Which power plant does my electricity come from?

https://practical.engineering/blog/2024/11/14/which-power-plant-does-my-electricity-come-from

by impish9208 • 2 years ago

201 116 2 years ago

It could be partially your neighbor's solar panels or batteries. A lot of domestic power that gets contributed to the grid never leaves the neighborhood. These things aren't always as clear cut.

The key to lower prices on the grid is more flexible and localized pricing. Power suppliers don't like this because it favors cheaper sources of power that push their more expensive legacy generation out of the market. But it would create price incentives for demand and supply to align better.

A good example is the UK, which has national energy pricing and a lot of excess wind power in Scottland that is often being curtailed at the same time gas plants further south need to power up to power local demand there. End result: the Scottish pay the same high rate even though they are literally discarding energy they don't know what to do with. If they had local energy pricing, their rates would go down a lot because they have a lot of wind power most of the time.

And further south, people would either invest in local power generation (instead of far away in Scottland) or actually relocate data centers and other energy intensive businesses to where the power is cheap. As opposed to e.g. Slough.

Skeime• 2 years ago

Yeah, it’s the same in Germany. (And to add insult to injury, people in places with renewable generation often pay higher grid fees due to the investments necessary to connect all the new plants.)

baridbelmedar• 2 years ago

Yes, but that's partly a consequence of how the German electricity market operates and the neglected state of its infrastructure, isn't it?

Wind power and other intermittent sources create grid instability, which drives up costs.

And to my knowledge, Germany has chosen not to have different bidding markets within the country (or has at least kept prices consistent across its four markets) to protect vital industries in the west?

brylkarim• 2 years ago

I don’t think it’s as simple as that. Expensive legacy gas and nuclear plants provide base load power at scale. Something renewables don’t really do. These have to be built and the cost distributed across everyone who takes power from the grid. The shared model is what makes it more resilient and reliable.

jillesvangurp3• 2 years ago

It is actually that simple. The current pricing system was created for a grid that no longer exists. There is now lots of wind generation, solar, battery power, etc. And growing rapidly. Both on the grid and domestic. And soon large amounts of batteries with wheels capable of powering houses and delivering power to the grid.

All this means lots of fluctuations in power availability and cost. Pretending that it costs the same all the time everywhere is irrational. If you give people incentives to adapt to these fluctuations, they will. Energy providers like Octopus prove that at scale. They by the way are a big proponent of more localized power. Because it's just more optimal.

Price incentives cause people and companies to adapt their behavior. Including when to to use power and where to use power. Likewise, it incentivizes power companies to invest in power generation where the demand is instead of where the NIMBY's are not (like Scottland). Speaking of NIMBY's, if they could benefit from lower pricing, they'd probably love wind power a lot more. Buy more electric cars, do the laundry when it's windy, etc.

As for base load. Nobody ever specifies a number in GW or GWH. It's a very fuzzy notion that people just assert is needed in huge (unspecified) amounts. If you put actual numbers on it, you would be able to have a sane discussion on (much) cheaper alternatives. But that never happens. Most discussions around base load center on the notion that we allegedly need a lot of it. What's the budget we need to reserve for that? How much? When? Where? Why? Are there any alternatives? The debate is mostly completely irrational and hand wavy on this.

There is a basic notion that power companies don't mind charging the same rate nationally because that means they make lots of money charging for mostly cheap power available everywhere except in a handful of places. The way the system works is that everybody pays the highest price on the system. Localized prices would introduce lots of variation and cause lots of reasons for power companies to optimize their power delivery and pricing. High prices mean unhappy customers voting with their feet. They are being shielded from that currently.

It's a big reason they are resisting changes on this front. In some cases they actually get paid to not generate power or discard it. That's wasteful. Scottland has plenty of base load. They are exporting their power surplus most of the time.

mschuster915• 2 years ago

Expensive legacy gas and nuclear plants provide base load power at scale. Something renewables don’t really do.

Running hydro, biogas (e.g. in Denmark) and offshore wind (UK, Spain, France, Italy) can definitely fulfill base load demand on the basis of renewable energy generation. With solar, enough overcapacity can guarantee base load during the day even when it's cloudy, and in the summer the solar overcapacity can be used to run synth-fuel plants for those things that we absolutely cannot run with electricity (ships and large airplanes).

