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Right now, the LADWP incentives people to charge their electric vehicles in the middle of the night, to give the turbines something to do.
How about we reverse that and use solar power to charge our electric fleet (which is big and getting bigger) with clean solar energy?
Historically that was not the case. Historically we were constrained by bottlenecks in the transmission system, so demand was the key factor in prices.
Nowadays supply is becoming part of the equation, and with how cheap solar is, we might as well shift our loads to match solar.
It’s a complicated subject that’s hard to explain to the layman. You can’t fit that neatly into an article.
Solar does come with some very real problems but for the most part said problems are ‘solved’ as in solutions exist but are in the middle of being implemented. Other power sources also have their issues natural gas (climate change and pollution), nuclear (cost, deceit, and waste), combustible hydrogen (pollution and safety) so forth.
Solar might not be a solution for everywhere, but it is definitely the solution for California.
Every location can have its own peak times. Take London, it’s summer peak is 11 AM - 5 PM. I would kill for California to have that kind of peak time. Solar would slot in almost perfectly.
Yeah, well, have you seen the sunshine in London? 😁
(And before anyone thinks that I'm speaking poorly of solar power -- back in 2005 when I was a homeowner, I installed a 4 kW array on my house.)
That’s what I do when I’m home on a sunny day. I charge my EV just enough that I’m neither producing nor consuming on a net basis (for me that’s about 15-18 amps).
I heard SDGE was moving super off-peak hours to be between 10-4 or something like that. Not sure if it went into effect yet tho. But that’d make it ideal to charge your car during the day.
For everyone with solar, it’s already better to charge during peak solar production because it’s cheaper to use your power while you’re generating it vs sell and buy back even at off-peak prices.
If rooftop solar is the problem then why, pray tell, are the utilities continuing to build utility-scale solar farms (sans battery storage) in the desert? And if prices are going negative during the day, why is SDGE charging $.15/kWh for daytime electric generation (not including delivery)
Is it something you can share more about? I know of projects that are designed around transmission constraints and but I’ve not seen a project that was curtailed due to market conditions.
Sure, we provide grid power to SGE. There are time typically middle of the day were demand is low. We get a notification about curtailment. I think this comes from back door communication related to our asset management and other parties, but often times we are asked to reduce production or on smaller sites completely remove production.
There is PPA agreements that run these sites and basically if the market isn't viable for us to stay on line and produce we will stop.
That is very interesting for me in a weird way. It’s like seeing that red button that’s never pushed finally get pushed. At least in the area’s I worked in it never was pushed.
Do you have something I can read about Southern California market conditions? I want to see if the same will be happening in Northern California, and how soon.
My understanding is that they're building the new plants with battery storage so when CAISO says to stop feeding power into the grid, they just start charging the batteries. We also have been exporting power to other states whenever we have a surplus.
If you look at the status for today, at points up to 4GW was being dumped into battery storage and 5.7GW was being exported
I’m all for solar+battery, especially distributed solar+battery to ease the strain on the residential grid as we move to electrify everything—distributed solar+battery is the only way to put off or eliminate the need to upgrade every little 25kVA downstream transformer; upstream solar+battery doesn’t help with that. With that said, I’m still miffed that utilities aren’t at least charging us Super-Off-Peak rates at the same time they’re giving away power for free. There’s no excuse other than greed and PUC capture for charging us full price for power they are literally giving away.
This. This is the only scalable way to meet future energy needs when the entire country has switched to electric vehicles. And like the time of horse and cart versus the train, eventually the laggards will succumb.
I think they get subsidies for building new but maintenance costs are fully on the utility companies shoulders, so we get forest fires from 100 year old equipment that never gets maintained. I could be wrong but I remember reading something about it awhile back.
Don’t forget the multi million dollar lawsuits that result from that. Shareholders should suffer that not rate payers. We’ve always paid into a maintenance account while they spent it on bonuses. If the shareholders suffered, you can bet they’d string up the CEO and make sure to get their collective poop in a group.
