Context: This was a tweet thread from 2021:
https://xcancel.com/techreview/status/1415359221168709636
Here is the full article: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/14/1028461/solar-value-deflation-california-climate-change/
TL;DR: The issue is Capitalism.
I dream of humans one day building a Dyson swarm around the Sun and becoming a Kardashev type 2 civilization. It’s a magnificent dream that we probably must one day accomplish or accept extinction.
But that is one serious problem with it. Unless it’s managed democratically, if one psycho gets to control all of it, yeah, they could literally block out the Sun for anyone who won’t pay for protection.
But we can start rejecting late stage capitalism. Unfortunately, that’s not what is happening people are voting for right wing nut jobs who will enforce capitalism through oppression, poverty, mass surveillance and militarized police.
They’ve got economist-brain and view everything as a money thing, which is fucked up and a problem.
But negative net demand (the thing “negative cost” is signaling) is a pain in the ass, because you either need to shut off the panels from the grid, find some very high-capacity and high-throughput storage, or blow out your power grid.
Like some hydroelectric dams in Germany get run backwards, pumping water back up behind the wall. I think there are pilot projects to pump air into old mines to build up a pressure buffer. Grid-scale batteries just aren’t there yet.
Solar is good for things where the power demand is cumulative and relatively insensitive to variation over time (like, say, salt pond evaporation, but you don’t actually need panels for that). It’s also good for insolation-sensitive demand (like air conditioning).
Turns out distributed rooftop solar makes more sense given our current grid than big solar farms out in the desert (California built one, it was not a good use of money).
It’s not great, but we need to bite the bullet and use fission+reprocessing in a big way for the near future.
Agreed. It’s framed incorrectly, but the real problem is the “duck curve,” the time disparity between peak generation and peak consumption. Pumped hydro, battery storage, electrolysis, and mechanical storage are all options, but each has its own constraints. Ultimately, though, it’s an engineering problem with viable solutions. We just need the political will for the investment.
Distributed rooftop solar is the worst way to use our grid. It’s designed to pump a lot of power from a single place to a lot of little places. The opposite doesn’t work very well.
The solution is to not focus on solar by itself. Solar/wind/water/storage/long distance transmission need to be balanced with each other. Each has strengths and weaknesses that cover for the strengths and weaknesses of the others.
Distributed rooftop isn’t supposed to be about feeding the larger grid so much as topping off local demand right when it’s needed.
I’m kind of eccentric so I got a humongous array; even then at peak production I was running the A/C for 3-4 houses in my cul-de-sac other than my own. Most installations around where I live are like 1/4 of the size I put up and rarely feed much back.
And home-scale batteries are getting cheap enough that excess won’t necessarily need to get fed into the grid anyway.
We have such a stupid fucking system for running society. We go out of our fucking way to block better options simply because they don’t maximize profit. Not even “are actually unprofitable,” just that they don’t maximize profit.
A system of disturbing goods and services that can’t handle negative value is not a system that should be maintained. Our collect pursuit as a species should be the abundance of these things, not the artificially managed scarcity of them.
Problems for Capitalism are Solutions for Humanity
See also: Solutions for capitalism are problems for humanity
Capitalism has always been the problem, nothing new here.
Capitalism makes abundance problematic.
Supply side Jesus says put your faith in the wisdom of the CEO.
I would post that passage from Grapes of Wrath about oranges. But copy-paste doesn’t work on my phone
I got you.
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
Thanks. I love this quote. But it pisses me off so bad
Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
This reminds me of 2020 when they shut down slaughterhouses due to COVID. They killed hundreds of thousands (likely into the millions) of pigs using ventilation shutdown. These were not diseased pigs, it was simply to dispose of them while the slaughterhouses were shut down.
We live in a fundamentally sick society.
Isn’t capitalism the opposite ?
Competition and open market would promote sellers who quote lower because of abundance and consumers as well as sellers would benefit from the abundance.
Sellers who try to restrict the supply ultimately would loose in the long run because in a competitive market the seller would always choose cheap prices.
roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price This would be valid if no one wan’t to be sellers and a all the sellers in a market cooperate together to do this or are required by law to do this.
I know we like to blame capitalism for a lot of things but this here is a different situation i think.
It would in a properly free market. But late stage capitalism’s goal is monopolization, because it maximises profit. Or to quote Marx: “Monopoly is the inevitable end of competition, which engenders it by a continual negation of itself.”
And this is exactly what Steinbeck is describing here: “you buy food from us, at our prices, or nothing at all. We’d rather destroy our product than to sell lower.” And they can do this because no one has access to the products, or the means of production (e. g. the land to grow produce).