Additionally, we can reduce base load demand during night time... a lot of places are still running incandescent lighting, for example. Replace that with LEDs, better reflectors (for less waste) and movement detectors, and you tackle light pollution at night at the same time. Or heat, add storage to a heat pump system to avoid having to run the heat pump at night. And for fucks sake France please get rid of resistive heating.

jonatron• 2 years ago

To reduce curtailment, more transmission is required. However, the planning process is absolutely ridiculous, so multiple years of consultations are required before there's a chance anything might actually get built.

barbegal• 2 years ago

Which is why the UK is putting in subsea cables between Scotland and England despite the added cost.

yodelshady• 2 years ago

Those transmission components are expected to cost the taxpayer at least £54 bn (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-62085297). Transmission, of course, doesn't solve storage, which, to quote the article, "can’t really be stored or stockpiled on an industrial scale". Because it can't. Batteries are orders of magnitude less than what is needed, as is hydro.

Do you think anyone would be building mammoth turbines in the North of Scotland without access to the Southern markets? Oh yes please, I really want to invest several billion pounds in order to serve Ullapool and Wick, that makes my capitalist bones tingle.

But "nuclear expensive", and of cause that isn't to do with the planning process at all. Not if you have a competing product to sell.

The UK has the most expensive electricity in the developed world, and approximately 10 times the CO2 footprint per kWh of France, or of France since the 1980s. If the goal of the renewable energy policy was to be a world leader, it has dramatically failed.

UltraSane5• 2 years ago

I wonder if you could use tunnel boring machines to dig tunnels to run power cables to avoid some of the NIMBY objections. Expensive sure but the tunnels will be there basically forever.

paulhart• 2 years ago

You make an excellent point - so much so that it already exists today at the wholesale level in many markets. What you're describing is Locational Marginal Pricing (LMP) - a reasonable introduction is here: https://www.enverus.com/blog/an-intro-to-locational-marginal...

In the wholesale market the biggest consideration is transmission capacity - if I can generate 100MW of electricity at $15/MW but the transmission line between me and the demand can only carry 20MW, and another generator can generate 100MW for $30/MW with excess transmission capacity to the demand, the price at the demand will lean heavily towards the $30/MW price.

The same model could be applied to local grids as a way to "manage" residential solar installations for example; overcapacity is penalized through pricing signals (but if you throw in batteries so you can shift the release of electricity...).

xattt• 2 years ago

How is this partitioning implemented?

Local “production-generation” can make sense at some level, but the mental model breaks down when you go back to the “water-in-a-lake” way of considering the grid.

I assume that there is less electricity being moved on one end of a winding of some downstream transformer, but it could also be that we really don’t know.

Retric• 2 years ago

The grid can’t move infinite power through any one point.

Substations and long distance transmission lines make local production a meaningful thing with real upsides. The overall grid avoids losses when power isn’t going through long distance transmission lines. Further as heat increases transmission losses and transmission losses produce heat, lowering the power sent through a long distance transmission line makes it more efficient.

TacticalCoder• 2 years ago

Power suppliers don't like this because it favors cheaper sources of power that push their more expensive legacy generation out of the market.

Meanwhile a common scam in several EU countries consists in having the power supplier that is either fully state-owned or officially a private company but actually state-ran behind the scenes and... They force you to give back any excess power for free to the grid.

At the same time ofc they pass crazy laws mandating most of the energy generated to be sold for pennies on the dollar to other state ran companies, while then reselling it based on the price of... natural gas. It's quite the wonderful state-ran scam. Some politicians denounced that scam when electricity prices skyrocketted in France etc. a few years ago.

So not only do they steal people's produced energy but they also make sure to resell it at an inflated price, while their little friends in fake privately owned companies are lining up their pockets (the scheme is very probably complete with illegal kickbacks to the politicians).

I know not one but two person who have powering on on-demand... Cryptocurrency mining equipment (for some GPU based ones)! This way they make sure to not give back for free electricity to the state. Sucks but it's what it is. Wouldn't be that way if these people were paid for that excess energy.

