Batteries can be used to store excess power until needed
ideally you want to use not batteries as they have to be replaced - a physical “battery” using two lakes that pump between each other for example would be a better potential energy store than a battery imo
It’s fine. Unlike fossils, the lithium isn’t burned and released into the air. The resources can be reclaimed. It’s not an infinite cycle of extraction.
Lithium woulndt be needed for grid batteries at all. Weight doesnt matter for som permanent stationary installation.
We can retvrn to lead-acid.
+ for being fully recyclable in a garage.
- for lead.
Rusty salt batteries would be ideal for grid. Steel and saltwater.
no, but reprocessing when lithium goes out of date after x cycles isn’t ideal
You can still put it in the water supply to improve mental health.I guess it’s possible that eventually we sit on a bunch of lithium we don’t know what to do with. What happened to all the mercury and lead?
edit: honestly, there are so many potential mobile uses that I’m really not too worried.
“The problem with solar panels is that, besides being extremely clean, they also provide extremely cheap electricity”
Statements made by the utterly deranged.
This is a false framing of the actual dynamic at play. The problem is not the unmonetizability of it. This IS an issue to certain capitalist forces but the much more serious problem in the eyes of the capitalist state is that solar is decentralized. Centralized power production relies on infrastucture controlled by the capitalist. Even a personal home generator needs fuel to function. Which must be bought from those who control oil supplies. Solar once bought is entirely decoupled from their control. You can have solar panels and they cannot cut you power off anymore. It is an issue of power. Not the electric kind but the political kind. Controlling energy gives a person significant power of a society. Part of this is the ability to monetize that control but it is also simply a mechanism for control. The proletariet is seen as a threat by the capitalist and so any technology or policy that would remove direct control over the lives of proles is a threat. If they cannot cut off our power it removes a way for them to stop us from rebelling against them. Food and water supplies are also centrally controlled for this region. In many regions it would be cheaper and make more sense to grow much of our own food locally and have small well or rain catchment water systems. These are not used as they would destroy central control over the proles means to live. Making the prole a threat that cannot easily be neutralized. “Off-grid” living will always be something they attempt to discourage and make possible only for the wealthy. As to live truly off grid would mean to break free from the majority of the control mechanisms that are used to keep you subservient.
Hear me out: we build a literal iron dome over the entire world and sell sunlight to people regardless of whether they use it for solar energy or not!
Someone else will then build a Dyson Sphere & sell property on it while killing your scheme.
This doesn’t even pass an econ 101 sniff test. The market should self regulate by increasing electric usage during the day and scaling down at night. Alas the free market cannot manage such an ideal scenario.
The problem with nature is it causes negative money in our market design somehow
the result now , particularly with net-zero solar where you aren’t allowed to run negative , and especially balcony solar is that we all end up subsidizing grid power on our own dime
This seems like the real reason they will scorch the skies like they did in the matrix…
shit, at least Mr. Burns’ provided nuclear power as an alternative instead of coal
I’ve seen that post a few times now and I still don’t get what they’re trying to say like how could that possibly be a bad thing?
Energy prices being driven into negative territory means that energy providers (and thus households with solar panels) have to pay for energy they provide to the electricity grid because the grid is almost at capacity. It’s a measure to discourage electricity production and encourage energy use for these periods.
Solar energy has the characteristic that it provides lots of energy during a sunny summer day, less in winter and none at night. So it’s not a constant or controllable flow like nuclear or fossil energy. To be able to completely switch to green energy, (afaik) either the grid capacity has to be increased tenfolds, or energy suppliers need huge batteries to store energy during supply spikes. Batteries are not super durable and their production not green at all so that has to be taken into account when determining the ecological footprint and material cost of solar energy.
This all is not to say that solar is comparably bad to fossil energy, I’m just explaining the hurdles that need to be taken care of when switching to solar.
Oh what a shame I guess it makes economic sense to nationalize utilities then
For the national economy sure, but if we are talking about ROI on buying out power plants, hard to imagine a worse time for that.
Let them go bankrupt then they’re cheap.
