"the problem with solar is we can't monopolize the sun or make it scarcer than it is"
Oh contraire. Have you seen the cloud seeding chemtrails?
this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2026
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Screen caps need dates. These tweets are pretty old from memory. It feels like making a joke about rotary phones not fitting in your pocket, it's out of date.
Your mom needs dates, like even if she's happily married to your father, great lady.
I dated his mom for a while
Someone should tell MIT about battery storage.
Yeah but once people see the balance sheet in the red that's a big no no. If only someone smart, like maybe went to MIT could explain how it could be profitable overall.....like humans living being a profitiable side effect.
Batteries are already being used profitably all over the world.
germany is developing a lot of hydrogen options, which is a surprisingly good strategy in a lot of fields. like, steel and cement can be produced with hydrogen alone, and germany is learning how to store and transport hydrogen through pipelines quickly.
Or, if the topology allows, use the excess electricity to fill up reservoir located up high so that it can drive turbines when needed. Organic energy storage is really cool
Yes, I consider this as a variation of hydro dams.
Use excess solar to turn the wind turbines into fans and reverse global warming
I want those salt batteries to kick off for mass home storage. Less likely to explode like lithium.
How can the price go negative? There's always going to be maintenance costs that have to be covered if nothing else.
Power grid stability.
Over generation and under generation can destabilize a power grid.
Thats why when there's over generation it can sometimes go negative because that power needs to go somewhere so they're willing to pay people to consume it.
Here in Sweden our electricity provider gives us a real time view of consumption and prices. When we charge the car during peaks of overproduction we get paid and the amount on our bill goes visibly down. It usually happens like 5-15 times a year during summers, and occasionally also because of excess winds on the farms year around.
The system is overloaded so there is no need for more power, in fact putting more power into the system has a negative effect. So there is no value to putting more power in the system and it may actually have a cost.
The system still has physical hardware that has to be maintained, the company has to charge it's customers to pay for this maintenance at the very minimum. As well as any other cost to deal with the excess power, although I don't see why that couldn't be mitigated by simply disconnecting excess panels from the system. That price should never be negative. It makes no sense. A negative price would mean they're paying their customers. For what?
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It's like a dumpster filling up, where you have to pay a waste management company to come haul that stuff away, at least if people can't find a way to take it off your hands for free.
prices do not actually go negative if the solar parks are correctly installed.
the issue is simple: the solar parks forgot an "off" switch, so they continue to push energy into the grid, even when there's no demand. so that destabilizes the grid which is bad, so the grid produces "negative electricity prices" which just means they pay someone else for taking that energy out of the grid to stabilize it, and they'll also charge the solar parks for pushing more power into the grid than the grid can handle.
honestly, it's just a construction mistake. the solar parks should obviously have a simple "off" switch to stop pushing power into the grid. they just forgot it during installation, end of story, no big deal. this is probably not going to be a permanent phenomenon, i'm very sure.
I actually never thought about that. Is there any damage to the cells if they’re bombarded by photons but not discharged?
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This gets posted regularly on Lemmy, and while the economic take is tone-deaf at best, there's a real issue with generating more power than you can use. You can't just dump grid power
it needs to go somewhere. The grid needs to consume as much as it generates at all times or else bad things happen.
There are of course solutions, but that doesn't mean it's not an engineering challenge to implement.
Figuring out what to do with kilowatts is easy, but figuring out what to do with megawatts, at the drop of a hat, is substantially harder.
Peak energy production would be a good time to train the damn llms instead of building natural gas power plant I guess.
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I feel like a 4g cellphone plan and a shutoff switch would do the trick. You can control what is being generated in real time
Why wouldn't batteries work?
Oh they absolutely do! My only point is that grid supply must equal grid demand. There are many ways to achieve this, as folks here have pointed out.
Throttling power generation (turning off/disconnecting PV from grid for example), and storage (chemical, heat, or hydro battery) are all established technologies, they just need to be implemented properly to avoid supply/demand mismatch.
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the best solar and wind ad you can imagine is russian energy grid attacks and how communities had built diverse workarounds to mitigate the grid going down here and there. it also spawned local businesses to maintain these stations which greatly helps local economies.
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.
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Won't someone PLEASE think of the prices?!
Where do you get free solar panels from?
Don't worry, there are literally startups, and Elon Musk, working right now to block sunlight from you and sell it back to you.
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