You must log in or # to comment.
This gets posted regularly on Lemmy, and while the economic take is tone-deaf at best, there’s a real issue with generating more power than you can use. You can’t just dump grid power — it needs to go somewhere. The grid needs to consume as much as it generates at all times or else bad things happen.
There are of course solutions, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an engineering challenge to implement.
Figuring out what to do with kilowatts is easy, but figuring out what to do with megawatts, at the drop of a hat, is substantially harder.
Peak energy production would be a good time to train the damn llms instead of building natural gas power plant I guess.
Sorry, but Johnny Oil with a shotgun to my head disagrees with your math. and while I never looked at the numbers myself, I am inclined to agree with him that such a plan would be disturbingly “unprofitable”.
-anyone around western spheres of influence in the vicinity of any sort of lever of power to authorize such changes in infrastructure investment
Given the price of RAM and graphics cards, it is obvious that running LLM is at least somewhat limited by the amount of hardware available. So having that hardware sitting idle, except when there is too much solar power, is obviously not economically viable.
obviously
citation needed
I’m saying this because a lot of things seem obvious at first glance, but are still incorrent. Sometimes reality behaves in unexpected ways and one actually has to check some stuff regularly instead of just assuming it.
Like, which scenario is more profitable? Use 100 chips and run them at all times, even when energy prices are high; or buy 200 chips and use them only when energy is cheap? Which scenario is cheaper? One actually has to do the maths, otherwise one cannot just know these things.
Gotta admit, didn’t think about that. Maybe the solution was a few guillotines all along. (This solution has its own problem tho, see the Robespierre gambit)
Yes but that would be woke soy and gay. You dont want to get gay woke soy in your ai. Thats against like the entire point of the thing!
Solar panels need an aperture.
Again, though, using gravity batteries or pumped hydro is a great way to manage excess juice, though these are expensive options.
You can dump megawatts. But there is no need for that. It’s not like solar panel inverters will just keep increasing voltage until they can push the power into the grid. They have an upper limit.
Basically I don’t see your point
The extra power issue is not that hard to solve, when you get close you can start mandating the inverters to have smart connection to the grid, so they stop providing power to the grid if demand is satisfied.
No. No no no. You can literally turn solar generation off, nearly instantly. It’s called curtailment and it’s done all the time in saturated markets. Older residential inverters don’t have the reactive technology, but residential solar is a drop in the bucket compared to utility-scale solar.
The economics of that are great. Negative power prices are an incentive to store energy and get payed for that. Then release the energy again later in the day or at night to earn money on it again.
Yes, and plenty of companies are doing just that. The effect is that as they charge the batteries, they increase demand and that increases the electricity price a bit. Grid doesn’t tip over and everybody wins!
Trouble is that at some point they run out of batteries. Batteries are expensive. And when they run out of batteries, the demand drops and the grid has to figure out where to dump the excess. And the price drops again.
Pumped hydro is a more scalable solution, but it’s slow to react and even that has its limits.
What you are saying is factually correct, why the down votes I don’t understand.
Load dumping is not really a big problem as any fail over solutions have some dumping capacity. Just let it heat a big ass resistor somewhere.
What you are saying is factually correct, why the down votes I don’t understand.
Lots of people are offended by people speaking in un-convoluted, direct ways. I’ve made that experience many times.
Then release the energy again later in the day or at night to earn money on it again.
This process is called “arbitrage” btw. Take one thing when it’s cheap and sell it some other time/place where it’s valued at a higher cost, and make a profit that way. It’s one of the foundations of trade in general.
a giant flywheel for every town!
Solar panels don’t care if the energy they could produce isn’t consumed.
Wind generators can be feathered and breaked until they stop rotating and generating.
Hydro-generation dams can simply close their water intakes and stop generating.
The things that have problems stopping generation are not renewables, they’re things like nuclear power plants.
Negative energy prices are not a technical problem - if the decision to do so is made, renewable generation systems can quickly stop producing.
Negative energy prices are due to Market systems being used to decide who stops generating if supply exceeds demand - instead of some centralized entity deciding who will stop, the individual suppliers look at the market price for their product and decide themselves to stop/start producing or not.
Because electric power supply/demand balance changes way faster than said market signals are produced and processed ultimatelly to decisions to stop or start generation, you end up with prices overshooting and undershooting the ideal price point which is in equilibrium with the supply/demand balance, and sometimes the undershooting results in negative prices.
So negative energy prices are the result of the political choice of using market systems rather than some kind of centralized control - a system with centralized control would respond far faster to falls in demand and would thus not generate more power than demand to the point that somebody is actually paid to consume power.
