I saw some context for this, and the short of it is that headline writers want you to hate click on articles.
What the article is actually about is that there’s tons of solar panels now but not enough infrastructure to effectively limit/store/use the power at peak production, and the extra energy in the grid can cause damage. Damage to the extent of people being without power for months.
California had a tax incentive program for solar panels, but not batteries, and because batteries are expensive, they’re in a situation now where so many people put panels on their houses but no batteries to store excess power that they can’t store the power when it surpasses demand, so the state is literally paying companies to run their industrial stoves and stuff just to burn off the excess power to keep the grid from being destroyed.
Lol
I just love when large organizations (governments included) skimp on something for monetary reasons, and get fucked down the line.
Too bad citizens pay the damages.
Wish there was just a faster way to get citizen input.
“Hey folks, this is going to be a cost overrun for this very very good reason, please vote yay or nay in the weekly election”.
Don’t see how it could work now though, given that half the citizens are deeply committed to destroying everything to prove gov doesn’t work.
Also, let’s be real here. The Lion battery farms, defeat any sort of environmental benefit. It is a total shot in the foot, which is why governments, and solar companies don’t advertise the concept.
For a moment I was thinking that lion battery is some brand, until it clicked in that you are talking about lithium ion batteries
Sorry, I should have put a dash in :D Li-ion. Also another i.
Rawr!
We own the factories building the panels.
Solar cells don’t really grow on trees.
Solar cells don’t really grow on trees.
Are you talking about
A scalable self replicating and self sustaining carbon capture technology that uses a mix of highly specialized biological processes to turn CO2 into engineering grade composite construction material, fuel and fertilizer.
?
I think they’re talking about chloroplasts. The cell component trees grow to collect solar energy.
The majority of panels produced in the world right now is China. Like dwarfs the other countries.
Big oil currently does not own the factories.
Well yeah, but that’s like a one-time purchase (for years) compared to coals/etc. where they can charge for the “amount” used
To be fair, having a mismatch between when energy is available and when it is needed is going to be a problem under any economic system, since it’s a fundamental inefficiency that must be worked around with additional effort and resources
You gotta recharge your phone battery sometime though - and if electricity had a different cost for nighttime vs. daytime, you can bet that people would choose the day option whenever possible.
(I chose a mobile device here bc it doesn’t need any “extra” battery or technology beyond what would already normally be at hand.)
Thats basically how its done in most of Europe. Price changes every 15 minutes and some smart system starting washing machines etc if a certain threshhold is reached.
Of course you can also get a hedged contract where you pay a fixed price and don’t need to care about it, but you have the choice.
Uh, in my part of Europe we don’t have 15-minute changes, that would be a nightmare.
You can have a contract where the day is split in 3 or 4 different rates, so that it’s cheaper to run your washing machine at night for instance.
I don’t get why that would be a nightmare. In my country the electricity prices change per hour for dynamic contracts (they just follow the energy market) and with normal usage it’s cheaper on average than fixed contracts, including those with peak and off-peak rates. For gas it’s a day price, again same as the energy market. For both electricity and gas the prices for the next calendar day are published in the afternoon (that’s how the energy market works). The companies charge a little extra per unit and a small fixed fee per month.
Contracts with fixed rates (including nighttime and daytime rates) have to buy in advance, which means that unforeseen circumstances are included in the price and they also have to account for the fact that they might need to buy extra or sell off their excess based an actual usage.
It’s priced per hour, and fairly low slopes, I think. Haven’t looked at actual smart grids, though. Basically you’ll know that electricity will be cheap (or even negative net) the following night or day or that there will be certain very expensive peak times from 8-10 and 15-17 or so.
You can adapt to these inefficies, sure, but doing so still takes more planning and effort (in this case in carefully timing one’s phone charging, and in avoiding power using activities like that during non ideal times) than if there was no mismatch of availability and demand. It lessens the impact of the problem, but does not entirely remove it.
it’s a fundamental inefficiency that must be worked around with additional effort and resources
In the OP the use of the word “problem” rather than something like “challenge”, and referring to the problem being the pricing structure (negative) makes it seem like we’ve switched topics slightly, but if you are just referring to the foundational inefficiency of energy distribution then yeah I agree it is definitely a challenge. However, that challenge need not be so overwhelming (even perhaps solely wrt pricing) that it negates the benefits of having that form of technology available altogether. e.g. if the power company itself, or each recipient building individually, had its own battery (if let’s say those were cheap & sustainable) then that could work, without the users needing to care much. I forget which city but one example in Germany iirc pumps water up a mountain during the day, then at night or on a cloudy day that potential energy falling back down generates electricity again. So yes a “challenge” for sure but not necessarily an insurmountable one!:-)
Also, there are “problems”/“challenges” wrt use of fossil fuels as well, which have implications for climate change, and therefore even purely from a profit perspective there’s government laws & subsidies and public perception that can affect it, which could push the overall net towards being beneficial to store that energy for later.
The answer to this is local energy storage. It could be at the home level, but doing it by neighborhood/industrial block would be better
Then, you lessen the strain on the grid at large, and you also capitalize on the periods of low demand. This means less spot energy production and built in storage, making it easier to make the most of renewables while minimizing the need to fire up a natural gas plant to make up the difference
Most places in the US have peak and off peak hours with different pricing already. Certain smart thermostats can take advantage of this for running your AC and such.
