This gets posted regularly on Lemmy, and while the economic take is tone-deaf at best, there’s a real issue with generating more power than you can use. You can’t just dump grid power — it needs to go somewhere. The grid needs to consume as much as it generates at all times or else bad things happen.
There are of course solutions, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an engineering challenge to implement.
Figuring out what to do with kilowatts is easy, but figuring out what to do with megawatts, at the drop of a hat, is substantially harder.
Sorry, but Johnny Oil with a shotgun to my head disagrees with your math. and while I never looked at the numbers myself, I am inclined to agree with him that such a plan would be disturbingly “unprofitable”.
-anyone around western spheres of influence in the vicinity of any sort of lever of power to authorize such changes in infrastructure investment
someone downvotes every sane storage suggestion in this thread. wish the chickenshit would argue their premise instead of just negging actual solutions that are working in real life.
There are only so many places where grid level pumped storage hydroelectricity works, and the capital and environmental costs are non negligible for most new locations.
The problem we have to solve is that the energy storage that’s built into the grid was built before widespread home solar adoption. We need new energy dumps, and those cost money. Of course the obvious answer is taxes, but good luck convincing Americans to pay for vital infrastructure
shit like this burns power fast if you need to clear capacity. just ground it. i’m not that smart of an engineer and this is not that hard of a problem. the hard part is the grid, the interconnectedness, the load balancing, and that’s already done.
You can dump megawatts. But there is no need for that. It’s not like solar panel inverters will just keep increasing voltage until they can push the power into the grid. They have an upper limit.
The extra power issue is not that hard to solve, when you get close you can start mandating the inverters to have smart connection to the grid, so they stop providing power to the grid if demand is satisfied.
Maybe I don’t know enough about electricity at large scale, but at small scale you can just cut the circuit. Electricity isn’t like water that just sits in the pipe when you close a valve, right?
It is a lot more like water than you think. The solution of “just cut the circuit” is like solving the problem of overflowing storm drains by “just plug the pipe”.
The power has to go somewhere. If you don’t do anything about it, the voltage in the cables will rise until things start to fry. Real world power balancing involves adjusting the output of power plants (e.g. how much fuel to burn) in response to changes, and in some cases, dumping power into the ground as safely as possible. This problem gets complicated when power grids span vast distances and involve many different power plants that all need to be in sync or things catch on fire.
In the case of solar power, this is part of why improved large-scale battery technology is so important. It lets you absorb the excess power at peak generation times, and then release that power at night.
That’s exactly what is done. The electricity market operator orders solar farms to limit how much they generate, home solar gets told not to export any power, it is done automatically
It is much easier to stop or limit solar power production compared to other technologies
The economics of that are great. Negative power prices are an incentive to store energy and get payed for that. Then release the energy again later in the day or at night to earn money on it again.
Yes, and plenty of companies are doing just that. The effect is that as they charge the batteries, they increase demand and that increases the electricity price a bit. Grid doesn’t tip over and everybody wins!
Trouble is that at some point they run out of batteries. Batteries are expensive. And when they run out of batteries, the demand drops and the grid has to figure out where to dump the excess. And the price drops again.
Pumped hydro is a more scalable solution, but it’s slow to react and even that has its limits.
Then release the energy again later in the day or at night to earn money on it again.
This process is called “arbitrage” btw. Take one thing when it’s cheap and sell it some other time/place where it’s valued at a higher cost, and make a profit that way. It’s one of the foundations of trade in general.
Like any hydroelectrics it has large environment impact and dam failures tend to be the deadliest industrial disasters when they happen.
Also most good locations have already been used. You cannot just build it wherever (without insane costs). Pumped hydro is hardly a solution here.
Pumped hydro isn’t the same as a hydroelectric dam. Because both reservoirs are engineered and you don’t have the concrete wall as the single point of failure, you don’t have the same risks involved. Pump Hydro can be whatever size you want and spread out to distribute the grid load.
Also, are dam failures worse then Climate Change or are they just more dramatic?
Then you either have small cheap and safe, without much capacity (so you need many of those), or big, with the problems of the big hydroelectric projects.
Of course pumped hydro has and will have its place in the grid, but it cannot solve all the energy storage problems.
You could store solar energy as heat in sand and use turbines(if you have water) or Sterling Engines(if you don’t) to spine a generator. Peltiers are a solid state method to convert heat to electricity, but they aren’t very efficient.
No. No no no. You can literally turn solar generation off, nearly instantly. It’s called curtailment and it’s done all the time in saturated markets. Older residential inverters don’t have the reactive technology, but residential solar is a drop in the bucket compared to utility-scale solar.
Distributed vs centralized has no impact here. It’s all about excess power across the entire grid.