And this is where we are today with Amazon, Nestle, Walmart and so on. They don’t have any real competition anymore.
oh no the power is too cheap. God forbid our trillions of tax dollars go to something actually useful and good for the people oh well looks like we will get the F-47 instead and pay it to private military contracts 😂
We need more military! Cut social security!
The answer is batteries. And dismantling capitalism, but batteries first
A big flaw in German energy policy that has done a great job in expanding renewables, includes not giving its industry variable rates, that lets them invest in batteries, and schedule production more seasonally, or if they have reduced demand due to high product prices from high energy costs, just have work on the good days.
Using EVs as grid balancers can be an extra profit center for EV owners with or without home solar. Ultra cheap retail daytime rates is the best path to demand shifting. Home solar best path to removing transmission bottlenecks for other customers. Containerized batteries and hydrogen electrolysis as a service is a tariff exempt path at moving storage/surplus management throughout the world for seasonal variations, but significantly expanding renewables capacity without risking negative pricing, and making evening/night energy cheaper to boot.
Nah, lets squash capitalism first.
Not saying we shouldn’t do both, but in reality waiting to destroy capitalism before fixing the grid just means you have too much theory and not enough praxis.
Lets squash it with batteries, they are heavy for a reason.
Batteries for something like this would be something like a lake on top of, and at the bottom of, a mountain.
Then you use excess power to move water up, and when you need power, the water comes down through a turbine.
Honestly, this attitude is downright suicidal for our species right now. Capitalism took centuries to develop. Anything that replaces it will form over a similar time scale. And with climate change, that is time we do not have.
I’ve got some bad news though. If our markets keep ignoring the environmental cost of… well, pretty much anything, as they always have, capitalism will also fuck us over in the long run. I’ve even heard it’s already happening…
CapitalistsPeople in just about every system ignore negative externalities, which are defined as costs borne by other people for the benefits that they receive themselves. Ironically, capitalism might be the best short-term solution, if only we had the political will. One of the major functions of government is to internalize negative externalities, via taxes and regulations. It’s easy for a factory owner to let toxic effluent flow into the nearby river, but if it costs enough in taxes and fines, it’s cheaper to contain it. We just need to use government regulations to make environmental damage cost too much money, and the market would take care of re-balancing economic activity to sustainable alternatives. The carbon tax is a well-known example of this technique, but we’ve seen how well that has gone over politically. Still, it’s probably easier to push those kinds of regulations in a short time frame than to fundamentally revamp the entire system.A non-functioning government is also a feature of capitalism, though.
Wasn’t there a town in China that produced such a glut of surplus electricity that they didn’t know what to do with it? And it was 100% solar?
I guess the biggest bottleneck for renewables is energy storage.
That’s the common thought, but it rests on the assumption that demand cannot be manipulated.
Legacy generation incentivized overnight consumption, when the grid had excess production capacity it needed to unload. With solar, we need to reverse those incentives. If it is harder to produce power overnight, we can drive large industry (like steel mills and aluminum smelters) to switch from overnight operations to daytime consumption.
Overnight storage is something we do need, but it is not efficient, and the need for it should be avoided wherever possible.
Parking garages are usually full during the day, when solar is at its highest generation. In the near future, as EV adoption rises, parking garages need charging stations at every space, sucking up every “excess” watt on the grid.
Pretty much. Once we got that covered there is no excuse anymore.
It’s basically solved. Sodium batteries are cheaper and much more durable than lithium batteries, and are currently being commercialized. Their only downside is that they are heavier, but that does not matter for grid-scale storage.
I remember reading about those. Sodium batteries are revolutionary. They don’t need a rare earth mineral… sodium is friggen everywhere.
Being cheaper than Lithium is great, but are they cheaper than nuclear?
The manpower of maintaining all these batteries seems like it would also be a lot, how would you do it for an entire grid, or would you need to have each individual placing a battery on their property to deal with brownouts?
That’s kind of irrelevant.
Nuclear handles the base power generation. Grid storage is meant to handle peaks. It needs to be cheaper than coal, which is also used for peaks.
Anyway, grid storage is already about 200$ per installed kw with lithium. If sodium gets us to 100$, a 1GW installation comparable to a nuclear plant would cost 100 million. That’s like 150 to 300x cheaper than a nuclear plant. And a plant takes years to build, decades even. A storage facility takes days or weeks.
Of course that does not count energy generation, but grid scale storage basically stores free excess energy from nuclear and renewables. So they actually improve the cost efficiency of nuclear and renewables, they don’t compete with them.