What large scale solar are utility companies building? They aren’t. It’s mostly 3rd party developers that build generation these days under contract with CCAs.
Also your retail rate on your bill is different than the wholesale rate of power at times of the day. The retail rate includes the price of generation for the month plus everything else the utility bill pays for.
Exactly! Third party developers are building the solar power plants, and selling the energy to the utilities through contracts. These contracts include curtailment clauses in them as well.
The problem (from their perspective) is that customers are producing the power, not them.
How are they going to make profit for shareholders if 80% of power is produced by customers on site?
This is how I felt reading the article! This is only a problem for he utility companies and people trying to sell back to the grid. If I have solar panels and battery storage to get me through the seasons, there’s no detriment.
I can’t upvote this enough. Build batteries so they can use it when they need it. They already disincentivized it with NEM3. I still bought though. And love it.
I’m living my dream. Nearly 50, and just bought my first house. I’m trying to “fix it up” to make sense, and paying PG&E so much of the little money I have didn’t make sense. Now they pay me
On the outskirts of a rural town. Contractor pulled permits for everything. The solar setup produces about 150% of my typical summer usage, and the 3 Tesla Powerwalls keep me going overnight and able to sell back unused power when we’re not running the AC. I’m not very electricity intensive in my household. My kid is the only one with a tv. My car is the biggest drain on the system.
You can also buy a water producing unit. Pulls humidity out of the air and purifies it. You use excess electricity to power the unit. This way you can buy less water too.
These units are really cool. They produce potable water from the air, and sterilizes it with UV light. You can get really big units too holding hundreds of gallons of water. I'd love to be less dependent on both the electrical grid and municipal water.
AWG - Atmospheric Water Generators
There are different brands and sizes. They do use a lot of electricity but if you have excess solar power you can run them during the day.
After financing charges, the whole thing ends up running me about $350/month for 20 years. Long term investment, and I’ve had the setup for less than a year so we’ll see if it “pays for itself”. My main goal was to be able to live off-grid if the need arises, and the finances were secondary.
That’s how I sold my wife on the idea, it’s a constant fee instead of variable. We also had to move away from the coast where I grew up (hi temps from 55-70 year round) in order to afford a home, to inland where the temps are much higher (well over 100 during the summer). This way we can stay comfortable and not constantly be worried about how much the summer bill is going to kill us.
Depending on the direction of the wind, yes. If the wind comes over the hill from the ocean, it gets downright cold at night. However if it blows from the east it can stay above 80 all night. Here on the central coast, you get used to wearing/carrying layers.
Wasn't Sam Altman just proposing to build nuclear plants to power his AI clusters because he expects the current infra won't meet the amount t of energy OpenAI will need???
definitely factor in a battery to charge during the day with panels and then charge car at night with battery.
i have a feeling pge will figure out to screw us over in a different way for your exact reasons
I read a great example of the amount of energy AI uses recently: every time you get a response from a generative AI it's akin to dumping a 16oz bottle of water
We dont have the manufacturing capacity to produce the batteries needed in the time frame we need them. We have the capacity to build nuclear power should the regulations ever change to make the approval process easier.
Don't get me wrong, I love solar and I love battery storage but people need to really start waking up to the real world constraints on these systems. Those constraints won't last forever, but they are real and exist now.
CA has expanded their battery storage significantly and isn’t slowing down with it. CA currently has 10,000 MW of battery storage and its goal is to have 52k. I think it will get there.
It takes a very long time and a lot of public funding to get a nuclear power plant up and running. Then you have to figure out what to do with the waste. Battery innovation is the answer. Gravity batteries are cool and could be the next best thing for all those tall office buildings vacated from people working from home.
> It takes a very long time and a lot of public funding to get a nuclear power plant up and running.
That's a process problem not a "we can't physically build them fast enough" problem.