So yeah, the idea that it’s solar panels that are the problem by causing negative energy prices is complete total bullshit - the choice of a market system to regulate supply and demand is the source of the problem and solar, because it has very low operational costs and thus the price solar operators are willing to sell their product for is lower, just means that when the market at times naturally undershots (because it’s SLOW at responding to changes in supply/demand) it will do so against an equilibrium price which is lower because solar is cheaper, and will thus more frequently end up going below zero price and into negative territory before bouncing back and stabilizing at the price which is in equilibrium with the current supply/demand balance.
Short term is grounding the power. Medium teen is building up storage or electricity intensive industries that can start up and shut down based on electricity swings.
You can cover them with a sheet You can pump water. You can do desalination. You can overcool houses during summer so the house is pleasantly chilly when you get home. Plenty of industrial processes already set the machines in-phase. You can do cool displays arcing it through the fucking air.
Youre inventing problems so your stonks stay valuable.
Oh no, I have too many megawatts, and somehow no batteries, turbines or any other shit, what could I possibly send it to
The humble ground:
Why waste it on the ground when we could start desalinating seawater
That is not how it works.
When you short something to ground, it’s everything in between that needs to dissipate the heat. Think about what “sending it to ground” means—it means you connect the hot to the ground. But with what do you connect the two? A wire? Sure, but you better hope that wire can dissipate all that power, because that’s what it’ll try to do.
You can’t just “dump power on the ground.” That’s not how it works.
So, I’m not good at these things, what you’re saying is that if I take a 240V cable in the street and just shove it into the ground, the cable will end up uh… melting? Trying to saturate itself until it matches the resistance of the ground or something?
If it’s a low resistance path to ground, it’ll get very very toasty! If it’s a lousy ground though, then it won’t…but it also won’t consume any power, so it’s not an effective way of scrubbing off electricity.
A good ground (low resistance) is found in your household wiring (the ground and/or the neutral). Of you short to that…well…you can guess what will happen! (Let’s hope you have proper circuit breakers.)
Yeah it’s, like, normal. I don’t know what I was confused about.
Guess those SWER powerlines are just for show then
I feel like a 4g cellphone plan and a shutoff switch would do the trick. You can control what is being generated in real time
I thought by this year we would’ve figured out a way to store solar energy the same way we store tanks of food/water. Like a big ol battery
You can store it in batteries, what are you on about?
deleted by creator
At least in my state of California, we’re building fuck loads of batteries
https://www.caiso.com/documents/2024-special-report-on-battery-storage-may-29-2025.pdf
Here’s the article this is responding to if anyone wants to read it. Here’s the study it’s reporting on.
I’d say the tweet is at least a little bit disingenuous because the article is not arguing against the adoption of solar power, rather the focus is on what the challenges to California’s solar goals are and what possible solutions might be. The tone is “economic constraints might slow down solar, how can that be addressed?” This is all from 2021, and it looks like since then the slowdown in solar capacity increase it cites as a concern has not materialized, still lots of consistent growth since then. I haven’t read enough to know whether this is because the study was wrong somehow, or that it’s premise that solar installation costs might not continue to drop just didn’t pan out, or that the increased subsidies it suggested came through, but it’s an interesting topic.
Solar panels costs continued to drop. A bit slower, but still. https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication/2025/Jul/IRENA_TEC_RPGC_in_2024_2025.pdf#p91
deleted by creator
The owners of my family’s last house left us with solar panels, and as a struggling barely middle class family, it helped my parents afford all our expenses; from groceries to rent and even a vacation. It makes me so happy to see solarpunk become so popular, the good it can do is nothing short of awesome.
Can you clarify how the recycling works? We had BP solar panels and after 6-7 years they all cracked (the crystalline silicon couldn’t handle the sun or heat) and stopped working
If they cracked, your installer may have fucked up. You need to leave a gap between panels because they expand with humidity and heat, kinda like flooring.
They were installed correctly and BP said they were faulty. They offered to replace them if an NDA was signed
deleted by creator
Just FYI: The claim that solar panels barely break even in regards of carbon is misinformation:
Indeed, the solar panels exported from China in 2024 will have paid off their “carbon debt” within an average of just four months, according to detailed recent analysis for Carbon Brief. Manufacturing the solar panels will have added some 72m tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2) to China’s emissions in 2024, but will cut them overseas by 203MtCO2 per year, the analysis found. In total, these solar panels will save some 4.1GtCO2 over their lifetimes, paying off the upfront “carbon debt” some 57 times over. Looked at another way, the lifecycle emissions of solar power are far lower than those of fossil fuels, as shown in the chart below, which is based on UN data published in 2021.
And since most solar panels are produced in China and China is rapidly building clean energy, that will also go down further in the future. Solar is great.