Problem with coal or nuklear is it isn’t cheap. In Germany it survies only on subsidies. And Nuclear was abolished in Germany, a bit to early. I said we needed it 10 years longer and we could have shutdown our coal.
The problem I see with wind and solar is you need backup power, to handle the sinusoidal nature of production. So you need to duplicate your power production, and that costs a lot.
Story of 2010s Germany as well.
It’s funny how capitalist apologists in this thread attack the format of a tweet and people not reading the actual article, when they clearly haven’t read the original article.
Negative prices are only mentioned in passing, as a very rare phenomenon, while most of it is dedicated to value deflation of energy (mentioned 4 times), aka private sector investors not earning enough profits to justify expanding the grid. Basically a cautionary tale of leaving such a critical component of society up to a privatized market.
Negative prices are only mentioned in passing, as a very rare phenomenon
Negative prices are occurring more and more frequently. The cause is baseload generation: it can’t be dialed back as quickly as solar increases during the day, and it can’t be ramped up as fast as solar falls off in the evening. The baseload generators have to stay on line to meet overnight demand. Because they can’t be adjusted fast enough to match the demand curve, they have to stay online during the day as well.
The immediate solution is to back down the baseload generators, and rely more on peaker plants, which can match the curve.
The longer term solution is to remove the incentives that drive overnight consumption. Stop incentivizing “off peak” consumption, and instead push large industrial consumers to daytime operation.
Where did op put that link?
Without reading the article, I could already see what the problem was.
Unless you have capital to invest, you can’t expand or improve the power grid. That capital can either come from the gov’t–through taxation–or from private industry. If you, personally, have enough capital to do so, you can build a fully off-grid system, so that you aren’t dependent on anyone else. But then if shit happens, you also can’t get help from anyone else. (Also, most houses in urban areas do not have enough square feet of exposure to the sun to generate all of their own power.)
Fundamentally, this is a problem that can only be solved by regulation, and regulation is being gutted across the board in the US.
That’s not the problem the article gets to. The capital is there. Capital is being dumped into solar at breakneck speed. That’s the problem.
As more solar gets built, you get more days when there’s so much excess solar capacity that prices go near zero, or occasionally even negative. With more and more capacity around solar, there is less incentive to build more because you’re increasing the cases of near-zero days.
Basically, the problem is that capitalism has focused on a singular solution–the one that’s cheapest to deploy with the best returns–without considering how things work together in a larger system.
There are solutions to this. Long distance transmission helps areas where it isn’t sunny take advantage of places where it is. Wind sometimes blows when the sun isn’t shining, and the two technologies should be used in tandem more than they are. Storing it somewhere also helps; in fact, when you do wind and solar together, they cover each other enough that you don’t have to have as much storage as you’d think. All this needs smarter government subsidies to make it happen.
As a side note, you seem to be focused on solar that goes on residential roofs. That’s the worst and most expensive way to do solar. The space available for each project is small, and it’s highly customized to the home’s individual roof situation. It doesn’t take advantage of economies of scale very well. Using the big flat roofs of industrial buildings is better, but the real economies of scale come when you have a large open field. Slap down racks and slap the solar panels on top.
If what you want is energy independence from your local power utility, then I suggest looking into co-op solar/wind farms. If your state bans them–mine does–then that’s something to talk to your state representatives about.
Transmission is tough. But the solution from too much solar investment driving down profits would be to invest that same money into storage. That seems like a natural follow up.
Imagine your profit if you can charge your storage with negative cost power!
It’s one of the solutions, yes.
But let’s look at this more broadly. The idea of combining wind/water/solar/storage with long distance transmission lines isn’t particularly new. The book “No Miracles Needed” by Mark Z. Jacobson (a Stanford Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering) outlined the whole thing in 2023, but was the sum total of the author’s insight that he had had over a decade prior. Dumping all the money in one was never going to get us there.
Capitalism does sorta figure this out, but it takes steps of understanding as it focuses on one thing at a time. The first step dumps money into the thing that’s cheap and gives the best ROI (solar). Then there’s too much of that thing, and the economics shifts to covering up the shortfalls of that part (be it wind or storage or whatever). That makes it better, but there’s still some shortfalls, so then that becomes the thing in demand, and capitalism shifts again.
It does eventually get to the comprehensive solution. The one that advocates in the space were talking about decades before.
The liberal solution–the one that leaves capitalism fundamentally intact–is to create a broad set of government incentives to make sure no one part of the problem gets too much focus. Apparently, we can’t even do that.
Wow, someone actually explaining the problem correctly. I’ll also mention that part of the fix should be on the demand side. Using your home as a thermal battery can load shift HVAC needs by hours, and with a water heater, it works even better. That’s not even talking about all the other things that could be scheduled like washer/dryers, dish washers, EV charging, etc.-
the real economies of scale come when you have a large open field.
