there is insufficient transportation capacity to transport that gas to other places.
Logistics are a real thing…
[Take California](https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook#section-demand-trend), "base demand" on a yearly basis is ~15 GW. At peak the Californian demand is ~45 GW.
The difference between "base demand" and peak is 30 GW.
With a system where intermittent renewables handle all daily, seasonal and weather based variations on top of a nuclear baseload you just confirmed that renewables can also easily handle the baseload.
Why on earth would you use extremely expensive nuclear power for the 15 GW "base demand" when the renewables in your system provide double the capacity when they are the most strained?
You need to update your stance on batteries to 2024. California now has ~10 GW of batteries with 20-30 GWh of storage. They regularly become the largest producer in the grid during evenings.
California’s current rate of battery deployment is 5 GW with 20 GWh of storage a year.
Assume a 20 year lifetime.
When reaching saturation and recycling as many installations as they build California will have:
- 20*5 = 100 GW
- 20*20 = 400 GWh
California is on track for about 10 hours of storage **at the summer peak** of 45 GW demand.
No mean consumption, not anything making it easier. We are talking about not solving the final 0.01% now.
I don’t think people appreciate how fast things have changed and where we end up by simply extending todays rate of progress to saturation.
People are starting to drive around in big batteries on wheels. Consumers are willing to pay for batteries put of pocket. Pumped hydro is also something we need more of. [Theres one near me ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blenheim%E2%80%93Gilboa_Hydroelectric_Power_Station) that can store 12000 megawatt-hours. I think these could help entice purple states like Pennsylvania, Virginia and North Carolina into supporting candidates who support addressing climate change. Coal country is perfect for pumped hydro. Good sized mountains, plenty of water, a good midpoint between the cities of the coast, windy plains and sunny south. It also has a workforce whose wheelhouse is being able to carve out tunnels and move massive amounts of rock. Coal is in decline, so giving those folks a place of pride in the new energy mix could win the loyalty of that region for generations.
That's the way it SHOULD work, but all the people and politicians in Appalachia seem to be on the side of more fossil fuel extraction.
The people who would benefit the most are the ones keeping it from happening.
why would anyone driving an electric car be ok with dead cars every morning from supplying the grid during renewable downtime?
jesus renewable people have to be some of the dumbest people on earth. grids run overnight, and in winter. solar isn't magic fairy dust.
I don't know what you're reading to come to this conclusion, but it's infused with large amounts of speculation. Nuclear is still one of the best ways to generate energy and reduce carbon emissions. China is building one power plant in just under 7 years, and does so with technologies that are much safer than the reactors we are operating right now. China doesn't waste money on things that are inefficient. They're building hydro, nuclear, solar, coal..all of it. A mix is exactly what the west should be aiming for (minus fossil fuel burning). Nuclear is safe, environmentally friendly, sustainable and reliable in terms of power output. It's also cheap over the long run - money spent once will be put to use for many decades.
There's some summarised reports and articles here:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-22/nuclear-power-double-the-cost-of-renewables/103868728
https://www.csiro.au/en/news/all/news/2024/may/csiro-releases-2023-24-gencost-report
But I won't claim to be all that knowledge on the topic - it seems like a big factor is that:
a) this would be Australia's first nuclear plant, so there's a lot of up front costs countries like China and the US have already done the leg work on.
and b) the costs of batteries and renewable energies are steadily declining, whilst the costs associated with nuclear energy don't seem to be following the same trend, making it much less appealing when you look at how a country is gonna reach net 0 in several decades.
China also cuts a lot of costs a functioning democracy couldn't get away with, like dumping their nuclear waste into the ocean and burying their heads in the sand about the possible environmental ramifications.
But again, I'm not an engineer or even an economist, these are just the finding delivered by my government that I'm sharing my incredibly surface level understanding of, that seem to have been pretty unassailable so far, despite how badly the opposition wants nuclear power to be a thing (the coal mining lobbies need something else to dig up now that coal power is becoming unfashionable), so I don't really know enough about the topic to debate people on any of the finer points.
> **China doesn't waste money on things that are inefficient.** They're building hydro, nuclear, solar, coal..all of it. A mix is exactly what the west should be aiming for (minus fossil fuel burning).
oh boy, they are, they suck at it. they are building anything to get more power because they are desperate for more power. they can't pick and chose like we saw when they turned down Australian coal during covid19 blaming and then had power issues and had to shutdown factories and shit not just because of covid, but because they had no power to run them or the rest of the country.
they have regular power supply cuts and blocking that juicy australian coal fucked the over when the backup supply ran out in september 2021. https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3150469/china-power-crisis-hammers-smes-firms-upend-production
they are now sucking up that sweet sweet australian coal again after the au elections and "stance changes" of the au goverment.
Nuclear would have been feasible in Australia forty years ago but there was Chernobyl and the issues around reactor safety and waste (both of which have largely been addressed since). The Oil industry also played a huge part in labelling nuclear dangerous to sell their far more toxic products.
Between oil and plastics they've destroyed the environment in a very short. Less than fifty years for plastics.
I'm a fan of nuclear, or I was of the infrastructure was built and running by 2000 but it's way too fucking late for us now, which is fine as renewable energy is coming whether the kooks like it or not.
I mean Dutton won't even release details of how nonsense plan because it's not real and it's about smearing renewables.
A bit like the 80's where big oil fucked the planets. Did I say a bit like. I meant exactly like.
Edit if someone could recommend me a decent on screen keyboard....
> France is mainly nuclear. The US should do the same
Won't ever happen, the oil and gas industry owns too many politicians (predominantly Republicans)
Socialists like Bernie Sanders and AOC want to ban nuclear. As in stop all license renewals on existing plants and halt all new construction. Russian upvote/downvote troll farms supported Bernie's presidential campaign so only the idealistic good things about him were shown on the front page.
> "This plan will stop the building of new nuclear power plants and find a real solution to our existing nuclear waste problem. It will also enact a moratorium on nuclear power plant license renewals in the United States to protect surrounding communities. We know that the toxic waste byproducts of nuclear plants are not worth the risks of the technology’s benefit, especially in light of lessons learned from the Fukushima meltdown and the Chernobyl disaster. To get to our goal of 100 percent sustainable energy, we will not rely on any false solutions like nuclear, geoengineering, carbon capture and sequestration, or trash incinerators."
https://berniesanders.com/issues/green-new-deal/
Meanwhile Communist China builds 2 coal fired power plants *per week*.
Republicans have been pro nuclear for decades. It's the green lobby on the Democrat side that has historically been opposed to nuclear. IIRC it was only during the 2020 election cycle that the Democrat platform officially began supporting nuclear.
It’s easy to support nuclear now when it will never get built because of the costs. Investors don’t want it because the ROI sucks compared to solar right now.
We should prioritize increasing efficiency, renewables, and storage first. Nuclear does provide large amounts of power very consistently so it is good for grid stability. It is also expensive, takes forever to build and theres always that very small but very serious risk of a meltdown. I'd say in the US we should at a minimum replace all existing US nuke plants with new ones. If the original plant had two reactors and adding a third or forth would be practical, we should add those to the new plants.
France is one of a handful of nuclear powered countries that recover useable fuel from spent reactor fuel pellets (which have quite a bit of useable fuel left thanks to the design of reactor fuel pellet poisons + plutonium from normal reactor operations)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Hague_site
*cries quietly as he reads his [GA Power monthly bill](https://www.augustachronicle.com/story/news/environment/2023/12/19/georgia-power-customers-will-pay-7-562-billion-for-plant-vogtle-cost-overruns-nuclear-reactors/71970955007/).
You missed one factor.
Negative prices heavily encourage deployment of grid batteries.
Grid storage is expanding at an exponential rate, the days of negative prices will soon be behind us
When I visualize a battery i see a nice pair of lakes at different altitudes with a pumping station in between them.
And when the sun shines or the wind blows, the electricity from those turbines and household solar panels is used to pump up water to the top lake which recharges the gravitational battery.
And then at night, water is sent back down hill through the dynamos to supply the grid with about an 80% energy recovery.
And i feel good.
The world would be a much happier place if it had more pumped hydro.
There are big issues with this as well though. This is large scale infrastructure and thus has both a high upfront cost, and a relatively high ongoing maintenance cost compared to something like distributed, networked residential battery backups. There is also increasing concern over the environmental impacts of hydro power in general.
Every year it's a new factory making something new and better for grid storage. Iron-Salt, Iron-Air batteries are not only made with more common materials, they're safer, last longer and also hold a charge for days longer than lithium-ion.
Fossil fuels still owns the world otherwise it's so braindead obvious that a mere few billion in storage subsidies would hyper-charge the transition.
That doesn't really matter for batteries that sit still and don't move. Power density/efficiency only really matters when you have the carry the battery around, i.e. in a car etc.
If the power is half cost at midday or midnight, and you lose 25% of it to inefficiency, but your storage is scalable and dirt cheap, you still come out ahead. Both the battery owner and grid operator (assuming they're not the same entity) profit when when $0.50 of power is bought at peak generation, then 75% of it is sold back for $1 per at peak demand. You lose 25% of the power generated, but you save on the cost to install X non-solar peak capacity.
i.e. It only costs fuel (or nothing, if solar/wind at midday exceeds demand already) to generate power when it's not needed and can be stored, but doing so reduces the capital needed for peak capacity, so even losing a significant percentage can still be good.
It's only a problem that the loss is close enough to the difference in price (which reflects the difference in demand) that it's not worth the cost of installation/maintenance. And the cheaper the batteries get, the less that matters.
It's been weird to change my mind about grid energy storage. I spent years reading and being excited about all sorts of setups with pumped hydro, gravity batteries, compressed air, smart demand management, continental supergrids...
... and then this year I find that [just plain chemical batteries have snuck up on me](https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-batteries-apr-2024/) while I wasn't paying attention, and that [you could have seen it coming years ago](https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline). Decades ago, if you're Tony Seba. I assume there'll still be places where the other alternatives are useful, but the "haha battery printer go brrr" solution has its own elegance.