Like turning them off… Which is fine. Turning off solar panels is literally built into the systems and can be automated
Sure, but you’re not getting as much output from your panels as you could in total that way, making them less efficient overall. I’m not saying you can’t run a power grid on this stuff, just that the adaptations to use them in a grid effectively have costs, and those costs are not exclusive to capitalism
It’s definitely a problem with the grid, since too much supply is at least as big a problem as too much. Hopefully we’ll get things like molten salt batteries so we can soak up this excess and decarbonise heavy industry.
Why couldn’t the solar panels simply be turned off - is that not an easy solution to having too much intake?
You’re wasting energy then, and you also need to have some controller on each one to communicate with the grid. No country has a smart grid yet.
Yeah but you said it was a “problem” - like I dunno, likely the excess energy start a fire or something? - whereas turning them off seems like it would reduce that to the system merely being less efficient than would otherwise be possible.
Anyway, definitely some kind of energy storage battery seems naively to me like it would be the best solution, even if used in conjunction with several forms of energy production (solar, wind, geothermal, maybe biomaterials etc.).
They do shut off (“curtail”) renewable energy because it is a problem - excess power can destabilise the grid, causing brownouts and blackouts and also physically damage grid equipment like transformers and transmission lines over time.
Both of the statements in that screenshot are just so inane.
Frequency has to be maintained on the grid. It’s the sole place where we have to match production and consumption EXACTLY. If there’s no battery or pumped storage storage available to store excess energy, the grid operators have to issue charges to the producers, in line with their contracts, to stop them dumping more onto the grid (increasing the frequency). The producers then start paying others to absorb this energy, often on the interconnectors.
It’s a marketplace that works (but is under HEAVY strain because there’s so much intermittent production coming online). When was the last time you had a device burning out because the frequency was too high?
Turning the electricity grid into some kind of allegory about post-scarcity and the ills of capitalism (when in fact it’s a free market that keeps the grid operating well) is just “I is very smart” from some kid sitting in mom and dads basement.
Your explanation works very well, but completely falls apart in the last paragraph.
Solar power production clearly is (at least in part) a post-scarsity scenario, given we literally have too much power on the grid.
Furthermore, calling the power market anything like “free” is just plain wrong. A liberal approach to market regulation here would have led to disaster a long time ago, for the reasons you described at the beginning of your comment.
The market “works” because of, not inspite of regulation.
And negative prices are a good thing for consumers, not market failure.
But too much power on the grid isn’t “here, have at it”. It’s fried devices and spontaneous fires breaking out. The grid can’t “hold the power”, only pumped and battery storage can, of which we have nowhere near enough. The grid literally cannot work if other producers put more electricity on to it.
If you have smart meter, you can literally be paid to use power at that point.
wait until you figure out how we solve this problem…
wait for it…
You just don’t produce that energy.
lol. Yes, it’s that simple.
that’s how we’ve been doing it for the past 2 centuries, it’ll be how we continue to do it for the next 2 centuries.
Nobody said it can hold power
Additionally, this has been a known issue for decades. If only there had been investment in handling it…
Frequency has to be maintained, and it is trivial to do so when you have excess renewables because inverters are instantly throttle-able. The reason why you’ve never heard about devices failing because frequency is too high is because it is and has always been such a non issue to shutter unneeded generating capacity.
Typically with fossil fuel plants, when the price drops below the cost of fuel for the least efficient plants they drop offline because they are no longer making a profit on fuel and the price holds. Because renewables have upfront cost to build but are free to run on a day to day basis, when there are a lot of renewables the price signal has to drop all the way to nothing before it is no longer profitable to run them.
All this means that all that happened was that for a few hours, solar production was actually enough to satisfy demand for that region. Along term, if low wholesale prices can be counted on midday then people will build industry, storage, or HVDC transfer capacity to take advantage of it.
If these prices are sustained for enough of the day that it is no longer profitable to add more solar farms, then they will stop being built in that area in favor of was to generate power at night such as wind, hydro, and pumped hydro while the panels will instead go to places that still don’t have enough solar to meet demand.
Also as an aside, the wholesale electricity market in north america is by definition about as far from a free market as it is possible for a free market to be without having exact outside price controls. It is a market built solely out of regulation that only exists at all because the government forced it to exist by making it illegal to not use it, either by making contracts off market or by transmission companies in-houseing production, or use it in any way other than as precisely prescribed by the government.
Now we can argue whether or not the wholesale electricity market is well or poorly set up or even if it should exist in the first place, but I don’t think that anyone can argue that it is a free market. At least not without defining the term free market so broad that even most of the markets in the USSR qualify as free markets.
Also, free markets and capitalism are very distinct concepts with no real relation between each other. You might argue that free markets tend to lead towards a capitalist system, but given free markets existed thousands of years before capitalism was invented I don’t think many people would say it was a very strong relationship.
Usually too low frequency is issue, I can’t imagine why even double frequency can damage PSU.
There’s a reason why the frequency is exactly 50hz or 60hz, and it’s not “at least 50hz or 60hz”. You can’t just have 55hz on the grid, you’ll destroy half a country.
