Electricity That's Too Cheap to Meter

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/12/electricity-thats-too-cheap-to-meter/

by edent • 3 years ago

57 97 3 years ago

sam_goody• 3 years ago

A bunch of years ago, there was an article about Yellowstone tapping into the supervolcano, which would ease off of the pressure building up, while providing Wyoming with electricity that is "too cheap too meter".

If they succeeded, the demand would increase (by new uses people would find for cheap electricity, and by people who would move into Wyoming to take advantage of the price) which would affect production.

And the State would use it as a source of income, not start giving it for free or at a fixed price.

Klaster_1• 3 years ago

Is there a framework that helps to reliably determine which side of the two extremes - too cheap to meter (internet access) or induced demand (roads) - the problem will fall into and how to nudge it in the desired direction? Is this even the right framing of the question? Seems like an important management and policy problem for the humanity to get a grip on, so we can prevent negative outcomes.

AndrewDucker• 3 years ago

The problem with inducing demand for roads is that they take up significant amounts of space and disrupt everything around them.

We can provide everyone with terabit internet without taking up more than a tiny amount of surface space, so inducing demand on that front isn't a problem.

icegreentea2• 3 years ago

Induced demand for roads is a problem because road network improvements (especially in the form of road widenings) are typically marketed to the populace as reducing travel time at peak, but in practice all they can do is improve overall throughput (with the temporary decrease in travel time coming as a bonus).

And I think road network improvements are actually quite good at achieving their throughput related goals. From that perspective, there isn't actually a problem at all.

Internet traffic absolutely "suffers" from induced demand. It just happens that we've been able to keep ahead of the worst of the congestion problems.

a) ISPs traffic shape. ISPs have more control over their traffic than cities/highways typically do.

b) ISPs don't guarantee minimal speeds, or even give you a sense of their distribution. The inability to provide a minimal tells you that probably at peak traffic, there is significant contention (induced demand has kicked in). It just happens that... internet usage demand is probably less coupled than traffic on a highway.

c) The largest traffic loads on the internet (streaming video) are majority provided by centralized corporations that can provide a 'parallel' service (through CDNs/edge caches... oh and I guess really degrading video quality) that minimize the load onto the 'main internet'. This is like taking the train or public transit or something.

bell-cot4• 3 years ago

...electricity that is "too cheap to meter".

One can write a nifty article by assuming that huge geothermal power plants are somehow free. Similar for assuming that FTL drives are easy to build, or ...

JackMorgan• 3 years ago

Last week I read a fascinating thesis in HN that steam engines only could have been invented on top of a flooded coal mine, because it was the only place where significant rotational energy could be used to acquire more energy in a virtuous cycle. Those two constraints happened to take place in the UK, starting the industrial revolution.

I wonder if we will find another such situation in a future where there might be an abundance of electrical energy due to renewables.

Perhaps there's another research area that just isn't worth pursuing unless electricity has a zero or negative cost.

thelastgallon8• 3 years ago

We already have an energy sink, bitcoin, just like /dev/null, but for energy.

Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, currently consumes an estimated 150 terawatt-hours of electricity annually — more than the entire country of Argentina, population 45 million: https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2022/05/04/cryptocurrency-...

jakewins4• 3 years ago

This was tried in Texas though, and my understanding was the capital costs were too high to not run the units constantly.

More likely the sink will be - as it already is in commercial steel projects like Hybrit - electrolysis.

JumpCrisscross2• 3 years ago

steam engines only could have been invented on top of a flooded coal mine

One of my favourite reads [1]. (Darker if similarly-fascinating thread [2].)

[1] https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...

[2] https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...

QuantumGood• 3 years ago

Follows modern principles of disruption somewhat closely.

Affric3• 3 years ago

That was a great read. Thank you.

thelastgallon8• 3 years ago

Desalination Can Beat Out Batteries for Excess Energy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38685239

chadash• 3 years ago

Don't get me wrong, it is great that we can harness wind and solar to generate tons of electricity. But as the article points out, they aren't consistent enough to provide electricity that's always on, which is something our society is built to expect. Last year, Contruction-Physics.com put out a great 3-part article on why nuclear is so expensive. It's worth a read [1]. But long story short, we hardly build them anymore (we last finished a new plant in 2016 and there are two more currently under construction, which takes many years) and regulations change all the time so there are very few people with real expertise at putting them together. And talented people certainly don't want to go into the field, because there's no guarantee of consistent work.