They simply don't want to encourage this government ran electricity scam.

pclmulqdq5• 2 years ago

Yes, one of the problems of renewables is that they are highly correlated as to when they generate power, so the value of the power they produce (per kWh) is much lower than it would be if they were uncorrelated with each other. Since we have all invested so heavily in renewables, there is generally a huge amount of excess power generated at these peak times that has to be burned. The correct marginal price of those joules that have to be burned is $0.

Providing that power back to the grid for free is about the right price for the power, and if you would like to be the one to burn it instead (because that is what the grid is doing with a lot of that power), I assume you are free to do so.

UltraSane5• 2 years ago

"They force you to give back any excess power for free to the grid."

If the power being generated is in excess of what the grid is consuming then it is worthless. I've seen people suggest installing bitcoin mining hardware directly inside wind turbines so they can consume excess electricity and make a profit.

belorn2• 2 years ago

Two major problems that need to be considered with using localized pricing are sudden bidding wars and partitioning.

Let's say locally you have a few factories when a sudden drop in supply occurs in the energy market. The biggest costs of those factories are personnel, equipment and building, so rather than shutting down they will be willing to pay much more for energy than what is rational in the market in order to continue producing and maintain contracts in the short term. Long term they may move away to a more energy stable and cheaper location, but for the next 10-20 years they will eat the occasional spike in price. Everyone else who locally live there can't eat a sudden 100x in energy costs, with the result that they will vote into office politicians that protect against such situations, and those politicians will in turn spread out the problem over a wider area where areas with stable supply of energy can help through funding (higher energy price) and transmit energy to areas with less stable energy. Alternatively they can pay their citizens' bills directly, as happened during the energy crisis a couple years ago, money that then get taken from the general budget (paid through taxes).

The other issue is partitioning. The more local zones you get, the more borders you get between those zones. People living on the border will see a unreasonable price difference depending if their house/town/city happened to land on one side or the other. This feels unfair, which results in upset citizens, resulting in people voting in politicians that can fix the situation. Politicians then feel a pressure to even out the prices among the zones, using things like adjusting local taxes.

As a general rule, the voting population want stable energy availability, stable prices and fair prices that are similar to everyone else.

pclmulqdq5• 2 years ago

Power demand is often inelastic. There are many places in summer where people would pay $200/kWh to run a small air conditioning unit, for example, when their normal price of power is $0.10/kWh. There is no reason to shift toward generation sources that have price uncertainty when demand is inelastic like this. See the exact same thing in healthcare. The proper solution to this economic problem at a societal level is to have a predictable low price of available power.

ViewTrick1002• 2 years ago

If you can't handle volatile prices and know your demand in advance then simply by PPAs or energy futures?

You know, the standard method all markets use to handle volatility. But apparently electricity is different and we need enormous subsidies instead.

pjc502• 2 years ago

Everyone adapts to the single most expensive uneven form of local pricing: property prices.

I think there's a very strong case to link grid and generation capacity improvements to local pricing in the effective area, even if it doesn't end up being through the market. Make the link explicit: "if this pylon project is built, we will give everyone in the receiving county 1p/unit off their bill for five years."

unethical_ban• 2 years ago

This was an interesting read. I still don't quite understand the pricing during emergencies or shortages, though.

There is no tolerable scenario where providers could choose not to generate electricity for a grid if it were necessary and they were the only provider available.

I want to assume that in the freest of markets the state could still compel electrical generators to operate in the events of an emergency.

I really need to read up on what happened in Texas in 2021.

sesuximo• 2 years ago

providers could choose not to generate electricity for a grid if it were necessary

Enron basically forced this exact situation in order to charge inflated prices.

Maybe worse is that this isn’t even the reason they ended up in court.

Epa095• 2 years ago

IDK how it is in the jurisdiction of the author, but I know a bit about how it is in the small European country I reside in (and which has a market almost identical to how it's described in the post).

There is a "System operator" which has the final responsibility for the stability of the grid. The TLDR is that they really really really want to use the market to solve it, but in a crisis they have supreme powers over all production and all consumption.

There are multiple short-term intra-day markets for extra capacity, and both producers and consumers can participate (consumers can reduce their capacity temporarily). It is extremely rare that these markets are not enough. Any "weird" bidding (e.g possible attempts at market manipulation) is audited, and market manipulation is of course illegal. You can only provide bids based on your estimation on the value of the power, and you need (if audited) to be able to show how this is calculated in a consistent (over time) way.

