this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2026
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I mean, a surplus in the electricity grid is actually sort of a problem, especially if you don't have any way to store the extra energy.
we can just put a white blanket on top of the panels...
I'm ignorant of the mechanism of solar panels and electrical grids...do they just explode if they are set up and not draining power?
Because why can't you just cut the inflow of electricity on a signal? I'd appreciate actual answers.
Edit: In fact, I don't see why "just don't send the power if it isn't needed" doesn't work for any power generation source. In lieu of answers, I can imagine the issue is with the non-renewable resources. Maybe you want to spin down burning generators, if you don't need the extra energy. So it's a planning problem to know when you don't need energy, so you know when you don't need to burn resources.
But you don't waste wind if you just let the turbines keep spinning while blocking of energy output. Sunlight isn't burnt up if solar panels keep slurping while the downstream draw is blocked.
Is this a problem being baked in because it's assuming "burnable fuel" restrictions?
Yes solar panels and most renewables can be turned off easily if there is too much energy on the grid. The term for this is "curtailment". Some energy sources can't be turned off easily, like nuclear, large coal plants, and combined cycle gas turbines. So you will tend to turn off the easy things before the hard things.
The only major problem here is that this upsets the capitalists that own the generation; they don't want to pay for stuff that isn't producing money at every instance that it could be producing money. There are no real technical reasons why you can't curtail wind and solar plants whenever you need to.
Worth noting that a large amount of "renewables bad" you'll see is fossil fuel propaganda too, so be careful there.
Yeaaaah, I hate that. A lot of the structures that everyone says are shite seem to be propped up by "solutions" that create and perpetuate the problems they "solve."
Would a nuclear or fossil fuel turbine power plant just tear itself apart if disconnected from load at speed? I vaguely understand that the load provides a sort of magnetic resistance on the spinning generator. Without load they would they spin too fast? Or is it a matter of there not being any easy way to dump the power by doing something useless with it like just melting sand or smth?
Fossil plants, not really. The hard part for them is getting them started again which can take hours. But disconnecting them suddenly won't hurt them. There are many layers of protective devices keeping them from overspeed events.
Nuclear plants are similar but they will continue generating heat long after they are disconnected from the grid and you have to have a plan for removing that heat or bad things will happen. This was what caused problems at Fukushima.
We setup a 25kw setup recently in Pakistan but ran out of money to have inverter and batteries for it. So far they have been up for a couple months, none have exploded yet.
You can cut it, but how? If you don't have a system in place, thousands of private home will be injecting power into the grid because they don't know any better. In extreme cases it could overload the grid. Not really explode, but cause voltage spikes, trip breakers, and ultimately (and somehow ironically) cause a blackout as the grid protection mechanisms kick in.
I Germany all new installations need to be able to be remotely controlled to prevent grid feed in when there's too much production.
Disclaimer: hobby self-taught solar panel enthusiast, not an electrician or grid engineer.
Yeah the remote connection to the local utility would be the obvious answer.
People with Nest systems can enroll into "Energy Saver" programs that start the AC at 3pm to cool the house early for the energy spike at 5pm when many get home from work. All you get is a minor credit per year.
If that shit works they can setup a system for solar.
Of course you can... but it's not there right now. Imagine your AC needs a physical switch to flip. No incentives can overcome that, and new equipment is expensive.
Solar panels have no problem if nothing consumes the power they can produce.
Wind turbines can be feathered and the turbine break engaged until they stop, at which point they're not generating anything.
So negative energy prices are not really a technical problem of renewables, rather they're due to the way the decision of "who stops their generation" being left to market systems - rather than there being some kind of centralized control, possibly with agreements in place, that decides which generators are stopped first when there is excess generation, market prices just float as offer and demand float and individual suppliers are left to individually decide if it's worth it for them to generate for a given price or not and thus if they should reduce or stop their generation.
There are delays and inertia in the whole process of signalling demand/supply balance via market prices, so there result is that the price can overshot and undershot, the latter being sometimes all the way down to negative prices.
Can't it go to some AI datacenter or smth?
Datacenters largely have fixed power needs; the computers are going to be running constantly, or else they aren't making money for their capitalist overlords. What you want is something located at the solar arrays themselves, so that you can selectively switch whether the juice is going to the grid or to your power sink - and the power sink ideally should be something that also makes you money, but doesn't need to run 24/7 to do so. Like a crypto farm.
LLM training and processing batched requests are 2 things that can be done i think. Batched requests have a 24-48h window when they need to be processed.
Big dams are actually great since they let you store the energy for later.