> the "haha battery printer go brrr" solution has its own elegance.
There's nothing quite like solving a global problem through the simple purity of mass manufacturing.
Supply and demand should take over. Deeply negative prices encourage storage, if storage is overbuilt, it will raise peak demand and encourage more generation resources.
Someone smarter than me can likely suggest a ratio of grid storage to peak demand / total daily consumption. Seems like grid storage capacity can't reasonably exceed overnight power demand and peak grid discharge shouldn't exceed the 7-8pm delta between demand and renewable supply.
Gravitational batteries (pumped hydro) can be used to supply the grid for days/months at a time when there is limited wind or sun.
The Lake Onslow project in New Zealand is looking at putting a 5Twh battery on to the grid - which would supply the residential needs for 2 million households for 125 days.
They describe it as a solution for dry years when snowpack and rainfall doesnt fill the existing standard hydro lakes.
The idea is that the Lake Onslow company would simply buy up excess daytime solar and wind to recharge. Overnight it would release for car charging, but it allows all the other lakes/dams to lower their overnight output and keep their storage levels higher into the season.
At any time if the price on the electricity market gets too high, they can instantly release and stabilize the price.
Its also much cleaner than lithium batteries and provides a recreational lake.
> Gravitational batteries (pumped hydro) can be used to supply the grid for days/months at a time when there is limited wind or sun.
The vast majority of areas that are geographically ameniable to such deployments have already been deployed. These are very rare geographic conditions, especially when needing to be within distance of people without impacting them in a major way.
Pretty much all hydro capacity - pumped storage or not - is more or less spoken for and built already. In fact, you will see hydro share go down as more marginal dams are removed for environmental reasoning in western nations.
The one potentially interesting thing I haven't seen anyone talk about is using existing reservoirs for pumped storage - but I briefly looked into that and even there, there aren't too many areas where it seems to make any sense.
Pumped hydro is great and all, but you are talking about what amounts to a rounding error for total global energy storage needs should we go full non-dispatchable.
> Supply and demand should take over. Deeply negative prices encourage storage, if storage is overbuilt, it will raise peak demand and encourage more generation resources.
That is awfully close to Factorio not ngl...
We're extremely far away from reaching that delta though.
California has peak energy demand between 6pm-9:30pm. 12-3pm barely has more demand than 3am (about 10-15% more), whereas peak demand can be 100% higher than 3am.
Sadly the sun isn't really working in our favor.
Storage is a must, and building out 60GWh storage to handle the evenings is gonna be absurdly expensive. Not to mention that we simply don't produce batteries on that scale outside of EVs.
We need to find a better storage solution. Batteries, that degrade pretty aggressively, are sadly not great.
Carbon capture has its place but excess energy should be used to replace fossil fuels. CCS is much further down the list. Charge electric cars and grid batteries or pumped hydro in the daytime.
> because the transmission lines cannot handle the amount of electricity being generated
That can be one issue, but normally it is because there is simply no demand for the power.
So anyways a 100% renewable grid requires on overcapacity of something like 400%. That means most of the time there will be an oversupply of electricity and payment for production goes to zero. Who is going to pay to construct the excess capacity required for the 100% renewable grid?
Even with 400% there are some very complicated period in winter ( low solar , low wind and high demand ).
And export/import has some limit , in Europe most of the country get the same solar / wind condition at the same time ( country that can share electricity , not portugal vs norway of course ).
That's what IMHO is always being hand waived. When you have a working grid and then add some solar/wind to it, these renewables seem ultra cheap, as they can ignore factors like grid capacity, storage and backups as they're all provided by the existing infrastructure. It's like having a kid helping you with painting; it really doesn't matter what they do, the adults will fix whatever mess they make, and finish the work when the kid loses interest.
However, once you provide a significant fraction of power with such intermittent energy sources, then the grid must be upgraded, batteries must be installed, and likely you **still** need a lot of backup power generation in winter or long periods of unfavourable weather conditions, or risk blackouts.
IMHO the solar/wind renewable deal is only good when the adults are ready to take over, and huge investments are done to provide guard rails, safety nets and supervision to make up for weather induced and seasonal tantrums.
Texas also has a demand-response program. For example, suppose you had a large predictable consumption of energy, like computing. As long as energy prices are economical, you would consume as much as you can. But to incentivize those consumers to not consume when there is a shortage of energy, consumers that choose to be in the demand-response program can get paid to stop consuming.
It can be a lot cheaper and more efficient than building out batteries, and it helps mitigate the negative energy prices issue in the same way batteries can. The only objection is that very few consumers can adjust their consumption so quickly, other than cryptominers. But hypothetically, it could be any large consumer that fits the requirements for demand-response.
Yes, but why doesn't the renewable want to turn off? Really, they should be turning off well above $0/MWh, because their opex is greater than 0. ~$5/MWh, perhaps?
A common reason why they don't want to is non-market revenue streams. I don't know the specifics in France, but you often get some form of "green" credits from renewable generation, and so you can pay up to the amount you're getting in credits.
So you have the wind turbines incurring wear and tear, but still running ahead of plants that actually have negative running costs.
It's a good example of poor outcomes from well intentioned subsidies.
Wind and solar can produce below their opex because their marginal price is essentially 0 (no need to pay for fuel).
Let’s say your wind farm needs to operate at 30€/MWh to be profitable. The current spot price is 10€/MWh.
You can shut off/curtail, and not get anything, or you can keep producing, and at least make a little bit of revenue.
As for the negative prices, those are actually likely caused by nuclear reactors, who cannot curtail/shut off their production as easily. Shutting off a nuclear plant and cold starting it later can put stress on the equipment and reduce it’s maintenance intervals. So some nuclear plants would rather pay to keep producing electricity than to throttle down, provided the negative prices are a short term thing
This happens quite frequently, especially during times of low demand.
It's not unusual to see negative prices in the UK when the windfarms are going full whack but everyone's in bed. The old electricity bill never seems to go down though...
Look into Octopus Agile.
Whether it will actually benefit you or not depends on your particular usage, but in my case I'm paying an average of 12p/kWh due to load shifting.
Unfortunately building generators is only 50% of the work. You need to be able to transmit and potentially store the generated energy.
We could add a load of electrolysis plants near large amounts of renewables to produce hydrogen or other useful biproducts when this happens.
Negative Prices are a symptom of insufficient battery storage. We’re at the point where there are enough renewables that they will occasionally peak out during daylight hours. Without adding equivalent storage on a 1:1 basis with electrical production from now on these periods will continue to get worse.
The more renewables take up a larger and larger segment of the grid the amount of storage increases at a parabolic rate. Up to 30% little storage is needed, at 60% 1:1 is necessary, at 90% 2:1 battery storage, at 100% 3:1 is the minimum of what is required.
Essentially we’re crossing the 30% threshold now.
This isn't an investment issue it's a technical one: existing battery tech isn't suitable for grid scale storage. Round trip inverter losses alone are a significant barrier for AC generated power (PV could skip this if the batteries are local).
And it's not like people aren't trying: inventing a viable grid scale storage solution would turn any company immediately into Nvidia. Unfortunately wishing something existed is not the same as actually inventing it.
Pumped hydro and similar storage schemes are what is needed in the short term, unfortunately these tend to be environmentally catastrophic and hugely unpopular so rarely get built in the west.
What is really needed is joined up thinking: there's no point in pouring state money into building more green generating capacity if it's just going to sit idle. The money could instead be spent on more R&D to solve the other problems.
>Round trip inverter losses alone are a significant barrier for AC generated power (PV could skip this if the batteries are local)
Who cares about the losses when the energy is free or even cost negative? "Oh no, I'm only getting half of the energy I am being paid to store and that would go to waste entirely if I didn't store it. The horror."
Because you aren’t really being paid to store it, you’re being paid to *give it back* after the storage period. So if you lose half of it to conversion in the process, you only give half of it back and only make half as much money to cover your capital costs.
And that’s assuming the cost of incoming power is negligible. Yes, we’re discussing a news event where that happened, but the purpose of building these is to *prevent* those events and stabilize the price. On average you’ll still need to pay for the power you input into the battery, which means the output sale price needs to cover the input cost for the power you keep AND the power you lose to conversion. As the percentage lost to conversion increases, that gets dramatically more difficult.
We have a [pump storage solution here in Ireland that was built in the late 60s-early 70s](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turlough_Hill_Power_Station). It's an incredible place to visit and is quietly located near Glendalough, a site of natural beauty, without many people noticing at all.
I would love to see more of this technology deployed as it doesn't require chemical battery technologies with fixed or decaying lifespans that we're so used to today.
Bonus: the top lake looks like a scene from a James Bond action scene.
The UK is building loads of pumped hydro at the moment. Scotland has many lochs located at different altitudes so it’s simply a matter of pumping water up and down the lochs. Loch Ness already has one and there’s a few companies that are thinking about building some more.
Well that's fine except it only has a capacity of 300MW and 75% efficiency. The article is talking about 6GW daily demand changes, so you'd need twenty of them. Most countries don't have the topography to do that.
It's also designed for the opposite scenario: it fills slowly using off peak power and generates for a short time at peak. Presumably it could also use peak power to fill and generate slowly at off peak but the engineering requirements are going to be rather different.
California’s current rate of battery deployment is 5 GW with 20 GWh of storage a year.
Assume a 20 year lifetime.
When reaching saturation and recycling as many installations as they build California will have:
- 20*5 = 100 GW
- 20*20 = 400 GWh
During the summer peak California has a demand of 45 GW.
At the spring/autumn minimum California has a demand of 15 GW.
California is on track for about 10 hours of storage **at the summer peak**.
No mean consumption, not anything making it easier. We are talking about not solving the final 0.01% now.
I don’t think people appreciate how fast things have changed and where we end up by simply extending todays rate of progress to saturation.
The progress is mind bogglingly fast.
I'd say sitting idle is better than burning fossil fuels until we find better way. Besides, that excess power usually finds a way to be soaked up by someone.
