solarpunk memes

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 system is overloaded so there is no need for more power, in fact putting more power into the system has a negative effect. So there is no value to putting more power in the system and it may actually have a cost.

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.

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

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.

https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/factcheck/solar/index.html#section-solar-farms-pump-out-more-carbon-over-their-lifetimes-than-they-save

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.

I used to genuinely be against solar because the carbon costs barely break even,

Carbon costs are not break even. The monetary costs include all economic inputs including the dirty energy used to produce the panels. So even if 100% of the $1000 cost to create a panel was from burning coal, that means once the panel has generated $1k in electricity, it has recouped all the carbon output. Because the alternative to $1k in burning coal to make a solar panel is $1k in burning coal for electricity.

Solar takes 10 years to break even and lasts a minimum of 20 years. And 20 years it hasn't stopped working but is only outputting at worst 80% less power. There are 40 year old panels outputting 80% of what they did when new.

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.

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.

Why wouldn't batteries work?

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.

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.

Peak energy production would be a good time to train the damn llms instead of building natural gas power plant I guess.

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.

Well, not "literally", since the sun will one day stop working (it will take a while, though) plus even it is not a limitless source of energy.

But yeah, in practice at the moment given the amount of energy our society consumes is there is limitless energy available to us.

Just not "literally" 🤪