There are two aspects to this that are part of the way this will play out in the future.
1) More storage is required to spread the solar/wind power out over the day. Most countries are well behind on grid storage. Its more common in domestic solar installs and that depends significantly on policies on import/exports.
2) Green power will always require over provisioning. For example in Australia they get about 1.5x the Solar power daily in Summer compared to Winter and the system needs to be designed for the winter which involves more storage and more production. In the summer this means there is excess power.
What I think will happen is that there will be periods of almost free power when there is excess and there will be periods of very expensive power where grids pay for people to reduce their usage, we are seeing this in the UK already at ~50% renewables.
There will be businesses that will make sense to run when power is cheap in the near future, ideally I would hope maybe energy intensive hydrocarbon fuel creation from CO2 in the atmosphere and desalination but a lot of business will become competitive is power is nearly or actually free.
The future looks very different and curtailment is a sign the market and systems haven't yet caught up to the reality of renewable energy.
We just need much cheaper catalysts to enable these sorts of industries that could be a very efficient use of ultra cheap excess electricity. Right now catalysts to create hydrocarbon fuels from the atmosphere are so expensive that it isn't worth it to build them, only to run them the ~20% of the time when electricity is so abundant that it can't be stored.
While it's possible that the over supply of solar power in California is a case of poor incentives, my money is on it being a result of different parts of the CA solar + electricity ecosystem have progressed at different speeds. Assuming that we see increases in our facility with electricity transmission and storage, having "too much" solar power now doesn't seem as big of a deal as this article makes it out to be.
Which is more likely? That excess transmission and storage infrastructure gets built out before excess generation gets built out? Or that the demand for better transmission and storage infrastructure is preceded by an oversupply of solar power?
I tried estimating how much power was curtailed from their big scary number(tm).
3 million megawatt hours per year.
Assuming 2200 hours of sun per years that's 1.4GW average. Total solar is 15-18GW maybe. So what 10% gets curtailed.
Maybe throw some more containerized batteries at it.
LA Times always feels like The Wall Street Journal of the west. Your go to source for reactionary negativism.
10% goes to waste…
I've never worked anywhere that had significant servers and managed to load the production server CPUs anywhere near 90%. 9% perhaps.
Yes I think that's a fair comparison. Both are about choosing the appropriate capacity and the solution involves electronics without any moving parts.
The only downside with drawing these kinds of analogies is that you're still paying an operating cost for the unused portion of your production server.
The light falling on a solar panel is free.
Yeah there's theoretical lost revenue, but that's a theoretical loss versus a real loss from operating costs.
If you want to be pedantic, hail falling on solar panels isn't free and happens sometimes. But adding up these kinds of cost requires a large dose of pedantry, because the costs are so small compared to the cost of operating devices that have moving parts.
(Pedantry is fun, of course. I love it.)
My comment wasn't so much about being pedantic, though insurance would cover the hail and you're paying for that regardless of output amount.
I was more taking umbrage with referring to curtailed solar and wind as "waste". It isn't waste any more than the sunlight falling on a plot of land without a solar panel is waste; neither have a real marginal cost associated with them.
Unlike say the coal plant that chooses to go into negative prices rather than turn down its output.
Will just say a mini-mill would be happy to use otherwise unused solar to power their electric furnaces.
Uhm, doesn't that need to keep the furnaces at an even temperature? I don't know much about mini-mills specifically, but devices generally age quickly if you heat and cool them repeatedly.
Anyway, it doesn't matter. In terms of money, the LA Times is complaining that the investment in solar is close to 100% efficient, just not 100%. 0.x% of panels break every year because of hail or other random wear and tear, so if they produce saleable power 90% of the time that's an investment where 0.0x% of the money is wasted. Like, wow. I wish my biggest problem could be that small.
Electric furnaces are batch operations. Melt 10-100 tons of steel in 30 minutes, pour and reload with scrap. I believe they already chase the cheap power.
But yeah oh noes efficiency isn't 100% stop everything, I wish I had such problems. What if I told you my car sits completely idle 98% of the times. Seriously I drive it for half an hour per day.