Sure, the solar system I own generates a few kilowatts and if I’m home cooking or running AC, I use almost all of it. But if I’m not home, my AC is off, fridge isn’t running at that moment, all of that power gets dumped onto the grid. My neighbor’s down the street do the same thing, their next door neighbor, the houses all in my neighborhood, and across the entire city, we’re all doing this. A hundred or thousand homes generating excess few kilowatts adds up to megawatts
Sure, the energy company pays a pittance for the energy I put onto the grid, but it’s still payment. I’m not gonna put a dummy load on my house to not export power
But if I’m not home, my AC is off, fridge isn’t running at that moment, all of that power gets dumped onto the grid.
And if it couldn’t do that, your solar panels would warm up a little bit and nothing else of consequence would happen. Ditto for your neighbors’ solar panels, and everybody else’s. Whoop-de-do.
It wouldn’t even cause a net increase in the urban heat island effect, because if that energy weren’t hitting solar panels it would just be heating up people’s roofs instead.
Sure, the energy company pays a pittance for the energy I put onto the grid, but it’s still payment. I’m not gonna put a dummy load on my house to not export power
You’re conflating an technological problem with an economic one. The only reason you claim my proposal wouldn’t work is because you don’t want it to because it cuts into your profit.
Short term is grounding the power. Medium teen is building up storage or electricity intensive industries that can start up and shut down based on electricity swings.
Oh they absolutely do! My only point is that grid supply must equal grid demand. There are many ways to achieve this, as folks here have pointed out.
Throttling power generation (turning off/disconnecting PV from grid for example), and storage (chemical, heat, or hydro battery) are all established technologies, they just need to be implemented properly to avoid supply/demand mismatch.
You can cover them with a sheet
You can pump water. You can do desalination. You can overcool houses during summer so the house is pleasantly chilly when you get home. Plenty of industrial processes already set the machines in-phase. You can do cool displays arcing it through the fucking air.
Youre inventing problems so your stonks stay valuable.
this is not the intractable problem you make it out to be.
there’s a fantastic way to smooth out production peaks, and hey, it fixes the lulls - it’s called storage. battery storage can take all kinds of forms, from pumped hydro to large stationary chemical batteries. we’re finally starting to see large rollouts of storage and it’s one of the few bits of light in a dark future.
It doesn’t even have to be stored in a way that can be turned back into electricity. Electrical heaters are damn near 100% efficient except for transmission losses, and there are tons of industrial processes that can store and use that heat.
When you short something to ground, it’s everything in between that needs to dissipate the heat. Think about what “sending it to ground” means—it means you connect the hot to the ground. But with what do you connect the two? A wire? Sure, but you better hope that wire can dissipate all that power, because that’s what it’ll try to do.
You can’t just “dump power on the ground.” That’s not how it works.
So, I’m not good at these things, what you’re saying is that if I take a 240V cable in the street and just shove it into the ground, the cable will end up uh… melting? Trying to saturate itself until it matches the resistance of the ground or something?
If it’s a low resistance path to ground, it’ll get very very toasty! If it’s a lousy ground though, then it won’t…but it also won’t consume any power, so it’s not an effective way of scrubbing off electricity.
A good ground (low resistance) is found in your household wiring (the ground and/or the neutral). Of you short to that…well…you can guess what will happen! (Let’s hope you have proper circuit breakers.)
This gets posted regularly on Lemmy, and while the economic take is tone-deaf at best, there’s a real issue with generating more power than you can use. You can’t just dump grid power — it needs to go somewhere. The grid needs to consume as much as it generates at all times or else bad things happen.
There are of course solutions, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an engineering challenge to implement.
Figuring out what to do with kilowatts is easy, but figuring out what to do with megawatts, at the drop of a hat, is substantially harder.
Peak energy production would be a good time to train the damn llms instead of building natural gas power plant I guess.
Sorry, but Johnny Oil with a shotgun to my head disagrees with your math. and while I never looked at the numbers myself, I am inclined to agree with him that such a plan would be disturbingly “unprofitable”.
-anyone around western spheres of influence in the vicinity of any sort of lever of power to authorize such changes in infrastructure investment
Yes but that would be woke soy and gay. You dont want to get gay woke soy in your ai. Thats against like the entire point of the thing!
Solar panels need an aperture.
Again, though, using gravity batteries or pumped hydro is a great way to manage excess juice, though these are expensive options.
They still cost much less than evacuating the entire coast line of the world when we finish melting the Greenland and Antarctic land ice.
Batteries? Boil water? Anything?
Use excess to boil water for steam turbines. Solved. Big oil has INSANE propaganda.
I have played factorio so im an expert. Just boil billions of gallons of water and store the steam for as long as you need with zero loss of enegry.
Bam
You just took the excess energy to generate more energy with it?!?
Steam store in tank. Tank lose little-to-lot depend on how long. Use steam night when no sun.
