Batteries can be used to store excess power until needed
this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2026
158 points (99.4% liked)
technology
24387 readers
261 users here now
On the road to fully automated luxury gay space communism.
Spreading Linux propaganda since 2020
- Ways to run Microsoft/Adobe and more on Linux
- The Ultimate FOSS Guide For Android
- Great libre software on Windows
- Hey you, the lib still using Chrome. Read this post!
Rules:
- 1. Obviously abide by the sitewide code of conduct. Bigotry will be met with an immediate ban
- 2. This community is about technology. Offtopic is permitted as long as it is kept in the comment sections
- 3. Although this is not /c/libre, FOSS related posting is tolerated, and even welcome in the case of effort posts
- 4. We believe technology should be liberating. As such, avoid promoting proprietary and/or bourgeois technology
- 5. Explanatory posts to correct the potential mistakes a comrade made in a post of their own are allowed, as long as they remain respectful
- 6. No crypto (Bitcoin, NFT, etc.) speculation, unless it is purely informative and not too cringe
- 7. Absolutely no tech bro shit. If you have a good opinion of Silicon Valley billionaires please manifest yourself so we can ban you.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
I've seen that post a few times now and I still don't get what they're trying to say like how could that possibly be a bad thing?
Energy prices being driven into negative territory means that energy providers (and thus households with solar panels) have to pay for energy they provide to the electricity grid because the grid is almost at capacity. It’s a measure to discourage electricity production and encourage energy use for these periods.
Solar energy has the characteristic that it provides lots of energy during a sunny summer day, less in winter and none at night. So it’s not a constant or controllable flow like nuclear or fossil energy. To be able to completely switch to green energy, (afaik) either the grid capacity has to be increased tenfolds, or energy suppliers need huge batteries to store energy during supply spikes. Batteries are not super durable and their production not green at all so that has to be taken into account when determining the ecological footprint and material cost of solar energy.
This all is not to say that solar is comparably bad to fossil energy, I’m just explaining the hurdles that need to be taken care of when switching to solar.
Oh what a shame I guess it makes economic sense to nationalize utilities then
For the national economy sure, but if we are talking about ROI on buying out power plants, hard to imagine a worse time for that.
I mean it's a thing and it has effects.
Some people financed them under the obviously flawed assumption that they would always get like 10c/kWh for their excess electricity.
In some countries (
) pension funds are pretty bought into conventional energy production, under the assumption that this is a save investment with consistent returns. So this will be a bit of a blow to an already crumbling system.
"The problem with solar panels is that, besides being extremely clean, they also provide extremely cheap electricity"
Statements made by the utterly deranged.
Solar panels require mining and non-renewable materials to make, and are economically non-recyclable, meaning they end up in landfill.
economically non-recyclable
Solar panels are almost entirely recyclable. The same is true for batteries used for energy storage. It not being "economical" is a capitalism problem and not a renewable energy problem.
This is bordering on miss information. It's a tiny fraction of resources compared to what we are currently extracting to produce energy and discarded solar panels are pretty safe (unless it's American solar panels that sometimes contain heavy metals like cadmium).
And the neoliberal answer to solar panels being economically non-recycleable is to increase the cost to putting them in landfills until they are economically recyclable. Even if it's just grinding them into dust to use as a filler in concrete or something.
edit, some rough calculations:
20kg of solar panels produce about as much electricity as 5 tons of coal.
Nothing I said is bordering on “miss information”. It’s all true.
If we were serious about “net zero” we’d be all in on nuclear. It’s the only way to it.
Solar panels require mining and non-renewable materials to make
All human activity has an impact, replacing fossil fuels by solar is extremely positive
and are economically non-recyclable
Their lifespan is 30+ years easily. Recycling may very well become economically feasible once we start generating millions of tons of solar panel residue, large scale operation is a huge aspect of profitability
Hey I’m about to blow your mind: coal comes out of the fucking ground, often requiring mining!, and it can’t be recycled
No shit. Coal works at night though.
