I mean it is a problem, not because of capitalism but because of reality, while there can be a lot of overlap between sunny day and lots of solar energy for all the ACs running our energy usave is also significant in the afternoon when solar is winding down and the evening where its non existent and we need to balance that and transfer all the energy, copper prices are going through the roof, there are shortages in electric grid components, its nice that solar is cheap but you need to distribute that energy and at some point we will have to bite the bullet and deploy a lot of nuclear energy, last time I checked the wind/solar installations didnt even offset the energy demand increase happening that year.

I wonder what it’s like to be as dumb as that mit guy. Like just for a second no longer cuz I wouldn’t wanna go full retard from overexposure.

run pumps, move water

My favorite solution for storage of excess power is closed loop pumped hydro. Two bodies of water of different elevations are connected by a generator/pump. When there is too much power, the pump moves the water to the higher lake. When the power is needed, the water flows through the generator to the lower lake.

There is never surplus power with a network of a few “turn it on as needed” intensive industrial uses like haber-bosch reactors for ammonia, dessalination plants and electrolysis for aluminium or other metals…right?

No, it’s not. It’s a practical problem, not an economic one, but leave it to the tankies here to take it as an opportunity to show how many slogans they have learned.

Am I the only one noticing a lot of conservative economic priests in here? Is this normal?

This is a real problem but you can only have so many words in a tweet. Note that the price isn’t zero but instead negative. It means there is literally too much power in the grid and it would need to be used. If a grid has too much power then it is bad. It can damage it. There are things we can build that essentially amount to batteries (or natural variants like a dam) that get charged during times of higher supply than demand and discharged during times of higher demand than supply.

My shareholders!

Remember what Conservatives said about “not enough power”? I think that might be a lie

If the excess energy cannot be stored, it should be used for something energy intensive like desalination or carbon capture.

Actually there is a good amount of credible economic theory which backs the idea that localized post-scarcity markets do cause capitalist influences to wither away, and that power generation is a big fucking domino in that equation. The simple version is that maintenance of artificial scarcity is modeled as capital overhead, so there will always be an inflection point where that overhead actually exceeds the value of all other inputs. The same way eg, marketing cannot create infinite or arbitrary demand.

The other angle here is how there is often incentive for alternative commodification of abundance, which in turn incentives that abundance. This is another common model for various forms of post-scarcity capitalism. Take a YouTube video for example. The commodification of content takes the form of advertising, which effectively transfers the scarcity of one market onto another. Content is basically infinite compared to viewership time inputs. The key here is that there will always exist some forms of scarcity - and time is the big one. Art, company, leisure, physical space, etc. the model here is that eventually something like energy and physical resources might be completely abundant and effectively free, but enabled by competition over attention or leisure or aesthetic experience. You can make a strong argument that this is already happening in the post-industrial world to some degree.

The final issue is that this equation isn’t unique to capitalism. Socialism mediates scarcity in more or less the same way - by transferring and meditating it across various markets using labor as the quanta of scarcity instead of capital. Indeed, many economists will argue that regulated, democratic, liberal forms of capitalism theoretically reduces to the same core basis, since “free labor” itself both creates the market regulation as well as provides the consumption which mediates access to capital. This is, in fact, the core thesis of “third way” market socialism, though it is obviously contentious among orthodox Marxists.

I get the sentiment in here, but the poster is missing an important point: there is a reason some group of lunatics (called the TSO or Transport System Operator or in some cases other power producers) are willing to pay for people to consume electricity when there is too much of it; They are not doing it for the sake of being lunatics, the electrical system cannot handle over or underproduction. Perfectly balanced (as all things should be) is the only way the grid can exist.

The production capacity in the grid needs to be as big as peak demand. The challenge we face with most renewables is that their production is fickly. For a true solarpunk future, the demand side needs to be flexible and there need to be energy storages to balance the production (and still, in cold and dark environments other solutions are needed).

In off-grid, local usages we usually see this happen naturally. We conserve power on cloudy low-wind days to make sure we have enough to run during the night (demand side flexibility) and almost everyone has a suitably sized battery to last the night. The price variability is one (flawed) mechanism to make this happen on a grid or bidding zone level.

Unlimited free energy of any sort is unsustainable. Our planet is a balanced system that has evolved over eons, simply adding energy upsets this balance and probably not in ways that will ultimately be beneficial for us. We can see many negative effects already from adding massive amounts of fossil energy to the system (besides the greenhouse effect and pollution) such as population growth beyond the bounds of the planet.

This BULLSHIT comes up every so often, and I’m kinda tired so I’ll to someone else to try and explain how the electricity grid actually works.