You're viewing a single thread.
This is idiotic. The fact is your electricity transmission system operator has to pay a lot of money to keep the grid stable at 50 or 60Hz or your electronics would fry. With wind and especially with solar power, the variable output is always pushing the frequency one way or the other, and that creates a great need for costly balancing services. Negative pricing is an example of such a balancing service. Sounds good, but for how long do you think your electricity company can keep on paying you to consume power?
People also don't realize that too much power is just as bad as too little, worse in fact. There's always useful power sinks: pumped hydro, batteries, thermal storage, but these are not infinite.
Stupid question but can we not like, make toggleable solar panels? Like if I Just pull the plug extracting power from a solar panel does it explode or break or something?
Solar panels are easily disconnectable. Unlike conventional power plants it does not have spinning rust, that can walk away entire building.
Sure, but for all the times my electricity goes negative for half an hour, the monthly bill indicates that is vastly outweighed by all the times that it isn't.
Amazing! Every word of what you just said is wrong.
You'll need to be more specific.
To start the frequency of the electricity isn't the issue. Second all modern electronics use switching power supplies which don't care about frequency. That's two incorrect things just in the second sentence that they literally said was fact.
I'm pretty sure that "your electronics" in this context is most likely referring to the grid operator's electronics, not individual personal devices. In that case, frequency is extremely important- if you like grid stability and dislike blackouts, that is. 😅
That's a ridiculous way to define "your electronics". The original commenter was trying to fear monger with incorrect information, and you are jumping to protect them. I didn't realise the grid owners had astroturfers in the fediverse.
I read it more as "your personal electronics won't enjoy the brownouts and blackouts from having shitty frequency stability on the grid" more so than "your personal electronics will directly suffer from frequency instability," but maybe I read it with subtext because I'm literally studying power systems right now.
So are you studying to protect the ghouls or fix them?
...are you okay? You seem primed and ready to correct and attack people. Chill out, man.
I'm primed to correct FUD. If that means I'm not OK so be it. Love the textbook ad hominem by the way. That's a classic that never goes out of style.
Christ, go back to Reddit.
Sounds like somebody's jimmies got rustled.
We have a union. Watch out.
I'm not remotely worried. I know the IBEW will protect me.
Why isn't this as easy as storing some of that excess energy in a home battery and letting the rest down in a wire into the ground? Then if it's smart enough it could only give back energy when needed.
The easiest solution is to send the power somewhere else where it can offset the use of fossil fuels. This solution is fraught with political hurdles, subject to market forces (due to privatization) and often grid compatability issues(looking at you Texas). It is, however, a time tested and common method for mitigating excess production.
While water in pipes is often a metaphor for electricity, it's not particularly useful here. You can't ground out part of a charge. Energy storage is the solution though. Batteries are good, pumping water up back up into dams to be regained from a hydro plant when needed is ideal, as I understand it.
Well, that's what they're doing some places. The batteries assets are not in private homes usually though, they're by themself or run by power-consuming industries. Batteries are expensive though, and they degrade quickly if you use them wrong. In the EU, ENTSO-E defines the market rules, trade systems and messaging systems that energy companies and asset owners play by. Sometimes the revenue-generating asset is a battery, sometimes it's a hot water boiler, wind park, factory, hydro plant etc.
This whole thread has way too many people who see the price as some kind of made up number that dictates how people behave, rather than recognizing that the price is a signal about the availability of useful real-world resources.
Even if the prices were strictly mandated by a centrally planned tariff that kept the same price throughout the day, every day, we'd still have the engineering challenge of how to match the energy fed into the grid versus taken out of the grid.
The prices are just a reflection of that technical issue, so solving it still needs to be done.
Just have few percent of spare capacity. If suddenly it will become too sunny, you can just disconnect solar cells. If not sunny enough, then connect them back.
Obviously I'm talking only about day - the only time when solar panel output can fluctuate.
pay a lot of money to keep the grid stable at 50 or 60Hz or your electronics would fry
Absolutely not. Please don't make things up.
You're answering the wrong questions. I don't think people are assuming that it's simple to manage the power grid (if so, they shouldn't be...) but rather why are we locked into a system that lets business profit motive be responsible for the continued existence of the ecosystem.
sounds more like we should just change away from a shitty system that needs to be a specific frequency. If only there was an alternative....
What alternative are you suggesting?
high voltage DC, it was a bad idea in the past due to the difficulty of changing voltage, but Buck boost converters exist now, as due inverters.
Tell this idea to an electrical engineer, and bring a stopwatch to time how many minutes they laugh for
Now imagine replacing all transformers with buck-boost converters...
Nah. We'll go more primitive. We'll do all our voltage and AC/DC conversions...mechanically! Do what they did to power DC subway systems back at the start of the 20th century. Just have a big AC motor directly coupled to a big DC generator! And we can use gearing to convert voltages! Let's bring a needlessly complex and steampunk aesthetic to our electric grid!
Higher frequency and voltage tolerance