>There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices

It seems like an opportunity more than a crisis to me.

There are tons of potential applications for "free" electricity.

* Storage heating/cooling that's basically free

* Manufacturing carbon neutral jet fuel

* Cheaper aluminium production

It could also lead to onshoring of certain industries which previously moved to locales with access to cheap electricity. This would make supply chains more robust.

Some people are gonna get rich off this - partly because more people view it as a threat than an opportunity.

This. Transition to renewables is not just about replacing power plants, it is about changing demand structure.

Negative prices are an incentive to build power buffers, or to use power when it is plenty. You can even do crazy things like make steel.

One funny side effect that might happen is that for individuals, power will not become more expensive from renewable energy, but rather cheaper - so cheap that the metering it is more expensive than the electricity, so there will be flatrates (up to a certain usage). The reason is that personal usage is just a drop in the ocean compared to all the cars and all the other things that now run on fossil.

It would be cool if i could use an electric car parked at home during the day to store some of that cheap electricity then spend it from the car back into the house at night.

When i looked into this last, it wasn’t common to have that bi-directional power flow capability. There was one, very expensive, Mitsubishi solution on the UK market around 2 years ago.

Cycling car batteries is expensive. The cost of wearing out the battery is probably not going to exceed the value you get from drawing on it most of the time.

That said, if you leave a car plugged in overnight and it charges fastest when the wind is blowing and slowest when prices drift up that will have a similar effect - for free.

If you were to fully charge and then fully discharge the battery, it might be an issue; however, that is not what you would typically do. If you cycle between say 25% to 90%, there is some evidence that it is better than just letting it sit. (The biggest issue seems to be leaving it fully charged for a long period of time.)

Nissan were looking into V2H for years but not sure what happened with it.

I was registered for a pilot at one point with a third party but never got invited to participate and have since forgotten who the company is.

EDIT: Looks like these can now be purchased and imported from China by end users: https://www.setec-power.com/product/vehicle-to-home-v2h-6kw/

We are involved in (so far as we know) the largest residential V2G trial in the world (certainly, the largest in the UK). Some links:

https://www.indra.co.uk/v2v-grid-to-vehicle

https://www.ovoenergy.com/electric-cars/vehicle-to-grid-char...

https://www.cenex.co.uk/projects-case-studies/sciurus/

OVO Energy that’s the one! Sadly I appear not to be in the pilot area.

The trial included people all over the country. Alas, the original trial is coming to an end, so they haven't been accepting new participants for quite some time.

If you want a V2G, you might try contacting Indra though we really sell more to installers rather than direct to customers. Alternatively, if you have a local(ish) installer that installs Indra's smart chargers, you could try inquiring through them.

I know it is possible to optimise to octopus's tariffs, but I don't know how available that is yet from the commercial side of things (I work on the technical side).

> "Nissan were looking into V2H for years but not sure what happened with it."

In the UK, there are a few companies offering V2G packages for the Nissan Leaf. For example, Octopus Powerloop (available in London and parts of South East England):

https://www.octopusev.com/powerloop

Second gen Leafs are equipped with the proper hardware - at least in Japan.

I believe all current-generation LEAFs worldwide are V2G-capable.

Basically every Leaf since 2012. Also Mitsubishi Outlander PHEVs work too though their batteries are quite small.

Buy a powerwall or equivalent, they are designed for this use case, they tune the battery chemistry, cooling, weight, etc for this use case.

Wearing out a expensive electric car, with a high load, while it's not moving (harder to cool), to save a few pennies per Kwh isn't worth it. Keep in mind that there's power losses just charging and discharging, so you need a pretty big swing to make it worth while.

A powerwall (11kwh) costs $7500 or so installed and is generally enough to "peak shave" by charging when power is cheapest and discharge when it's most expensive. It does lower electric bills, but generally isn't really a good financial decision unless you put a financial benefit of having power when during outages.

Why would power become cheaper for individuals?

It might work, but it's not necessarily going to be very profitable. The equipment that sits around waiting for low or negative electricity prices represents locked up capital, and ongoing maintenance and depreciation costs.

For the same reason, it's not a good idea to have bitcoin mining equipment sitting around waiting for cheap electricity. The hardware becomes obsolete very quickly, so there's only limited time to earn back the investment.

That depends on how often you can use the equipment. The company I work with pours cast iron in one factory - if you get a job there you work the overnight shift because that is when power is cheap. Since energy is the main cost of melting iron (it takes a lot of energy to get to get over 1100c) we are willing to let the equipment be idle and pay the workers extra to work a shift that doesn't work with the rest of the world.

Planned maintenance in that factory is worked with the power company. I'm not sure if that means they are also doing maintenance on some power plant, or if that means during Christmas lights season.

