From a grid stability point, you can't produce more than is used, else you get higher frequencies and/or voltages until the automatics shut down. It's already a somewhat frequent occurence in germany for the grid operator to shut down big solar plants during peak hours because they produce way more power than they can dump (because of low demand or the infrastructure limiting transfer to somewhere else)

Negative prices are the grid operator encouraging more demand so it can balance out the increased production.

If only there were some way to take energy made from sunshine and store it in some form for later. Like in a battery. Or as heat. Or in a flywheel. Or just use the energy for something we'd really like to do as cheaply as possible. Like sequester CO2. Or desalinate water. Or run industries that would otherwise use natural gas.

Literal free goddamn energy from the sky and these greedy fucks are going to burn the world down because they can't flip it for a buck

In this thread: a bunch of armchair energy scientists who think they've solved the energy storage problem all on their own.

This is idiotic. The fact is your electricity transmission system operator has to pay a lot of money to keep the grid stable at 50 or 60Hz or your electronics would fry. With wind and especially with solar power, the variable output is always pushing the frequency one way or the other, and that creates a great need for costly balancing services. Negative pricing is an example of such a balancing service. Sounds good, but for how long do you think your electricity company can keep on paying you to consume power?

This reminds me of a quote (that probably isn't real) from Westinghouse to Tesla in regard to wireless energy transmission he was trying to create.

"This is wonderful, but where would we put the meter!?"

This is a real problem for renewables.

You don't get paid when the sun shines, and you don't get paid for when it does not.

You had to pay for building the solar panels and maintaining them. Corporate greed aside none sane would like their tax money either to be spent on producing electricity when it's not needed.

Next step for renewables must be storage that is cheap enough for it to beat having fossil fuel on standby.

Didn't China have a community use lots of solar and they ended up with such a glut of excess power that they didn't know what to do with it?

All communities should have that. Electricity should be free and it would be plausible to make it free. Except for maintenance costs, but that would be peanuts compared to what we pay now.

The "problem" of negative energy costs is easy to solve, but quite costly.

Build water desalination/carbon capture and storage/hydrogen generation plants that only run when the price goes below 0; even though these are very energy intensive, they would help stabilize the grid.

Then build more solar; you want to try to have the daytime price stay in the negative as often as possible.

So what they are saying is that our current financial system is too focused on short term gains to cope with short term losses?

Sigh, when I grew up, I was allways taught to save money so that I have a buffer to fall back on. This concept seems to have completely gone out the window for busniesses lately.

I dislike the talk about how capitalism is bad as a general concept, but when seeing stuff like this I do agree with it in parts.

Ok, so let's solve the issue.

There is too much electricity, so generating power to transmit to the network will cost us money.

This has an easy solution, just don't transmit it to the network.

Build a battery facility where you store the power instead, infact if the price of electricity is negative, use the power on the grid and charge your batteries as well, I mean, when the electricity cost is negative, you are being paid to consume power.

Then when the sun goes down, and the electricity price goes up, you sell the charge you have in the batteries.

Depending on your location you could even set up a pumped storage system, where instead of batteries getting charged, you use the cheap excess energy to pump a resarvoir full of water, and release it when you need the power.

it's long past time we took businessman out of control and replaced them with scientists.

The real issue isn't the overproduction per se, but that we (globally speaking) don't have enough cheap scalable responsive distributed storage. I'm writing this from a privileged position since Switzerland has loads of dams and can pump water during such peaks. But it's clear that's not the solution everywhere. I hope a good cheap mass producible battery tech with less rare earth metal requirements comes along soon.

That's not what they were saying, they were saying that it's not economical to have an abundance of electricity when people need it the least, and little or no electricity when people need it the most. It would be one thing if utilities could sell solar electricity at peak demand hours for a higher price, to make up the difference, but that's just when solar generation is slowly down significantly or stopped entirely.

And, yes, I know that battery storage could theoretically solve this, but battery technology is not currently capable of providing electricity for the entirety of the time we need it. New technologies are being developed right now with the goal of achieving long term grid storage, but they are still in the R&D phase. I'm confident a suitable storage technology, or multiple technologies, will eventually come to market, but it's going to take a while.

Regardless, it is likely we will always need some kind of on-demand power generation to supplement renewables and maintain grid stability, and I think nuclear is the best option.

But we shouldn't act like the problem is that utilities are just greedy. Many utilities aren't even for-profit companies, as many are either not-for-profit cooperatives or public entities. Sure, there are also many for-profit power utilities as well, maybe even some with connections to the fossil fuel industry, but generally power utilities are not some great villain.

The real special bit is that this crap isn't coming from, say Harvard, who one expects is all about business, but MIT which is supposed to be about Science and Engineering.

"For years, mankind has yearned to destroy the Sun." - CM Burns.

Ya know what, I'm gonna solar even harder

Before commenting, you should know there are 2 types of solar panels:

• the ones owned by people (which may or may not feed into the grid)
• the ones owned by corporations

The article is probably about the 2nd kind (if you can only sell energy when there is a surplus, your company will fail), while the twitter user makes it seem like the 1st kind was meant. We probably need to built more of both types. Identify what type the other commenters are talking about before getting in any arguments here.

Negative prices are an opportunity and people will take advantage. This would be the perfect time to change batteries, make hydrogen, send compressed air into an old mine or refill a dam