Can you point me to a study saying carbon cost barely breaks even? Compared to what?
deleted by creator
Don’t worry, there are literally startups, and Elon Musk, working right now to block sunlight from you and sell it back to you.
I mean yes, but what’s genuinely problematic is the variability of the sun. Since it doesn’t shine at night, you have to store the energy generated during the day somehow. What about winter, especially in parts of the world where it lasts a very long time? How can we transfer the energy generated in, say, the Sahara desert to Svalbard? Solar is great for generating electricity, but storage and transport of said energy is not completely resolved, yet.
deleted by creator
That isn’t really a problem for where many people live though, nor for very long, so some modest storage medium and transmission lines (which likely already exist to many places dark in the winter) coupled with wind or whatever else makes sense locally would be just fine for those locations where it is a problem. There’s no need to transmit from the Sahara to islands at the poles either, there’s so much sun to go around, and so many places to gather it.
I mean, a surplus in the electricity grid is actually sort of a problem, especially if you don’t have any way to store the extra energy.
we can just put a white blanket on top of the panels…
Can’t it go to some AI datacenter or smth?
Datacenters largely have fixed power needs; the computers are going to be running constantly, or else they aren’t making money for their capitalist overlords. What you want is something located at the solar arrays themselves, so that you can selectively switch whether the juice is going to the grid or to your power sink - and the power sink ideally should be something that also makes you money, but doesn’t need to run 24/7 to do so. Like a crypto farm.
LLM training and processing batched requests are 2 things that can be done i think. Batched requests have a 24-48h window when they need to be processed.
Big dams are actually great since they let you store the energy for later.
deleted by creator
Yeah but once people see the balance sheet in the red that’s a big no no. If only someone smart, like maybe went to MIT could explain how it could be profitable overall…like humans living being a profitiable side effect.
deleted by creator
germany is developing a lot of hydrogen options, which is a surprisingly good strategy in a lot of fields. like, steel and cement can be produced with hydrogen alone, and germany is learning how to store and transport hydrogen through pipelines quickly.
Or, if the topology allows, use the excess electricity to fill up reservoir located up high so that it can drive turbines when needed. Organic energy storage is really cool
Use excess solar to turn the wind turbines into fans and reverse global warming
deleted by creator
They’ve found the same is true for the wind, that the oil robbers can’t own that either… I think Maria may own the wind… I’m not sure. They call it that… the wind, that is.
How can the price go negative? There’s always going to be maintenance costs that have to be covered if nothing else.
It’s like a dumpster filling up, where you have to pay a waste management company to come haul that stuff away, at least if people can’t find a way to take it off your hands for free.
The idea is there such an abundance of energy that they are willing to pay you to consume some of it to keep the net stable at 50 (or 60) Herz.
In practice, there are always taxes and surcharges that the final prices is not negative, but is lower than the surcharges themselves.
Too much energy is not good for the system, so there must be a way of compensation.
Can they not just cut off some of the panels with some sort of breaker when the output exceeds consumption/storage?
They could, but those breakers are not currently installed in many many setups.
They started being mandatory in Germany last year, but many countries don’t have it.
Here in Sweden our electricity provider gives us a real time view of consumption and prices. When we charge the car during peaks of overproduction we get paid and the amount on our bill goes visibly down. It usually happens like 5-15 times a year during summers, and occasionally also because of excess winds on the farms year around.
Because its deterrent for people to supply electricity when its not needed.
I have a 10kWp system, sometimes I have to pay for the electricity I create and I dont use. There’s no maintenance costs in my system
Who are you paying when that happens?
Also, the panels never wear out or get damaged or have to be cleaned or anything? This isn’t me trying to make a point against solar, I’m just questioning how there could ever be absolutely no cost to having it. More in the sense of an electric company rather than private owners.
prices do not actually go negative if the solar parks are correctly installed.
the issue is simple: the solar parks forgot an “off” switch, so they continue to push energy into the grid, even when there’s no demand. so that destabilizes the grid which is bad, so the grid produces “negative electricity prices” which just means they pay someone else for taking that energy out of the grid to stabilize it, and they’ll also charge the solar parks for pushing more power into the grid than the grid can handle.
honestly, it’s just a construction mistake. the solar parks should obviously have a simple “off” switch to stop pushing power into the grid. they just forgot it during installation, end of story, no big deal. this is probably not going to be a permanent phenomenon, i’m very sure.
I actually never thought about that. Is there any damage to the cells if they’re bombarded by photons but not discharged?
nope. there’s a thing called open-circuit voltage but they don’t take damage.
“the problem with solar is we can’t monopolize the sun or make it scarcer than it is”
Oh contraire. Have you seen the cloud seeding chemtrails?
Sleep at night, turn the lights off. Problem SOLVED.