This is a false framing of the actual dynamic at play. The problem is not the unmonetizability of it. This IS an issue to certain capitalist forces but the much more serious problem in the eyes of the capitalist state is that solar is decentralized. Centralized power production relies on infrastucture controlled by the capitalist. Even a personal home generator needs fuel to function. Which must be bought from those who control oil supplies. Solar once bought is entirely decoupled from their control. You can have solar panels and they cannot cut you power off anymore. It is an issue of power. Not the electric kind but the political kind. Controlling energy gives a person significant power of a society. Part of this is the ability to monetize that control but it is also simply a mechanism for control. The proletariet is seen as a threat by the capitalist and so any technology or policy that would remove direct control over the lives of proles is a threat. If they cannot cut off our power it removes a way for them to stop us from rebelling against them. Food and water supplies are also centrally controlled for this region. In many regions it would be cheaper and make more sense to grow much of our own food locally and have small well or rain catchment water systems. These are not used as they would destroy central control over the proles means to live. Making the prole a threat that cannot easily be neutralized. "Off-grid" living will always be something they attempt to discourage and make possible only for the wealthy. As to live truly off grid would mean to break free from the majority of the control mechanisms that are used to keep you subservient.
Having solar panels does not mean “they” can’t cut your power off and ruin your life.
The sun doesn’t shine 24/7, and the amount of batteries you’d need to be able to be completely off grid is prohibitively expensive.
“They” still have you bye the balls.
This is a good argument for utilities and natural monopolies to all be state owned and operated.
It’s a social good to use solar and if the market is not able to operate in a way that enables a social good, then clearly markets are the wrong choice for economic management of the power grid.
markets are the wrong choice for economic management
full stop here. For everything.
Which is it? Is it that it doesn't work or that you need batteries to make it work which is expensive? You know... the thing I literally mentioned in my comment that it is purposefully kept expensive to prevent proles from doing it en masse? Because it can't be both.
I will answer for you. It is 100% possible to live entirely off solar you own as many people do it day to day and have no grid connection at all. It doesn't even take that much solar if you don't waste a shit ton of power like most people in the west do.
I also do not get your issue with me using ""they"" when I quite literally name the they I am talking about early in the comment. Should I continue to write out "the capitalist state" everytime to make it more clear for you?
Also your entire comment is operating off of a massive assumption that the goal is 24/7 luxurious power like you are used to in the west. Electricity is not a "yes" or "no" question. You can have some, a lot, an abundance, none, etc. You can get a lot done on very limited power. I have 500W of solar panels and a small portable power station along with various rechargable devices. When the grid goes down I have, a DC cooler I can use to keep food from going rancid, a rice cooker I can use, a handheld radio I can use, my computer/phone, and I can keep my home dimly lit indefinitely. Which is much better than pitch black darkness. Can I slow cook a roast or turn on a gaming PC with a big beefy GPU? Can I power my AC? No. That doesn't make what I can do any less valuable.
In a revolution any decoupling from centrally controlled infrastucture is a force multiplier.
So anyway... no. They don't have me by the balls. I can survive just fine with the power grid cut off. Speak for yourself.
No, the problem at the economic level is that solar generates the large majority of its power when it’s not needed. Power companies don’t need the power because there is massive excess, so they will start charging for feed-in.
It’s like if you got a 20kW solar panel setup but didn’t have batteries and are at work all day every day - yeah you generated a shit-tonne of power, but you didn’t use it, couldn’t store it, and you still have to buy electricity as soon as the sun goes down, only now with shrinking profit for the power companies due to excess solar during the day, they charge you now for power at night, meaning you’re power bill increased after getting solar.
We’re already at the part where solar power is like trying to sell ice to Eskimos.
That's just fear mongering. The energy markets are fucked but not that fucked.
It’s literally where we’re at in Australia. Right now. As we keep pushing for more and more “renewables”. Prices keep going up. Feed-in goes into negative, meaning you pay the power company to export your solar power to them.
I’m sure it’s just a coincidence.