And before anyone bothers you about the impact of turning fields into solar farms, I’ll add that we (the US) already have more farmland dedicated to energy production (ethanol corn) than would be necessary to provide our whole electricity demand.
And before anyone bothers you about the impact of turning fields into solar farms, I’ll add that we (the US) already have more farmland dedicated to energy production (ethanol corn) than would be necessary to provide our whole electricity demand.
Oh hell yes. 40% of the corn is grown in the US for ethanol, and it’s a complete and utter waste. Even with extremely optimistic numbers the amount of improvement is close to zero. It might be the worst greenwashing out there; sounds like you’re doing something, but its benefit is likely negative.
We have the land. That’s so not a problem.
It doesn’t take advantage of economies of scale very well.
You missed my point; I was talking about being entirely off-grid there. So unless the homeowner in question also has a large industrial building with a flat roof, we’re back to where I said that they didn’t have enough generative capacity to not be reliant on a power grid, at least in part.
If what you want is energy independence from your local power utility,
No, I want energy independence period. Not just from the local utility, I want independence from a co-op as well. I want to have my own well so I’m not relying on someone else to deliver water. I want enough arable land to grow most, or all, of my own food. This isn’t compatible with living in a city. (And part of the reason I want to generate my own power is so that I can use all electric vehicles.)
You missed my point. What you assumed the article said was completely off base.
No, I want energy independence period. Not just from the local utility, I want independence from a co-op as well.
Then what you’re asking for is a more fractured human society. This kind of independence from others is an illusion and is not compatible with how humans have evolved.
Then what you’re asking for is a more fractured human society.
No, I’m saying I want energy independence. I don’t want to be dependent on the vagaries of service providers, or politicians that decide one day that renewables are great, and then the next day fuck it all drill baby drill, or a utility–or government–that refuses to invest the necessary capital into infrastructure to maintain capability. I’ll pay my taxes so that shit can get done IF that ends up being the will of the people, but I don’t see the point of being dependent on a system that I both need and have no control over.
Drive to get groceries? You’re dependent on most of those same factors.
Water? Same. Even if you have a well, you still don’t want that well to be polluted by people around you.
Shelter? You presumably don’t want a neighbor’s rickety structure to fall over on yours during a storm.
This kind of independence is a farce.
Drive to get groceries? You’re dependent on most of those same factors.
I said I wanted enough arable land to grow my own.
Water? Same. Even if you have a well, you still don’t want that well to be polluted by people around you.
See above.
Shelter? You presumably don’t want a neighbor’s rickety structure to fall over on yours during a storm.
See above. I don’t intend to have neighbors within a mile.
The question comes down to this. How do you incentivize work other than with money?
The same way arts and crafts were invented - humans want to do things whenever they aren’t stressed out of their minds.
Who wants to clear out sewage pipes? Who wants to do underwater welding? Who wants to work on an oil rig?
A lack of stress isn’t going to get anyone to do jobs like these.
Capitalism isn’t “when people get paid for working.” And people getting paid for doing a job isn’t the problem highlighted in this post. In any case, there are any number of ways people might be motivated to do something useful.
This problem goes beyond capitalism. Even in a communist, socialist, anarchical, or whatever system you have to figure out a way to get people to spend a good portion of their lives doing things they don’t typically want to do.
In this case how do you get hundreds of people to continue working at these power grid companies if they’re in the red and eventually run out of money? People won’t stay around without a paycheck.
Historically, people have worked due to real scarcity in order to meet their basic survival needs. We don’t face such scarcity in the modern, developed world.
I’ve often conceptualized UBI or other such schemes (e.g. negative income tax) to provide a basic, spartan standard of living. If you want luxury, you need to work for it. Of course what constitutes “luxury” might fluctuate over time. And in times of greater abundance, UBI might be more generous while being scaled back in times of scarcity. If too many people opt out of working and only collect UBI, then real scarcity may indeed become and issue requiring such programs to be reduced.
But the point here is that we produce FAR more than what people actually need. This “must work and produce for the sake of it” leads to a lot of make-work in the form of things like artificial scarcity, planned obsolescence, or people producing and selling solutions in search of problems. The amount of actual fucking trash produced is mind-boggling. Something like fast fashion that produces low quality apparel only intended to be worn a few times has an enormous impact on our environment.
Imagine a world where we worked towards quality and making sure that actual needs were being met rather than being fixated on highest profitability at the exclusion of everything else. A more collaborative society instead of a hyper-competitive “winner take all” freak show.
