This is generally the right idea of a solution, but it’s a difficult engineering problem.
It’s not “just an economics problem” despite the headline.
The “cost of power becoming negative” is phrased in an economic way but what it really means is the grid has too much power and that power needs to go somewhere or it will damage infrastructure.
Yes but there are many solutions already to that problem.
The first one being to shutdown a few stations production when overproducing. The second one being a myriad of storage solutions that already exists and scale them.
It is an economic problem because we already have many ways to skin the cat, but it won’t produce shareholder value in the short term.
“Economic problem” isn’t merely short form for “if we had a socialist system we could solve it with free money.” These solutions require us to dig huge amounts of minerals out of the ground and tear the earth apart in the process. And we’re already doing that at a rate exponentially larger than we ever have in history. Plus these are the same materials we need to build the batteries for EVs, so building them for grid storage competes with the EV transition.
And then you factor in the rapidly increasing electric demand we’re producing by switching over to EVs and that means the demand on the grid is even higher. The grid wasn’t built to be able to source power from everywhere so putting solar panels on everyone’s rooftops is making the situation even worse.
This is generally the right idea of a solution, but it’s a difficult engineering problem.
It’s not “just an economics problem” despite the headline.
The “cost of power becoming negative” is phrased in an economic way but what it really means is the grid has too much power and that power needs to go somewhere or it will damage infrastructure.
Yes but there are many solutions already to that problem.
The first one being to shutdown a few stations production when overproducing. The second one being a myriad of storage solutions that already exists and scale them.
It is an economic problem because we already have many ways to skin the cat, but it won’t produce shareholder value in the short term.
“Economic problem” isn’t merely short form for “if we had a socialist system we could solve it with free money.” These solutions require us to dig huge amounts of minerals out of the ground and tear the earth apart in the process. And we’re already doing that at a rate exponentially larger than we ever have in history. Plus these are the same materials we need to build the batteries for EVs, so building them for grid storage competes with the EV transition.
And then you factor in the rapidly increasing electric demand we’re producing by switching over to EVs and that means the demand on the grid is even higher. The grid wasn’t built to be able to source power from everywhere so putting solar panels on everyone’s rooftops is making the situation even worse.
I know that, and to incentivice people to use the power, they pay you to do it.