If you can predict high wind times a week in advance I'll work my energy hungry production around your cheap energy prices. The only thing I need is some sort of guarantee that those times will happen "often enough". I can pay employees to work 60 hour weeks some months, and other months get paid vacation, so long as over a full year I get reasonable use of my factory and there is some prediction.

I forsee periods of negative/cheap/free electricity becoming much more common. If your equipment is not used on average two days a week, the economics start to look a LOT more sensible even for more capital intensive, energy intensive applications.

At the moment pretty much every MWh generated is a substituted MWh not generated by gas and periods of negative pricing are still relatively rare.

Wind is so cheap though, that at some point, overproduction will become the norm rather than exceptional and being able to timeshift your usage could, unexpectedly, end up saving you more money than reducing your usage.

The counterintuitiveness of this and the fact that this is new territory is why I think that there's lots of profit potential.

Lots of things that we currently do were designed on the basis that power supply and demand were predictable and slowly-changing. Now we will see technologies evolve on the basis that unpredictable power supply is very cheap and predictable power supply can be quite expensive. That's fine.

With negative electricity rates you can do crazy things like buy thousands of space heaters, and just heat the outside.

Space heaters don’t become obsolete, and they’re not very capital intensive, or require much maintenance. You just need space to put them in.

> You just need space to put them in.

What are you talking about? Just take the three phases from your power outlet and stick them in the ground, with some distance between them. There, zero capital costs, and a nice, mostly resistive load for the power plant. A bad time to be an earthworm, though.

Yeah, last time that (accidentally, effectively) happened just down the road from here, it caused some rather interesting smells, and that was just a 300A feed (or rather, it blew a 300A fuse - repeatedly - the technician kept just replacing the fuse a few times until I wandered over and told him about the smelly bit of pavement).

> the technician kept just replacing the fuse a few times

What the fuck?!

That admittedly was kind of my thought at the time. As he explained to me, often the underground cable will short out due to water ingress (it had rained a lot in the previous few hours), and pumping 300+A through that water could often drive the water off, and resolve the short.

It took a bit of persuading to get him to believe me about the smell of burning plastic and suspiciously dry area of pavement just down the road. Once he believed me, a crew came in, dug the thing up, replaced a section of cable, and relaid tarmac, in a surprisingly short time.

Alternatively, maybe in an era of climate change, there could be an incentive to use the extra to run processes like carbon capture. If carbon credits became a thing in a global economy, I could see some companies in a cap-and-trade scenario use that as a convenient way to offset their total footprint.

You can buy a 10MW load bank on alibaba for $40k

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/11KV-10MW-Load-Bank-f...

Sometimes power plants have GW size load banks, it's an acre or so of steel wires strung up on poles. All the wires glow red hot when in use. It is quite a sight.

I'd assume their are tradeoffs between capital costs, maintenance costs, and efficiency. If electricity prices are really going negative you can funge against efficiency hard and still come out ahead.

Bitcoin is "special" because you've got hardware that will pay for itself in 2 years and be obsolete in 4 years. So if you've got it turned off 50% of the time, you're losing money.

But if you're in a different industry, with equipment that takes a longer to become obsolete or wears out before it becomes obsolete, lower utilisation might be fine. Plenty of capital equipment spends loads of time idle.

> But it's not necessarily going to be very profitable.

Not paying for electricity is profitable by default.. Having a reserve for the long term that's environmentally friendly, its a benefit.. Investing in infrastructure that doesn't depend on finite fossil fuels is profitable.. So I have no idea what you're talking about.

> For the same reason, it's not a good idea to have bitcoin mining equipment sitting around waiting for cheap electricity. The hardware becomes obsolete very quickly, so there's only limited time to earn back the investment.

Its really nothing like that at all..

> So I have no idea what you're talking about.

Then you should also read the sentence directly after the one you quoted, in which it's explained:

> > The equipment that sits around waiting for low or negative electricity prices represents locked up capital, and ongoing maintenance and depreciation costs.

> The equipment that sits around waiting for low or negative electricity prices represents locked up capital, and ongoing maintenance and depreciation costs

But the costs over time are negligible when current alternatives will eventually only go up due to scarcity. I might be missing something.

> But the costs over time are negligible [...]

In heavy industry, they're very much not. Large machines often cost large amounts of money. You don't want large machines sitting around doing nothing when they could do useful work and earn money instead – so that you can, for example, pay off the loans you took out for them, or pay the operational staff that pulls the levers and turns the switches.

You're not solving the problem. There are lots of applications for "free" electricity, but there aren't many applications for unpredictable and unstable bursts of free electricity.