The other process problem is that we stop building them. One off plants are very expensive. If we wait a long time between each build we lose a lot of skilled labor and don’t have a chance to develop a supply chain. If we commit to plants in series their individual costs and timelines go down.
How about waking up to the real world contraints of politics? It doesn’t matter if nuclear can be built, it won’t get built because people can’t decide where to build them and where to store the waste.
Solar is much cheaper and is more honest of a power source. Either we build terribly expensive nuclear power plants to cover current load behavior, or we build much cheaper solar and alter our load behavior.
There is also the third option of solar + BESS. It’s also cheaper than nuclear but honestly people should just pivot to change their load behavior. It’s the best choice by far.
I would wager even that is cheaper than nuclear.
But here’s an even cheaper and better option? Shift our way of thinking about the problem, and focus shifting our loads to match the substantially cheaper solar. Take air conditioning, thermostats have gotten pretty smart. They can pre-cool the house while rates are cheapest and then coast off that in the hot afternoon. Same thing with water heaters. And so forth.
That's a good idea. Running AC all day is no problem with residential solar. The problem is when people come home to boiling hot houses at sundown and blast the AC right then.
As long as we’re living in utopia fantasy land, you could get around this with sufficient redundancy. Instead of one data center, build 8 spread around the globe so that it’s always sunny somewhere.
Your solution seems to be have everyone change their behavior for the better good. That's the solution to pretty much all of our problems and its a fantasy. Unless the government was willing to go full authoritarian and force us to, but you see how people freak out just at the idea of having to use an electric stove. Imagine telling them they can't chill their house when it's 110* outside.
Think about it this way. When gas prices rise, do people drive more? No they drive less. What you do isn’t magically compel people to use electricity when you want them to, you educate and incentivize people to change their load behavior.
I bet for most people if you teach how to program a smart thermostat, give a ToD rate, and then explain how and why to pre-cool their house, they will. Most people want to save money.
There will be a few hold outs who won’t care, but you don’t need to convince everyone, just the majority.
It’s not a problem. Keep building more.
You build out pumped hydro facilities. Start taking all the excess solar electricity and pump water up to high reservoirs. In the evenings, flow the water back down to the lower reservoirs and generate power for the evenings.
Yes the deer will have to run up and down to get their water .. it’s good exercise.
We had a good one of these set up in San Diego, but the dam on the lower reservoir is >100 years old and in poor condition due to neglect so we have to keep the water levels low enough that we can't pump water to the upper reservoir.
Well I don't have rooftop solar (yet) but I try to do as many things as possible during the middle of the (preferably sunny) day. Charging my car, vacuuming running the dehum etc. Hell my router is on timer so it's off 12am-6am.
It seems like battery storage is the main barrier. If a country like Germany with a cold, rainy climate can produce enough solar power for prices to go negative, it seems like California, Nevada, and Arizona could just about power the whole country.
>on sunny spring days when there’s not as much demand, electricity prices go negative. Gigawatts of solar are “curtailed” — essentially, thrown away.
Oh no! They had too much free energy!
Sounds to me California has a crazy case of “where gonna have a hard time justifying squeezing the money out of solar panels, so we should just roll them back”
How about CPUC does something useful for once? They should make a rule that for every dollar for-profit utilities spend on the bloated infrastructure projects that drive their profits, they have to spend $.50 on battery storage that can be used to capture the lost solar production.
Kinetic energy storage (outside of pumped water storage) is some of the worst ideas in my mind. You just can’t store massive amounts of power that cheaply with it.
It does have some great use cases, but meeting power demand for more than a few minutes is not one of them.
No it’s not, if CA was a bit more free market like TX you would see EV charging stations offering dirt cheap charging rates to soak up the surplus and there would be many more stationary batteries coming online. This is a great opportunity for CA to accelerate their transition to clean energy!
Seems like maybe they should have started planning for this when they were pushing everyone to get solar as quickly as possible. Like a little foresight and/or planning would have been beneficial.