The story lede of this article is buried in the final paragraphs:
Aside from the fact that California produces far more solar power than it can effectively use, solar projects "have cleared thousands of acres of pristine land in the Mojave Desert, where it has angered local residents worried about declining property values and environmentalists concerned about the loss of wildlife habitat."
As the final graph of the article notes, the people who live in the California desert regions are not deceived.
"We have this planet to save and they are throwing away power?" said Mark Carrington, a resident of Desert Center, a town east of Joshua Tree National Park, which has been nearly surrounded by solar projects.
From a technical and high-level economic point of view, solar should be 'overbuilt' so that it supplied excess energy a decent percentage of the time, to make up for when it doesn't output near 100%. It sounds like the main issue is how the incentives are set up and rewards are distributed, not with building more solar in and of itself.
This article is light on exact details. When prices go negative, who is paying that and how, exactly? It sounds like it's at least partially effectively a government subsidy through credits. Is that necessary to compel the amount of building? The article doesn't even ask that question. They talk about trades making large profits by buying electricity when it's cheap and selling it when it's expensive. How are they doing that? Either they're actually storing the energy somehow (which is something that likely should be rewarded), or they're predicting electricity demand and supply and trading derivatives, in which case what inefficiencies are driving that market to be very lucrative for pure traders? And finally, are the high electricity prices in California at all related to the wholesale pricing? From what I could quickly find online, California's wholesale prices are not particularly high (lower than Texas, in fact). But that's usually only part of a household's electricity bill.
>From a technical and high-level economic point of view, solar should be 'overbuilt' so that it supplied excess energy a decent percentage of the time, to make up for when it doesn't output near 100%....
> Either they're actually storing the energy somehow (which is something that likely should be rewarded), or ...
Storing it is the big problem. You can't just overbuild solar power and put the energy in the network. You need to meet the demand. ND that is problematic if you must mix and match different energy sources across the network.
You can actually if you have energy trading between regions. The problem with California is that during peak-power use times (18:00->20:00) there is no where to buy more solar from. But California can sell its solar for other regions peak-power use time.
I think the problem is that the US grid is also not well set up for this to be viable though, but I don't know the specifics (I think the east coast is on a different grid from the west coast, and Texas has its own grid?)
Washington, Oregon, and Idaho all have lots of hydro with OR/ID good amounts of wind. CA should definitely get the transmission up to par to supply all their solar during the daytime and receive hydro+wind at night.
There seems to be a blindingly obvious solution, to capture some economic value from the otherwise excess solar power generated -- Bitcoin mining. In theory, it's very similar to this application, using otherwise wasted gas flares from oil drilling: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/12/23-year-old-texans-made-4-mi...
Please note, I am not advocating for Bitcoin mining as a productive means of consuming electricity that could have gone to something else (either industrial or commercial or residential) -- I'm specially talking about what the article is covering, aka EXCESS generation that truly has nowhere else to go... Might as well convert that electricity into Bitcoin, to capture something (better than nothing) from the generated electricity.
On a philosophical note.
Bitcoin's entire value prop is based on proof of work. At the end of the day, for something to be work, it must have some type of use. The usefulness is philosophically part of the definition.
So, if this power is actually indeed excess, if it actually has nowhere else to go, it cannot provide value to the bitcoin network. Think about it: if bitcoin were entirely run on "free" electricity, where would the value come from? If it doesn't take value to prove work, no value is provided. The "value" of bitcoin comes from its using useful electricity, electricity that would (not just could -- would!) otherwise go towards useful purposes.
Someone who puts a bitcoin miner e.g. next to a solar plant to capture power that is otherwise curtailed is performing an arbitrage. They are trading their worthless power for valuable power elsewhere and pocketing the difference -- and hence extracting value from the other parts of the network which utilize useful power.
Even if tomorrow we switched to bitcoin mining with only "free" power, one of two things would happen: (1) the power actually is truly "free" and hence it does not function as "work" for value purposes and hence the the underlying asset is worthless. Or, much more likely, (2) the power is not "free," the bitcoin is not worthless; it is a drain on our resources.