The applications can be any process which converts electricity into another usable form of energy. Some we do already, like aluminium smelting and steel manufacture. Some we have the technology to do, but don't currently do because the economics don't work - water desalination, hydrogen production through electrolysis, electro-chemical synthesis of ammonia.

We currently make hydrogen and ammonia from methane - there's no financially viable way to make it from electricity which is generated from fossil fuels (and therefore always costs more). Once that electricity becomes free or negative, it completely changes the economics.

> The applications can be any process which converts electricity into another usable form of energy.

You’re ignoring capital costs. Try to think of all the things you know what consume electricity and compare the price of that thing to the cost of the electricity it consumes.

Specifically, free electricity is only useful if the cost of electricity is a high percentage of the cost of the machine that consumes it. E.g. building a $10M machine that normally consumes $100k worth of electricity in its lifetime doesn’t make sense just because the electricity becomes free (or even priced at negative $100k). You’d still be spending 99% on the machine itself, thus saving — at most — 1% due to cheaper electricity.

Ginormous batteries come to mind. Buy low (so low it’s negative) sell high.

We’ve seen Tesla do it quite successfully in Australia, no reason why we won’t start seeing similar thing happening in the U.K.

I also suspect that there are many applications of unpredictable bursts of free electricity (I don’t really know what “unstable” electricity means when it comes to pricing). The most obvious is district heating, it’s a massive natural energy store. You can use the electricity to reduce your consumption of what other energy supply you normally use.

Then there are things like canal pumps. You could basically turn canals into huge hydrostores by varying their level by a few cm. This is just demand shifting, but no reason why you can’t do it.

Basically any application that currently involves topping up a natural energy store, whether that be pumped water, heat, or just any lifted mass. Could be converted to shift demand to take advantage of low or negative energy prices.

All of these systems have natural buffers that can be utilised safely and cheaply. They just need the economic incentive to make it happen. And there are far more of them in the world than most people realise.

Maybe not directly, but it can be useful with a buffer. The most obvious buffer would be batteries, e.g. installing a PowerWall on a building; but there are a whole bunch of more direct use-cases, which may be more efficient.

For example, we wouldn't want unpredictable/unstable bursts of heating and cooling for buildings; but it would be very useful for a heat source/sink, which a building's heating/cooling can use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_storage_air_conditioning

Likewise, batteries which will be used on a known schefule don't need to be charged as quickly as possible (which is the current assumption for most charging). For example, we can slow/delay charging of commercial vehicles in case prices go down.

Datacentres can also spin up machines in seconds to take advantage of lower energy costs. Cloud providers like AWS allow resources to be auctioned off, e.g. we can put latency-insensitive tasks (backups, indexing, report generation, etc.) in a queue until resource costs drop below $X/minute (if it lingers for too long we can either re-insert with a higher threshold, or cancel and process at normal price).

But these applications will appear.

so will fusion. Much better to spend resources building high density energy like fusion than these Rube Goldberg machines.

Are you suggesting that fusion is a close-to-viable technology which has been held back because it hasn't had enough research resources spent on it?

No,I am suggesting that its as close as the magic solutions to wind and solars intermittency issue we hear so much about and therefore the money would be better spent creating something as powerful as fusion than something to help a inferior and backwards looking type of energy that doesent even provide 1% of the worlds energy.

The low end estimate for the cost of completing ITER is $22 billion, and it’s a 500 MW (thermal) output reactor.

The cost estimate for batteries was about $137/kWh last year.

Therefore, ITER costs about as much as ~160 GWh of storage, which is enough for the entire UK for 4 hours 40 minutes… or the thermal output of ITER for 13 days, 9 hours. Which is enough to cover even the least productive production gaps in combined wind and solar output. Also, those batteries are rechargeable and last at least 1000 cycles, which would be a bit more than 36.5 years of drain (even with negligible recharge time), which is 16.5 years longer than the planned lifetime of ITER.

And remember, the batteries are made at a profit, even including the cost of building the factories.

wind and solar provides less than 1% of the worlds energy. That should provide you with a pretty good reason why your calculation is useless in this discussion.

PV alone made 3% of global electricity in 2019. Wind was 5.3% of global electricity demand in the same year.

PV has been growing at close to ~37% per year (compound) since 1992, and at current rates will be making almost all electricity by 2025 and all power (i.e. enough to electrify transport, heat, etc.) by 2030. And given wind and solar are currently the two cheapest form of power, it is very plausible the growth of these two will continue at least to the 50% point.

Electricity is less than 20% of the world energy consumption.