Negative prices are even more a symptom of inadequate transmission lines. Unfortunately, construction of transmission lines have to go through certain monopoly utility companies that have no interest in paying more for electricity so there is little incentive to build them.
unless you are adding transmission to other countries that can use the free energy, adding more transmission lines doesn't do anything. '
You can only produce as much power as the grid uses.
Actually, it can help average out local weather issues. Just because there is a lot of sun in Texas doesn't mean it's the same everywhere else in the US.
> Negative prices are even more a symptom of inadequate transmission lines.
Primarily because of a lack of demand.
You could always argue that the power could be transported somewhere else, maybe even further way, next country, next continent, but everything has a limit.
It can't even be moved around the US, one of the most advanced countries. It's a problem that needs solving and politics are of course hindering this progress.
If everyone had an EV that was charging and connected to the Grid that would solve this battery issue.
You get a car, and a battery all in one. And the discharge/charge cycle could be set so that it would help extend the batteries use life. This is the only feasible way of achieving that much energy storage.
That or a gravity battery made of water.
There's a difference between wholesale power prices and retail power prices. California especially has been seeing negative wholesale power prices for years.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-power-natgas-prices-turn-negative-texas-california-arizona-2024-05-07/
https://futurism.com/the-byte/california-solar-electricity-prices-negative
It's like buying coffee. Coffee prices (the commodity) can be very volatile. As a coffee consumer - you never see these price swings.
Retail power prices are structured as a fixed rate. You pay well above wholesale some of the time and well below wholesale some of the time.
if you're familiar with spot prices and futures on commodities, like soy beans, etc, it's pretty similar.
when you buy and sell futures and/or commodities, you're buying and selling a contract that you will deliver or take delivery of physical goods of a certain quantity, so it's not as simple as consumer purchases.
No matter how cheap energy itself gets what you are paying for is the actual physical grid, and texas and california have a whole lot of land to cover in that grid.
France has as much people as above states combined and population is much more concentrated in hot spots. Zoning laws in the US is increasing the price for infrastructure a lot.
> population is much more concentrated in hot spots
Shouldn't that make building an electricity grid easier?
> Zoning laws
European infrastructure projects are insanely complex. There is practically no government owned land and certainly no unowned land to run through. EU law demands environmental studies, all kinds of other bureaucracy, public consultations, complex planning laws, archeological studies, and there's a whole framework around fair tendering for private infrastructure contracts. The idea it's somehow easier to build infrastructure in the EU is crazy.
>Shouldn't that make building an electricity grid easier?
I wouldn't call it easier, just more energy efficient and cheaper to maintain. It's more complex to build in more heavily populated area but it's cheaper in the long run.
>European infrastructure projects are insanely complex. There is practically no government owned land and certainly no unowned land to run through. EU law demands environmental studies, all kinds of other bureaucracy, required public consultations, complex planning laws, archeological studies. The idea it's somehow easier to build infrastructure in the EU is crazy.
I agree but bureaucracy goes both ways. No company will charge you thousands of euros for electricity and European blackouts are extremely rare because of safety and energy regulations. A blackout and cheap infrastructure can literally kill people, I would choose the more expensive and save variant. But as it's mostly the case : good for the people is bad for money.
Yup, and this is the biggest reason why large, centralized power projects like Nuclear have an inevitable diminishing return. Grid infrastructure maintenance and distribution is about 50% of the cost of getting electricity into your home. A much better solution to all this is to move in the direction of highly localized micro-grids, where solar and residential battery storage create virtual power stations.
This way you significantly reduce the transmission overhead for most power, since most of it is generated, stored and used locally, and load balancing happens regionally. You still need interconnects between microgrids, but these can be much smaller, since each microgrid will connect to dozens of local peers rather than one or two giant ones. Over time this comes to resemble a circuit-switched power network.
I'll reassure you, the article is about market prices, not consumer prices.
The price for consumers in France is fixed by contract (it can't go up in a snowstorm, for example), but it has increased by 50% in a few years and will probably never go down.
California has to import most of its fossil fuel which keeps prices high when wind and solar aren't producing.
Prices in TX are inexcusable. Not only does Texas have vast wind and solar resources, they have so much natural gas as a byproduct of oil drilling that it's often flared off.
Texas prices are pure corruption. With it's nearly unlimited renewable and natural gas resources it should have the cheapest electricity in nation.
TX is also huge and empty, which means people in the cities are literally subsidizing millions of tons of copper wire being run to eighteen random people in bumfuck nowhere whose primary economic contribution is custom horse blankets and political animus. It doesn't matter how cheap you can make electricity when you still need physical infrastructure to move it around on the macro-grid.
TX is an interesting study in how not to do energy production. Prices went up with deregulation, counter to any principle or common sense. They put wind/solar in the wrong locations, preventing 24 hour a day renewable energy production. The amount paid to property owners for wins turbine placement is protected by NDAs. Transmission lines haven't been upgraded to handle all the build, so the grid is continuously backlogged.
Basically, corruption...
> Prices went up with deregulation, counter to any principle or common sense.
Next you're gonna say cutting taxes will lead to a huge boom in wealth for the middle class!
I am shocked, shocked I tell you that energy firms shirked their responsibility to upgrade the grid, in favor of more profit now, at the cost to consumers later. And that there was massive consolidation leading to less competition
Friendly reminder that when LNG companies had surplus resources they would destroy them instead of keeping it in storage because it would drive the price of fuel down rapidly.
In UK, a few energy companies will inform you the day before an expected rise in renewable generation and will let you use as much as you want for free.
Octopus. You need a smart meter and they can accurately measure how much electricity you used during the time period. Then will add it as credit to your bill at the end of the month.
During winter they also reward you for using less energy than you would, during times the grid is expected to be used a lot.
This is not a negative. This is a temporary lack of imagination on the part of the old school utility companies.
Energy is kind of what our civilization is built upon. As energy has become cheaper and more plentiful, our civilization has gotten bigger and stronger.
This is not a sign to cut back on renewable, but to keep pushing forward. In most regions, a 4x renewable capacity results in closing in on 100% renewable. France is a little weird with lots of wonderful nuclear.
The key is to find something really nifty to do with the excess but irregular power. Something which can be turned off and on as the capacity is there. For example:
* Taking quasi recyclables such as plastic waste and turning it into diesel, or plastic precursors.
* Taking old asphalt, and with a bit of cracking turning it into new asphalt.
* Recycling old steel into much higher quality steel.
* Refining low grade ore into a high grade end product. This can allow for the reopening of domestic mining.
* Storing it in inefficient ways. The goal is that the storage medium should be cheap, but the charging discharging cycle doesn't have to be all that efficient as the goal is to mop up the otherwise wasted energy.
* Some recycling/ore refining may even be related to the grid. Things such as recycling old lithium from batteries, or refining rare earth/lithium ores which might not be normal commercial grade. Then producing batteries to then store extra grid power.
* Many factories have a step which uses piles of power. A bit of a rethink of how these factories are set up could result in the power hungry step being run full tilt while power is free, resulting in a surplus supply of that step while energy is higher. The rest of the factory then uses this surplus. I've seen factories do this with time of day pricing where they only ran certain machines at night while the rest of the "just in time" factory ran 24h/day.
It only takes a bit of imagination to find all kinds of beneficial ways to use this kind of surplus energy in ways where intermittent availability isn't a problem. The key is to not somehow preserve the old ways by somehow preventing incentives for this oversupply.
Used correctly, this could be a huge quality of life improvement for France.
Isn’t this just an extension of the time of use pricing structure for consumer? Use electricity for your needs when it’s cheap during the day and cut back when it’s expensive (evening peak).
>This is not a negative. This is a temporary [negative]
Cut the "inspirational" talk. This can be made useful by using the excess electricity. But *at the moment*, it's a negative outcome of having excess electricity.
Its not inspirational. Pump water into a reservoir during excess energy times. Dam its exit off and then hydro power the reservoir during high demand times. Literally a hydro battery. Yes there are geographical and regional challenges. But again we could do these things.
One would have thought by now energy would be one of the few "fundamental" things akin to rights.
(Yes, I know what rights are. I am not saying they're 1:1)
Happens in the UK. People get paid to use energy. You have to be on a certain smart meter tarrif, which costs a little bit more. So overall it's not a big saving, unless you can really take advantage of the negative prices.
You mean the France with the world’s smartest and best nuclear power implementation, right?
Because that will always be the real story behind the story. France bet on nuclear and won. Anything it generates from anything else is just icing on the nuclear cake.
More nuclear. More mini-reactors onsite, especially for large business sites. Nuclear is the way forward. Everything else is supplemental.
A lot of businesses have them, but SMEs & domestic supply contracts are virtually all stillon some kind of regulated tariff (which are cheaper than neighbouring countries due to the domestic nuclear production volumes used to underwrite the tariffs, but have still trended up along with wholesale prices). Now that most houses have "smart" meters, there's not really a material barrier to spot pricing
I'm from the UK, I regularly use the negative-prices. Charging batteries from the grid even if I have solar, and also as a joke I turn on some space-heaters to heat-up outdoors. When it's very windy, that's when we get negative prices, solar isn't a factor here yet.
Not in France, because they all have fixed price contracts.
In the Netherlands we also have the option of dynamic contracts: your prices will differ per day, or per hour. Especially the per hour contracts are interesting if you have solar, battery storage, and a bit of software to control when you save or sell your energy.
Battery capacity prices aren't there yet to make buying and selling power profitable... **yet**, but for optimizing home usage it can do miracles for your power bill.
All home appliances have start delays, so before you leave your house you make sure your dishwasher and washingmachine do their thing ~15:00 in the afternoon when power is free.
If you have some sort of smart home you can set it up to that sort of stuff automatically, including heating/cooling your house when the energy is free. And charge your (car) batteries when it's free/cheap and use that power to bridge the expensive moments.