That’s why I say low frequency is problem, but high is not as much.
I don’t think you said why?
some clocks are bound to grid frequency. It’s the easiest most accessible way to clock time semi accurately.
It’s not just about frequency - though that is important for devices that synchronize using the grid. When your frequency is going up because of too much power so will voltage. Think about that for a minute.
Not necessarily(see field windings), but higher voltage is indeed a problem
Not everything on the grid is a motor. Even if it was you would still need to rebuild the motor to change field windings.
Ok, your particular device may handle a wide band of frequencies. Congrats.
But do we agree that not all devices can? What about sensitive devices keeping patients alive in hospitals?
lol If you think hospitals don’t have managed power systems you shouldn’t be contributing.
Also lol if you think medical equipment isn’t required to be robust, have you ever read a supply tender spec for a hospital?
Those would not be plugged straight into the grid but with a power conditioner inbetween
Oh ok, I guess frequency maintenance on the grid isn’t a problem then and all the pumped storage and battery installations can shut and all the grid planners can go home and the spots markets can close and we can just dump as current as we see fit onto the grid and you’re right and I’m wrong.
All of that matters, but I think the parent post was only calling out the hospital equipment as a bad example. Like how your keyboard and your SSD don’t care what the grid is doing as long as the PSU can handle it.
But back to maintaining the frequency on the grid, along with keeping it within tolerance don’t they also have to make sure that the average frequency over time is VERY close to the target? I believe there are devices that use the frequency for timekeeping as well, like some old plug-in alarm clocks.
Fair enough. I was getting frustrated because I was trying to make a larger point about the fact that the grid can’t endlessly handle production. At some point the grid has to say “it will cost you to dump this onto the grid”. And suddenly I found myself discussing PSUs. I mean, yes, I’m aware there’s equipment on the grid that can handle different frequencies better than others but I felt we were discussing the bark of a single tree when I was trying to talk about the forest.
Also fair enough!
It really is a good point you make though. There’s a large balancing act to produce the right amount of power at exactly the time it’s needed. I think in our daily lives, and especially for non-tech/STEM folks, electricity is just taken for granted as always available and unlimited on an individual scale. I think people don’t envision giant spinning turbines when they plug something in, just like they don’t think of racks of computers in a data center when they open Amazon or Facebook.
Maybe it will be less like that in a couple decades when there is distributed energy storage all over the grid, including individual homes & vehicles.
But do we agree that not all devices can?
By not all you mean motors with windings connected to grid? Well, they still will work on higher frequencies, but on higher speed. Real problem is low frequency, not high. Well, 0.5kHz not all devices can handle, but most consumers(even conumer electronics, no pun intended) even rated to 50-60Hz range. So 46-64Hz should be fine for them.
What about sensitive devices keeping patients alive in hospitals?
Sensetive devices that can’t handle range bigger than ±0.4Hz? Are you kiddding me? How does that even pass certification?
Most frequency-sencetive devices are not consumers, but transformers and turbines.
Transformers are very important for the grid though. You also have large synchronized motors connected to the grid.
If the excess energy cannot be stored, it should be used for something energy intensive like desalination or carbon capture.
- melpomenesclevage ( @melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee ) 23•3 months ago
Or just fill debts. Overclock every air conditioner freezer and industrial coolant system for those hours, store that not-heat. Do cpu intensive processes, time industrial machinery to be active during those hours, Sure, desalination, but pumped hydro(even just on a residential scale, more water towers, dammit!) or… Anything.
OR we could just decline to build them because they’re… Sometimes too good to make a profit off of?
Or heck, have fun with it. It’s leftover
You mean just juice your veins?
Kinky
Like a Phase Plasma Rifle with a 40-Watt range.
Heck pumping water uphill for all I care. The more potential energy the better.
Yes we need more long time energy storage. It helps to balance the energy grid and it helps for days when not enough energy is produced. Batteries aren’t really the answer, but pumping water uphill might be.
Many places actually do pump water uphill into reservoir lakes for hydroelectric dams. In that case it is a form of energy storage, a literal water battery.
Unfortunately, it’s not always a feasible option. For instance, in the great planes there’s not much of an uphill to pump the water to.
I’ve seen some interesting ideas from Low Tech Magazine - one that I found particularly interesting was flywheel energy storage. Take a heavy disk or drum and spin it up with excess electricity, then discharge the spin from the battery when the Sun goes down.
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.
This could also be made more “local” with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed-air_energy_storage or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage and not reliant on the difference of elevations.
I was talking with an engineer about using a closed loop hydro system at home, maybe in a tower. He said the water wouldn’t have enough head to generate electricity. But that compressed air energy storage just might be the solution I was looking for.
the other arguably more effective option for home use is dumping it into heat. Heating up water is a great heat storage solution for radiant heating for instance. Getting that energy back out is arguably harder, but hot water is also pretty useful, so.
Hydrogen fuel cells also. Use the excess to make hydrogen which is simple to store and then use it as a fuel to burn when you have demand. These have started to be put at the bottom of wind turbines so they don’t need to be stopped when the wind is blowing but there is no grid demand.
