0 sats \ 5 replies \ @Undisciplined 22 Jun \ parent \ on: Predictions vs. Reality: How solar outgrew expectations econ
Thanks, that makes sense. I was wondering if US subsidies ended up being larger than expected or something.
Probably the opposite actually, as lots of places are scaling back subsidy programs.
OTOH a hidden subsidy that many people forget about is that in most places solar generators aren't getting charged during negative electricity prices. They should be paying to put their electricity on the grid, which of course would result in everyone adding additional hardware to disconnect during negative prices. But AFAIK that's pretty much not happening yet.
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Are negative prices caused by the grid being overcapacity?
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Yes. The key reason negative prices happen is because many large electricity generators would rather temporarily pay you to dispose of their power rather than shutdown, because ramping power up and down is hard on their machinery. Of course, there's always some emergency system that allows them to disconnect from the grid pretty much instantly. But those systems are often expensive to operate due to them creating more maintenance, as well as sometimes putting the plant offline for a few hours (or more!) to reset certain systems.
A good example of such a generator is a big coal or biofuel plant. During operation the boilers will have a lot of energy in the form of steam. The energy in that steam has to go somewhere. If there isn't enough electrical load on the steam turbines they'll over speed, and the steam will have to be dumped into the atmosphere. That annoys the neighbors and is hard on the equipment. So they'd rather just pay someone else to use the power for few minutes/hours so they can continue operating normally without any disruptions.
What's ridiculous is that solar panels can be shut off essentially instantly, and most wind turbines shut off nearly instantly. There's no reason why your solar panel should be feeding more power into the grid during a negative pricing event. Yet because of bad contracts, lacking hardware, etc. lots of them do. And even worse, they don't pay for it.
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Thanks for the explanation. That's something I recall reading about a while ago and wanted to make sure I had it right in my head.
If ever there were a great use case for bitcoin mining, negative electricity prices would have to be it.
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Came here to say the exact same thing.
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