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My rural electric coop limits the amount they will pay for end user generated solar power per month. They will never let the bill zero out or be negative.

Buy this battery, and the power company will pay you to charge it. Problem?

In isolation, it's very obviously a bad thing, because it makes solar less profitable and might slow down the switch to renewables.

In a wider context, it can still be seen as a god thing as it means there has been a significant pivot to solar already and luckily it's also a very solvable problem. There just needs to be more energy storage.

It's a sign of a grid stability issue. A power grid needs to balance input, output and losses. An imbalance in either direction is bad.

A negative price means the grid is worried about a collapse. They are willing to pay sinks to come online NOW, or for production to go offline.

The solution isn't less renewables however! It's more storage, and better smarts on the grid. Most grids are poorly designed for renewables, and their loads characteristics. That needs to change rapidly.

This is happening, to a degree, in most of Europe. Storage is the answer as described in the article. Unfortunately politics are not proactive, you need to break the system before something happens... and now the system is broken, yeah!!!

Most power is produced in the morning to early afternoon. Most power is used in the evening. We just don't have that much storage yet.

It's hard to say we're wasting energy though. There's a whole lot more solar power than what we're capturing, after all.

That split system is how it works where I live. Obviously it's quite difficult to have competition for the infrastructure. So I can choose who delivers power (well, I mean it comes from the same grid. But different companies buying power from the same spot market charge you different amounts 🤷) but the infrastructure is a monopoly. Not only do we pay a fixed fee for the infrastructure, but also a transfer fee (and taxes, and also taxes on the taxes)

So in the end I pay more for the infrastructure part than the power consumption.

The infrastructure one shouldn't be static either. I'm not fast charging an electric car to ride my non-electric bicycle, I'm not the reason the grid needs expensive upgrades so much...

It's being metered too now. In Belgium it's calculated on your max peak usage per month, averaged out over 12 months. You fastcharge 2 cars at once while running a washing machine, electric heater, vacuum, a bitcoinmine etc all at once: your infrastructure part of the bill rises. The only stupidness is that they put the "fictional minimum capacity used" too high, so you don't benefit from practically 0 capacity usage.

One of the nuke plants I work at put in a hydrogen electrolyzer two years ago for this reason, and they are doubling it's size next year because it worked so well. Their "problem" is different than solar. Nukes constantly put it the same amount of power, so they feed the excess into the electrolyzer when demand is low, but it's basically the same idea. Electrolysis id inefficient, but if you're producing more energy than you can feed into the grid you may as well do something useful with it.

In fact we have to pay the neighboring countries to take the excess power in order to lighten the load on the grid. Switzerland and Austria will then use the power to pump up water to store the energy.