[1] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power...

pydry4• 3 years ago

They're more consistent than people think - especially when anticorrelated solar and wind are paired.

Power is cheaper to store than people think.

Nuclear power is worse on all dimensions than people think.

celeritascelery• 3 years ago

How do you store power cheaply? We don’t have the have capability yet. Doesn’t mean we can’t figure it out, but until then we need consistent power. nuclear power is great because the materials are cheap and abundant and the power is very stable. Even the disposal is much safer “than most people think”.

mpol• 3 years ago

Nuclear gives electricity continuously. I wonder what happens with earnings for the owner, when a lot of electricity gets generated by wind and solar, with prices moving up and down even more than now. If a nuclear installation is so expensive in fixed costs, will the owner earn it back in 30 or 40 years. I don't know ofcourse, but it does sound like a risk to me.

Gas turbines fit this scenario much better, you turn them on when wind and solar is down. The same with batteries. Batteries aren't in the news much, but there are quite some huge batteries online already, and that might pay off for the owner (buy low, sell high).

jakewins4• 3 years ago

I have a cabin with no grid connection.

It has solar panels, batteries, and a gas generator.

Last year, I used the generator one time, for four hours. So, with a half gallon of gasoline, I ran a 1000sq ft home for 365 days.

We can build a grid, today, the same way. It will produce 95-98% less CO2 (depending on which papers you read), while keeping enough gas capacity as backup for those few hours or days, just like my cabin.

While we work towards 80-90% clean capacity, we commercialize the tech to replace the gas.

llimos• 3 years ago

Shameless Plug

I see what you did there.

mytailorisrich3• 3 years ago

Wind - and other renewables - have done what nuclear couldn't. They have provided such an abundance of electricity that consumers are paid to use it.

That's actually a symptom of the current issues with renewables: production is highly variable and unpredictable (to an extent) and cannot be controlled, and electricity produced cannot be stored.

Interestingly, if electricity indeed becomes too cheap to meter then why bother with heat pumps, etc. at home? It is much easier and cheaper to just install an electric boiler and electric heaters.

pydry4• 3 years ago

It can be stored, it's just that it's currently cheaper to curtail or pay people to use it and to fill in the gaps with cheap gas.

Despite intense lobbying against them pumped storage plants like coire glas and snowy 2 are under construction.

toomuchtodo2• 3 years ago

As renewables approach a cost of zero (major projects are already close to $0.01/kwh), the cost of power then becomes storage and distribution. As the cost of storage declines (battery manufacturing capacity ramp), the cost of power continues to decline. Put another way, the cost of power is a function of renewables and battery storage ramp rate.

Regarding your last point, we should not sacrifice efficiency when we still need incredible amounts of power to sequester excessive atmospheric CO2 with carbon capture (paying back the energy debt), and HVAC system lives are measured in decades. As the post mentions, a component of the story is energy efficiency, and we shouldn’t throw that away going forward.

mytailorisrich3• 3 years ago

Sure. The thing is that in the real world if people get essentially free electricity they are not going to invest in energy efficiency because there is no benefit in doing so.

I don't think this will happen anytime soon, though. Renewables are still expensive and in many cases rely on price guarantees by the government, and we're still in a phase when production has to increase significantly to keep up with demand. So overall the market reality and incentive is to push for efficiency while prices remain relatively high (at least in the UK)

KaiserPro4• 3 years ago

I get your point, but nobody apart from the state is going to build enough nuclear power to make electricity worthless.

why bother with heat pumps

Unless you say "install a heat pump" then heatpumps are reasonably cheap. If you want non super thin radiators, then some domestic aircon is not actually that much more expensive than electric.

bshacklett• 3 years ago

Purely a data point, and not meant to be persuasive, but I bought a heat pump dryer this year, largely because of the ventless operation. Dryer lint fires are frightening.

Heat pumps could save money in new construction by reducing the amount of copper, too. Builders will be all over that if it becomes acceptable.

I think we’ll find that there are other benefits that come with new technology beyond the direct electricity consumption.

Worst cases, though, if all the electricity is produced in clean methods, how much does it matter that we’re not using it as efficiently as we could be?

mytailorisrich3• 3 years ago

If you mean copper pipes, I don't think that heat pumps save anything. In addition nowadays there are plastic pipes that may actually be superior to copper (no corrosion and they are cheaper).

My point is that if electricity is effectively free then there is no incentive to invest in energy saving. The same goes for any resources. In any case, I don't think it is a realistic prospect to expect electricity to become effectively free at least in the medium term.

bell-cot4• 3 years ago

IF one has some cheap & convenient way to efficiently store MWh-scale quantities of electrical power, then spot-market electricity prices <= 0 are extremely interesting.