Yeah, although negative electricity prices are not necessarily equal to negative electricity cost for consumers
When various taxes and tariffs are accounted for. In Denmark we occasionally have negative spot prices but the taxes and tariffs are so high that ordinary consumers rarely enjoy it. However, some people with EV home charging or electric heating enjoy a tax reduction on their electricity price to a degree where using electricity at negative spot prices might actually pay the consumer. As the negative prices are almost always in the summer, you’ll have people charging their EVs and blasting their heat pumps (AC-mode) at full power with open windows and getting paid for it.
In Norway we pump water up into the water reservoirs when it makes sense. Typically with negative prices or when prices are cheap.
The water reservoirs functions like a battery.
It's not that bad for us since we have hydro. Unless the reservoirs are full Norway and Sweden just limits flow through their plants and saves water for days when wind is low.
Yes. My power price is sometimes negative. Usually when it's sunny as fuck and I'm exporting power to the grid via solar panels on my roof. When the price is negative I *pay* to export and there's nothing I can do to stop that, other than turn on as many power sucking devices as I can. It's stupid.
Could this not be abated by having a large Tesla arc near the renewables? I mean yes it's wasted electricity because it wasn't used, but it's better than frying the grid
Not to be a negative Nancy but the correct way of seeing zero/negative wholesale prices is not that it's "free", but rather that it's "worthless on the margin". Negative prices aren't a good thing.
That being said I'm expecting the combo of batteries, dynamic retail pricing, and (hopefully soon) thermal storage will abate this.
Yeah, happens here in Finland too and it is an issue. It also goes the opposite way if weather isn't great for renevables and it'll result in 300% prices.
This is VASTLY due to nuclear energy. Stop trying to give renewables credit for what nuclear does. Both are important but nuclear is far better in many ways, and needs more widespread attention.
Some quick notes about negative electricity prices: - The negative prices come from an algorithm essentially begging the renewable to turn off because the transmission lines cannot handle the amount of electricity being generated, so the renewable ends up having to pay up money for its excess generation. This is generally considered a *not* optimal outcome (but can be somewhat fixed in the long term with more investment into the electric grid, and also setting up batteries near the wind farm). - Electricity prices generally settle at whatever it costs to generate the next MW of electricity at something like a natural gas plant- the renewable collects that money even though its own cost of production is 0. This results in free-ish money. Negative prices, although good for the consumer in the short term, have the adverse effect of making renewables less attractive to invest in. If you have a bunch of wind farms, and the next wind farm you make will induce more negative prices that affect all your existing wind farms, it makes you not want to make more and it also makes you complain to your local politician about making it harder for others to do so. - Negative electricity prices are more common than you'd think... at least locally. For example, west Texas has a ton of renewable generation- see anything with WEST here https://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_spp.html
West Texas also has stranded gas assets. There is insufficient takeaway capacity to move all gas out of the permian. NG prices in the permian have occasionally turned negative. So of course power plants are going to burn $0 cost gas. That leads to excess power generation - and there is insufficient power take away capacity. The price signal really says - build storage capacity. And it's happening. Negative power pricing is interesting - it should not be very rare when there is a fuel component but solars cost structure (capex followed by minimal fuel costs) makes the incremental cost of electricity basically 0. But you're right - negative power pricing is a barrier to further renewable adoption.
The frustrating thing as someone who works for power companies - there is no such storage capacity. It doesn't exist. It is incredibly expensive - as expensive or more than a power plant itself and they are orders of magnitude too small to modify the grid. California has 50% of the USA grid storage batteries. All of them combined are less than the one nuclear power plant left in California. They're simply not big enough, not even close.
No wonder some places just pump water uphill into a lake with that excess energy, its a form of storage I guess
Gravitational potential energy. If the electricity would otherwise be wasted, why not?
Or make some hydrogen out of it & use it for fuel
That's an option for very niche industries (steel) as it's wasteful to convert it.
that's always been my thought: have a water source, wind/solar farm, and a steel/cement plant then the excess electricity -> converts to hydrogen (electricity is free here b/c of the overgeneration), then when the hydrogen storage is half full or whatever the plant kicks over to the hydrogen for their heat source so the excess is used, the fossil fuels are displaced by the renewables, and in theory this would make the steel or cement cheaper. Possibly use the same idea for lots of different heat-intensive processes such as glass making, paper/pulp making, oil refining, etc. Also if battery are too heavy for airplanes. in theory they could run on hydrogen made from excess renewables.
Agree airplanes can use hydrogen but it is less energy dense than jet A, still better option than batteries with heavy motors , fuel always get burns up batteries nope weight plays major role
It's a fantastic form of storage, this is what we need to build lits of
But where? You need 2 nearby lakes separated by a convenient cliff, basically in an uninhabited area because NIMBYism always blocks them, they're very expensive to operate and maintain, and pretty bad for the local ecology. Although you can argue local impacts are insignificant if it lets us use more green energy and lower emissions. Anyway, there's a reason we have an on-demand power grid. We just haven't figured out a good way to store massive quantities of electrical power yet.
It's actually really surprising that electrical power is so hard to store without a significant loss. You'd think just separating opposite charges would give you what you want, but those goddamn electrons keep sneaking around >:)
You need an area that has not only one large basin but two large basins, but wait, they also need to be separated by a large elevation to make it worth it. It's basically impossible to find area like that naturally.
I think the previous commentor meant building gas storage not electrical battery storage.
Top comment mentioned batteries for wind farms explicitly, probably where the confusion is from
The anecdote I like to bring up was that recent OL3 nuclear reactor, when built, was one of the most expensive construction projects in human history. If it was replaced with batteries and renewables, and the renewables were entirely free, the construction cost of the plant would purchase only few days worth of storage capacity for the power output of the plant. (~25h when I did the math, probably more now, batteries keep getting cheaper.) In Finland, to move entirely to using renewables and storage, we would need ~3 months of storage.
You don't need to hold days worth of electricity for a battery plant to be effective. You charge when prices hit negative and discharge later the same night, when prices are highest. That one battery station could service several generation plants. There are also other methods to store energy than electrical batteries. I've seen gravity storage, water pumped storage, compressed air and h2 electrolysis, all with varying levels of price, efficiency, and technological readiness.
You don't need to hold days worth **if you live in California or Texas**. Notably, a study found that 3 hours worth of peak consumption is enough for California. I, on the other hand, live in Finland, where in the deep winter there can be less than 1 hour of effective sunlight per month. (Not a month of 1 hour per day, 1 hour per month.) Also, wind power drops to zero during persistent high pressure conditions in winter, which is also precisely when it gets the coldest and when consumption is highest. Put together, this means that do go full renewables+storage, we would need several months worth of storage, which is simply not feasible.
This is precisely why the long term solution is *residential* battery storage and microgrids. Centralized battery storage does not scale well, but if you heavily subsidize the installation of these backup systems (say, to the tune of $10k per household or so), then you will end up with massive capacity and hyper-local load balancing while also reducing transmission line losses.
Power companies don't like that because they lose a lot of control, but it really is the answer for a lot of reasons. I'd even argue vehicle to home capabilities could fulfill a part of that role as EVs continue to become more common. But these power companies are all a bunch of corrupt dinosaurs, so trying to incentivize them to do something like this is hard. Here in Ohio where we have the almost supervillain level corrupt First Energy, it's hard to even get net metering.
And in many places those power companies are properly regulated utilities which don't have much say in the matter. We are about to get a big lesson in the difference between regulated and deregulated energy markets in the next couple of decades. In places where there is a strong regulation tradition, this kind of architecture will take shape much more quickly, and we will see regional electricity in these markets prices trend literally towards zero, as they will be subsidized by inefficient, deregulated peer grids using them for load balancing.
I hope you're right. Just based on my experience where there is heavy regulation there is also a ton of regulatory capture which kind of cancels it out.
Yep. The utilities themselves have been involved in testing these sorts of things out. In California, the "[Virtual Power Plant](https://www.tesla.com/support/energy/virtual-power-plant/pge)" program with PG&E. In exchange for giving the utility some control over your battery and letting them tap your supply during high load periods, they pay you back $2 per kWh. A hefty profit for the homeowner. Or Green Mountain Power in Vermont [has been installing](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/09/business/energy-environment/green-mountain-home-batteries.html) Tesla Powerwalls at customers' homes, after determining that it was cheaper to give customers battery backups than it was to improve grid reliability in rural areas. They can either overbuild the grid to improve uptime in the middle of nowhere, or they can spend a fraction for people to simply be able to ride it out until power is restored, meanwhile saving them from having to install/run home backup generators.
Why don’t electric utilities embrace gravity batteries ? Not sure thats the correct term, but mechanical devices that move water or weights with the excess power during peak times and then lower them to generate power when needed. These seem like ridiculously cheap alternatives to chemical batteries and can be scaled up to any size.
They are. Every place where you can cheaply build pumped hydro, probably has a project ongoing for it. But they are very expensive, not because of the capital costs of equipment, but because of land costs. In general, people who own land near a lake shore are not happy for the shoreline to frequently go up and down. Understandably so, if only because of how it makes the place smell. Weights are generally not worth it because the amount of energy stored by moving mass up and down is actually not that high for the amount of mass that's reasonable when you are not talking about water.
Couldn't we just pump all excess electricity into hydrogen production? It takes energy to produce hydrogen, but then you have approximately that amount of energy locked in hydrogen and usable to power hydrogen cars, for example. Seems like a much better way to store and use excess power than batteries.
Such projects are ongoing, but it adds a lot of capital cost.
No, because hydrolysis facilities on such a massive scale do not exist not to mention the hydrogen storage and turbines you would need to burn it. All this would cost massive amounts of money to build. And because hydrolysis is really inefficient it would take a really long time to make back that money.
Not hydrogen cars, that would be really stupid. You'd mostly use that hydrogen in power plants for grid stabilisation. At least that's the plan of the current German government for the phase-out of natural gas power plants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_cycle_hydrogen_power_plant
> Not hydrogen cars, that would be really stupid. The worlds largest car manufacturer doesn't seem to think so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Mirai
Are there not non battery types? I’ve heard of ideas like dams and large blocks being stored at the top of a hill or grade to be rolled down to generate energy. I’m sure these are also expensive and hard to get done.