Or
Move water to higher tank from lower tank. When needed pour high tank through generator to low tank. Repeat.
someone downvotes every sane storage suggestion in this thread. wish the chickenshit would argue their premise instead of just negging actual solutions that are working in real life.
No, the hot steam is for onsen. It’s hot-tub baths, kinda. Very comfy, very recommendable. 10/10.
we figured out this problem centuries ago it is called capacitors. long term it is called batteries
Of course. Like I said, we know how to do it, but it’s still an engineering feat to get it done.
Neither of which grow on trees.
Edit: well I guess lemons grow on trees and those are batteries if you try hard enough…
my dude gravity is a battery if you know how to use it
There are only so many places where grid level pumped storage hydroelectricity works, and the capital and environmental costs are non negligible for most new locations.
That’s only one method of using gravity
The problem we have to solve is that the energy storage that’s built into the grid was built before widespread home solar adoption. We need new energy dumps, and those cost money. Of course the obvious answer is taxes, but good luck convincing Americans to pay for vital infrastructure
That relies on them not already being full and enough of them existing
shit like this burns power fast if you need to clear capacity. just ground it. i’m not that smart of an engineer and this is not that hard of a problem. the hard part is the grid, the interconnectedness, the load balancing, and that’s already done.
That would actually be sci-fi as fuck, and I’m now 100% for it. I want power plants to have constantly zapping Tesla coils
i was mostly just thinking arc gap sparking bullshit but tesla coils playing music for the workers and running the PA system. yesss now we are cooking
Reverse lightning rods.
You can dump megawatts. But there is no need for that. It’s not like solar panel inverters will just keep increasing voltage until they can push the power into the grid. They have an upper limit.
Basically I don’t see your point
The extra power issue is not that hard to solve, when you get close you can start mandating the inverters to have smart connection to the grid, so they stop providing power to the grid if demand is satisfied.
Maybe I don’t know enough about electricity at large scale, but at small scale you can just cut the circuit. Electricity isn’t like water that just sits in the pipe when you close a valve, right?
It is a lot more like water than you think. The solution of “just cut the circuit” is like solving the problem of overflowing storm drains by “just plug the pipe”.
The power has to go somewhere. If you don’t do anything about it, the voltage in the cables will rise until things start to fry. Real world power balancing involves adjusting the output of power plants (e.g. how much fuel to burn) in response to changes, and in some cases, dumping power into the ground as safely as possible. This problem gets complicated when power grids span vast distances and involve many different power plants that all need to be in sync or things catch on fire.
In the case of solar power, this is part of why improved large-scale battery technology is so important. It lets you absorb the excess power at peak generation times, and then release that power at night.
It’s not only possible but also required already. The system needs to be able to shut itself off to protect the grid.
That’s exactly what is done. The electricity market operator orders solar farms to limit how much they generate, home solar gets told not to export any power, it is done automatically
It is much easier to stop or limit solar power production compared to other technologies
The economics of that are great. Negative power prices are an incentive to store energy and get payed for that. Then release the energy again later in the day or at night to earn money on it again.
Yes, and plenty of companies are doing just that. The effect is that as they charge the batteries, they increase demand and that increases the electricity price a bit. Grid doesn’t tip over and everybody wins!
Trouble is that at some point they run out of batteries. Batteries are expensive. And when they run out of batteries, the demand drops and the grid has to figure out where to dump the excess. And the price drops again.
Pumped hydro is a more scalable solution, but it’s slow to react and even that has its limits.
What you are saying is factually correct, why the down votes I don’t understand.
Load dumping is not really a big problem as any fail over solutions have some dumping capacity. Just let it heat a big ass resistor somewhere.
Lots of people are offended by people speaking in un-convoluted, direct ways. I’ve made that experience many times.
This process is called “arbitrage” btw. Take one thing when it’s cheap and sell it some other time/place where it’s valued at a higher cost, and make a profit that way. It’s one of the foundations of trade in general.
a giant flywheel for every town!
Pumped Hydro is a pretty safe storage method using preexisting technology if you have hills in the area.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PH0IJ-_qOI
i don’t want safe, i want DANGER!
Store it as compared air in steel tanks buried underneath your home. No protective coating.
why not hydrogen?
Already done and he hasn’t blown himself up yet.
https://hydrogenhouseproject.org/index.html
sounds like he’s not even trying then
Giant flywheels are also safe. Great for smoothing out energy generation from a fickle source as well.
not if you leave them uncovered!
Like any hydroelectrics it has large environment impact and dam failures tend to be the deadliest industrial disasters when they happen. Also most good locations have already been used. You cannot just build it wherever (without insane costs). Pumped hydro is hardly a solution here.
Pumped hydro isn’t the same as a hydroelectric dam. Because both reservoirs are engineered and you don’t have the concrete wall as the single point of failure, you don’t have the same risks involved. Pump Hydro can be whatever size you want and spread out to distribute the grid load.