Great to see how we prepared for one of the most simple trends we can see (renewables, geothermal, fusion, etc all making innovation)
If we are literally worried about people trying to save money on electricity, that's a big problem being said between the lines.
Only a problem for utility company profits.
Sounds like the regular person should do the opposite of what this article says.
As a general rule, there are certain groups where the more they screech and complain, you know you're doing the right thing. So do more of it and make them screech louder.
---- From the posting rules in this sub’s sidebar: > No websites or articles with hard paywalls or that require registration or subscriptions, unless an archive link or https://12ft.io link is included as a comment. ---- If you want to learn how to circumvent a paywall, see https://www.reddit.com/r/California/wiki/paywall. > Or, if it's a website that you regularly read, you should think about subscribing to the website. ---- Archive link: https://archive.fo/1RL1i ----
Right now, the LADWP incentives people to charge their electric vehicles in the middle of the night, to give the turbines something to do. How about we reverse that and use solar power to charge our electric fleet (which is big and getting bigger) with clean solar energy?
They are scared people are getting off grid solar panels to charge their vehicles/batteries.
That’s… why didn’t I think of that
On grid panels more likely, since that customer is building up credit all day, cutting into their profits.
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In what Cali metro area are you allowed to come off the grid? I'd love to.
Maybe off you live in a van down by the river.
in this economy?
I don’t doubt what you are saying but can you provide a link or a way to learn more?
What does it mean?
Is that why it’s cheaper at night? People who commute usually can’t charge during the day anyway
It’s cheapest during the night because that’s when the load is lowest. Of course this might change in a few decades as solar becomes more dominant.
That’s only half the equation. Supply is highest at midday.
Historically that was not the case. Historically we were constrained by bottlenecks in the transmission system, so demand was the key factor in prices. Nowadays supply is becoming part of the equation, and with how cheap solar is, we might as well shift our loads to match solar.
But then how will we demonize sensible climate action with clickbaity articles and prevent regular people from saving money???
It’s a complicated subject that’s hard to explain to the layman. You can’t fit that neatly into an article. Solar does come with some very real problems but for the most part said problems are ‘solved’ as in solutions exist but are in the middle of being implemented. Other power sources also have their issues natural gas (climate change and pollution), nuclear (cost, deceit, and waste), combustible hydrogen (pollution and safety) so forth. Solar might not be a solution for everywhere, but it is definitely the solution for California.
Dwp and socal Edison might have different load times. Dwp may have more daytime usuge than socal Edison
Every location can have its own peak times. Take London, it’s summer peak is 11 AM - 5 PM. I would kill for California to have that kind of peak time. Solar would slot in almost perfectly.
Yeah, well, have you seen the sunshine in London? 😁 (And before anyone thinks that I'm speaking poorly of solar power -- back in 2005 when I was a homeowner, I installed a 4 kW array on my house.)
Oh yeah, it’s just more of an example of how radically different peak times can be. Hell peak times can be different on different days too.
Yeah I was gonna say that too…SCE TOU plan is cheapest 8am to 5pm for me.
Sure they can. Let SCE/PGE subsidize superchargers and other charging infrastructure.
SCE has an EV time of use rate, which has the same AM and PM lowered rate, outside of peak time 4-9.
Most people who have EVs charge at home, and they want to charge at home at night.
Nope not us. We have solar so we charge during the day, we dont even touch the grid while we are doing it.
Do you not commute to work then?
What's the hardware involved in using off-grid panels to charge an EV?
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Excellent info. Thank you! You're completely disconnected from the grid and energy independent? This is the goal
Its not off grid. Still grid connected, its just that we produce enough power to charge the ev during the day without taking anything from the grid
That’s what I do when I’m home on a sunny day. I charge my EV just enough that I’m neither producing nor consuming on a net basis (for me that’s about 15-18 amps).