2.6 GW (article doesn't state capacity, like 4 hour storage for 10.4 GwHr) are coming online this year. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61202#:~:text=The%20five%20largest%20new%20U.S.,Storage%20(Texas%2C%20500%20MW
Those cheap batteries are coming and California's grid is evolving incredibly quickly and benefitting very significantly from the batteries. It's not a 1-1 improvement because the grid has dynamic variables so it's a 'low hanging fruit' situation adding early batteries provides a very large benefit. California is now in the sweet spot for battery additions and it's meaningfully adjusting the supply curve in a fantastic way now as they're adding batteries. Give it a year and it'll be so neat. THe new batteries coming online are of a different type and getting very cheap - and large. THey're not lithium Ion but other types. And things like compressed air storage could be even cheaper still.
I think you are wrong. I just found a source that says there is 8000mw of storage in California. Thats roughly 4x bigger than diablo canyon. https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/california-electricity-data/california-energy-storage-system-survey
This is not true at all, though. Look at [the California ISO supply page](https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/supply) for any recent evening: batteries routinely supply 7 GW at the peak, which is three times nuclear’s 2.3 GW. And the number of hours per day that they supply more than double the nuclear output is increasing every month. The reality is the exact opposite of what you said: the storage capacity is already online and is making a huge difference to California’s grid in the evening, which is when power is needed.
France is mainly nuclear. The US should do the same
We've actually been having this debate in Australia, and the government finally contracted the CSIRO to do a feasibility study for it. Turns out nuclear is by far an inferior alternative to solar and other renewables with the current technology we have available, that costs a shit ton more and takes dozens of years we don't have to setup with net zero targets looming (and by which point renewables and energy storage technology will be even more efficient). Nuclear used to be the best technology, but the fact that you need to burn so much money making sure they don't explode, digging out uranium and then containing it mean it's starting to fall behind. Obviously it's possible the economics are different in the US - we're very spread out here, and don't have the same pre-existing nuclear infrastructure the US does. But I suspect it's probably a similar prognosis.
yep, would have been great if we started at least 1 plant 60 years ago, it might have actually been operational by now. even though Britain nuked the fuck out of OUR outback for their own bombs, their own strategic security, their own research, for entirely their benefits, 70 years later we finally have extremely limited access to the fruits of the testing we were made to endure.
> Turns out nuclear is by far an inferior alternative to solar and other renewables with the current technology we have available, I just can't see how that would be true, both have upsides and downsides. The downside to renewables like wind and solar is that it's supply varies and it's peak production doesn't reliably sync up with peak usage times. The only way to offset this is to store that energy in batteries, which is prohibitively expensive. Nuclear energy you control energy output and can crank it up and down to meet demand.
If you want to see how it's true there just so happens to be a cisro research document detailing why its inferior. Edit: since some people don't believe this report exists or apparently can't google. [https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/GenCost](https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/GenCost)
Here is one from the IESO, independent electrical operator of Ontario, that highlights the pathways to decarbonization. Complete opposite of what you are proposing and highlights the absurd amount of solar and wind you need to build to ensure grid reliability. https://www.ieso.ca/en/Learn/The-Evolving-Grid/Pathways-to-Decarbonization
That's also touched on in the report that old mate posted (referring to base line share variability and reliability) and accounted for at each increment (50% renewables, 90% renewables etc) and renewables are still more feasible. The report also takes into account SMRs and classic nuclear powerplant schemes. This report concerns Australia, which has massive amounts of coast and open land for solar, and literally one medical reactor in the entire country. Nuclear is not an industry here unless you include exporting uranium.
and you have a link to the document?
Gencost has a lot of issues to put it mildly. For example it omits the cost of several large expensive projects (Snowy 2.0, several HVDC lines) that renewables need to scale up. It also majorly overfits generation based on weather data which results in the model adding and removing generation assets from year to year. [This video goes into the details if you're interested.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-GwnPWTwmU)
Nuclear and renewables are apples and oranges. Nuclear can run 24/7. Solar and wind are entirely subject to time of day and climate that they will never be able to replace nuclear. Before you say “but muh batteries” they are unbelievably expensive for the scale of deployment needed and incredibly wasteful when it comes to needing replacement every 10 or so years. Nuclear first, renewables to supplement nuclear when the weather allows.
Batteries used for this kind of thing have longer lives than 10 years. Grid scale batteries do not scale well, but creating microgrids via residential battery backups does, and there is a very viable subsidy path to incentivize installing them.
> they are unbelievably expensive for the scale of deployment needed and incredibly wasteful when it comes to needing replacement every 10 or so years. even compared to nuclear?
Yes. The fact is you need a stable baseline of electricity generation. That's gonna be hydro, coal or nuclear. Hydro is obviously best but it is limited by geography and most countries have built as much as they can. So, for the rest the choice is coal or nuclear.
Why coal when you can use gas? It's way better.
Most places don’t have gas, not a lot of gas in China or India for example. The U.S. converting from coal to gas is mostly due to the fact that we have **a lot** of it right now. But there is insufficient transportation capacity to transport that gas to other places. Logistics are a real thing…
[Take California](https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook#section-demand-trend), "base demand" on a yearly basis is ~15 GW. At peak the Californian demand is ~45 GW. The difference between "base demand" and peak is 30 GW. With a system where intermittent renewables handle all daily, seasonal and weather based variations on top of a nuclear baseload you just confirmed that renewables can also easily handle the baseload. Why on earth would you use extremely expensive nuclear power for the 15 GW "base demand" when the renewables in your system provide double the capacity when they are the most strained? You need to update your stance on batteries to 2024. California now has ~10 GW of batteries with 20-30 GWh of storage. They regularly become the largest producer in the grid during evenings. California’s current rate of battery deployment is 5 GW with 20 GWh of storage a year. Assume a 20 year lifetime. When reaching saturation and recycling as many installations as they build California will have: - 20*5 = 100 GW - 20*20 = 400 GWh California is on track for about 10 hours of storage **at the summer peak** of 45 GW demand. No mean consumption, not anything making it easier. We are talking about not solving the final 0.01% now. I don’t think people appreciate how fast things have changed and where we end up by simply extending todays rate of progress to saturation.
People are starting to drive around in big batteries on wheels. Consumers are willing to pay for batteries put of pocket. Pumped hydro is also something we need more of. [Theres one near me ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blenheim%E2%80%93Gilboa_Hydroelectric_Power_Station) that can store 12000 megawatt-hours. I think these could help entice purple states like Pennsylvania, Virginia and North Carolina into supporting candidates who support addressing climate change. Coal country is perfect for pumped hydro. Good sized mountains, plenty of water, a good midpoint between the cities of the coast, windy plains and sunny south. It also has a workforce whose wheelhouse is being able to carve out tunnels and move massive amounts of rock. Coal is in decline, so giving those folks a place of pride in the new energy mix could win the loyalty of that region for generations.
That's the way it SHOULD work, but all the people and politicians in Appalachia seem to be on the side of more fossil fuel extraction. The people who would benefit the most are the ones keeping it from happening.
why would anyone driving an electric car be ok with dead cars every morning from supplying the grid during renewable downtime? jesus renewable people have to be some of the dumbest people on earth. grids run overnight, and in winter. solar isn't magic fairy dust.
I don't know what you're reading to come to this conclusion, but it's infused with large amounts of speculation. Nuclear is still one of the best ways to generate energy and reduce carbon emissions. China is building one power plant in just under 7 years, and does so with technologies that are much safer than the reactors we are operating right now. China doesn't waste money on things that are inefficient. They're building hydro, nuclear, solar, coal..all of it. A mix is exactly what the west should be aiming for (minus fossil fuel burning). Nuclear is safe, environmentally friendly, sustainable and reliable in terms of power output. It's also cheap over the long run - money spent once will be put to use for many decades.
There's some summarised reports and articles here: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-22/nuclear-power-double-the-cost-of-renewables/103868728 https://www.csiro.au/en/news/all/news/2024/may/csiro-releases-2023-24-gencost-report But I won't claim to be all that knowledge on the topic - it seems like a big factor is that: a) this would be Australia's first nuclear plant, so there's a lot of up front costs countries like China and the US have already done the leg work on. and b) the costs of batteries and renewable energies are steadily declining, whilst the costs associated with nuclear energy don't seem to be following the same trend, making it much less appealing when you look at how a country is gonna reach net 0 in several decades. China also cuts a lot of costs a functioning democracy couldn't get away with, like dumping their nuclear waste into the ocean and burying their heads in the sand about the possible environmental ramifications. But again, I'm not an engineer or even an economist, these are just the finding delivered by my government that I'm sharing my incredibly surface level understanding of, that seem to have been pretty unassailable so far, despite how badly the opposition wants nuclear power to be a thing (the coal mining lobbies need something else to dig up now that coal power is becoming unfashionable), so I don't really know enough about the topic to debate people on any of the finer points.
> **China doesn't waste money on things that are inefficient.** They're building hydro, nuclear, solar, coal..all of it. A mix is exactly what the west should be aiming for (minus fossil fuel burning). oh boy, they are, they suck at it. they are building anything to get more power because they are desperate for more power. they can't pick and chose like we saw when they turned down Australian coal during covid19 blaming and then had power issues and had to shutdown factories and shit not just because of covid, but because they had no power to run them or the rest of the country. they have regular power supply cuts and blocking that juicy australian coal fucked the over when the backup supply ran out in september 2021. https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3150469/china-power-crisis-hammers-smes-firms-upend-production they are now sucking up that sweet sweet australian coal again after the au elections and "stance changes" of the au goverment.
> China doesn't waste money on things that are inefficient. The China that has built giant ghost towns full of buildings nobody lives in?