I mean, let's go further than that even... Imagine if somebody invented commercially viable nuclear fusion and achieved effectively free and infinite electricity, then by your logic, either of two things could happen:
- Bitcoin becomes immediately worthless, because suddenly many actors could afford to tap infinite energy to mount a 51% attack and destroy the security of the network
- Or, self-interested miners would try to "corner" the market, nearly infinite though it may be... Industrial players might try to outrace each other in terms of bringing more fusion power plants online that are dedicated towards mining -- "white hats" trying to preserve Bitcoin, vs "black hats" trying to destroy, and it's just an arms race... Maybe the end result is actually that, humanity only has productive need for 5% of the total energy that fusion generates (hey it's my thought experiment, just go with it), so what do you do with the other 95% that is otherwise pure excess? ... Maybe it all goes back into Bitcoin mining anyways, because maybe God loves a recursive joke
Or we could use it for an actually useful purpose, like charging batteries to handle peaks later in the day.
Comments in other threads explained why there will always be a gap between generation vs storage capacity, or why it's economically unwise to build so much storage as to cover peak generation.
For my purposes, I assumed a reasonable allocation towards storage was already going to happen, and that there would still be excess unused capacity beyond that level.
Maybe, maybe no. But it’d put wasting money on Bitcoin very low on that list.
My person idea would be a 1,000ft tesla coil to have it look cool.
If we're going to use excess power to run compute, I'd rather it go towards protein folding simulation. Something that might actually prove useful.
I wouldn't argue about usefulness, but certainly Bitcoin mining is more directly economically rewarding than an indirect contribution towards protein folding progress for the field at large.
Every 1 hr of mining at X hash rate will yield a fairly predictable (though fluctuating) $Y of output, but every 1 hr of protein folding will not necessarily yield any direct or predictable income. From the perspective of profit-maximizing energy producers, I suspect they will prefer the former, unless someone can quantify or monetize the latter more easily and directly.
The amount of Bitcoin produced per hour is constant (or rather, designed to be constant between halvings). We don't need more miners.
Then you need to have the hardware sitting idle when the power produced isn't in excess of what can be used. I'd guess that's not economically viable.
I believe there are better options.
aluminum smelting is very energy intensive and can be run on-demand.
Also, lots of other areas have figured out how to pump water UP a dam to store energy for later.
Carbon capture.
The issue with both is that hardware is expensive, so it's a tough sell for stuff that intends to sit idle half the time.
California grid storage growth has increased every year for five years, now that everyone has realized the importance of having batteries to buffer solar for peak and evening demand, and it will likely continue to grow — especially once someone in power realizes that desalination plants can turn their waste sodium into batteries.
What happens to the chlorine?
I’m sure there are industrial uses for chlorine. We could probably also bond it with something else and bury it.
Surely when the price of power turns negative, you just start to disconnect panels from the inverters at the low-voltage side? The voltage remains, but no current flows, and no power is generated. If switching huge DC currents is the issue, this disconnection can be pushed down towards the panel level; relays/contactors would do fine, and you can dial capacity up and down by connecting or disconnecting a greater or lesser area of panels.
Is there some electrical engineering reason this cannot be done?
This article is really well crafted propaganda.
Curtailment is part of running a low cost grid. If you have zero curtailment you're wasting money.
But it's great for propagandists. Instead of explaining like a journalist would, you can exploit that ignorance.
12% Natural gas at peak times also refutes this article.
It's not too much solar if we still have to burn fossil fuels for power generation.
I believe natural gas plants have a minimum idle so they can respond to the volatility of energy demand that needs to be met in real time. I don't think you can run the plants at 0 during the entire day and start them up again quick to respond immensely at 6pm.
If only there was a pattern to calibrate gas usage to... like a particular time when the sun goes down :D
As long as there is gas in the mix in my opinion it is not a "too much solar" but a distribution and storage problem.
seems like storage is the answer?
the grid status folks published a blog entry talking about batteries are reducing CA’s reliance of nat gas.
There are two aspects to this that are part of the way this will play out in the future.
