It only makes sense if you have ‘more than free’ energy you need to get rid of, because not getting rid of it causes problems. Similar to flaring natural gas, but for actual electricity.
This is not a common occurrence or situation, or shouldn’t be anyway, or someone is screwing up pretty badly somewhere.
Electricity prices around here (Austria) are negative around noon on most summer days. They pay you to waste all that solar energy people are feeding into the grid.
Is it really screwing up? If solar panels are cheaper than batteries, then you can over-provision the solar panels and then you won’t need to use the batteries as much, so you can probably get away with smaller installations.
My gut would expect it to approach $0 if full communication were possible, based on the instinct that most people would run their dishwashers if the energy cost was $0.
Solar panels don’t produce excess power that needs to be dissipated - just don’t invert the unneeded current, and that’s it.
‘Overproduction’ in this sense is from something like a spinning generator which starts to overspin, or an inverter which oddly starts to overvolt the output for some inexplicable reason.
It’s actually quite common. You have base load generation stations and your highly variable solar and wind. There are often times when the power at a wholesale rate dips below zero. It’s too costly to turn off your base load plants and maybe both solar and wind are generating above normal.
Solar inverters can just not draw the solar current, and wind can generally just change the pitch on their rotors at the individual level. The only ones that generally can not help ‘over produce’ are baseload power stations as they have actual physical inertia in very large turbines and can’t respond as quickly to demand.
With variable sources of electricity it can be cheaper to have capacity at a level that you sometimes overproduce than to have a capacity that produces at a lower level, and so mostly needs a backup source of power.
It only makes sense if you have ‘more than free’ energy you need to get rid of, because not getting rid of it causes problems. Similar to flaring natural gas, but for actual electricity.
This is not a common occurrence or situation, or shouldn’t be anyway, or someone is screwing up pretty badly somewhere.
Electricity prices around here (Austria) are negative around noon on most summer days. They pay you to waste all that solar energy people are feeding into the grid.
Is it really screwing up? If solar panels are cheaper than batteries, then you can over-provision the solar panels and then you won’t need to use the batteries as much, so you can probably get away with smaller installations.
My gut would expect it to approach $0 if full communication were possible, based on the instinct that most people would run their dishwashers if the energy cost was $0.
Solar panels don’t produce excess power that needs to be dissipated - just don’t invert the unneeded current, and that’s it.
‘Overproduction’ in this sense is from something like a spinning generator which starts to overspin, or an inverter which oddly starts to overvolt the output for some inexplicable reason.
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It’s actually quite common. You have base load generation stations and your highly variable solar and wind. There are often times when the power at a wholesale rate dips below zero. It’s too costly to turn off your base load plants and maybe both solar and wind are generating above normal.
Solar inverters can just not draw the solar current, and wind can generally just change the pitch on their rotors at the individual level. The only ones that generally can not help ‘over produce’ are baseload power stations as they have actual physical inertia in very large turbines and can’t respond as quickly to demand.
2 replies →
With variable sources of electricity it can be cheaper to have capacity at a level that you sometimes overproduce than to have a capacity that produces at a lower level, and so mostly needs a backup source of power.