Nuclear would have been feasible in Australia forty years ago but there was Chernobyl and the issues around reactor safety and waste (both of which have largely been addressed since). The Oil industry also played a huge part in labelling nuclear dangerous to sell their far more toxic products. Between oil and plastics they've destroyed the environment in a very short. Less than fifty years for plastics. I'm a fan of nuclear, or I was of the infrastructure was built and running by 2000 but it's way too fucking late for us now, which is fine as renewable energy is coming whether the kooks like it or not. I mean Dutton won't even release details of how nonsense plan because it's not real and it's about smearing renewables. A bit like the 80's where big oil fucked the planets. Did I say a bit like. I meant exactly like. Edit if someone could recommend me a decent on screen keyboard....
> France is mainly nuclear. The US should do the same Won't ever happen, the oil and gas industry owns too many politicians (predominantly Republicans)
Socialists like Bernie Sanders and AOC want to ban nuclear. As in stop all license renewals on existing plants and halt all new construction. Russian upvote/downvote troll farms supported Bernie's presidential campaign so only the idealistic good things about him were shown on the front page. > "This plan will stop the building of new nuclear power plants and find a real solution to our existing nuclear waste problem. It will also enact a moratorium on nuclear power plant license renewals in the United States to protect surrounding communities. We know that the toxic waste byproducts of nuclear plants are not worth the risks of the technology’s benefit, especially in light of lessons learned from the Fukushima meltdown and the Chernobyl disaster. To get to our goal of 100 percent sustainable energy, we will not rely on any false solutions like nuclear, geoengineering, carbon capture and sequestration, or trash incinerators." https://berniesanders.com/issues/green-new-deal/ Meanwhile Communist China builds 2 coal fired power plants *per week*.
Republicans have been pro nuclear for decades. It's the green lobby on the Democrat side that has historically been opposed to nuclear. IIRC it was only during the 2020 election cycle that the Democrat platform officially began supporting nuclear.
It’s easy to support nuclear now when it will never get built because of the costs. Investors don’t want it because the ROI sucks compared to solar right now.
It's more that the nuclear power industry in the US has been a total financial disaster.
We should prioritize increasing efficiency, renewables, and storage first. Nuclear does provide large amounts of power very consistently so it is good for grid stability. It is also expensive, takes forever to build and theres always that very small but very serious risk of a meltdown. I'd say in the US we should at a minimum replace all existing US nuke plants with new ones. If the original plant had two reactors and adding a third or forth would be practical, we should add those to the new plants.
France is one of a handful of nuclear powered countries that recover useable fuel from spent reactor fuel pellets (which have quite a bit of useable fuel left thanks to the design of reactor fuel pellet poisons + plutonium from normal reactor operations) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Hague_site
*cries quietly as he reads his [GA Power monthly bill](https://www.augustachronicle.com/story/news/environment/2023/12/19/georgia-power-customers-will-pay-7-562-billion-for-plant-vogtle-cost-overruns-nuclear-reactors/71970955007/).
You missed one factor. Negative prices heavily encourage deployment of grid batteries. Grid storage is expanding at an exponential rate, the days of negative prices will soon be behind us
I mentioned batteries
But did you think about batteries?
Did you actually ‘visualize’ batteries?
Did you feel the batteries?
Did you smell the batteries?
Did you taste the batteries?
Did you become the battery?
But did you put the battery down your pee hole?
When I visualize a battery i see a nice pair of lakes at different altitudes with a pumping station in between them. And when the sun shines or the wind blows, the electricity from those turbines and household solar panels is used to pump up water to the top lake which recharges the gravitational battery. And then at night, water is sent back down hill through the dynamos to supply the grid with about an 80% energy recovery. And i feel good. The world would be a much happier place if it had more pumped hydro.
Or any hydro that you can pause and use when other renewables aren't available.
There are big issues with this as well though. This is large scale infrastructure and thus has both a high upfront cost, and a relatively high ongoing maintenance cost compared to something like distributed, networked residential battery backups. There is also increasing concern over the environmental impacts of hydro power in general.
Cabin Creek Colorado
Every year it's a new factory making something new and better for grid storage. Iron-Salt, Iron-Air batteries are not only made with more common materials, they're safer, last longer and also hold a charge for days longer than lithium-ion. Fossil fuels still owns the world otherwise it's so braindead obvious that a mere few billion in storage subsidies would hyper-charge the transition.
But they are all less efficient than lithium. That’s been the biggest problem
If you mean less dense, then that's really not a problem as long as they're cheaper
Talking more about the losses from charging and discharging. The round-trip efficiency is much less
That doesn't really matter for batteries that sit still and don't move. Power density/efficiency only really matters when you have the carry the battery around, i.e. in a car etc.
If the power is half cost at midday or midnight, and you lose 25% of it to inefficiency, but your storage is scalable and dirt cheap, you still come out ahead. Both the battery owner and grid operator (assuming they're not the same entity) profit when when $0.50 of power is bought at peak generation, then 75% of it is sold back for $1 per at peak demand. You lose 25% of the power generated, but you save on the cost to install X non-solar peak capacity. i.e. It only costs fuel (or nothing, if solar/wind at midday exceeds demand already) to generate power when it's not needed and can be stored, but doing so reduces the capital needed for peak capacity, so even losing a significant percentage can still be good. It's only a problem that the loss is close enough to the difference in price (which reflects the difference in demand) that it's not worth the cost of installation/maintenance. And the cheaper the batteries get, the less that matters.
It's been weird to change my mind about grid energy storage. I spent years reading and being excited about all sorts of setups with pumped hydro, gravity batteries, compressed air, smart demand management, continental supergrids... ... and then this year I find that [just plain chemical batteries have snuck up on me](https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-batteries-apr-2024/) while I wasn't paying attention, and that [you could have seen it coming years ago](https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline). Decades ago, if you're Tony Seba. I assume there'll still be places where the other alternatives are useful, but the "haha battery printer go brrr" solution has its own elegance.
> the "haha battery printer go brrr" solution has its own elegance. There's nothing quite like solving a global problem through the simple purity of mass manufacturing.
Supply and demand should take over. Deeply negative prices encourage storage, if storage is overbuilt, it will raise peak demand and encourage more generation resources. Someone smarter than me can likely suggest a ratio of grid storage to peak demand / total daily consumption. Seems like grid storage capacity can't reasonably exceed overnight power demand and peak grid discharge shouldn't exceed the 7-8pm delta between demand and renewable supply.
Gravitational batteries (pumped hydro) can be used to supply the grid for days/months at a time when there is limited wind or sun. The Lake Onslow project in New Zealand is looking at putting a 5Twh battery on to the grid - which would supply the residential needs for 2 million households for 125 days. They describe it as a solution for dry years when snowpack and rainfall doesnt fill the existing standard hydro lakes. The idea is that the Lake Onslow company would simply buy up excess daytime solar and wind to recharge. Overnight it would release for car charging, but it allows all the other lakes/dams to lower their overnight output and keep their storage levels higher into the season. At any time if the price on the electricity market gets too high, they can instantly release and stabilize the price. Its also much cleaner than lithium batteries and provides a recreational lake.
> Gravitational batteries (pumped hydro) can be used to supply the grid for days/months at a time when there is limited wind or sun. The vast majority of areas that are geographically ameniable to such deployments have already been deployed. These are very rare geographic conditions, especially when needing to be within distance of people without impacting them in a major way. Pretty much all hydro capacity - pumped storage or not - is more or less spoken for and built already. In fact, you will see hydro share go down as more marginal dams are removed for environmental reasoning in western nations. The one potentially interesting thing I haven't seen anyone talk about is using existing reservoirs for pumped storage - but I briefly looked into that and even there, there aren't too many areas where it seems to make any sense. Pumped hydro is great and all, but you are talking about what amounts to a rounding error for total global energy storage needs should we go full non-dispatchable.
I've seen articles from December 2023 saying the project is getting cancelled.
The conservatives got into power and axed it.
> Supply and demand should take over. Deeply negative prices encourage storage, if storage is overbuilt, it will raise peak demand and encourage more generation resources. That is awfully close to Factorio not ngl...
We're extremely far away from reaching that delta though. California has peak energy demand between 6pm-9:30pm. 12-3pm barely has more demand than 3am (about 10-15% more), whereas peak demand can be 100% higher than 3am. Sadly the sun isn't really working in our favor. Storage is a must, and building out 60GWh storage to handle the evenings is gonna be absurdly expensive. Not to mention that we simply don't produce batteries on that scale outside of EVs. We need to find a better storage solution. Batteries, that degrade pretty aggressively, are sadly not great.
We really need to use any excess energy that can’t be stored for later use into directly running carbon capture devices
Carbon capture has its place but excess energy should be used to replace fossil fuels. CCS is much further down the list. Charge electric cars and grid batteries or pumped hydro in the daytime.
> because the transmission lines cannot handle the amount of electricity being generated That can be one issue, but normally it is because there is simply no demand for the power.
So anyways a 100% renewable grid requires on overcapacity of something like 400%. That means most of the time there will be an oversupply of electricity and payment for production goes to zero. Who is going to pay to construct the excess capacity required for the 100% renewable grid?
Amazon will bundle your electric bill into Prime and feed ads to your living room's digital display wall.
Even with 400% there are some very complicated period in winter ( low solar , low wind and high demand ). And export/import has some limit , in Europe most of the country get the same solar / wind condition at the same time ( country that can share electricity , not portugal vs norway of course ).
A largish country like France would need like a dozen TWh of storage to make up for when it's not sunny or windy
That's what IMHO is always being hand waived. When you have a working grid and then add some solar/wind to it, these renewables seem ultra cheap, as they can ignore factors like grid capacity, storage and backups as they're all provided by the existing infrastructure. It's like having a kid helping you with painting; it really doesn't matter what they do, the adults will fix whatever mess they make, and finish the work when the kid loses interest. However, once you provide a significant fraction of power with such intermittent energy sources, then the grid must be upgraded, batteries must be installed, and likely you **still** need a lot of backup power generation in winter or long periods of unfavourable weather conditions, or risk blackouts. IMHO the solar/wind renewable deal is only good when the adults are ready to take over, and huge investments are done to provide guard rails, safety nets and supervision to make up for weather induced and seasonal tantrums.