In the case of a system instability from either market failure or some extreme unexpected event (e.g. multiple production facilities going offline) there are a hierarchy of actions:

- Many/most large industrial consumers have deals where they pay less in grid fees, but they can be disconnected with little warning and no compensation. In the old days the system operator would call them, but these days more and more of this is digitalized. (There are prototypes of markets where these kind of load-shedd services can sold on a per-kW-per-hour basis)

- Any producer can be forced to produce at any time. They will be compensated according to normal spot-price for that hour.

- Any consumer can be cut at any time. Every substation is prioritized according to their criticality (suburbia is less important than hospitals). If nothing else works then substations will be disconnected in accordance with this list. (Also btw, there is always 2 network-paths to every substation over a certain size)

bob1029• 2 years ago

"Our generators & compressors froze over" was PR bullshit. The spot price of natural gas went through the roof at the time.

gruez• 2 years ago

From wikipedia:

Data showed that failure to winterize power sources, principally natural gas infrastructure but also to a lesser extent wind turbines, had caused the grid failure,[15][16] with a drop in power production from natural gas more than five times greater than that from wind turbines.

What's the difference between "Our generators & compressors froze over" and "natural gas infrastructure froze over"? What's the PR gain from blaming yourself?

danans2• 2 years ago

I still don't quite understand the pricing during emergencies or shortages, though.

Unpredictable supply shortages (almost always from emergency shutoffs at fossil plants) happen on the grid all the time. To deal with this, grid operators contract with "operating reserves", which are sources of supply that stay ready to make up for a supply shortfall. Often this takes the form of running natural gas turbines (hence the subcategory called "spinning" reserves).

This is very expensive electricity because usually you must pay for the fuel spent while the reserve isn't being used also.

As more battery storage is added to the grid, this service will be increasingly provided by batteries instead of natural gas turbines.

It can also be provided by voluntary (and compensated) demand curtailment programs.

None of this can make up for a grid that is under-invested in resilience (in exchange in the short term for extremely low electricity prices), which is basically what happened in Texas.

pfdietz8• 2 years ago

The problem in Texas was exacerbated by underinvestment in efficiency. Simply insulating homes more effectively would have allowed more resilience. A home is a kind of thermal battery, allowing load shifting due to its thermal inertia. The more insulation, the longer the thermal time constant, and the longer load can be shifted.

Lerc• 2 years ago

What mechanism exists in the initial bid phase to deter lower cost producers from offering less power than they will actually supply? This would push the price per unit up. Supplying more than they offered would get them a larger chunk of it.

I'm not sure how the market works in my country, but I understand there are bitcoin miners that work directly with suppliers to buy power that can be cut off at a moments notice so extra supply can be generated and sold cheaply if not needed, eliminating spin up time.

I think it might be at the pilot program stage, but it does seem like a reasonable option to provide resiliency in an economical fashion.

dleink• 2 years ago

They also have a marvelous youtube channel.

kergonath• 2 years ago

Or Nebula :)

howenterprisey• 2 years ago

I would like to use Nebula - I even bought a subscription once - but will not until they add comments.

maronato• 2 years ago

One thing that bothers me about Nebula lately is their apparent shift toward quantity over quality.

They started as a handpicked group of creators who consistently produced excellent content, but it seems they've fallen into that classic 'eternal growth' trap, lowering their standards and accepting creators who, IMO, put out mediocre or lazy stuff.

The platform's now flooded with so many creators that finding good content has become a real challenge. The irony is that I remember Nebula founders advertising the lack of YouTube’s recommendation system and ratings as a feature. While that made perfect sense in a carefully curated environment, these tools have become necessary now that, like on YouTube, it's hard to separate signal from noise.

mikeweiss• 2 years ago

I was hoping for some website where I could plug in my address and find out.

Cheer2171• 2 years ago

Clickbait headlines like this should be flagged

pyth02• 2 years ago

Just because you misunderstood what the article was about does not make it clickbait. The article answers the question in the title in a generalized way and I did not interpret it the way you did on first read.

jweir• 2 years ago

There’s pretty much no way for them[renewables] to lose money if they’re connected to the grid, especially because many get outside incentives for every megawatt-hour they generate. They even submit negative bids in some cases, meaning they’re willing to pay money to stay connected to the grid.