Also, are dam failures worse then Climate Change or are they just more dramatic?
Then you either have small cheap and safe, without much capacity (so you need many of those), or big, with the problems of the big hydroelectric projects.
Of course pumped hydro has and will have its place in the grid, but it cannot solve all the energy storage problems.
Apparently you can do something similar with sand if you live in a desert.
Thermal sand batteries are a thing, I think?
That was some solution talked about on Undecided.
Gravity Batteries? They’re much, much easier using water compared to solid masses.
You could store solar energy as heat in sand and use turbines(if you have water) or Sterling Engines(if you don’t) to spine a generator. Peltiers are a solid state method to convert heat to electricity, but they aren’t very efficient.
No. No no no. You can literally turn solar generation off, nearly instantly. It’s called curtailment and it’s done all the time in saturated markets. Older residential inverters don’t have the reactive technology, but residential solar is a drop in the bucket compared to utility-scale solar.
So what you’re saying is that if it’s distributed enough (say, on the roofs of houses, sized to serve the needs of the occupants) it’s not a problem.
Distributed vs centralized has no impact here. It’s all about excess power across the entire grid.
Sure, the solar system I own generates a few kilowatts and if I’m home cooking or running AC, I use almost all of it. But if I’m not home, my AC is off, fridge isn’t running at that moment, all of that power gets dumped onto the grid. My neighbor’s down the street do the same thing, their next door neighbor, the houses all in my neighborhood, and across the entire city, we’re all doing this. A hundred or thousand homes generating excess few kilowatts adds up to megawatts
Sure, the energy company pays a pittance for the energy I put onto the grid, but it’s still payment. I’m not gonna put a dummy load on my house to not export power
And if it couldn’t do that, your solar panels would warm up a little bit and nothing else of consequence would happen. Ditto for your neighbors’ solar panels, and everybody else’s. Whoop-de-do.
It wouldn’t even cause a net increase in the urban heat island effect, because if that energy weren’t hitting solar panels it would just be heating up people’s roofs instead.
You’re conflating an technological problem with an economic one. The only reason you claim my proposal wouldn’t work is because you don’t want it to because it cuts into your profit.
Short term is grounding the power. Medium teen is building up storage or electricity intensive industries that can start up and shut down based on electricity swings.
Why wouldn’t batteries work?
Oh they absolutely do! My only point is that grid supply must equal grid demand. There are many ways to achieve this, as folks here have pointed out.
Throttling power generation (turning off/disconnecting PV from grid for example), and storage (chemical, heat, or hydro battery) are all established technologies, they just need to be implemented properly to avoid supply/demand mismatch.
You can cover them with a sheet You can pump water. You can do desalination. You can overcool houses during summer so the house is pleasantly chilly when you get home. Plenty of industrial processes already set the machines in-phase. You can do cool displays arcing it through the fucking air.
Youre inventing problems so your stonks stay valuable.
I feel like a 4g cellphone plan and a shutoff switch would do the trick. You can control what is being generated in real time
this is not the intractable problem you make it out to be.
there’s a fantastic way to smooth out production peaks, and hey, it fixes the lulls - it’s called storage. battery storage can take all kinds of forms, from pumped hydro to large stationary chemical batteries. we’re finally starting to see large rollouts of storage and it’s one of the few bits of light in a dark future.
It doesn’t even have to be stored in a way that can be turned back into electricity. Electrical heaters are damn near 100% efficient except for transmission losses, and there are tons of industrial processes that can store and use that heat.
Channel it to an underground phase change storage.
Oh no, I have too many megawatts, and somehow no batteries, turbines or any other shit, what could I possibly send it to
The humble ground:
Why waste it on the ground when we could start desalinating seawater
That is not how it works.
When you short something to ground, it’s everything in between that needs to dissipate the heat. Think about what “sending it to ground” means—it means you connect the hot to the ground. But with what do you connect the two? A wire? Sure, but you better hope that wire can dissipate all that power, because that’s what it’ll try to do.
You can’t just “dump power on the ground.” That’s not how it works.
So, I’m not good at these things, what you’re saying is that if I take a 240V cable in the street and just shove it into the ground, the cable will end up uh… melting? Trying to saturate itself until it matches the resistance of the ground or something?
If it’s a low resistance path to ground, it’ll get very very toasty! If it’s a lousy ground though, then it won’t…but it also won’t consume any power, so it’s not an effective way of scrubbing off electricity.
A good ground (low resistance) is found in your household wiring (the ground and/or the neutral). Of you short to that…well…you can guess what will happen! (Let’s hope you have proper circuit breakers.)
Yeah it’s, like, normal. I don’t know what I was confused about.
Guess those SWER powerlines are just for show then