Comment by cess11
3 days ago
I basically just did, that's how markets of this kind work. If it is more profitable to warm the wind along a mountain side than some cold person, then that person will stay cold.
Poverty and misery in the world are mainly caused by this kind of mechanism.
When the grid has to much money for 10 seconds, the cost of finding an having a productive asset that is ready to accept such a short burst of energy means that paying people to throw it away can easily be cheaper, leaving you with net positive money that can be used towards keeping people warm. Real systems involve tradeoffs, and so there will always be some short enough time frame where throwing away energy is better for society and human welfare than building infrastructure to use it. Everyone already using the energy gets it for free when prices are negative.
If it is profitable to produce heat, it means prices are negative. If prices are negative, then that is true also for cold people.
On the other hand if prices are high, and someone has sells electricity that was bought when prices were close to zero, then the cold people will get warm for cheaper than if there wasn't a battery.
Sorry, but you really make no sense.
Manufactured scarcity and related phenomena are really, really common. You should probably look into themes like the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and planned obsolescence and so on, and then explain why this specific case of coked yuppie market would be immune to them.
Again, more players in the market (both batteries and the renewables they enable) and the base fact that batteries pull prices toward the mean means that if anything, they would be exactly one of the mechanisms to avoid manufactured scarcities.
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In this case there are two things that contribute: one is cost of distribution, which means that it does in fact cost something to get the electricity to the cold person, and the second thing is the kind of structures which help insulate consumers from extreme prices: most people pay a fixed rate for electricity despite the variation in the wholesale price, which means that while they may pay some amount while the price is negative, they are also not paying a small fortune when the price goes up massively. This could probably be done better, though, and things are changing which would do make electricity free or negatively priced for some end-users when there's excess in the grid, while still insulating them from extremely high prices (they're still going to be paying something for the insurance, though).