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Rooftop solar panels are flooding California’s grid. That’s a problem. As electricity prices go negative, the Golden State is struggling to offload a glut of solar power (wapo.st)

submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'll note that right now, this is a seasonal issue, associated with moderate springtime temperatures when there is a lot of sunshine available.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (2 children)

They keep it in line by curtailing or switching off generation. The generator typically still gets paid as if it were generating whatever it has available, which is perhaps an issue, but the total generation is reduced to meet the demand.

This is why there is negative pricing, it's cheaper to sell electricity in the negative than to pay a generator to be offline.

They can't direct excess generation to batteries if the batteries aren't there yet. They're being installed, but the overall capacity is still relatively low. Transferring it to other grids also has limits, and in particular if there's an excess of solar in one region the neighbouring regions also probably have an excess, so there really is no other option but to curtail.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Jeeze it almost seems like the 21st century might take some sort of smart grid, and having a bunch of big dumb plants that cannot be turned on and off without great expense should be a relic of the past!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

There is a cost to that. Everyone complains about that.

That's why for example China are building new coal plants. The new ones turn on and off quicker.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

"Batteries" don't need to be what we commonly think of as storing electricity. They can very much be a different way of storing energy instead. For instance, pumping water up to a tower (or upstream), or splitting water into hydrogen + oxygen (for consumption/combustion later)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Yes I'm aware of water storage, and even quite fond of it, but it's very dependent on geography (as you need a very large body of water so you can't really just use a water tower) and also incredibly expensive. There are generally more effective and profitable uses for land.

Meanwhile BESS is tiny, something like 30MW per acre.

Storing energy as hydrogen is a fool's errand, in fact many of the new use cases for hydrogen are snake oil touted by people looking to sell more hydrogen. Even ignoring the fact that hydrogen leaks through and embrittles any container it's stored in (or that it explodes violently), converting hydrogen to electricity only leaves you about 70% of the energy you put in.