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the best solar and wind ad you can imagine is russian energy grid attacks and how communities had built diverse workarounds to mitigate the grid going down here and there. it also spawned local businesses to maintain these stations which greatly helps local economies.
πΈπΎπΊπ πππ πΊπ πΌπΊπβπ π»πΎ πΊ πππππππ π π»πΎπΌπΊπππΎ π’ππππΊ πΊπ ππΎπΊπ½π πΌππππππ π π«π’% ππΏ πππΎ ππΊππΎπ π πΊππ½ πππΎ ππΊπππππ πΊππΎ ππ ππΊπππ ππππ πππΊπ πΆπΎπππΎππ πΌππππΊπππΎπ πΌπΊπβπ ππΊππΎ π»πΊππ ππ πππΎ ππΊππ½ππΊππΎ. π¨ππππΎπΊπ½ πππΎπ ππΊπ½ ππ ππΎπ πΌππΎπΊππππΎ πΊππ½ πππΊππ π πΎπΊππππ πππΎ ππππ ππ ππΎπ π πππ πππ πΊ π»πΊπππΎππ ππΊπ π ππππ ππ π ππΌπ πππ ππ. π ππ½ πΎππΎπ πππΎπ πππ ππππ π πΌπΊπβπ ππΌπΊπ πΎ πΏπΊππ π»πΎπΌπΊπππΎ πππΎ ππππ½ ππ πΊ π£π«ππ πΌπΎπππππ ππΎπ ππΌ πππΊπ πΌπΊπβπ ππΊππ½π πΎ πππΎ πππ πππΎ πΊππππΊπ.
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.
Can't it go to some AI datacenter or smth?
Don't worry, the market will adapt to solar becoming a better product.
Isn't that what you always tell us?
Problem counter: 0
You know I've really come around to solarpunk as a concept.
I used to genuinely be against solar because the carbon costs barely break even, but the very simple point was made to me that solar panels are an ideal ore for making solar panels -- meaning the carbon costs of solar panels goes down once we start recycling them. Add the independence solar panels give people (that punk aspect), and yeah I dig it.
Can you point me to a study saying carbon cost barely breaks even? Compared to what?
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
Don't worry, there are literally startups, and Elon Musk, working right now to block sunlight from you and sell it back to you.
Lack of capitalist imagination
We own the land you need to build the solar panels on.
We own the factories that build the solar panels
We own the solar farms.
There is literally limitless energy available to us. But as long as the people in charge benefit from people believing the supply is limited, people will be made to believe the supply is limited.
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.
It's colosally stupid to tie solar power generation to It's economic value. We are quickly heading to a future with climate extremes without doing something different.
Well there is one problem with negative electricity prices though. It's that you're gonna have to pay to produce electricity, charge batteries you might not have, or disconnect from the grid. I suspect fancy new inverters allow doing the latter automatically, but people with older setups will have to either do it manually by the hour when prices go negative, or upgrade their setup.
Good news is that negative electricity prices also apply to fossil fuels so there's incentive to reduce production there too.
Here is an idea.
What if we do something becsuse its a net food, and who cares if there is a positive or negative price because tying everything ever to monitary value is cancer on society.
The reason the price goes negative is that there's too much electricity being produced and not enough being used. The grid isn't a magical electricity sink. Things will break if the frequency raises too much due to overvoltage. I hate money and capitalism as much as the next guy here, but this dynamic is based on material realities, not market scheming.
Okay but you're still free to do that. Put up solar panels and PAY for the privilege of producing electricity when there's not enough demand.
If you do it on a large enough scale, you can probably bankrupt some coal plants or something.
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
My unscientific personal experience answer to your last paragraphβs question:
The study didnβt anticipate that California power companies would be so unbelievably corrupt and that the price of electricity would nearly double since 2021. We pay $.40-$.60/kWh while the national average is like $.12-$.16 so us Californians are willing to do literally anything to get away from the PG&E cartel. There is supposed to be a governing body that reins in the prices but itβs controlled by the Governor. In this case thatβs Gavin Newsom who just happens to own hundreds of millions worth of shares in the utility companiesβ¦.π€
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.
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.
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 βunprofitableβ.
-anyone around western spheres of influence in the vicinity of any sort of lever of power to authorize such changes in infrastructure investment
Channel it to an underground phase change storage.
You canβt just dump grid power β it needs to go somewhere. The grid needs to consume as much as it generates at all times or else bad things happen.
we figured out this problem centuries ago it is called capacitors. long term it is called batteries
Of course. Like I said, we know how to do it, but it's still an engineering feat to get it done.