Comment by adiabatichottub

2 days ago

I don't know why it rankles me to think that generated power should be fed into a dump load just to make the storage owners extra money. Even though it's inefficient at the system level, it shouldn't be harmful releasing energy that would have been eventually dissipated as heat anyways. And yet it still just feel wasteful to me.

I had to go search my bookshelf for this one:

  "There has been an increasing awareness among engineers of the last two decades that machines can perform a useful purpose in many applications, even though their characteristics do not conform to the orthodox standards of goodness.  The main objective of the engineer is to make money -- to exploit economically the physical properties of materials.  Economic considerations, however, do not stop at the first cost of an article, nor at the running cost, but extend to everything connected with that article in the situation in which it is to be used."

Eric R. Laithwaite, Induction Machines for special purposes

6 comments

adiabatichottub

colechristensen 2 days ago

>I don't know why it rankles me to think that generated power should be fed into a dump load just to make the storage owners extra money. Even though it's inefficient at the system level, it shouldn't be harmful releasing energy that would have been eventually dissipated as heat anyways. And yet it still just feel wasteful to me.

This is one of those efficient market things where you need to manage the market in order that wasteful things happen sometimes... but that waste is an opportunity.

If you and your competitor are both in the business of dumping energy into heat, you're going to compete with each other for access to that money.

Then one of you is going to try to find a way to make _more_ money with that energy and find something quickly scalable with not-too-high idle overhead costs to do with that energy besides just flowing through a resistor.

Negative prices are a sign of an inefficient market or just the lag time between a changing landscape of resources and someone to utilize them.

If there's a free resource someone's going to figure out how to use it, just let it hang out for a while and the problem fixes itself.

Especially with solar energy, this is just going to be a thing. There's a certain balance where overprovisioning is cheaper than storage and so you just do that. Then you wait for industry (or consumers) to figure out how to take advantage of the intermittent cheap energy.

eru 1 day ago
> Then one of you is going to try to find a way to make _more_ money with that energy and find something quickly scalable with not-too-high idle overhead costs to do with that energy besides just flowing through a resistor.
Yes, exactly.
Which reminds me of the occasional story about how one native group or another was so in tune with nature, because they used every part of the (insert important animal here).
Modern economies obviously use all parts of the animal, for exactly the reason you outline.
> Especially with solar energy, this is just going to be a thing. There's a certain balance where overprovisioning is cheaper than storage and so you just do that. Then you wait for industry (or consumers) to figure out how to take advantage of the intermittent cheap energy.
Yes, though you also need to make sure that regulations don't get in the way. Or at least not too badly.
One example I can think of is forcing utilities to charge people by net-metering, forcing the utility to implicitly pay the same price for electricity as they charge. We don't do that for eg used car salesmen.
- colechristensen 1 day ago
  
  >One example I can think of is forcing utilities to charge people by net-metering, forcing the utility to implicitly pay the same price for electricity as they charge. We don't do that for eg used car salesmen.
  A large proportion of the cost of consumer electricity is distribution built in to the per kWh cost. Their buy price needs to be lower than their sell price. I think most people would be surprised by how much of the cost of their electricity is incurred between the power plant and their home.

nhecker 2 days ago

My shallow understanding is that utilities and grid operators need to manage the supply/load ratio carefully to keep the grid's operating frequency in a very narrow band, centered around 50 or 60 Hertz. If supply outstrips demand, and assuming supply can't react [quickly enough], the operating frequency starts to rise as all the rotating masses connected to the grid gain momentum from the additional power. If the operating frequency increases too much outside of design parameters that could end badly.

So one solution is to incite demand (with negative rates) for folks to ramp up their use of electricity (into e.g., a dump load resistor bank), bringing demand back in line with supply, and bringing the operating frequency back under control.

I hate the waste, agreed. But it would be irresponsible of the operator to bank that extra supply energy into the momentum of spinning things owned by the consumers just so they could pull it out later by intentionally under-supplying. E.g., an aquarium's big water pumps designed to spin only so fast or produce so much pressure might not like being operated at 110% the rated speed at random times of the day.