I find it fascinating that a tech focused forum like HN is so intent on taking an inferior solutions like wind and solar which literally can't provide enough heat for the majority of needs we have, can't scale, requires insane amounts of land, requires complex daisy chains of different solutions to work, isn't reliable, requires absurd amounts of resources, needs backup from oil, coal, gas or nuclear and won't be able to deliver anything even close to useful baseload and most importantly is so inadequate when it comes to thinking about any future civilisations energy needs both in scale and density. A forum like this people still clings to these Rube Goldberg constellations and think they are somehow supportiing progress. Especially since 3billion people still don't have proper access to energy. Oh well.

> Electricity is less than 20% of the world energy consumption.

I know. I made implicit reference to that with the 2025/2030 split.

> I find it fascinating that a tech focused forum like HN is so intent on taking an inferior solutions like wind and solar which…

Has it occurred to you that you might be… wrong? I mean, when I find myself disagreeing with a lot of smart people, I do ask myself that question. I could go thought all of your claims separately, but I’ve never found that to be successful at convincing anyone.

what exactly would i be wrong about? I am open to a persuasive argument. Dropping calculations based on speculations not even factoring everything in isnt one of them.

> what exactly would i be wrong about?

Everything. Literally everything.

> wind and solar which literally can't provide enough heat for the majority of needs we have

Almost all heat on Earth is solar in origin, including the majority that we don’t use.

> can't scale

Scales up to Kardashev III.

> requires insane amounts of land

Only looks like lots of land because there’s 7 billion people.

15TW all-source power use * 1kW/m^2 * 20% cell efficiency * 25% capacity factor = 300,000 square km = 1.7 years of lost rainforest = 38.9 m^2/person = a little more than half my apartment as land area per person.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=15TW%20%2F%28%201kw%2Fm...

Again, that 38.9 m^2/person is for all power — heating and transport, domestic and industrial usage — if you only wanted to deal with electricity you can achieve that just by covering rooftops, while you can cover about 90% of car needs with PV on BEV cars (if you allow them to share, but that’s not difficult, heavy users need to charge just like they already do and light users would want to sell the excess, dismissing this as “complex” would be ridiculous given what cars are), meaning not much extra new land has to be dedicated to PV (or to wind if you want diversity).

The only big things people even need to think about now is stuff like synthetic jet fuel, and even then we already know the chemical reactions, it’s just about commercialising them.

> requires complex daisy chains of different solutions to work

No more complex than anything else in the modern world, therefore calling it complex as a criticism is false.

And further, they’re still incredibly valuable even without batteries.

And they are the only existing long-term solution to our energy needs, given fossil fuels are finite and commercial fusion isn’t actually a thing yet.

> isn't reliable

Can be forecast reliably a week ahead in great detail, and seasonally in broad brushstrokes. We’re not going to be surprised that winter is dark, we can plan around this trivially in much the same way and for much the same reasons that supermarkets don’t get surprised by seasonal demand for ice-cream or raincoats.

> requires absurd amounts of resources

Less than the alternatives, again only looks big because there’s 7 billion people.

> needs backup from oil, coal, gas or nuclear and won't be able to deliver anything even close to useful baseload

Or, as demonstrated, batteries.

You could also do it with a sufficiently large grid, because transmission losses between e.g. Berlin and the Sahara desert are less than the price difference between PV and coal or nuclear.

> and most importantly is so inadequate when it comes to thinking about any future civilisations energy needs both in scale and density

Literally Dyson swarms.

> A forum like this people still clings to these Rube Goldberg constellations and think they are somehow supportiing progress.

“PV + battery” is two items, calling that a Rube Goldberg machine is like dismissing the wheel because you get the most out of it by adding an axel.

Plus I can literally buy USB batteries with PV pre-mounted to them at negligible cost compared to those without PV — the hard stuff has already been done, commercialised, commoditised, and made it to the high street.

> Especially since 3billion people still don't have proper access to energy. Oh well.

PV and wind are the cheapest power sources, so the most capable of improving that.

"Almost all heat on Earth is solar in origin, including the majority that we don’t use."

yes and it's spread out thinly which is why it doesn't kill us.Your solution is to take the least energy dense form and spend material, huge areas of land and money to build a solution that is inferior to all the other solutions.

Scales up to Kardashev III" In theory not in practice. You are speculating not actually proving anything.

"Only looks like lots of land because there’s 7 billion people."

Ehh we are going to be 9 billion. Not sure what exactly you think it proves. You are playing excel sheet scientist not actually proving the application in reality.

"No more complex than anything else in the modern world, therefore calling it complex as a criticism is false."

There is a world of difference between having a nuclear power plant or using oil or gas or coal which all have the energy STORED in themselves vs having to convert thin layers of energy into batteries which again aren't even close to be able to deliver the kind of utility the other sources can.

"Can be forecast reliably a week ahead in great detail"

No it can't and it isn't and will require backup from other sources. Again excel sheet acrobatics isn't really useful here.