All these systems help balance the grid too meaning these renewables can be used as base loads instead of dirtier base load generators like coal or gas fire stations.
pumped hydro is pretty slick but incredibly dependent on geology and ecosystem.
Thermal storage is a similar vein, you can even use water, we do use water for this even. Compressed air as suggested, i believe there’s a mine somewhere in the US that’s used a compressed air storage plant. And of course, motion, flywheels go hard i hear, but i find those to be less preferable, even if high energy density. I imagine those would work better at scale.
That was a very cool read!
The only problem is that it is inefficient
It’s more efficient than just dumping the energy, at least some is being stored
That’s true
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.
This has me thinking
The resurgance of sand batteries has been interesting. While not great for converting back into electricity, it’s great for heating and cooling which is a massive portion of our energy consumption. They can also store quite a ton of energy with crazy efficiency, especially when paired with heat pumps. And from what I’ve been able to deduce, they aren’t dependent on beach sand and can use rougher or man-made sand reliably.
First if we could get enough large buildings and neighborhood/home installation sand battery heating & cooling infrastructure operating with heat pumps. Then when during high times of energy production we can dump the energy into the sand battery infra and help keep the grid stablizied and keeping our heat & cooling overall percentage of use down.
In the end, we’re going to need tons of solutions and strategies for storing excess production during low demand times. I’m hopeful to see where we go here, the crazy things were seeing in energy storage is extremely interesting. I’m super excited to see the advances were seeing in calcium and sulfur based batteries expand in adoption and the production lines can scale with demand.
I’ve been really curious about the possibility of a small DIY sand battery type system. I currently store my “negative value” midday solar power by dumping it into a water tank and using it to feed my hydronic heating system.
However as we know that results in a tank containing useless low-grade heat on a cloudy day, where a sand battery would result in a small amount of usable high-grade heat.
The cooling equivalent could actually be implemented fairly easily at home with common consumer ice machines (which are effectively heat pumps). Make ice when there’s surplus, dump it in an insulated hopper with a heat exchanger for night-time cooling, recycle the near-freezing melt water to make ice the next day. Water is a lot easier to handle because it can be pumped instead of conveyed, and you get the advantage of phase change storage.
That’s really interesting you’re storing power. Was it diy??
Entire system is home built and programmed except the inverter which was a surplus rack-mount.
The dump load in the water tank tracks the battery bank voltage, drawing more power as the voltage rises into the float range. This is used to sense available surplus power, which is used to turn on other dump loads, i.e. air conditioning in summer.
I have a couple window units that are cranked to max cooling and come on in sequence as the surplus power rises, on an early summer day with clear skies it can get to the point of needing a sweater in the house :D I’m migrating to a homebuilt multi-stage heat pump this year after the prototype worked quite well last year.
Also seriously considering the ice storage concept for hot nights, though I might need to make an actual ton of ice!
Just made a deal on 8 massive surplus AGM batteries too to refresh my bank
Fucking amazing😮😮 Write a blog if you document things… Might come handy to beginners
I have been running the numbers on one myself and it seems to me the best case would be to actually have one inside my home, since the waste heat will also end up heating the space. I admit it is similar to just having a lot of thermal mass in the house.
Yes, also it doesnt technically have to be sand, there are concrete mixes and even just bedrock that can be used for similar purposes. I’ve been looking at sand batteries myself for this reason: run the battery hot when power is cheap, let it cool when not.
This sort of thing is of course why it’s useful to have a market mechanism for energy, it can encourage us to build environmentally friendly solutions.
Actually a modern “sand battery” does have to be sand or at least a granular material. The difference between a sand battery and thermal mass is that you use a conveyor to superheat small fractions of the sand, allowing the isolation of high grade heat.
If you have a single kWh to store and 1 ton of sand to work with, you could heat 1kg of sand to hundreds of degrees (sand battery), or 1 ton of sand by one degree (thermal mass).
1 ton of slightly warm sand is useless, while you can extract the high grade heat from the 1kg and get your 1 kWh back.
Interesting, thanks for sharing that!
Solar panels already turn off when grid voltage is too high
Could they not just install a series of big “resistors” that can be switched on and off to burn off overproduction when necessary?
Those still have to be connected to the grid. be maintained, cooled, controlled, all of which costs money.
Okay? So does the entire rest of the grid.
The point is that those have a cost, so grid has to pay for them, essentially. Hence negative electricity prices.
Scarcity is artifically created in the modern age
My local library can only lend out x copies of each ebook at a time, so sometimes I’m in a queue for the last lenders loan time to run out
Surely just pirate it so you can read it on your timetable, and take the book from the library when it’s your turn to give that author the lending stats?
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.
- melpomenesclevage ( @melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee ) 11•3 months ago
No but see you can’t build infrastructure to solve problems. What is this the 1700s? Go ride a train, commie!
Problems are only solved by grinding humans into a fine paste/powder, or destroying things for quarterly profits. Or doing a giant mountain of cocaine.
Yes, infra can be built, but not fast enough to keep up with all the solar panels being installed. For example: In the Netherlands our network can’t keep up with the requests being put out by companies, and we’ve already been busy for the last 5-ish years to install new infra, but that shit can take over 10 (!!!) years before a large line has been added. Land needs to be bought, people need to be informed, plans need to be made or adjusted, local companies need to be hired, the materials bought in and build into new pylons, etc.