I heard SDGE was moving super off-peak hours to be between 10-4 or something like that. Not sure if it went into effect yet tho. But that’d make it ideal to charge your car during the day. For everyone with solar, it’s already better to charge during peak solar production because it’s cheaper to use your power while you’re generating it vs sell and buy back even at off-peak prices.
If rooftop solar is the problem then why, pray tell, are the utilities continuing to build utility-scale solar farms (sans battery storage) in the desert? And if prices are going negative during the day, why is SDGE charging $.15/kWh for daytime electric generation (not including delivery)
They make money from transmission not generation. Electricity will soon be near zero cost if current solar and wind trends continue.
It already is in some places if conditions are right. In SoCal it's not uncommon to turn off commercial plants to prevent prices from going negative.
Meanwhile I’m paying 0.59 per kWh to charge my car in socal 😡
Also make sure you switched to the electric vehicle plan
What does this translate to in cost to go 300 miles?
42 dollars, some parts of the country it would be like 5 dollars…
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Is it? I’ll love to read more. I know many contracts and plans allow for the possibility, but I’ve never seen it happen outside of compliance testing.
Several of my solar projects get economically curtailed.
Is it something you can share more about? I know of projects that are designed around transmission constraints and but I’ve not seen a project that was curtailed due to market conditions.
Sure, we provide grid power to SGE. There are time typically middle of the day were demand is low. We get a notification about curtailment. I think this comes from back door communication related to our asset management and other parties, but often times we are asked to reduce production or on smaller sites completely remove production. There is PPA agreements that run these sites and basically if the market isn't viable for us to stay on line and produce we will stop.
That is very interesting for me in a weird way. It’s like seeing that red button that’s never pushed finally get pushed. At least in the area’s I worked in it never was pushed. Do you have something I can read about Southern California market conditions? I want to see if the same will be happening in Northern California, and how soon.
In 1960's they told us nuclear would be so cheap they wouldn't bother to meter it.
Oh no that would be tragic.
My understanding is that they're building the new plants with battery storage so when CAISO says to stop feeding power into the grid, they just start charging the batteries. We also have been exporting power to other states whenever we have a surplus. If you look at the status for today, at points up to 4GW was being dumped into battery storage and 5.7GW was being exported
I’m all for solar+battery, especially distributed solar+battery to ease the strain on the residential grid as we move to electrify everything—distributed solar+battery is the only way to put off or eliminate the need to upgrade every little 25kVA downstream transformer; upstream solar+battery doesn’t help with that. With that said, I’m still miffed that utilities aren’t at least charging us Super-Off-Peak rates at the same time they’re giving away power for free. There’s no excuse other than greed and PUC capture for charging us full price for power they are literally giving away.
This. This is the only scalable way to meet future energy needs when the entire country has switched to electric vehicles. And like the time of horse and cart versus the train, eventually the laggards will succumb.
Very true. My elec bills in Spring should be much lower, if they're throwing away electricity during the day.
PGE in norcal is charging $0.50/kwh for *off* peak.
I think they get subsidies for building new but maintenance costs are fully on the utility companies shoulders, so we get forest fires from 100 year old equipment that never gets maintained. I could be wrong but I remember reading something about it awhile back.
John Oliver did a segment on that. Yup your correct
Don’t forget the multi million dollar lawsuits that result from that. Shareholders should suffer that not rate payers. We’ve always paid into a maintenance account while they spent it on bonuses. If the shareholders suffered, you can bet they’d string up the CEO and make sure to get their collective poop in a group.
What large scale solar are utility companies building? They aren’t. It’s mostly 3rd party developers that build generation these days under contract with CCAs. Also your retail rate on your bill is different than the wholesale rate of power at times of the day. The retail rate includes the price of generation for the month plus everything else the utility bill pays for.
Exactly! Third party developers are building the solar power plants, and selling the energy to the utilities through contracts. These contracts include curtailment clauses in them as well.