"Less than the alternatives, again only looks big because there’s 7 billion people."

We are going to be 9. It's a reality and you aren't actually dealing with it. It's not going to go away.

Batterie are not demonstrated as being a solution by any metric what so ever so no.

You keep comping up with speculative solutions which wont actually work nor solve anything as the grid will never be flexible enough and batteries can't actually deliver what you seem to be dreaming they can.

"Literally Dyson swarms."

Again more speculcation.

Come back when energy from wind and solar is more than 10% of the worlds energy consumption.

"“PV + battery” is two items, calling that a Rube Goldberg machine is like dismissing the wheel because you get the most out of it by adding an axel."

I am not. I am calling all your other solutions to solve the issues with intermittency like grids and weather forcasting PLUS batteries plus storing of energy in batteries and PV for rube goldberg machines.

Traditional plants to manufacture aluminium do not work on-demand though. If they are not shut down orderly, you can rebuild the whole plant essentially.

So there will be some innovation needed to shutdown (and boot up) these plants quickly, I would think?

From what I understand that does not really work. For example, you can't have jet fuel manufacturing based on negative prices, because you need to have high utilisation rate for manufacturing equipment itself. It's not economically viable to have that equipment sitting idle during times of normal electricity prices.

If the primary cost is the machines you are correct. If the primary cost is energy, then low energy prices and extra machines makes sense.

Office work will ignore energy prices in general. Jet fuel manufacturing will if at all possible shut down when energy prices are high. If it isn't possible they will do some form of energy storage to cover high energy prices times.

Statistical analysis would show regions where production is viable for x days per year and to be honest, a jet fuel manufacturer could just recognize this energy abundance and build its own grid and invest in solving these problems as a means of optimization / investment / market strategy....

Is electricity the primary cost for the things you list? Once you have paid for the factory, equipment, employees, materials to manufacture aluminum or jet fuel, I can't imagine the stakeholders just shutting everything down if the cost of electricity fluctuates.

For actual buffers to be developed, we need applications that are super cheap to set up but expensive to run. Storage heating / cooling is a good idea, I can't come up with others from the top of my head.

> from the top of my head

Charging your electric car battery.

BTW, heating/cooling my house is half my energy bill. Time shifting that could easily cut that by a third. All I need to make that work is variable rates. But with fixed 24/7 rates, nobody has any incentive to do that.

> heating/cooling my house is half my energy bill. Time shifting that could easily cut that by a third. All I need to make that work is variable rates.

This isn't as simple as you make it sound. You can't just cool your house once when electricity is cheap and then have it stay cool all day. Keeping your house at a different temperature than outside is a constant, active process.

There are industrial systems that "store" cold by making large blocks of ice when electricity is cheap, and then using that ice as part of the HVAC system to cool the building throughout the day. This could be adapted to home use, but I have no idea the relative cost of the machinery vs electricity savings.

> This isn't as simple as you make it sound.

It is. There is no single comfortable temperature, it's a range. The first step is when electricity is cheap, cool the house to the low end of the range.

The next step is to cool a tank of water. People already have a hot water tank, it doesn't seem like much of an engineering or cost challenge to have a cold water tank, and using that to cool air.

A further step is to increase the thermal mass of the house, which means it will take longer to heat up. Thermal mass can be simply adding a big pile of rocks in the basement and blowing air through it.

I agree it's not _hard_, but your original assertion was "All I need to make that work is variable rates". Now, you're talking about installing additional HVAC equipment and spending $$$.

In the summer, even if you cool your house down to 60F, it'll be back to 70F in a couple hours max. Electricity rates from renewable overproduction do not vary on the timescale of hours. It's not a solution without new equipment to "store" the hot or cold that you produce when electricity is cheap.

A couple of hours still substantially reduces your demand during peak rate hours.

(Besides, I grew up in Arizona, and was comfortable up to 78 or so.)

How much money do you need to save for the incentive to exceed the effort and discomfort? If you make $50 an hour how much effort will you spend every day to save $50 a month?

I am sure the variable rates helped to incentivize people to conserve electricity in Texas recently but that is an extreme case.

Electricity infrastructure is capital intensive and long term stable rates are required to finance it.

> long term stable rates are required to finance it.

Gasoline prices vary all over the place, and there's a heluva lot of expensive infrastructure for it.

Compare gasoline prices to the electricity prices in Texas recently, Texas has experienced negative prices in windy periods and prices at the artificial market limit of 11,000 $/MWH, which is the equivalent of $396 / gallon of gasoline. Electricity prices change much faster and the swings are much larger than gasoline.

Electricity is different from gasoline since it can’t be easily stored production and consumption are always perfectly in balance.