I'm not really familiar with the Australian energy market but electricity doesn't appear to be getting more expensive really https://www.energyplans.com.au/electricity-price-index-australia
This doesn't even pass an econ 101 sniff test. The market should self regulate by increasing electric usage during the day and scaling down at night. Alas the free market cannot manage such an ideal scenario.
Turning your lights and aircon on for 8 hours during the day isn’t going to light and cool your house after dark. .
The problem with nature is it causes negative money in our market design somehow
Hear me out: we build a literal iron dome over the entire world and sell sunlight to people regardless of whether they use it for solar energy or not!
Someone else will then build a Dyson Sphere & sell property on it while killing your scheme.
Sure, but that’s far enough future beyond my idea that I’ll have years of profits from selling sunlight to people that won’t matter because I’ll be long dead.
Plus, it really just shows that my idea could be extended to instead be a solar panel dome so that not only do I steal all of the sunlight from earth, but also harness a fraction of the energy a Dyson Sphere would provide which I can also use to further profit off of the sunless world beneath me that’s now forced to either pay for the privilege of receiving their own sunlight or for the privilege of the energy I generate so they can run their artificial sun lamps.
Spoilers for Pantheon
spoiler
What if we all just upload our consciousnesses to the cloud and then build a giant ring of solar panels around Earth. The 100,000 years later we make a Dyson Sphere cuz we're salty at our baby daddy and met in him an infinite simulation of reality only to find out we ourselves are living in a simulation of reality created by an anti-virus software turned sentient who just wants to thank us for creating it and invite it to live in a utopian hive mind with it?
load more comments
(3 replies)
That's not an accurate way to paraphrase what MIT Technology Review is saying.
Yeah what MIT is actually saying here is that because solar creation is too efficient it is actually creating an economic situation in which switching to solar costs more than the profit that would be made from it.
That wouldn't be an issue if they just allowed Chinese solar panels but without Chinese production it's an economic issue with capitalism.
No that’s not what they’re saying. They’re saying that generating loads and loads of power when no one needs it is leading to power companies having to charge people for feeding into the grid to stop them from doing so, instead of paying them.
Solars biggest problem is that without batteries it’s basically useless now, and grid scale batteries don’t exist, and there’s no real outlook where they are.
Yeah what MIT is actually saying here is that because solar creation is too efficient it is actually creating an economic situation in which switching to solar costs more than the profit that would be made from it.
Not only that, but it reduces the profitability of other forms of generation too.
The major issue is of course capitalism, because everything has to make a profit. But what they really want is to socialize the losses encurred by solar onto us so they can continue to profit.
Our options are to either subsidize, or behead all the private energy company execs and subsidize it without profit.
There are a ton of non-private energy cooperatives around the US that do actually invest heavily in solar because of this though, so maybe as time goes on the "third position" is that power co-ops win out in the marketplace because they don't have a profit motive/burden
Addendum: It's insane that systems like MISO and ERCOT exist. Both of those systems but the reliability of the grids of 60% or more of Americans in the hands of a closed "free market" of energy trading to help stabilize the grid. It's absolutely amazing that it has continued to function at all, and that system is the exact issue that prevents wide adoption of solar due to the negative prices causing the whole market to start collapsing in on itself until they get bailed out by a State or Federal entity.
If power coops can generate more than they need then they could aggressively expand by swallowing up whole neighbourhoods on the basis of being able to provide power at a lower cost than the grid.
If you can work out a model for it you could even take on new clients and offload the infrastructure cost to banks via loans to buy more panels for each participant. The coop essentially providing all the panels to a new participant on the guarantee of them staying in the coop for x amount of time. This isn't even a loss if things go wrongly because the coop still owns all the panels even if a participant runs off or breaks contract or something.
Where are they getting the power grid from? These Co-ops going to raise and spend literal trillions of dollars making the infrastructure?
You know why it hasn’t been done? Because there isn’t a plan where it works. The maths doesn’t math.