It’s a MASSIVE undertaking. Even if you talk on a local level, where “The Last Mile” is the time-consuming problem there.
Shit takes time.
- melpomenesclevage ( @melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee ) 2•3 months ago
What infra? Youre acting like its a single thing. Sure pumped hydro takes a while. Even small scale, water towers on buildings. Sure.
But build a metal smelting thing. Take a crack at fusion. Use crypto mining techniques to tap cables and install massive racks of computers to do comedic deep fake smut of fascist politicians. Basically all meta-capacity can be applied to this, and some of it is really fucking portable.
What infra?
Sorry, I should’ve been explicit that I meant the power grid. You can generate all you want, but if the power grid can’t handle it, you’re shit out of luck :)
- melpomenesclevage ( @melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee ) 1•2 months ago
but not everything needs to feed the main grid. solar near a major factory, for example-its mostly generating during the same hours the machines are on. or in the middle of residential in a hot region, that power all gets eaten up before it hits (and I’m going to assume from what little I know of power grids that they look at least a little similar to networks) a trunk line. you need a lot less wire there. if you use generating methods closer to sites, and storage closer to sites, theres less transport to to, right?
not everything is more efficient at centralized scale. thought that was like half the point of solarpunk.
Or you ask a large company to run their machines for a bit to catch up the “overgeneration” (if that’s a word).
…yes. That’s why the price is negative. You’re paying folks to use electricity.
Unfettered capitalism will be the end of us.
Capitalism can work to our benefit. It’s main benefit is incentivising people to get more, which seems to work well at encouraging people to be productive. The main idea is supposed to be efficient resource allocation, but that plainly does not work as it leads to wealth accumulation at the top.
Our problem is twofold. The first problem is we externalize negative costs onto society. So environmental damage, health costs, workers pensions, roads, bridges etc.
The second problem is efficient wealth distribution. Currently we focus on income rather than wealth. We should tax wealth just as much as income. We certainly should make any use of an asset as collateral a taxable event.
Some things that might help. We should look at changing taxation systems to be a formula rather than bands. The more income you get, the higher it goes. The lower your income, the lower you’re taxed. Same as now but rather than having to meet a threshold to move bands, every dollar is taxed based on where it falls in the distribution curve. It would be more complex for people to get their heads around at first, but actually simpler for all calculations going forwards.
UBI would also help with redistribution and make society more efficient overall.
I get what you are trying to say, but you sound like someone in an abusive relationship that still believes they can fix the abuser somehow.
40 years of néolibéralisme cannot be undone overnight, it will take small steps to reverse the damage done, and to normalise societal expectations
UBI would also help with redistribution and make society more efficient overall.
UBI is a band-aid, not a solution. It’s a way to keep a broken system working for a little bit longer until it’s no longer politically expedient to help those in need. It props up capitalism in the guise of giving people a leg up.
It’s selling people bootstraps so they can lift themselves up by them.
UBI is not a band aid. It would be a complete overhaul of our economic system with a major change in how we value people, time products and services.
It is not a way to prop up capitalism, but a way to use capitalism for better equality and minimum standards of living.
What you’re describing could just as well not be capitalism. Why cling to capitalism?
Practicality for one. How do you change the world economy when they couldn’t even get together to manage a respiratory disease by wearing masks and isolating for 2 to 3 weeks.
There is nothing inherently wrong with capitalism as a concept. It’s how it’s abuses. Regulation and rules to circumbet that can help.
Communism doesn’t work. China shows some totalitarianism works, but I don’t want to lose personal freedoms for the greater good.
What system would you suggest would address capitalisms faults yet has a chance to actually happen?
Practicality for one. How do you change the world economy when they couldn’t even get together to manage a respiratory disease by wearing masks and isolating for 2 to 3 weeks.
You could say the same about UBI. Proper implementation requires wealthy to give up their wealth. Do you see that practically happening?
There is nothing inherently wrong with capitalism as a concept. It’s how it’s abuses. Regulation and rules to circumbet that can help.
Except that the system inherently causes capital accumulation and rewards abusive behavior. The kind of rules and regulations you’re thinking of work against capitalism and the wealthy are allowed to circumvent those rules anyway (see how they avoid paying tax).
Communism doesn’t work. China shows some totalitarianism works, but I don’t want to lose personal freedoms for the greater good.
I’m not going to get into the details of what communism actually is supposed to be or how the USSR or China are not necessarily the way to communism. I’m just going to point out that socialism does not have to go the way of USSR or China.
What system would you suggest would address capitalisms faults yet has a chance to actually happen?
Socialism. Not the Leninist way but the Marxist way. Marx described socialism as a process, a series of steps necessary to dismantle capitalism and establish communism. He didn’t go into details on what those steps are or how many steps they may or may not be. So to be true to Marx I’m not saying “let’s completely throw capitalism in the bin and go into planned economy” but rather lets treat it as a process. We don’t need to establish communism, but lets take step by step towards a better future.