1) More storage is required to spread the solar/wind power out over the day. Most countries are well behind on grid storage. Its more common in domestic solar installs and that depends significantly on policies on import/exports.
2) Green power will always require over provisioning. For example in Australia they get about 1.5x the Solar power daily in Summer compared to Winter and the system needs to be designed for the winter which involves more storage and more production. In the summer this means there is excess power.
What I think will happen is that there will be periods of almost free power when there is excess and there will be periods of very expensive power where grids pay for people to reduce their usage, we are seeing this in the UK already at ~50% renewables.
There will be businesses that will make sense to run when power is cheap in the near future, ideally I would hope maybe energy intensive hydrocarbon fuel creation from CO2 in the atmosphere and desalination but a lot of business will become competitive is power is nearly or actually free.
The future looks very different and curtailment is a sign the market and systems haven't yet caught up to the reality of renewable energy.
We just need much cheaper catalysts to enable these sorts of industries that could be a very efficient use of ultra cheap excess electricity. Right now catalysts to create hydrocarbon fuels from the atmosphere are so expensive that it isn't worth it to build them, only to run them the ~20% of the time when electricity is so abundant that it can't be stored.
While it's possible that the over supply of solar power in California is a case of poor incentives, my money is on it being a result of different parts of the CA solar + electricity ecosystem have progressed at different speeds. Assuming that we see increases in our facility with electricity transmission and storage, having "too much" solar power now doesn't seem as big of a deal as this article makes it out to be.
Which is more likely? That excess transmission and storage infrastructure gets built out before excess generation gets built out? Or that the demand for better transmission and storage infrastructure is preceded by an oversupply of solar power?
I tried estimating how much power was curtailed from their big scary number(tm).
3 million megawatt hours per year.
Assuming 2200 hours of sun per years that's 1.4GW average. Total solar is 15-18GW maybe. So what 10% gets curtailed.
Maybe throw some more containerized batteries at it.
LA Times always feels like The Wall Street Journal of the west. Your go to source for reactionary negativism.
10% goes to waste…
I've never worked anywhere that had significant servers and managed to load the production server CPUs anywhere near 90%. 9% perhaps.
Yes I think that's a fair comparison. Both are about choosing the appropriate capacity and the solution involves electronics without any moving parts.
The only downside with drawing these kinds of analogies is that you're still paying an operating cost for the unused portion of your production server.
The light falling on a solar panel is free.
Yeah there's theoretical lost revenue, but that's a theoretical loss versus a real loss from operating costs.
If you want to be pedantic, hail falling on solar panels isn't free and happens sometimes. But adding up these kinds of cost requires a large dose of pedantry, because the costs are so small compared to the cost of operating devices that have moving parts.
(Pedantry is fun, of course. I love it.)
My comment wasn't so much about being pedantic, though insurance would cover the hail and you're paying for that regardless of output amount.
I was more taking umbrage with referring to curtailed solar and wind as "waste". It isn't waste any more than the sunlight falling on a plot of land without a solar panel is waste; neither have a real marginal cost associated with them.
Unlike say the coal plant that chooses to go into negative prices rather than turn down its output.
Will just say a mini-mill would be happy to use otherwise unused solar to power their electric furnaces.
Uhm, doesn't that need to keep the furnaces at an even temperature? I don't know much about mini-mills specifically, but devices generally age quickly if you heat and cool them repeatedly.
Anyway, it doesn't matter. In terms of money, the LA Times is complaining that the investment in solar is close to 100% efficient, just not 100%. 0.x% of panels break every year because of hail or other random wear and tear, so if they produce saleable power 90% of the time that's an investment where 0.0x% of the money is wasted. Like, wow. I wish my biggest problem could be that small.
Electric furnaces are batch operations. Melt 10-100 tons of steel in 30 minutes, pour and reload with scrap. I believe they already chase the cheap power.
But yeah oh noes efficiency isn't 100% stop everything, I wish I had such problems. What if I told you my car sits completely idle 98% of the times. Seriously I drive it for half an hour per day.