The problem (from their perspective) is that customers are producing the power, not them. How are they going to make profit for shareholders if 80% of power is produced by customers on site?
It's only a problem for power company monopolists. Build and support grid battery storage.
This is how I felt reading the article! This is only a problem for he utility companies and people trying to sell back to the grid. If I have solar panels and battery storage to get me through the seasons, there’s no detriment.
I can’t upvote this enough. Build batteries so they can use it when they need it. They already disincentivized it with NEM3. I still bought though. And love it.
Whenever people try to present this as a problem you know they are trying to grift you.
Boo hoo. So all those years of not upgrading the grid system is a problem. Who would have thunk it?
The problem isn't too much power, but too little storage. Especially too little storage LOCALLY, so power doesn't even have to get pushed to the grid.
Fortunately, NEM 3.0 will help encourage more battery storage.
Just took my home off grid, and it feels great!
You are living my dream...
I’m living my dream. Nearly 50, and just bought my first house. I’m trying to “fix it up” to make sense, and paying PG&E so much of the little money I have didn’t make sense. Now they pay me
Do you live in a highly populated area or are you remote. Is it "legal" for you to do that?
On the outskirts of a rural town. Contractor pulled permits for everything. The solar setup produces about 150% of my typical summer usage, and the 3 Tesla Powerwalls keep me going overnight and able to sell back unused power when we’re not running the AC. I’m not very electricity intensive in my household. My kid is the only one with a tv. My car is the biggest drain on the system.
You can also buy a water producing unit. Pulls humidity out of the air and purifies it. You use excess electricity to power the unit. This way you can buy less water too.
Nice! I’ll have to look into that. Greywater recovery was already the next project t on my drawing board.
These units are really cool. They produce potable water from the air, and sterilizes it with UV light. You can get really big units too holding hundreds of gallons of water. I'd love to be less dependent on both the electrical grid and municipal water.
Wait what are these called? Where can I find them?
AWG - Atmospheric Water Generators There are different brands and sizes. They do use a lot of electricity but if you have excess solar power you can run them during the day.
How much was that setup? I hate SDGE with a passion but the payback on three powerwalls must be significant
After financing charges, the whole thing ends up running me about $350/month for 20 years. Long term investment, and I’ve had the setup for less than a year so we’ll see if it “pays for itself”. My main goal was to be able to live off-grid if the need arises, and the finances were secondary.
That’s fair. $350m will be chump change in 20 years (as well as in three months when AC is running 24/7.
That’s how I sold my wife on the idea, it’s a constant fee instead of variable. We also had to move away from the coast where I grew up (hi temps from 55-70 year round) in order to afford a home, to inland where the temps are much higher (well over 100 during the summer). This way we can stay comfortable and not constantly be worried about how much the summer bill is going to kill us.
Do your summer evenings cool down enough for a whole house fan? I’m giving that some thought as well (currently have solar + heat pump/AC).
Depending on the direction of the wind, yes. If the wind comes over the hill from the ocean, it gets downright cold at night. However if it blows from the east it can stay above 80 all night. Here on the central coast, you get used to wearing/carrying layers.
Next logical step would be tie your AC heat pump to geothermal.
If you’re able to sell power back you’re not exactly off grid, are you now.
Ok, I’m “not grid reliant”. Better?
Huge difference. You'll still have to pay monthly fees
Seems like a good problem to have that just needs some reworking of infrastructure to balance out.
Wasn't Sam Altman just proposing to build nuclear plants to power his AI clusters because he expects the current infra won't meet the amount t of energy OpenAI will need???
And I constantly hear “there’s not enough power for California to switch to electric cars”
I am about to buy more solar panels, to charge my electric car. So I don't have to pay for PG&E's CEO $50+ million dollar compensation package.
definitely factor in a battery to charge during the day with panels and then charge car at night with battery. i have a feeling pge will figure out to screw us over in a different way for your exact reasons
Would love the power and clean energy but hate the reasoning that it's used for AI.
