California and its grid operator are grappling with a strange reality: There is so much solar on the grid that, on sunny spring days when there’s not as much demand, electricity prices go negative.
Gigawatts of solar are “curtailed” — essentially, thrown away.
Not applicable here: the problem is not power overload on the grid, it’s that the power company can’t charge for electricity because people are making it themselves, which isn’t a real problem.
and that many large power plants can't turn on and off quickly so they have to keep running, replacing solar - or that they'll go bankrupt if they don't sell power X amount of time and so they "have" to keep running to stay in business
Generating plants aren’t just all on or all off, and power consumption varies widely in the course of a normal day.
They also aren’t operating at the razor edge of business viability. They’re profitable, and which means they have more money than they need.
This is industry propaganda.
reason #9349 utilities should not be privately owned or run for profit (also PG&E already doesn't maintain the electrical grid where have you been for the past five years)
Sure but things are changing and so the people running things need to change to adapt to new challenges is an interesting story to read about regardless. Seems a bit boring to just blame any problems due to change on profits and capitalism rather that discussing the specifics, no?
“We didn’t used to have much rooftop residential solar and now we have a bunch and people running the electric grid have to adapt to the challenges of that change” is a thing that can happen in everything from pure communism to complete privatization
I didn’t “blame any problems due to change on profits and capitalism,” though, I blamed one specific problem that only exists under capitalism on capitalism.
Interestingness isn’t the measure of validity or relevance; lots of true and pertinent things are deeply boring.
It’s a problem because we cant store and transmit all the power that we are able to generate. It’s technical problem that we can solve but would exist under any economic system.