Otherwise...not so much. All the electrical infrastructure, from the wind turbines to your electrical meter, still has to be planned, built, and maintained. If there's isn't some perpetual* government subsidy involved, then the cost of doing all that still has to be paid from selling the power, and your ability to "play the market" - without sinking a metric buttload of money into energy storage equipment - is gonna be limited. And the more popular such market-playing becomes, the lower the spot price fluctuations will become.

*Yes, I know that "perpetual" never really lasts in this context.

jonstewart• 3 years ago

Sure, thank you for providing the standard contrarian disclaimer to absolutely every article ever written about renewable energy.

But in a historical lens, that the -UK-, i.e. His Majesty’s Coal Fire, has such abundant wind generation that it can be free every once in a while when The Great Smog was only ~71 years ago is an incredible feat.

* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London

huppeldepup• 3 years ago

   MWh-scale quantities of electrical power

Doesn't have to be electrical. I was part of a "demand response" study a decade back where a cold store was provided a prediction of electricity prices. When electricity prices were low or negative, the infrastructure would drive the temperatures to the lowest point to shift future energy consumption to the present. This shift in time is also a form of storage.

bell-cot4• 3 years ago

Sure, there are cases. Imagine if quick-response aluminum smelters were a thing. But for household electrical use...maybe you could get your well-insulated electrical water heater extra hot, and your freezer extra cold?

But all such cases suffer from the "only if it doesn't get popular" problem.

thelastgallon8• 3 years ago

Yes, EVs. No need to build specialized energy storage systems. If we have 10s of millions of EVs (to start with) and eventually 100m+, thats a gigantic energy reservoir that you can dump all excess energy. The best part is some of that energy is used every day, freeing up capacity for tomorrow's free renewable production.

And its distributed, no need to add new transmission lines, available to every grid, today.

adolph2• 3 years ago

Seems like a key challenge is coordinating all the EV owners to undercharge and then plug in at the needed time.

bell-cot4• 3 years ago

> IF one [...], then spot-market electricity prices <= 0 are extremely interesting.
> [...] is gonna be limited. And the more popular such [...]
Yes, EVs [...]

If there there are a zillion EVs, which cleverly charge up when the spot electrical price gets low, then those free-or-negative prices for electricity - which really seem to push people's buttons - will not actually happen.

No need to build specialized energy storage systems.

I am not aware of either the electrical grid, or most current EV's & their charging hardware, being built to actually do this. A whole lot of specialized stuff will still need to be built.

TheLoafOfBread• 3 years ago

Yes, EVs.

No that's a pipe dream. People are recommended to charge at night, when half of renewable energy is missing by definition (no sun is shining) and want to be charged at the morning, not discharged because there was no wind blowing and we needed to keep lights up in local town.

Affric3• 3 years ago

I think it depends on where on Earth you are but at this point, from the point of view of Australia, this seems inevitable due to its necessity in ensuring the maximisation of our natural advantage with sunlight and space when compared with our low population density and lack of water.

The potential for energy arbitrage with Asia is just too great for us to not find a way to achieve it.

KaiserPro4• 3 years ago

I have the same supplier, but, I suspect a different tariff.

I am on the "agile" price, which means that I have a different price per kwh every 30 mins.

Pros: I get negative pricing, ie, they pay me to take away power.

Cons: I can also get "surge" pricing upto to £1 a kwh.

It only really makes sense for me personally because I have both an electric car (second hand) and a house battery (with solar)

about 2-4 times a month, I get paid to charge my car.

edit you can see what my prices are here: https://agileprices.co.uk/?region=C they are published daily at 16:00 for the next day, more or less.

n2d43• 3 years ago

Could you just intentionally waste a lot of energy when the price is negative to make a lot of money? Is there a limit on how much you can use?

Of course you shouldn't do that, but I wonder how their business model looks like. I assume the negative price comes from subsidies, and those probably are limited?

edit: with "wasting", I mean literal wasting, basically discharging the grid without using the energy for anything (say, by putting a heater outside)

xboxnolifes• 3 years ago

Negative price can come from too much grid load which must be removed. This can be financially recovered through the non-negative prices.

cmrx642• 3 years ago

The negative rates phenomenon is fascinating. Little to do with subsidies, lots to do with load balancing / matching generation to demand. Hugenormous generation capacity tends to move slowly (just for the mental model, imagine a steam turbine that can only generate less power by _waiting to cool down_). In order to maintain stable grid frequency, the market steps in with some behavioral adjustment via pricing.