And as such I think the smallest first step, which in many ways is already a huge step, is changing the ownership of companies. Everyone working at the company is also the owner of the company and gets a say in how the company operates. That change alone would improve working conditions and arguably have companies do less shady shit. But realistically I don’t see it happening any more than I see UBI happening in the way that you imagine.
UBI can be changed gradually. It loses some of it’s efficacy in distribution but it doesn’t need to be revolution. It can be evolution. It also does not mean a high risk of capital flight for the first movers. This means countries or areas can do it incrementally, one at a time, rather than a complete global shift at once. The wealthy won’t want to give up their wealth, that’s a given. That is the case for any change we plan for better distribution, so it’s not really an argument against or for any change.
Yes, it favours capital accumulation and rewards poor behavior. So what I have suggested adding is a method that leads to better wealth distribution and to disincentivise the negative externalities. Correct the flaws, so to speak. There is no perfect system that cannot be exploited. It’s a case of risk mitigation not elimination.
Socialism may stop companies doing shady shit, but will it make them.less competitive on the world stage? Remember, they are competing with non socialist countries initially. As you mention, it would be a means of transition. Yet, every country that has tried communism has failed, often with devastating consequences for the people there. Our world and nation state economies are much more complex and intertwined than before, yet efficient use of resources was not possible then. The problem is not the theory, it is people. Power corrupts.
I don’t have a problem with changing the ownership structure. However, can you point to any cooperative that was able to scale in the way that modern companies in a capitalist system do? Cooperatives exist and on a local scale can be beneficial. On a macro scale, they are less efficient and society as a whole is worse off for that loss of efficiency. That is the problem. Capitalism priorities profits, which require growth. The key is not to ensure broader ownership, but rather broader distribution of the wealth and profits created by that. We already have examples of that with share disbursement as a reward. Perhaps we could look at that being a regulated norm, in tandem with pensions payments etc.
You just mentioned a number of ways that capitalism could be “fettered” to work more for the benefit of all. But the person you responded to said “unfettered capitalism” (unless they changed it later). :-)
I assumed they were using hyperbole as no country has unfettered capitalism. All our restrictions on it in some form. My suggestions would be one way we could do this. There are others.
One problem is that most of your solutions have been attempted before and they failed to stick - e.g. a majority of people who are alive today were present when the top marginal tax rate in the USA was 90% (I am focusing on that b/c the OP referred to MIT), and when that was true, government programs were so well & sufficiently funded that we literally went to the moon! (but how often have we been back there since? granted, there isn’t much real reason to go…:-P)
e.g. people started hiding their wealth in offshore tax havens, only bringing in what they need in the short term to get by at any given moment. This relates to globalism as in how much is a wealthy person even a resident of any one country, despite them living in it 100% of the time and getting 100% of their income from it? If you open up a broom closet and maybe assign 0-1 employees to it, but file the paperwork for thus you can make anything into your “global headquarters” even for a multi-national, multi-billion dollar corporation - Amazon does this all the time, and moreoever keeps shifting it around to take advantage of tax incentives offered to them to move it there (for awhile).
Another way that people hide their wealth - Donald Trump is famous for this (among other things:-) - is to keep the actual financials low while still having the full quality of life experience. So he and his family may not “earn” much, yet still live in a fantabulous apartment that they value in the millions if not billions of dollars. Their cars, helicopters, private jets etc. also may not be directly “owned” by them, but rather by their corporate entity, which is subject to all the tax burdens and benefits of such - so even though he gets the exclusive use of all of his “stuff”, does he truly “own” it, at least as far as tax reporting purposes go?
Even UBIs have been tried before - e.g. slaves might be given their rations regardless of output, so that their families could eat even while taking care of the next and present generation of workers rather than produce work product directly.
So it is not that nobody has ever heard of these things before, it is just that they do not “stick”. e.g. Donald Trump, after taking advantage of that whole financial system, when he gets into power decides to defund the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), essentially the police who monitor for such excesses and abuses as he and others like him are exactly likely to try to get away with. (And yes, the IRS - the general taxation services & enforcement division - got its funding reduced as well, but that gets off into a whole HUGE tangent where it is not just its funding level, but direct mandates to specifically not go after the most wealthy offenders, or rather the particular style of crimes that they are able to abuse, which are more complex and can be held up in court for years and thereby take up a disproportionate amount of resources to enforce) And then on top of that, Donald Trump also lowered the wealth taxes - so both by making things legal, and also by reducing the ability to enforce certain particular styles of crimes that are illegal, he steadily moved the notch more towards “unfettered capitalism” and away from “placing restrictions on it in some form”. Nothing ofc is 0% or 100%, but there is a spectrum, and we do move along somewhere on it.
So, extremely unfortunately, it is not hyperbole at all - the most narrow interpretation of it as meaning equal to precisely 0% restrictions would be, but the common interpretation is to look at the spectrum and see the direction we are moving along it towards that particular extreme end, as in “more unfettered now than it was in the past”. You may actually therefore be in agreement with the person you are arguing with, but missing out on that b/c you keep talking about how to “solve” the crisis, as if the solution could be to simply pass a handful of laws and the problem would be over. However, pass those laws how - through Congress? And with the Supreme Court now having been stacked with judges that each day are revealed to be even more corrupt than we suspected in the past, ready to strike down any law that may cause their own personal quality of life to degrade i.e. they might receive fewer free rides on private jets if they displease the billionaires that they have befriended?