>Negative electricity prices are more common than you'd think IIRC from grade school, all electrons have a negative charge.
My man! Nice!
Texas also has a demand-response program. For example, suppose you had a large predictable consumption of energy, like computing. As long as energy prices are economical, you would consume as much as you can. But to incentivize those consumers to not consume when there is a shortage of energy, consumers that choose to be in the demand-response program can get paid to stop consuming. It can be a lot cheaper and more efficient than building out batteries, and it helps mitigate the negative energy prices issue in the same way batteries can. The only objection is that very few consumers can adjust their consumption so quickly, other than cryptominers. But hypothetically, it could be any large consumer that fits the requirements for demand-response.
Yes, but why doesn't the renewable want to turn off? Really, they should be turning off well above $0/MWh, because their opex is greater than 0. ~$5/MWh, perhaps? A common reason why they don't want to is non-market revenue streams. I don't know the specifics in France, but you often get some form of "green" credits from renewable generation, and so you can pay up to the amount you're getting in credits. So you have the wind turbines incurring wear and tear, but still running ahead of plants that actually have negative running costs. It's a good example of poor outcomes from well intentioned subsidies.
Wind and solar can produce below their opex because their marginal price is essentially 0 (no need to pay for fuel). Let’s say your wind farm needs to operate at 30€/MWh to be profitable. The current spot price is 10€/MWh. You can shut off/curtail, and not get anything, or you can keep producing, and at least make a little bit of revenue. As for the negative prices, those are actually likely caused by nuclear reactors, who cannot curtail/shut off their production as easily. Shutting off a nuclear plant and cold starting it later can put stress on the equipment and reduce it’s maintenance intervals. So some nuclear plants would rather pay to keep producing electricity than to throttle down, provided the negative prices are a short term thing
This happens quite frequently, especially during times of low demand. It's not unusual to see negative prices in the UK when the windfarms are going full whack but everyone's in bed. The old electricity bill never seems to go down though...
You're on the wrong tariff/supplier in that case! Octopus have a flexi-tariff that goes negative at peak renewable generation times.
This is why they want to build additional transmission lines to the continent which should stabilize prices a bit.
Look into Octopus Agile. Whether it will actually benefit you or not depends on your particular usage, but in my case I'm paying an average of 12p/kWh due to load shifting.
Unfortunately building generators is only 50% of the work. You need to be able to transmit and potentially store the generated energy. We could add a load of electrolysis plants near large amounts of renewables to produce hydrogen or other useful biproducts when this happens.
Negative Prices are a symptom of insufficient battery storage. We’re at the point where there are enough renewables that they will occasionally peak out during daylight hours. Without adding equivalent storage on a 1:1 basis with electrical production from now on these periods will continue to get worse. The more renewables take up a larger and larger segment of the grid the amount of storage increases at a parabolic rate. Up to 30% little storage is needed, at 60% 1:1 is necessary, at 90% 2:1 battery storage, at 100% 3:1 is the minimum of what is required. Essentially we’re crossing the 30% threshold now.
This isn't an investment issue it's a technical one: existing battery tech isn't suitable for grid scale storage. Round trip inverter losses alone are a significant barrier for AC generated power (PV could skip this if the batteries are local). And it's not like people aren't trying: inventing a viable grid scale storage solution would turn any company immediately into Nvidia. Unfortunately wishing something existed is not the same as actually inventing it. Pumped hydro and similar storage schemes are what is needed in the short term, unfortunately these tend to be environmentally catastrophic and hugely unpopular so rarely get built in the west. What is really needed is joined up thinking: there's no point in pouring state money into building more green generating capacity if it's just going to sit idle. The money could instead be spent on more R&D to solve the other problems.
>Round trip inverter losses alone are a significant barrier for AC generated power (PV could skip this if the batteries are local) Who cares about the losses when the energy is free or even cost negative? "Oh no, I'm only getting half of the energy I am being paid to store and that would go to waste entirely if I didn't store it. The horror."
Because you aren’t really being paid to store it, you’re being paid to *give it back* after the storage period. So if you lose half of it to conversion in the process, you only give half of it back and only make half as much money to cover your capital costs. And that’s assuming the cost of incoming power is negligible. Yes, we’re discussing a news event where that happened, but the purpose of building these is to *prevent* those events and stabilize the price. On average you’ll still need to pay for the power you input into the battery, which means the output sale price needs to cover the input cost for the power you keep AND the power you lose to conversion. As the percentage lost to conversion increases, that gets dramatically more difficult.
True
This is a shit like incredibly shit way of looking at transmission losses. It not only about the fucking pricing
We have a [pump storage solution here in Ireland that was built in the late 60s-early 70s](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turlough_Hill_Power_Station). It's an incredible place to visit and is quietly located near Glendalough, a site of natural beauty, without many people noticing at all. I would love to see more of this technology deployed as it doesn't require chemical battery technologies with fixed or decaying lifespans that we're so used to today. Bonus: the top lake looks like a scene from a James Bond action scene.
The UK is building loads of pumped hydro at the moment. Scotland has many lochs located at different altitudes so it’s simply a matter of pumping water up and down the lochs. Loch Ness already has one and there’s a few companies that are thinking about building some more.
Well that's fine except it only has a capacity of 300MW and 75% efficiency. The article is talking about 6GW daily demand changes, so you'd need twenty of them. Most countries don't have the topography to do that. It's also designed for the opposite scenario: it fills slowly using off peak power and generates for a short time at peak. Presumably it could also use peak power to fill and generate slowly at off peak but the engineering requirements are going to be rather different.
Actually it's constantly filling and draining. It's used to regulate the frequency of the grid. I've seen it adjust in real time.
California’s current rate of battery deployment is 5 GW with 20 GWh of storage a year. Assume a 20 year lifetime. When reaching saturation and recycling as many installations as they build California will have: - 20*5 = 100 GW - 20*20 = 400 GWh During the summer peak California has a demand of 45 GW. At the spring/autumn minimum California has a demand of 15 GW. California is on track for about 10 hours of storage **at the summer peak**. No mean consumption, not anything making it easier. We are talking about not solving the final 0.01% now. I don’t think people appreciate how fast things have changed and where we end up by simply extending todays rate of progress to saturation. The progress is mind bogglingly fast.
I'd say sitting idle is better than burning fossil fuels until we find better way. Besides, that excess power usually finds a way to be soaked up by someone.
Negative prices are even more a symptom of inadequate transmission lines. Unfortunately, construction of transmission lines have to go through certain monopoly utility companies that have no interest in paying more for electricity so there is little incentive to build them.
unless you are adding transmission to other countries that can use the free energy, adding more transmission lines doesn't do anything. ' You can only produce as much power as the grid uses.
Actually, it can help average out local weather issues. Just because there is a lot of sun in Texas doesn't mean it's the same everywhere else in the US.
> Negative prices are even more a symptom of inadequate transmission lines. Primarily because of a lack of demand. You could always argue that the power could be transported somewhere else, maybe even further way, next country, next continent, but everything has a limit.
It can't even be moved around the US, one of the most advanced countries. It's a problem that needs solving and politics are of course hindering this progress.
If everyone had an EV that was charging and connected to the Grid that would solve this battery issue. You get a car, and a battery all in one. And the discharge/charge cycle could be set so that it would help extend the batteries use life. This is the only feasible way of achieving that much energy storage. That or a gravity battery made of water.
That can't be right. My politicians tell me they live in a socialist hellscape over there.
Meanwhile Texas and California, two states with the highest number of renewable energy, also have some of the highest electricity prices in the US.
There's a difference between wholesale power prices and retail power prices. California especially has been seeing negative wholesale power prices for years. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-power-natgas-prices-turn-negative-texas-california-arizona-2024-05-07/ https://futurism.com/the-byte/california-solar-electricity-prices-negative
What is the practical difference for your average domestic consumer though?
It's like buying coffee. Coffee prices (the commodity) can be very volatile. As a coffee consumer - you never see these price swings. Retail power prices are structured as a fixed rate. You pay well above wholesale some of the time and well below wholesale some of the time.
if you're familiar with spot prices and futures on commodities, like soy beans, etc, it's pretty similar. when you buy and sell futures and/or commodities, you're buying and selling a contract that you will deliver or take delivery of physical goods of a certain quantity, so it's not as simple as consumer purchases.
No matter how cheap energy itself gets what you are paying for is the actual physical grid, and texas and california have a whole lot of land to cover in that grid.
France is larger than California and only just smaller than Texas
France has as much people as above states combined and population is much more concentrated in hot spots. Zoning laws in the US is increasing the price for infrastructure a lot.
> population is much more concentrated in hot spots Shouldn't that make building an electricity grid easier? > Zoning laws European infrastructure projects are insanely complex. There is practically no government owned land and certainly no unowned land to run through. EU law demands environmental studies, all kinds of other bureaucracy, public consultations, complex planning laws, archeological studies, and there's a whole framework around fair tendering for private infrastructure contracts. The idea it's somehow easier to build infrastructure in the EU is crazy.
>Shouldn't that make building an electricity grid easier? I wouldn't call it easier, just more energy efficient and cheaper to maintain. It's more complex to build in more heavily populated area but it's cheaper in the long run. >European infrastructure projects are insanely complex. There is practically no government owned land and certainly no unowned land to run through. EU law demands environmental studies, all kinds of other bureaucracy, required public consultations, complex planning laws, archeological studies. The idea it's somehow easier to build infrastructure in the EU is crazy. I agree but bureaucracy goes both ways. No company will charge you thousands of euros for electricity and European blackouts are extremely rare because of safety and energy regulations. A blackout and cheap infrastructure can literally kill people, I would choose the more expensive and save variant. But as it's mostly the case : good for the people is bad for money.