There’s no reason you _shouldn’t_ do the behavior you describe: the more power you can sink during negative pricing, the better the efficiency of the grid! You’d rather any kind of productive use.

KaiserPro4• 3 years ago

I'm limited to about 12kw of power draw, so I could make maybe 50pence an hour, on a really really windy day. As an industrial consumer, you probably could chow down that power, but it'll affect the market price, and probably cost millions in connection/line rental fees.

The price is a function of the spot price, so its an indirect function of the way electricity prices are set. As a producer you get a guaranteed minimum price per kwh. some magic of contracts happen and the price paid is not always the price the producer gets.

ViewTrick10023• 3 years ago

Negative prices generally come from large thermal plants, usually nuclear or coal, bidding negative since their ramp times are too slow to lower their output for the negative period and then be able to increase it again for when prices are expected to become positive again.

They are generally unfit for modern grids which require dispatchable energy, and is why "baseload" is an outdated term on the power generation side, while it of course still exists on the consumer side.

tentacleuno• 3 years ago

Could you just intentionally waste a lot of energy when the price is negative to make a lot of money?

That's pretty much what Octopus Agile is designed for. We turn on all the electric heaters on plunge pricing, which is a very welcome addition in a cold house.

jonatron• 3 years ago

You don't have to have an electric car and battery. I've just got electric heating (Air con) and a hot water cylinder. I can automatically turn the cylinder heater on at night and turn down the thermostat at peak times.

KaiserPro4• 3 years ago

Yes, you are right! I have gas heat/boiler so that escaped my mind.

Heating up the hot water is a grand way to save money.

ekianjo• 3 years ago

(Renewables) They have provided such an abundance of electricity that consumers are paid to use it.

in one place. Once. And the author is making it sounds like it's valid everywhere. Well, no.

sergiosgc• 3 years ago

Just wait a couple more years:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-energy-consumption?...

We are in the middle of an energy technological leap. It'll take a decade to unfurl, but it's nothing short of astounding.

credit_guy• 3 years ago

It is, but ...

If prices become negative on average, then there is no financial incentive for anyone to build a new power plant. Except if that plant can follow the load and generate only during the times when the prices are positive, and are above its breakeven generation cost. Natural gas power plants fall in that category. Battery storage too, twice better actually, as they can charge when prices are low or even negative, and discharge when prices are high.

One could claim that solar plus batteries is fine. Except that whoever plans to build solar plus batteries can quickly figure out that the ROI is even better if they do battery only and no solar at all. The same goes for wind.

The Economist ran a fairly informative article about this in September [1].

[1] https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/09/21/r...

jakewins4• 3 years ago

Negative prices happen constantly? Especially if you’re trading intraday and similar faster markets.

It’s partially a useful thing - large generators paying to avoid stopping - but largely it’s because peoples rooftop solar doesn’t curtail and so produce huge surpluses that someone needs to take. We saw this over and over in several of the markets we trade in last spring.

thelastgallon8• 3 years ago

Power prices are negative 200 million times/year in US and rapidly growing! European grid has more renewables, we can expect it to be negative more frequently.

Right now, negative prices shut down production, wasting all the free production, called curtailment. Instead, EV owners can charge and be paid for charging. In fact, EV owners can get paid twice, once for charging and again for supplying power back to the grid as part of a virtual power plant. In a pilot this year, participants in VPP with their powerwalls made $150/day. It is entirely possible to do this with EVs.

And, very few needs 100% charge/range. 52% of all trips, including all modes of transportation, were less than three miles, with 28% of trips less than one mile. Just 2% of all trips were greater than 50 miles.[3]. You can set a range, keep my car charged between 60 - 90% at all times, give me money both for charging and supplying power back to the grid! I'm sure there will be some people who'd be interested in free money.

[1]https://electrek.co/2023/07/05/tesla-electric-customers-repo...

[2]Wholesale prices went negative about 200 million times across the seven US grids in 2021, more than twice as often as five years earlier: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-30/trapped-r...

https://archive.is/nFsOk#selection-4373.0-4373.136

adolph2• 3 years ago

Power prices are negative 200 million times/year in US and rapidly growing! European grid has more renewables, we can expect it to be negative more frequently.