Well, anyway if you are speaking on purely theoretical grounds, or perhaps in Aussie land it may even be possible on practical ones, but in America we do tend to feel that we are well and truly and even royally fucked by the system, and any such “solution” seems unlikely to ever be possible to implement, for the simple fact that our overlords do not wish it. We may have come too far down this road, to the point where even the entire federal government cannot fight against them any longer, except in perhaps specific areas, but not overall, not anymore:-(. Ironically this illustrates the dangers of unfettered capitalism: I get that capitalism isn’t so much “good” as it is the lesser of other competing evils (socialism being demotivating etc.), but it really is like harnessing the power of this giant behemoth beast, whereas if you let the beast take over control then you can become well and truly and royally fucked…:-(. When riding a mount, one must always remain in control, or else… well, we are about to find out I suppose.
i.e. capitalism may be good, but only if properly restrained.
Capitalism is neither good or bad. It’s a tool. It’s the people that design the system that hold ultimate responsibility.
All the things you say about things having been tried previously applies just as much to socialism, Marxism and other forms of non capitalism economies.
Slow incremental improvements pay off dividends in just the same way that slow incremental worsening has made things worse.
I think faster broader changes would help more, but that doesn’t make them easier to implement.
Yes, there is a despair with how the world is worsening. We have a lot of things to blame for it. Facebook, trump tax laws, tax havens etc. Yet people continue to use facebook and continue to vote for Trump.
What needs to be done is fight and push for better candidates and better policies. Many are doing that but not at the level that is required. When was the last time you went to a political meeting? Or a rally or march? Those questions are rhetorical. I know I haven’t been in a long time. We have become complacent and despondent as a society. Things are harder, but also easier. We have lots of conveniences now that were unthinkable at the times you mentioned where things were subjectively better in the past.
Things were not better for women and minorities. Things were not better for child workers. Things were not better for lgbtqi people. Slaves were not better off by having a UBI. Please be aware that ubi means you have no obligation to work. Any income from work would be on top of the UBI. With advancement in productivity. I don’t see how society will function without UBI or cutting hours significantly. Jobs in transport, logistics etc will all go. AI will kill many more in communication.
Exactly - bad implementations of communism, bad implementations of capitalism, bad implementations of whatever utopian form of government we can dream up in theory, all suffer b/c they are bad implementations, even if in theory they are perfect. Beyond that, some theories may themselves just be “bad” overall, if the theory is too far removed from reality.
One problem that the USA has found for itself is having allowed itself to devolve to become a 2-party system, where no other parties matter. This is a fundamental phase shift b/c at that point the parties no longer try to accomplish positive aims, and instead merely try to “not” be the other side. Biden won b/c he wasn’t Trump, Trump won b/c he wasn’t Hilary Clinton, Obama won b/c he wasn’t Romney, or McCain, Bush won b/c… well it goes back many, many decades. Afaik, no democracy has ever survived that.
Nor does it seem to matter even, b/c regardless of who wins, the wealthy are in charge. School shootings are a perfect example of that - our CHILDREN are being MURDERED… and nobody gives a damn. I recall one poll result where 80% of the American people were for some form of gun control, and that rose to >90% of responsible, registered gun owners! Also that was a decade ago, so surely after all that we’ve seen since, it could be even higher? There is nothing that engenders bipartisan efforts in Congress these days - but 80-90% agreement among the American populace is astounding!!?!! However, it does not matter one bit what we want - b/c the lobbies want something else there, and they are willing to pay 10-fold more than the counter-lobby, hence children continue to be murdered all across the nation (typically in poorer schools though).
In addition to being horrific, that example also reveals that our democracy is beyond broken, it is no longer “democracy” at all, but a plutocracy where regardless of whoever votes for whatever goal to be done, the rich control what actually gets done, regardless.
So to fix something like that… assuming that it even could be fixed, would take… I have no idea. But going to a political rally will not begin to cover it. We may literally have a civil war coming up, or at least it is highly expected (among experts, it is said) to have some kind of “constitutional crisis event”, much like the January 6 protests where Donald Trump attempted the most ineffective coup that I have ever heard of, yet still was solidly an attempt.
And one potential reason for all that is that whereas the wealthy previous wanted to use middle-class workers to be the underpinnings of society - doctors, researchers, lawyers, engineers, etc. - now they gloves are coming off, and they would have divide the world into the haves vs. have-nots. That CPG Grey Rules for Rulers really helped me see this clearly, though also depresses me:-).
Yes, that’s a great response. I would disagree on some points but agree overall.
What people fail to see is that all these systems are just that, systems we use as a tool. Its up to us to design the system such that it benefits more people. However, those that design the systems have an incentive to design them to be reelected rather than what’s best. We need to overcome that. One way that can help is sunset clauses on bills. They expire after a set time and need to be devoted on. It should reduce the effect of interest groups, or at least require more funding for them to be able to intervene multiple tines over multiple years with more and more politicians and beurocrats. Basically, reduces their investment. Next one is term limits.