The story lede of this article is buried in the final paragraphs:
Aside from the fact that California produces far more solar power than it can effectively use, solar projects "have cleared thousands of acres of pristine land in the Mojave Desert, where it has angered local residents worried about declining property values and environmentalists concerned about the loss of wildlife habitat."
As the final graph of the article notes, the people who live in the California desert regions are not deceived.
"We have this planet to save and they are throwing away power?" said Mark Carrington, a resident of Desert Center, a town east of Joshua Tree National Park, which has been nearly surrounded by solar projects.
From a technical and high-level economic point of view, solar should be 'overbuilt' so that it supplied excess energy a decent percentage of the time, to make up for when it doesn't output near 100%. It sounds like the main issue is how the incentives are set up and rewards are distributed, not with building more solar in and of itself.
This article is light on exact details. When prices go negative, who is paying that and how, exactly? It sounds like it's at least partially effectively a government subsidy through credits. Is that necessary to compel the amount of building? The article doesn't even ask that question. They talk about trades making large profits by buying electricity when it's cheap and selling it when it's expensive. How are they doing that? Either they're actually storing the energy somehow (which is something that likely should be rewarded), or they're predicting electricity demand and supply and trading derivatives, in which case what inefficiencies are driving that market to be very lucrative for pure traders? And finally, are the high electricity prices in California at all related to the wholesale pricing? From what I could quickly find online, California's wholesale prices are not particularly high (lower than Texas, in fact). But that's usually only part of a household's electricity bill.
>From a technical and high-level economic point of view, solar should be 'overbuilt' so that it supplied excess energy a decent percentage of the time, to make up for when it doesn't output near 100%....
> Either they're actually storing the energy somehow (which is something that likely should be rewarded), or ...
Storing it is the big problem. You can't just overbuild solar power and put the energy in the network. You need to meet the demand. ND that is problematic if you must mix and match different energy sources across the network.
You can actually if you have energy trading between regions. The problem with California is that during peak-power use times (18:00->20:00) there is no where to buy more solar from. But California can sell its solar for other regions peak-power use time.
I think the problem is that the US grid is also not well set up for this to be viable though, but I don't know the specifics (I think the east coast is on a different grid from the west coast, and Texas has its own grid?)
Washington, Oregon, and Idaho all have lots of hydro with OR/ID good amounts of wind. CA should definitely get the transmission up to par to supply all their solar during the daytime and receive hydro+wind at night.
Love this grid map for stats on transmission: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-CAL-CISO
There seems to be a blindingly obvious solution, to capture some economic value from the otherwise excess solar power generated -- Bitcoin mining. In theory, it's very similar to this application, using otherwise wasted gas flares from oil drilling: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/12/23-year-old-texans-made-4-mi...
Please note, I am not advocating for Bitcoin mining as a productive means of consuming electricity that could have gone to something else (either industrial or commercial or residential) -- I'm specially talking about what the article is covering, aka EXCESS generation that truly has nowhere else to go... Might as well convert that electricity into Bitcoin, to capture something (better than nothing) from the generated electricity.
On a philosophical note.
Bitcoin's entire value prop is based on proof of work. At the end of the day, for something to be work, it must have some type of use. The usefulness is philosophically part of the definition.
So, if this power is actually indeed excess, if it actually has nowhere else to go, it cannot provide value to the bitcoin network. Think about it: if bitcoin were entirely run on "free" electricity, where would the value come from? If it doesn't take value to prove work, no value is provided. The "value" of bitcoin comes from its using useful electricity, electricity that would (not just could -- would!) otherwise go towards useful purposes.
Someone who puts a bitcoin miner e.g. next to a solar plant to capture power that is otherwise curtailed is performing an arbitrage. They are trading their worthless power for valuable power elsewhere and pocketing the difference -- and hence extracting value from the other parts of the network which utilize useful power.
Even if tomorrow we switched to bitcoin mining with only "free" power, one of two things would happen: (1) the power actually is truly "free" and hence it does not function as "work" for value purposes and hence the the underlying asset is worthless. Or, much more likely, (2) the power is not "free," the bitcoin is not worthless; it is a drain on our resources.