Yup, and this is the biggest reason why large, centralized power projects like Nuclear have an inevitable diminishing return. Grid infrastructure maintenance and distribution is about 50% of the cost of getting electricity into your home. A much better solution to all this is to move in the direction of highly localized micro-grids, where solar and residential battery storage create virtual power stations. This way you significantly reduce the transmission overhead for most power, since most of it is generated, stored and used locally, and load balancing happens regionally. You still need interconnects between microgrids, but these can be much smaller, since each microgrid will connect to dozens of local peers rather than one or two giant ones. Over time this comes to resemble a circuit-switched power network.
I'll reassure you, the article is about market prices, not consumer prices. The price for consumers in France is fixed by contract (it can't go up in a snowstorm, for example), but it has increased by 50% in a few years and will probably never go down.
> price for consumers in France is fixed by contract (it can go up in a snowstorm, for example) **can't** go up in a snow storm ;)
CAISO and ERCOT both posted negative DA clearing prices for >1 hour at various hubs today
California has to import most of its fossil fuel which keeps prices high when wind and solar aren't producing. Prices in TX are inexcusable. Not only does Texas have vast wind and solar resources, they have so much natural gas as a byproduct of oil drilling that it's often flared off. Texas prices are pure corruption. With it's nearly unlimited renewable and natural gas resources it should have the cheapest electricity in nation.
TX is also huge and empty, which means people in the cities are literally subsidizing millions of tons of copper wire being run to eighteen random people in bumfuck nowhere whose primary economic contribution is custom horse blankets and political animus. It doesn't matter how cheap you can make electricity when you still need physical infrastructure to move it around on the macro-grid.
TX is an interesting study in how not to do energy production. Prices went up with deregulation, counter to any principle or common sense. They put wind/solar in the wrong locations, preventing 24 hour a day renewable energy production. The amount paid to property owners for wins turbine placement is protected by NDAs. Transmission lines haven't been upgraded to handle all the build, so the grid is continuously backlogged. Basically, corruption...
> Prices went up with deregulation, counter to any principle or common sense. Next you're gonna say cutting taxes will lead to a huge boom in wealth for the middle class! I am shocked, shocked I tell you that energy firms shirked their responsibility to upgrade the grid, in favor of more profit now, at the cost to consumers later. And that there was massive consolidation leading to less competition
> Prices went up with deregulation, counter to any principle or common sense You mean as it happens every time a few years down the road
And they want to add fees on top.
Blame the states, not the cheap technology.
Texas’s power is actually just below average (14 ¢/kWh vs 16)
Friendly reminder that when LNG companies had surplus resources they would destroy them instead of keeping it in storage because it would drive the price of fuel down rapidly.
Please sell it to Italy at lower prices
Corporations: Negative prices but we're still increasing your bills this month.
In UK, a few energy companies will inform you the day before an expected rise in renewable generation and will let you use as much as you want for free.
which ones, im with british gas and never heard of this.
Octopus agile
Octopus. You need a smart meter and they can accurately measure how much electricity you used during the time period. Then will add it as credit to your bill at the end of the month. During winter they also reward you for using less energy than you would, during times the grid is expected to be used a lot.
wtf, from Australia
If the electricity price is negative does that mean that the power company is going to pay me?
If you have access to a tariff where you pay the wholesale price directly, then yes.
Sure, if you want to sign up for a plan where you will get charged $15/kWh on occasion.
This is not a negative. This is a temporary lack of imagination on the part of the old school utility companies. Energy is kind of what our civilization is built upon. As energy has become cheaper and more plentiful, our civilization has gotten bigger and stronger. This is not a sign to cut back on renewable, but to keep pushing forward. In most regions, a 4x renewable capacity results in closing in on 100% renewable. France is a little weird with lots of wonderful nuclear. The key is to find something really nifty to do with the excess but irregular power. Something which can be turned off and on as the capacity is there. For example: * Taking quasi recyclables such as plastic waste and turning it into diesel, or plastic precursors. * Taking old asphalt, and with a bit of cracking turning it into new asphalt. * Recycling old steel into much higher quality steel. * Refining low grade ore into a high grade end product. This can allow for the reopening of domestic mining. * Storing it in inefficient ways. The goal is that the storage medium should be cheap, but the charging discharging cycle doesn't have to be all that efficient as the goal is to mop up the otherwise wasted energy. * Some recycling/ore refining may even be related to the grid. Things such as recycling old lithium from batteries, or refining rare earth/lithium ores which might not be normal commercial grade. Then producing batteries to then store extra grid power. * Many factories have a step which uses piles of power. A bit of a rethink of how these factories are set up could result in the power hungry step being run full tilt while power is free, resulting in a surplus supply of that step while energy is higher. The rest of the factory then uses this surplus. I've seen factories do this with time of day pricing where they only ran certain machines at night while the rest of the "just in time" factory ran 24h/day. It only takes a bit of imagination to find all kinds of beneficial ways to use this kind of surplus energy in ways where intermittent availability isn't a problem. The key is to not somehow preserve the old ways by somehow preventing incentives for this oversupply. Used correctly, this could be a huge quality of life improvement for France.
Isn’t this just an extension of the time of use pricing structure for consumer? Use electricity for your needs when it’s cheap during the day and cut back when it’s expensive (evening peak).
>This is not a negative. This is a temporary [negative] Cut the "inspirational" talk. This can be made useful by using the excess electricity. But *at the moment*, it's a negative outcome of having excess electricity.
Its not inspirational. Pump water into a reservoir during excess energy times. Dam its exit off and then hydro power the reservoir during high demand times. Literally a hydro battery. Yes there are geographical and regional challenges. But again we could do these things.
france, suffer from success
Dammit France! Not again.
One would have thought by now energy would be one of the few "fundamental" things akin to rights. (Yes, I know what rights are. I am not saying they're 1:1)
Happens in the UK. People get paid to use energy. You have to be on a certain smart meter tarrif, which costs a little bit more. So overall it's not a big saving, unless you can really take advantage of the negative prices.
Good for France. I wish California had that problem. (Who am I kidding? PG&E charges you even for just *thinking* about electricity.)
You mean the France with the world’s smartest and best nuclear power implementation, right? Because that will always be the real story behind the story. France bet on nuclear and won. Anything it generates from anything else is just icing on the nuclear cake. More nuclear. More mini-reactors onsite, especially for large business sites. Nuclear is the way forward. Everything else is supplemental.
Electricity prices turn negative - does that mean they are now paying you to use their electricity.
I'm French and it has no effect on the consumer. We purchase contracts at a fixed rate.
You don’t have spot price contracts in France?
A lot of businesses have them, but SMEs & domestic supply contracts are virtually all stillon some kind of regulated tariff (which are cheaper than neighbouring countries due to the domestic nuclear production volumes used to underwrite the tariffs, but have still trended up along with wholesale prices). Now that most houses have "smart" meters, there's not really a material barrier to spot pricing
I'm from the UK, I regularly use the negative-prices. Charging batteries from the grid even if I have solar, and also as a joke I turn on some space-heaters to heat-up outdoors. When it's very windy, that's when we get negative prices, solar isn't a factor here yet.
Not in France, because they all have fixed price contracts. In the Netherlands we also have the option of dynamic contracts: your prices will differ per day, or per hour. Especially the per hour contracts are interesting if you have solar, battery storage, and a bit of software to control when you save or sell your energy. Battery capacity prices aren't there yet to make buying and selling power profitable... **yet**, but for optimizing home usage it can do miracles for your power bill. All home appliances have start delays, so before you leave your house you make sure your dishwasher and washingmachine do their thing ~15:00 in the afternoon when power is free. If you have some sort of smart home you can set it up to that sort of stuff automatically, including heating/cooling your house when the energy is free. And charge your (car) batteries when it's free/cheap and use that power to bridge the expensive moments.
Yeah, although negative electricity prices are not necessarily equal to negative electricity cost for consumers When various taxes and tariffs are accounted for. In Denmark we occasionally have negative spot prices but the taxes and tariffs are so high that ordinary consumers rarely enjoy it. However, some people with EV home charging or electric heating enjoy a tax reduction on their electricity price to a degree where using electricity at negative spot prices might actually pay the consumer. As the negative prices are almost always in the summer, you’ll have people charging their EVs and blasting their heat pumps (AC-mode) at full power with open windows and getting paid for it.
Tends to happen in Scandinavia as well when it’s windy. Unless we can store the excess, wind is not that great.
Batteries might do the trick. Or pumping water reservoirs.
In Norway we pump water up into the water reservoirs when it makes sense. Typically with negative prices or when prices are cheap. The water reservoirs functions like a battery.
It's not that bad for us since we have hydro. Unless the reservoirs are full Norway and Sweden just limits flow through their plants and saves water for days when wind is low.
Meanwhile there are “no solar 🚫” signs in my area of Alabama.
Should be “🚫brains”
Awsome! Now build more energy storage.
Wish I had that problem
Yes. My power price is sometimes negative. Usually when it's sunny as fuck and I'm exporting power to the grid via solar panels on my roof. When the price is negative I *pay* to export and there's nothing I can do to stop that, other than turn on as many power sucking devices as I can. It's stupid.
Could this not be abated by having a large Tesla arc near the renewables? I mean yes it's wasted electricity because it wasn't used, but it's better than frying the grid
Not to be a negative Nancy but the correct way of seeing zero/negative wholesale prices is not that it's "free", but rather that it's "worthless on the margin". Negative prices aren't a good thing. That being said I'm expecting the combo of batteries, dynamic retail pricing, and (hopefully soon) thermal storage will abate this.
So now it's the trick to capture and retain the energy ,like batteries , hydrogen , methane and use those whenever there is a shortage
Yeah, happens here in Finland too and it is an issue. It also goes the opposite way if weather isn't great for renevables and it'll result in 300% prices.
Negative prices are nice, we have them sometimes where I live too, mostly on windy days. And some people are mad because the prices aren't stable lol.
The truer reality being that the electricity companies are corrupt asf and don’t need to charge you even 5% if what they do
This is VASTLY due to nuclear energy. Stop trying to give renewables credit for what nuclear does. Both are important but nuclear is far better in many ways, and needs more widespread attention.
And all our prices just went up...hooray for 26 new coal mines! */cries in Australian*