Point out the economic bind they’re in. Let them know you’re not going to subsidize them. Offer them a fire sale price.
A government willing to pay anything at all for a stranded economic asset is still an amazing deal. If they’re set to lose millions and you offer them a dollar, you just saved them millions, so the buy out should be cheap if managed by a government that isn’t beholden to billionaires.
Let them pay for cleaning up their own mess and build something renewable.
I think the idea that these power plants have a positive economic value 5-10 years from now is rather uncertain.
I mean it’s a thing and it has effects.
Some people financed them under the obviously flawed assumption that they would always get like 10c/kWh for their excess electricity.
In some countries (
) pension funds are pretty bought into conventional energy production, under the assumption that this is a save investment with consistent returns. So this will be a bit of a blow to an already crumbling system.
That’s not an accurate way to paraphrase what MIT Technology Review is saying.
Yeah what MIT is actually saying here is that because solar creation is too efficient it is actually creating an economic situation in which switching to solar costs more than the profit that would be made from it.
That wouldn’t be an issue if they just allowed Chinese solar panels but without Chinese production it’s an economic issue with capitalism.
Yeah what MIT is actually saying here is that because solar creation is too efficient it is actually creating an economic situation in which switching to solar costs more than the profit that would be made from it.
Not only that, but it reduces the profitability of other forms of generation too.
The major issue is of course capitalism, because everything has to make a profit. But what they really want is to socialize the losses encurred by solar onto us so they can continue to profit.
Our options are to either subsidize, or behead all the private energy company execs and subsidize it without profit.
There are a ton of non-private energy cooperatives around the US that do actually invest heavily in solar because of this though, so maybe as time goes on the “third position” is that power co-ops win out in the marketplace because they don’t have a profit motive/burden
Addendum: It’s insane that systems like MISO and ERCOT exist. Both of those systems but the reliability of the grids of 60% or more of Americans in the hands of a closed “free market” of energy trading to help stabilize the grid. It’s absolutely amazing that it has continued to function at all, and that system is the exact issue that prevents wide adoption of solar due to the negative prices causing the whole market to start collapsing in on itself until they get bailed out by a State or Federal entity.
If power coops can generate more than they need then they could aggressively expand by swallowing up whole neighbourhoods on the basis of being able to provide power at a lower cost than the grid.
If you can work out a model for it you could even take on new clients and offload the infrastructure cost to banks via loans to buy more panels for each participant. The coop essentially providing all the panels to a new participant on the guarantee of them staying in the coop for x amount of time. This isn’t even a loss if things go wrongly because the coop still owns all the panels even if a participant runs off or breaks contract or something.
The difference with co-ops is that they don’t necessarily have to participate in the fake energy markets if they have control over the grid in a region.
So they don’t have to do the ridiculous negative price energy thing that everyone else does to keep the market functioning as both an economic entity and a grid management system.
They just need to measure usage and charge based on operating costs. It doesn’t matter if energy prices would have technically been negative for a few hours, because their motivation isn’t market price, but just operating cost. You measure usage from co-op partners, then send them a monthly bill based on how much your costs are. It’s incredibly simple.
The confounding factor is the MISO and ERCOT markets that you may need to interface with (say there’s a disaster and the co-op needs power from another provider). To interact with those you need to basically destroy any logical system of pricing and management that you may have.
Basically this meme is doubly wrong because a monopoly would actually be better than the current status quo in a lot of the country. Duke sucks, but their monopoly allows them to do basically whatever they want without having to worry about copetition or weird market rates for energy that are also meant to be grid management signals, since they run those two departments separately.
The same thing happened with Ma Bell. It turns out that for large scale systems/utilities like water, power, telecom, etc. (I’d even include web services infrastructure now), having a single central body managing and developing it is good. Breaking up those monopolies just sets us back decades and creates an unmanageable chaotic market system that should have been replaced by a non-profit centrally managed one.
We know this works. It’s why we don’t really do militias anymore and even the national guard is basically subservient to the central governing body of the military.
Basically central planning good. Markets bad.