Gasoline is a world wide commodity, whereas electricity is consumed relatively close to where it is generated.

Oil and gasoline are global markets, but there are many regional electricity markets with their own sets of regulations which are constantly evolving.

From what I’ve seen The only way people sink money in to building electrical infrastructure is with some long term certainty for prices from some buyer. Maybe it is different once the asset is paid off you can operate in the spot market but I believe financiers prefer the certainty of a fixed contract.

Maybe refineries that are built find a buyer for their product before they build them too?

I suspect that the wild price increases in Texas are from people not realizing the price had gone up and continued using electricity as usual. With demand not dropping, that just continues to push the price up.

I doubt this would happen a second time, as people wise up. They'll either monitor the electricity prices, or put automatic shutoffs in place if the price exceeds $xx.

> long term certainty

Higher levels of risk simply mean higher prices.

Sadly these 'negative' prices aren't available to regular people. Only a select few who can trade on the spot market can use them.

If regular people could get paid to switch on space heaters, the negative prices would soon go away.

Anyone can go on the Octopus Agile tariff here in UK, where you pay exactly what the prices are. If the prices are negative, then Octopus actually credits your account. I know some people with EVs on the Agile tariff, they have their car chargers set to only charge when the price is <0 - which happens at least a couple times a week, and they effectively get paid for charging the electric cars. Personally I'm on their GO tariff which guarantees 5p/kWh at night which I prefer because I charge my car every night so I can't wait for negative pricing.

> which happens at least a couple times a week,

Citation needed. Last time I looked the pricing of octopus agile went negative for like 15 minutes a year...

EDIT: just crunched the data... It looks like this only happened frequently in 2020 (not in 2018/19/21), and even then, for a typical 1 kilowatt household, it would only save £2 per year, and even if you deliberately maxed out and used the maximum current limit of your AC supply (100 amps, 24 kW, for most households), it's still only a saving of £50, which doesn't pay for the effort really...

You're absolutely right, it was far more common last summer when I was switching, looks like this year the negative prices are very very rare:

https://www.energy-stats.uk/octopus-agile-north-eastern-engl...

This is why it should be done on an organisational level: a company provides a service that makes sure that the car charger is enabled only at times with negative prices, and then makes money on providing a certain guaranteed load.

Here in Texas a lot of people could get access to spot prices and it didn't work out as well as they'd hoped.

Yeah the problem is that what people actually want is not exposure to volatility in the energy market so much as cheaper energy prices. And energy looks cheaper if you just get wholesale prices because you are not paying for the insurance against high prices that your energy provider is probably buying. It isn’t easy to convince people that they are picking up pennies in front of a steamroller, so I’m not sure I would actually like to see it becoming easy to get wholesale prices.

With smart enough appliances, we could smooth out that volatility.

Shed the pool heater/cleaner, beer fridge and the hot water heater when things get incredibly expensive.

Put the washer/dryer in slow-mo when prices are high.

Ultra-chill the freezer and A/C when prices go low/negative.

Turn on a resistive heater and shut off the gas heat when things are negative...

Instead we want complicated too-big-to-fail grid storage systems instead.

So one difficulty is that the future price of electricity is hard to predict. There is a whole lot of money that goes into trying to make probabilistically accurate predictions about the future prices of things. If it were easy then there wouldn’t be such a large industry around solving these problems. Because it is hard to predict future prices, it is hard to know if prices have temporarily changed (ie if prices are high/low) or if prices are going to continue changing and will stay that way for a while (ie if prices are currently lower/higher than they soon will be).

For example, if you had a smart home that cut off heating in the recent Texas event when it saw prices rising (because it assumed prices would revert soon allowing for cheaper heating a little later) it would end up having to pay even more later when prices turned out to continue rising.

I don’t really think smart appliances are a sufficient solution for ordinary people because there is too much power usage that is fixed (or worse, correlated with high demand/low supply) and I don’t think consumers are actually signing up for the price volatility on their fixed usage.

It feels like you are suggesting that it’s ok to have everyone picking up pennies in front of steamrollers because they can speed up a bit if the steamroller gets too close or go and pick up more pennies if it is further away. But I say that this won’t be good enough if the steamroller starts going faster and they get too tired running away. It’s especially bad because many people merely thought they were picking up pennies and didn’t realise they were being chased by a steamroller. I feel like this analogy is pretty strained by now but the recent events in Texas showed a lot of people getting squashed without realising that they had been spending years running around in front of steamrollers.

the grid is quite reliable in most of the world and provides as much power as you want whenever you want.

I much prefer simple dumb appliances than smart crap that is garbage after 5 years. If the price is high like in Texas recently I can decide to not use the dryer.