The negative price reflects their incentive, not their willingness to pay.

If I am guaranteed $18 a MW/h for my solar farm, then I will bid -$18 (or maybe slightly less to account for costs). The state, or federal government will ensure I am paid at least $18.

Without these incentives we would not see negative prices, zero perhaps, but not negative.

For instance the IRA offers upto $33.00/MWh incentives.[1]

This is a problem if you have a power plant that must run - such as a nuke. You may end up paying that negative price, unless the market offers you some sort of make whole payment. But where does that come from?

[1]https://www.energy.gov/eere/water/inflation-reduction-act-ta...

pfdietz8• 2 years ago

Yes, this is a valid complaint from nuclear supporters. A better scheme would be a charge on CO2 emission, not a subsidy on renewable production, but that's politically unacceptable. Failing that, a subsidy on the capital cost of renewable installations (which nuclear fans are also asking for for nuclear, for example by loan guarantees.)

kmax12• 2 years ago

This article discusses the “deregulated” energy markets that allow many different participants to be involved in the generation of electricity.

One consequence of having many market participants is the availability of data that is published to make the markets function.

If you’re interested in seeing more about the real-time operations, I built a site that tracks all this data: https://www.gridstatus.io/live

grishka• 2 years ago

Interesting. I had no idea that these sorts of things happen in countries that never went through 70 years of socialism. We have "the" electric utility that services each particular city/area, it's a monopoly. The bill never breaks anything down, it's just "electricity" or "electricity (day)" and "electricity (night)" depending on what kind of meter you have. The power plants, the transmission lines, and the utilities are all owned by the government.

Though I am pretty sure that most of my electricity comes from the nuclear power plant near my city.

fadesibert• 2 years ago

A lot of discussion focuses on the supply side (not unexpected given the article).

The demand side is where we can take individual / small group action. On the one hand, you have CA (and most of the US) phasing out incandescent light bulbs (great - lowers baseline demand) - but you also have an order of magnitude increase in compute (model training anyone?) as well as a push towards electrification of cars, household appliances, heating etc. All fine - but that energy has to be moved (unless you're generating locally with Solar Panels).

Grid scale batteries and similar ancillary services do a pretty good job of levelling this out - making the market more "liquid" (to borrow a stock market term) - but they take 3-7y to bring up depending on the usual infra variables.

<shill> We think batteries to absorb household demand are part of the solution. [www.energyapplied.com]

If you can control when these batteries act in unison (and, as with anything, the devil is in the details) - and deploy them densely enough to absorb forecasted demand spikes (another comment ITT mentioned LMP markets - astute) - then you complement grid scale storage with something you can roll out in weeks to cover a high stress area, not years </shill>

Another comment mentioned "differently regulated" - and that's right - in order to participate in any of the supply and demand programs on the grid, you need to do a lot of things a certain way. The more you can encapsulate that for the user (don't have a household participate in Demand Response, do it through Nest or something similar and have 1mm households participate) - gets a lot more achievable.

In a funny way, power markets are probably the US's last real free-trade market. My first few years deep in the back office of an investment bank, there were 31 NYSE floor traders, when I left 13 years later in 2020, there were 2, and most volume is program trading / etfs / electronic trading. Ditto fixed income (bonds and bond like instruments), foreign exchange (though these latter two are slower).

Financial Markets inherently move towards being vanilla and scalable because it's cheaper - and this has been one area where the race to the bottom hasn't entirely harmed the consumer (there once was a time when you had to pay a broker a commission on each stock trade. Etrade / Robinhood anyone?).

Power still has a long way to go before it's there - but it will _probably_ be a good thing when it does, and given that it touches hard infrastructure and nobody's forgetting Enron any time soon - it _probably_ will end up better off for the consumer.

aucisson_masque• 2 years ago

I didn't think I would say that but sometimes state regulated industries are just simpler than free market.

I read it all, it feels like overly complicated and at the end the user pay more because the price is based on the last highest seller, 30$/MWh in his example when nuclear did cost only 20$ and provides 3 times more energy.

Some things like water, electricity and health shouldn't be left to the free market, that's how the richest country in the world ends up with a healthcare system slightly better than Bosnia.

Which power plant does my electricity come from?

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