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?
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.
Or as EVs get scrapped, repurpose their batteries for electricity storage so that the generation/demand curve can get more balanced. Encourage anyone with rooftop solar to put batteries in their homes. Selling to other states is hard because CA is far away from everywhere else with high populations
Sure but you don't even need to scrap EVs for this. EVs can be used as an energy sink if they are bi-directional and stored at way lower than maximum state of charge.
Agreed but also thinking about when the current generation of cars reaches it's end of life. Which realistically will still be at least 50% battery capacity. You can either recycle the batteries or repurpose them. There are so many possibilities with this technology.
I suspect a ton of them are still going to be used as cars even with degraded batteries, and getting to 50% on a properly maintained battery might be a 10 year proposition. The technology to use this capacity mostly exists already, might as well use it.
An EV with a degraded range under 100 miles is still useful to someone, if not the original owner. It can be an around-town commuter.
I plan to pick up a used EV for my kids when they start driving. Teens don't need range for driving 3 miles to school and back.
Some of the earliest Leafs are still around with 80-90% of their original capacity. Since those came out we learned a lot about battery management & chemistry. A lot of 10-year-old EVs have 90%+.
If they're built as durable as other modern cars, they could easily have 20+ years of useful life.
I've read the Leafs are unusually bad for degradation since they don't really have any heat management and the norm used to be to charge them to 100% all the time.
this requires that each home be equipped with transfer switches for grid outage situations and other equipment that allows for bidirectional grids to be properly monitored - it's a good idea but would take quite a bit of investment on the individual level to implement
Yeah but I wager most people have their EVs at work during the day when solar production is at its peak, and at home charging in the evening, exacerbating the issue.
Hard to say - EV owners are probably disproportionately WFH but at any rate if the utilities have access to a fleet of EVs then they're effectively getting nearly free capacity. For people who don't commute on a fixed schedule, there's not really a demand to charge them in the evening.
As a CA homeowner with panels but no battery, someone needs to create some big subsidies for solar batteries, they’re just too damn expensive for most to invest in. Getting the panels was as much as I could afford. Hopefully a few years down the line I can invest in a battery but idk.
30% federal tax credit applies nationwide. It looks like California has a means-based subsidy (SGIP) that will cover up to 100% of the balance. In an ideal world, what would you add to these?
Assuming one doesn’t qualify for SGIP (I haven’t looked into the requirements for that) you’re still talking about ~$6,500 after credit but before install for a system that doesn’t really provide that much value to the homeowner, especially factoring in net metering.
Basically, why should I buy a battery when this is by and large a problem for the grid operators, not me as a homeowner? Main benefit I see is I get to be off grid in the event of a blackout, which is annoying but infrequent.
I don't 100% know the "virtual powerplant" details for California, but I think they're similar to what we're doing here in Texas. The idea is: when wholesale rates spike, your system dumps your batteries into the grid. You win by "buying low selling high," and the grid wins by being stabilized.