Its a great video, by the way, I hadn’t seen it before. It does emphasize why democracy is better, but what might be missed is capitalism as part of democracy is what also provides that extra wealth that mininoses the risk of revolt and increases number of stakeholders or power brokers.
Those whonarguse socialism or communism forget that there is still a ruling class working in their own interest and that ruling by committee is slow and inefficient. Just ask anyone on a committee.
I agree, the wealthy have an outsize influence. The wealthy is not one person. It is a constant rotation of power brokers coming in and our of power. Take the USA, the 1% is 3 million people. Sure, there are a large number who stay at the top and corrupt society with their interestd, but they don’t control all the levers. They focus their efforts on controlling the interests that will benefit them most, usually taxation.
Gun law is a great example of people wanting change but not having consensus on that change. However, much ofnthst change was thwarted nut the NRA using membership moneybfron the same people that claim to want change. We now know they also took money from Russia, in an effort to destabilise. Russia understands that a large mass of people effects vhsbge. They have weaponised it. Those seeking to stabilise and improve the world need to do the same.
The fact that Trump, who staged a shitty coup, is a horrible person and has clear mental instability is on line to be reelected is a shitty endorsement of current politics. That’s not the fault of democracy as a concept, that’s the fault of bad rules, like the electoral college, like campaign finance rules, like citizens first etc. All of which the democrats have not touched, ever.
I don’t see a civil war coming. Society is too comfortable(even if financially very tough) for people to revolt violently end masse. I do expect some form of constitutional crisis. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened after the coup. Many of the problems identified by that, remain uncorrected. If something is tradition and not codified, it is useless as a protector of democracy.
I think the complexity of society and the intersecting interests of so many people and groups is what makes civil war so much less likely in developed countries. I can’t think of the last time it has happened. The closest thing is middle east or eastern Europe, but that was fallout from global power struggles more than general unrest.
The only point you have going for capitalism is the supposed productivity, but any system that has a way to reward performance can do the same just fine. There is a range of economic models between capitalism and communism, several of them very market based.
A good example which i always felt would work well with minimal systemic change is the free money system (freigeldsystem), which is largely private enterprise. The big differences are that all land and natural resources are owned by the public/the state, leasing it out to companies; and negative interest making the hoarding of wealth impossible.
These key changes give the public a large degree of power over the private sector, since they could simply choose not to lease any land to companies who are not compliant with the public needs, and largely remove the capitalist class - the owners, the profit parasites, the shareholders, the ones living off their hoarded wealth - from the system
We need natural batteries like solar power lifting water from a lake into a reservoir so that when we need that energy and the sun isn’t making it, released water does
A cubic meter of water above your roof has the storing capacity of a AAA cell. That’s why you need huge, massive damms to store any significant amount of power. But unfortunately it’s not flexible enough (you need mountains nearby) or dense enough.
What about storing energy as potential energy using some high density objects. This may work… Right?? gravitricity Check out their work.
It’s slithly better the more dense the material, but that’s basically the same thing. You could say that depending on the location, using water is much more practical.
A much more interesting one I saw was the molten salt ones, where basically you store the energy as heat in a sealed place, and then when you need it, you use that heat to run turbines.
Yes, suspended weights, also spinning flywheels, hot salt, hot sand
There’s options besides pumped hydro, hydrogen and batteriesInteresting concept, thanks for sharing
- melpomenesclevage ( @melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee ) 14•3 months ago
Am I the only one noticing a lot of conservative economic priests in here? Is this normal?
Reactionaries grow louder as the system becomes more strained and workers more class aware.
- melpomenesclevage ( @melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee ) 5•3 months ago
Yeah. Maybe that’s a class we could stand to just, like, not have?
To be fair, reactionaries aren’t a class by themselves.
- melpomenesclevage ( @melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee ) 4•3 months ago
No but the priests of “economics”, it’s the dumbest most toxic religion anyway, and they use so fucking much cocaine and so many children.
You’re literally spouting slogans.
The fact that this is a known phenomenon does not make it incorrect, lmao.
Just because you spout slogans doesn’t make you right
Sure, then counter what I said.
Come up with an original non-slogan thought and I will
So you just, what, refuse to make any coherent points other than vague gestures? Sounds about right for you, I guess, but still disappointing.
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.
Is supporting the fire department “tankie” to you? Lmao
I wasn’t talking about a fire department, and neither were the tankies so I’m not sure what you’re on about
You were. Publicly run power would function the same as the fire department - paid for via taxation to fulfill a societal need instead of charging for profit.
Or, are you under the impression that the Fire Department is privatized?
Nikola Tesla was a radical anarchist then, I guess? :-P
I mean, in a lot of ways he didn’t care about the economics of his inventions. He wanted to transfer electricity wirelessly across huge areas and there really wasn’t a way to monetise that if everyone could just tap into that.
In a communist society you could build something like that, in capitalism you’re not going to find an investor to do this.
Thus, Ben Franklin wins electricity, and they made Tesla into a joke, who goes on to be a recluse, yeah? Edit: Thomas Edison rather
Prices going negative is Capitalism’s solution actually. Gives the price incentive for folks to charge their cars when prices go negative, or whatever.
The electricity will still cost some money because of fees from for example the network owner and maintainer The prices would have to go pretty negative to outweigh any fees.