Given 31,536,000 seconds in a year, a more descriptive aggregate statistic might be how much of total capacity was at a negative billing rate.

audunw• 3 years ago

You could have said the same thing about the first cases of sending electronic mail. But once that ball got rolling it didn’t take long for e-mail to take over the world.

We’ve already gotten to the point where over-construction of renewables and energy storage to scale to peak seasonal demand is the cheapest way to get energy. The only barrier to get there now is we don’t have the production capacity to transition faster.

It’s now basically inevitable that renewables will result in energy too cheap to meter most parts of the year in most places. It’s just a matter of time to build it.

Check Tony Sebas recent presentation on The Great Transformation. If you want more practical/empirical details you can check Mark Z Jacobsens studies.

It’s kind of funny that people are now saying that solar is “only” providing 10% of electricity or whatever it may be in a given region. Just a decade or two ago people like Tony Seba was thought to be crazy for predicting that solar would reach this point this fast.

Look at any instance of technology transitions “logistics curves” (“S-curve”). When you get to past the 10% point the new technologies take over incredibly quickly.

edent3• 3 years ago

I'm sorry, I try to be clear in my writing. I did say "my electricity company emailed me" which was supposed to indicate that this was specific to my local area.

London, where I live, has about 9 million people. So I suppose it also applied to them as well.

And, I also pointed to a chart of the UK's energy mix. That was supposed to indicate that my blog post was about the UK.

As others have pointed out, these <= £0 prices happen fairly frequently.

k3103• 3 years ago

I was offered time of day pricing. Bottom line, my main electrical usage is air conditioning in the summer. So, charge a higher rate at the exact times that I use the most.

"It's cheap except when you use it."

Even PG&E's estimate says stick with flat rate. It's cheaper.

jakewins4• 3 years ago

Our customers use their HVAC to “pre-cool” or (more often, pre-heat) their homes when rates are low.. but you need a house with enough thermal mass and insulation that it can go 4-5 hours just “coasting”, which I guess is more common in cold climates with water-borne heat and masonry buildings..

JumpCrisscross2• 3 years ago

Heat also works because snow is insulating.

ZeroGravitas• 3 years ago

So, charge a higher rate at the exact times that I use the most.

More accurately, charge a higher rate when everyone is using it, and increasing supply would be expensive (roughly late afternoon to early evening in places that use solar PV and air conditioning) so incentivize the shiftable demand (charging EVs for example) to move to low demand and/or high supply times.

maccard2• 3 years ago

The trick is that you need to shift your consumption to when it's cheap. EV charging, hot water cylinders, battery systems can all be charged overnight when the usage is low, which reduced the demand at the times you need it for AC.

k3103• 3 years ago

I have none of the above! That's the problem with a simple life.

Without the A/C running, PG&E rates my home better than "energy efficient" homes. I just don't use much electricity except in summer, and the savings from heat pumps, solar cells and batteries would never pay back.

I suppose that I could afford a vacation at the coast if I just took off and didn't cool the home in the heat. I'll run the numbers.

Affric3• 3 years ago

Yeah, here much of the advertising is that you will receive zero prices but the fact is most consumers have limited ability to shape their usage due to local energy storage constraints, poor building design, and simply not being technically adept enough to use existing solutions.

Fundamentally this can be changed if, and only if, there are higher standards our homes are built to, more cost effective methods of storage, and the vast majority of the solution being automated.

But there will be winners out of users paying the real cost of their energy.

sgjohnson• 3 years ago

wind power genuinely became too cheap to meter.

No, it didn’t. The grid must always be in balance. Wind power production can’t be ramped up or down as needed. Overproduction could cause a surge on the grid, that would in fact be a massive liability for the power company.

Power became free for those periods because it was the cheapest option for the producer.

Kind of how it happened when crude oil was trading at negative $57 per bbl. The contracts came with an obligation that was impossible to meet, thus it was easier to pay someone to take them off your hands.

ViewTrick10023• 3 years ago

Wind power can of course be ramped down, the problem in this case is CFD contracts causing over supply since they are guaranteed to get paid.

In better functioning markets negative prices generally stem from large thermal producers, nuclear and coal, being unable to ramp fast enough and thus bid negative so they can produce at 100% when prices are expected to increase again.

Ekaros• 3 years ago

Wind power certainly can be ramped down or up. At least on level of individual turbines. Otherwise they could not lock them in storms when wind speeds are too high. If it can be done with higher wind speeds, nothing prevents doing it at lower.

Issue is that they got insane contracts that pay beyond market rates.