I mean, let's go further than that even... Imagine if somebody invented commercially viable nuclear fusion and achieved effectively free and infinite electricity, then by your logic, either of two things could happen:
- Bitcoin becomes immediately worthless, because suddenly many actors could afford to tap infinite energy to mount a 51% attack and destroy the security of the network
- Or, self-interested miners would try to "corner" the market, nearly infinite though it may be... Industrial players might try to outrace each other in terms of bringing more fusion power plants online that are dedicated towards mining -- "white hats" trying to preserve Bitcoin, vs "black hats" trying to destroy, and it's just an arms race... Maybe the end result is actually that, humanity only has productive need for 5% of the total energy that fusion generates (hey it's my thought experiment, just go with it), so what do you do with the other 95% that is otherwise pure excess? ... Maybe it all goes back into Bitcoin mining anyways, because maybe God loves a recursive joke
Or we could use it for an actually useful purpose, like charging batteries to handle peaks later in the day.
Comments in other threads explained why there will always be a gap between generation vs storage capacity, or why it's economically unwise to build so much storage as to cover peak generation.
For my purposes, I assumed a reasonable allocation towards storage was already going to happen, and that there would still be excess unused capacity beyond that level.
Maybe, maybe no. But it’d put wasting money on Bitcoin very low on that list.
My person idea would be a 1,000ft tesla coil to have it look cool.
If we're going to use excess power to run compute, I'd rather it go towards protein folding simulation. Something that might actually prove useful.
I wouldn't argue about usefulness, but certainly Bitcoin mining is more directly economically rewarding than an indirect contribution towards protein folding progress for the field at large.
Every 1 hr of mining at X hash rate will yield a fairly predictable (though fluctuating) $Y of output, but every 1 hr of protein folding will not necessarily yield any direct or predictable income. From the perspective of profit-maximizing energy producers, I suspect they will prefer the former, unless someone can quantify or monetize the latter more easily and directly.
The amount of Bitcoin produced per hour is constant (or rather, designed to be constant between halvings). We don't need more miners.
Then you need to have the hardware sitting idle when the power produced isn't in excess of what can be used. I'd guess that's not economically viable.
I believe there are better options.
aluminum smelting is very energy intensive and can be run on-demand.
Also, lots of other areas have figured out how to pump water UP a dam to store energy for later.
Carbon capture.
The issue with both is that hardware is expensive, so it's a tough sell for stuff that intends to sit idle half the time.
California grid storage growth has increased every year for five years, now that everyone has realized the importance of having batteries to buffer solar for peak and evening demand, and it will likely continue to grow — especially once someone in power realizes that desalination plants can turn their waste sodium into batteries.
What happens to the chlorine?
I’m sure there are industrial uses for chlorine. We could probably also bond it with something else and bury it.
https://archive.is/LIj1F
Surely when the price of power turns negative, you just start to disconnect panels from the inverters at the low-voltage side? The voltage remains, but no current flows, and no power is generated. If switching huge DC currents is the issue, this disconnection can be pushed down towards the panel level; relays/contactors would do fine, and you can dial capacity up and down by connecting or disconnecting a greater or lesser area of panels.
Is there some electrical engineering reason this cannot be done?
This article is really well crafted propaganda.
Curtailment is part of running a low cost grid. If you have zero curtailment you're wasting money.
But it's great for propagandists. Instead of explaining like a journalist would, you can exploit that ignorance.
It's fun to follow along on gridstatus.io:
https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso
12% Natural gas at peak times also refutes this article.
It's not too much solar if we still have to burn fossil fuels for power generation.
I believe natural gas plants have a minimum idle so they can respond to the volatility of energy demand that needs to be met in real time. I don't think you can run the plants at 0 during the entire day and start them up again quick to respond immensely at 6pm.
If only there was a pattern to calibrate gas usage to... like a particular time when the sun goes down :D
As long as there is gas in the mix in my opinion it is not a "too much solar" but a distribution and storage problem.
seems like storage is the answer?
the grid status folks published a blog entry talking about batteries are reducing CA’s reliance of nat gas.
https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-batteries-apr-2024/
Occasionally on sunny days.
Incentivize batteries.