Here in the UK if I had £8000 in panels and batteries I would replace 100% of my electricity usage for a household that has VERY high usage and 6 people in it. Excess can be sold back to the national grid, but if I was doing a coop then it would be many houses operating together to share load and further drive up the efficiency of that.
I don't know why you think "it hasn't been done". Individual households have been doing it for years and groups can do it more efficiently.
These costs are made back in savings within a decade.
I know you're probably not British but you might want to see a calculator just out of curiosity: https://www.spiritenergy.co.uk/solar-pv-calculator
To do this in a coop fashion you'd just be taking the debt burden of installation into the coop, locking people into a contract within the coop for payments at cost for x number of years and then running the installation, panel and battery costs through loans with the bank. You could start with your own house, then link up with your neighbour, then add their neighbours, and so on and so forth. The "grid" is you wiring up between neighbours among yourselves. There is nothing stopping you from running a cable between houses over fence boundaries if both neighbours agree to it. All you're doing is linking up the battery network. The advantage here is that households that already have full batteries would still be producing power that's filling up the batteries of other households. The larger the surface area of your solar network the more efficient you can make it so the more households added, the better.
Oh and if I could order Chinese panels at their prices (I can't) the cost of this would go down by 70%. The biggest barrier to going solar is tariffs that exist for energy industry protectionism.
When the maths do math 
The difference with co-ops is that they don't necessarily have to participate in the fake energy markets if they have control over the grid in a region.
So they don't have to do the ridiculous negative price energy thing that everyone else does to keep the market functioning as both an economic entity and a grid management system.
They just need to measure usage and charge based on operating costs. It doesn't matter if energy prices would have technically been negative for a few hours, because their motivation isn't market price, but just operating cost. You measure usage from co-op partners, then send them a monthly bill based on how much your costs are. It's incredibly simple.
The confounding factor is the MISO and ERCOT markets that you may need to interface with (say there's a disaster and the co-op needs power from another provider). To interact with those you need to basically destroy any logical system of pricing and management that you may have.
Basically this meme is doubly wrong because a monopoly would actually be better than the current status quo in a lot of the country. Duke sucks, but their monopoly allows them to do basically whatever they want without having to worry about copetition or weird market rates for energy that are also meant to be grid management signals, since they run those two departments separately.
The same thing happened with Ma Bell. It turns out that for large scale systems/utilities like water, power, telecom, etc. (I'd even include web services infrastructure now), having a single central body managing and developing it is good. Breaking up those monopolies just sets us back decades and creates an unmanageable chaotic market system that should have been replaced by a non-profit centrally managed one.
We know this works. It's why we don't really do militias anymore and even the national guard is basically subservient to the central governing body of the military.
Basically central planning good. Markets bad.
Is their concern inherently driven by a a capitalist profit motive?
If so, and I suspect it is, then it’s accurate enough.
Even if you were in a cashless planned economy, dumping excess watts into a grid when they're not required would be creating negative value. Solar plants would avoid that by curtailment or diversion, but this is still defined as a problem that needs solutions like load shifting and storage.
storage
That is the obvious solution to variable demand not correlated with variable output, yes, so is MIT saying that “the problem with solar is that we aren’t building enough storage capacity to manage peak usage that occurs outside of peak production times”?
No?
Why not?
The MIT article is pro solar and pro renewable, and does discuss storage, hvdc transmission, load shifting and subsidies to reduce costs.
storage and system costs rise sharply once renewables provide the vast majority of electricity on the grid.
Why is that? Perhaps the problems the article poses with storage solutions boil down to:
inherently driven by a a capitalist profit motive
shit, at least Mr. Burns' provided nuclear power as an alternative instead of coal 
This seems like the real reason they will scorch the skies like they did in the matrix…
I mean, the real problem here is storage. Solar works great in Phoenix but not so much in Seattle, cuz you know, clouds.
There are already solutions to this issue the problem is most of them are kind of expensive.
It always did this. It’s part of the natural fallout from thinking you could evolve on a world with an unabundant resource.
Fucking preposterous
view more: next ›