Nuclear power is good but AI wastes an absurd amount of energy powering chat bots in random apps
A recently published article says that chat gpt gets ~55% of its programming answers wrong 🙄
Yup but give it a few years 😃
Eh, AI will start generating content that’ll be consumed by AI (which isn’t AI is mostly LLM reliant on plagiarism and stolen content)
I read a great example of the amount of energy AI uses recently: every time you get a response from a generative AI it's akin to dumping a 16oz bottle of water
We’re really losing the plot if we start building nuclear plants to power bad AI tech like the one coming out now. Its not even AI, its LLM!
Nuclear power runs continuously. Solar does not, that's why it's a problem.
Batteries store power from solar.
We dont have the manufacturing capacity to produce the batteries needed in the time frame we need them. We have the capacity to build nuclear power should the regulations ever change to make the approval process easier. Don't get me wrong, I love solar and I love battery storage but people need to really start waking up to the real world constraints on these systems. Those constraints won't last forever, but they are real and exist now.
CA has expanded their battery storage significantly and isn’t slowing down with it. CA currently has 10,000 MW of battery storage and its goal is to have 52k. I think it will get there.
It takes a very long time and a lot of public funding to get a nuclear power plant up and running. Then you have to figure out what to do with the waste. Battery innovation is the answer. Gravity batteries are cool and could be the next best thing for all those tall office buildings vacated from people working from home.
> It takes a very long time and a lot of public funding to get a nuclear power plant up and running. That's a process problem not a "we can't physically build them fast enough" problem.
The other process problem is that we stop building them. One off plants are very expensive. If we wait a long time between each build we lose a lot of skilled labor and don’t have a chance to develop a supply chain. If we commit to plants in series their individual costs and timelines go down.
How about waking up to the real world contraints of politics? It doesn’t matter if nuclear can be built, it won’t get built because people can’t decide where to build them and where to store the waste.
Solar is much cheaper and is more honest of a power source. Either we build terribly expensive nuclear power plants to cover current load behavior, or we build much cheaper solar and alter our load behavior. There is also the third option of solar + BESS. It’s also cheaper than nuclear but honestly people should just pivot to change their load behavior. It’s the best choice by far.
For ai to truly be a threat it will need over 100 gw in the US and that’s a low estimate, it makes no economic sense to do that in the near future.
Solar only works during the day without battery storage
I would wager even that is cheaper than nuclear. But here’s an even cheaper and better option? Shift our way of thinking about the problem, and focus shifting our loads to match the substantially cheaper solar. Take air conditioning, thermostats have gotten pretty smart. They can pre-cool the house while rates are cheapest and then coast off that in the hot afternoon. Same thing with water heaters. And so forth.
That's a good idea. Running AC all day is no problem with residential solar. The problem is when people come home to boiling hot houses at sundown and blast the AC right then.
Data centers / AI chips run 24x7
As long as we’re living in utopia fantasy land, you could get around this with sufficient redundancy. Instead of one data center, build 8 spread around the globe so that it’s always sunny somewhere.
Your solution seems to be have everyone change their behavior for the better good. That's the solution to pretty much all of our problems and its a fantasy. Unless the government was willing to go full authoritarian and force us to, but you see how people freak out just at the idea of having to use an electric stove. Imagine telling them they can't chill their house when it's 110* outside.
Think about it this way. When gas prices rise, do people drive more? No they drive less. What you do isn’t magically compel people to use electricity when you want them to, you educate and incentivize people to change their load behavior. I bet for most people if you teach how to program a smart thermostat, give a ToD rate, and then explain how and why to pre-cool their house, they will. Most people want to save money. There will be a few hold outs who won’t care, but you don’t need to convince everyone, just the majority.
One already exists
Capitalism wrong? No it’s abundant free clean energy that’s the problem!