7thaccount2• 3 years ago

You can feather the blades or stuff like that, but you can't just ramp them up or down like a natural gas plant and keep them there. It's still weather dependent without some source of fuel.

snapplebobapple• 3 years ago

This utterly misses the point. Renewables are not so cheap that they are profitable at negative prices by themselves. Pricing is this way because renewables are largely not demand resources and run when wind, sun, etc is there, not when they are needed. In some situations they are still profitable at negative prices because subsidy is worth more than zero making breakeven pricing some negative number. Pricing is negative because the grid is in crisis from overproductiin and needs prices that low to get the renewables to shut off, its not a sign of a healthy, sustainable grid, its a sign of a grid in crisis trying to avert a collapse.

hefferbub• 3 years ago

Look at the work of Tony Seba, who has analyzed the properties of a possible fully-renewable grid.

In his models, you over-provision PV and wind (doable because it is so cheap, and getting cheaper) so it can cover peak loads. Then during the 90+ percent of non-peak time there is super-cheap excess power available which he dubs “super power”.

Using pricing signals, this can be used to enable activities which would normally be cost-prohibitive under current models. When power is cheap, crank up the desalinators, electric steel and aluminum mills, pumped storage, hydrogen converters, bitcoin miners, and anything else smart people can devise to do with inexhaustible, inexpensive clean power on a somewhat intermittent basis.

His model also shows that you can choose trade offs between how much battery you invest in and how much generation you build, allowing you to optimize costs depending on how much or little of this “super power” you want to generate. More batteries = less generation and less excess power, and vice versa.

I think many find this unintuitive because they formed their opinions of renewable energy during the early, high cost parts of its ramp and have not adjusted their thinking to the current part of the S-curve.

But renewable energy is already the least expensive source of electricity in most markets. It is our amazing good fortune that it is also environmentally fairly benign, extremely safe, has very low maintenance costs, can be geographically distributed to reduce grid distribution costs, and is able to scale with few limits aside from simple land availability. And its Wright’s law cost declines appear unconstrained for the foreseeable future.

epistasis3• 3 years ago

This is the key part that most people are missing.

Standard thermal electricity generation is a very mature technology, no matter the heat source. Turbine-based combined cycle natural gas generation was a bit of a step up, but it used already mature tech: jet turbines.

Solar and wind and batteries are fundamentally different, and more like integrated circuit technology or DNA sequencing: falling in cost at a tremendous rate.

Looking at current prices or current installed bases of solar or wind or batteries is not very informative for assessing the technologies. You really need to see the history of prices to project their future, then you need to start seeing that for each application, adoption is non-linear once the tech becomes the cheapest option for that application.

What I'm most surprised about on HN is how few commenters here seem to understand tech curves. The HN audience, of all audiences, should have the clearest view of how traditional energy industry assumptions are about to be disrupted in the coming decades. We don't know the full extent of the disruption, but views like Seba's of huge amounts of surplus energy, seem inevitable. Arbitrage in time and geography will be the money making opportunities.

rawfan• 3 years ago

Working for one of the largest energy grid providers in Europe, I can tell you: This is the future we‘re currently building. We already have many areas with a huge energy surplus completely generated by renewables.

There is no one here that doubts the renewable future and we‘re quite sure we can finish building the necessary grid until the end of the decade (with around 6 times the capacity of the current European grid).

specialist• 3 years ago

We'll always need something to be able to provide a base-load of electricity.

Correct.

Advanced geothermal and thermal batteries will be a large part of the solution. Those nascent markets today are where PV and Li-ion were in the 2000s: proven technologies that have climbed onto the cost-learning curve ladder, now just need capital and time.

We're so close to having all the necessary solutions we need to achieve net zero, and then push forward to net negative (to get CO2 back down to 350ppm).

vfclists• 3 years ago

When you de-industrialize and shift all your needs for sustained high levels of energy to China, you can always wax lyrical about the benefits of renewable energy.

Lets see you provide jobs in factories which depend on renewable energy.

Yup. Even the jobs that will be created by switching to renewable industry depend on products and materials created by Chinese heavy industry that cannot depend on renewable energy.

The wishful fancy self-congratulatory thinking of Westerners on renewable energy knows no bounds.

dogmatism• 3 years ago

*cries in my location where energy is like 70% from imported LNG and there's only flat rate pricing at $0.30/kWh...and it's windy AF but for political reasons no one's built the wind farms

Oh and there's a nuc plant I'm in meltdown range of, but don't get any pricing benefit

Electricity That's Too Cheap to Meter

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