Most people have too much depend that is fixed for spot prices to make sense. If you have two meters putting one on spot might make sense - but that only works if there is something is stopping you from changing what meter is active.

Depends on what you’re doing. All I really need is for my technology to work, and all-in that’s under 100w. Each light bulb is ~4-6w.

Too many people think about the above two because it’s easier to see/feel/touch while it’s really thermal loads that are the bulk of household loads.

If I have to go down to 15C or deal with 30C, delay my shower/dishwasher/clothes washer/dryer to save enough bucks when it could really count, I’d do it.

Meanwhile on fixed pricing, I turn things off when prices are negative (that’s bad!) and indifferent to high prices when I have zero incentive to do differently.

How much would you have to save? For me it is thousands I can’t be bothered to delay kids bath times to save five bucks!

My parents in 1988 put their water heater on an overnight mode. Even with 4 kids taking baths we ran out of hot water twice that I remember (so about once every 5 years), and I can assure you as kid we weren't worried about conservation. 200 gallons (800 liters) of storage turns out to be plenty for all the baths people take in a day.

I know my parents got half price electric for water heating, but I don't know how much they actually saved.

A 60 gallon tank is considered large around here, so no wonder you had a 200 gal tank if it only heated at night!

The electric company gave us the tanks for free to us to sign up. Though the need for larger tanks to pull this off is important.

Yes a lesson has been learned, not particularly hard to mitigate though. I'm sure sales of generators, battery storage, and software/hardware capable of disconnecting from the grid when prices are insane are brisk in Texas.

And a lot of Texas power utilities charged fixed rates but had to buy at spot prices. It didn’t work as well as they’d hoped, especially if they didn’t have generation capacity themselves.

Power companies tend to buy hedges and other financial instruments to offset the risk. The ones that went bankrupt like Griddy were strict wholesale passthrough.

That's not say someone isn't eating the cost of the high spot prices, it's just a lot of that cost is borne by sophisticated professionals who's job it is to price risk and black swan events. The problem with wholesale passthrough rates is consumers are rarely sophisticated enough to understand the details of energy markets and the financial instruments to offset the risk.

There’s been 2 others that sold fixed rates:

“Just Energy” and another cooperative.

Reality is, electricity distribution corps are more tolerant of risk than individuals because generators have to sell, but the distributor can always file for bankruptcy if it suddenly becomes very unprofitable.

This is starting to happen: https://octopus.energy/agile/ I imaging more suppliers will start offering this soon.

(I'm not in anyway associated with Octopus btw, just interested in this sort of thing)

Octopus Agile makes them available to regular consumers. Last summer people regularly got paid to charge their electric cars during the night!

Bringing the inf. online will take time and needs government backing.

I have my issues with this Tory decade but in this small area they've absolutely smashed it out the park.

> Energy policy in Scotland is a matter that has been specifically reserved to the UK parliament under the terms of the Scotland Act 1998 that created the devolved Scottish Parliament. However, since planning is a matter that has been devolved, the Scottish government has the ability to shape the direction of energy generation in Scotland by approving or refusing new projects.

> In 2004, the Enterprise Committee of the Scottish Parliament called for the development of a 'fully fledged' Scottish energy policy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_policy_of_Scotland?wpro...

The 2003 Scottish parliament was Labour, later parliaments were SNP.

Is there a UK wide energy policy that pushed aggressively for renewables?

>Some people are gonna get rich off this - partly because more people view it as a threat than an opportunity.

Bitcoin miners probably.

As long as you don't have a reliable way to deliver this electricity all you have done is making the energy system more complicated and expensive.

Also :

* Produce hydrogen for hydrogen-powered vehicles

* Bitcoin, I guess

The apparatus to produce hydrogen from electricity doesn’t like fluctuations in its power input.

This is why you have many smaller ones and disable them one by one instead of varying the power supplied to them.

Who cares about efficiency and does it matter if the fluctuation is the on/off kind? I don’t see voltage changing.

Mining cryptocurrency seems like a win-win

Negative electricity prices are not a crisis but a great business opportunity. There is a lot of money to be made from free energy, or even better energy that someone is paying you to take.

There are, for example aluminum plants, whose major cost is electricity. There is steel, which can be made by electric arc furnaces (this is not the only way to make steel, but it certainly the more environmentally friendly). There is cement. Cement is currently not made by electricity and it is currently one of the most polluting and carbon intensive industries out there. But, as the major power input in cement is heat, I am sure there is a way to make it profitably from electricity given low enough electricity prices.

There will also be electric cars. One can choose when to charge an electric car, and if the power companies decide to pass on some of the savings on consumers, consumers can choose to charge up their cars when there is plentiful wind power.