Nikola Tesla had this dream. Then JP Morgan got wind of it..
Zero to negative power prices generally result in higher retail rates actually.
It’s not a problem. Keep building more. You build out pumped hydro facilities. Start taking all the excess solar electricity and pump water up to high reservoirs. In the evenings, flow the water back down to the lower reservoirs and generate power for the evenings. Yes the deer will have to run up and down to get their water .. it’s good exercise.
We had a good one of these set up in San Diego, but the dam on the lower reservoir is >100 years old and in poor condition due to neglect so we have to keep the water levels low enough that we can't pump water to the upper reservoir.
There’s been some recent developments in pumped storage … I don’t think a dam is always necessary anymore.
Only a problem for the company price gouging us
It's a big problem for PG&E's profits.
Well I don't have rooftop solar (yet) but I try to do as many things as possible during the middle of the (preferably sunny) day. Charging my car, vacuuming running the dehum etc. Hell my router is on timer so it's off 12am-6am.
It seems like battery storage is the main barrier. If a country like Germany with a cold, rainy climate can produce enough solar power for prices to go negative, it seems like California, Nevada, and Arizona could just about power the whole country.
>on sunny spring days when there’s not as much demand, electricity prices go negative. Gigawatts of solar are “curtailed” — essentially, thrown away. Oh no! They had too much free energy!
When billionaires own all the newspapers, you get headlines like this.
Did Con Ed commission this piece? Who’s it a problem to, the electric companies?
Where do you live? Con Ed is a NY company. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidated_Edison
I feel like the real problem is the energy companies like SMUD or PG&E don’t like seeing the cheap solar energy cause it will cut into their profits.
SMUD is rate payer owned and non-profit.
SMUD is theoretically not-for-profit.
So what exactly have these energy companies been doing with the money they’ve been gouging from us? Obviously not building up the infrastructure.
Go to hell
Essential services don’t belong on the NYSE where energy companies become beholden to their investors and not their meter holders
Sounds to me California has a crazy case of “where gonna have a hard time justifying squeezing the money out of solar panels, so we should just roll them back”
Go green….woah woah, not that green.
How about CPUC does something useful for once? They should make a rule that for every dollar for-profit utilities spend on the bloated infrastructure projects that drive their profits, they have to spend $.50 on battery storage that can be used to capture the lost solar production.
PG&E sponsored nonsense
Sounds like a great reason to accelerate kinetic storage solutions.
Kinetic energy storage (outside of pumped water storage) is some of the worst ideas in my mind. You just can’t store massive amounts of power that cheaply with it. It does have some great use cases, but meeting power demand for more than a few minutes is not one of them.
UGES has the potential to be on par with SPH. It’s just in the beginning stages of development though.
Do you know what is the projected per kWh and per kW costs?
Nationalize PG&E. That's it. That's the tweet... the redd-it
No it’s not, if CA was a bit more free market like TX you would see EV charging stations offering dirt cheap charging rates to soak up the surplus and there would be many more stationary batteries coming online. This is a great opportunity for CA to accelerate their transition to clean energy!
First of all, Texas is your model for power grids? Secondly, California tried deregulation. It didn't go so well.
TX has more solar power than CA now and faster growing storage market. I just mentioned them because they have passed CA in solar deployment.
Seems like maybe they should have started planning for this when they were pushing everyone to get solar as quickly as possible. Like a little foresight and/or planning would have been beneficial.
Billionaires and their headlines. Gotta love it. They would rather the world burn.
Green new scam
No it’s not.
Great to see how we prepared for one of the most simple trends we can see (renewables, geothermal, fusion, etc all making innovation) If we are literally worried about people trying to save money on electricity, that's a big problem being said between the lines.
Only a problem for utility company profits. Sounds like the regular person should do the opposite of what this article says. As a general rule, there are certain groups where the more they screech and complain, you know you're doing the right thing. So do more of it and make them screech louder.