So no, this will not be a "crisis" for long. And really if things get very bad, one can always slam the brakes on the windmills so you won't have power you don't want. But I expect there will be a lot of businesses that will pop up to use intermittent cheap electric power.

Just because some change is required, we shouldn't call it a crisis or put negative connotations about it. And of all the crisises that could happen, having cheap or free energy is not the worst crisis one could have, to put it mildly.

Say you had a rare meterological condition in your town, where it started raining little nuggets of gold. Would that be a crisis. It would certainly require action. You'd have to improvise a protective hat of some sort, and then you would have to drop everything and run out and gather all the gold. But I would not call it a crisis.

Sure, power cars (any car with a 300 mile range is likely on average to use 300 miles per day). Make ice (in the summer) to help with off peak cooling, pump water uphill above any hydro plant. Even pull carbon out of the air and sell carbon credits and then sell the fuel you make as a result.

The trouble is that the factory costs something too. If you're only running half the time, now you need to spend twice as much on factory to make the same amount of stuff each month.

So if we build a wind/solar grid without enough storage, this sort of demand management isn't a free lunch. It's just that instead of the power company paying the cost of intermittency, it'd be externalizing that cost to everybody else, who pay in higher capital costs.

(For aluminum in particular you have another problem: if you shut down more than about six hours, the molten aluminum freezes and you spend a lot of money on repairs.)

You could have a car charger that is remotely controlled by the power companies and can be disabled to shed/elevate electricity consumption in the country.

Tesla already supports this in some Scandinavian countries, where vehicles are controlled as distributed aggregate load.

It’s no different than Google getting paid when utilities send a signal to Nest saying, “power is going to be expensive shortly, precool everyone’s home in this geobound and then raise the temp so we don’t have to start gas peakers up.”

This reminds me of a certain quote:

"Talk is cheap. Show me the code."

It seems a bit reckless to already be transitioning into a situation expecting those solutions to magically come to be.

As long as the powersource isn't reliable it's a problem. A problem that doesn't have any solutions in sight that are closer than something like fusion which would be the preferable solution rather than unreliables like wind and solar.

> "something like fusion which would be the preferable solution"

The preferable solutions are ones that actually exist.

Hey, (human) fusion is currently 100% reliable in its power output, with a track record extending back to the beginning of time. Can wind compete with that? I think not!

Reliable solar and wind power is similarly non-existent.

>> Once this comes online, wind generation will often be over 100% of demand UK wide

Which is exactly what I would expect from island nations. The UK has lots of coast, which means lots of wind. That is a resource to export. The cornerstone of free trade is that some things are worth more in some places and less in others. UK has lots of wind. Maybe they can trade that for imports of luxury goods from elsewhere. If only there was a ready trading partner nearby. Maybe Canada needs power.

Yes, the point with selling electricity is that you need to guarantee that you will deliver some fixed amount of electricity. If you depend on wind power plants how this guarantee can be given? What if wind stops.

Maybe it would make sense to build huge bitcoin mining data centers and mine bitcoins in case of surplus. Hardly useful, but given current coins rush could be profitable. Better than paying producers for not producing energy.

> Yes, the point with selling electricity is that you need to guarantee that you will deliver some fixed amount of electricity

Surely this can change, no? You'd just have to sell it at a cheaper rate to make up for the fact that the other side has to ramp up/down other sources to accomodate your changes in volume.

Electricity in most networks is bid on usually just two or three hours into the future, for 30min windows of electricity. (Biding starts up to a day or two before, but the auctions usually only close and hour or two before the 30min block starts).

It’s pretty easy to predict the amount of wind two or three hours into the future, wind doesn’t just “stop” without any sort of warning. (At least not when you’re dealing with wind over 100s of square KM in the middle of an ocean).

So selling renewables into the grid isn’t that hard, even across grids. But you might not be able to command the same premium that a more “reliable” source could.

> the point with selling electricity is that you need to guarantee that you will deliver some fixed amount of electricity.

No you don't. Electricity is sold at spot prices in real time. At that is how I and most people in Norway buy theirs.

It should be possible to reduce the likelihood of prices going negative by continuing to improve the interconnectedness of the various national grids in Europe.

> Yes, the point with selling electricity is that you need to guarantee that you will deliver some fixed amount of electricity. If you depend on wind power plants how this guarantee can be given? What if wind stops.

Real-time bidding for prices already works at some places, but we need to modernize the whole electric system of the world. Smart grid was always part of the renewable solution.

> Maybe it would make sense to build huge bitcoin mining data centers and mine bitcoins in case of surplus. Hardly useful, but given current coins rush could be profitable. Better than paying producers for not producing energy.

It's already happening, but with all the negative conotations of Bitcoin mining, it's generally easier to listen to interviews with people working at energy companies than to discuss it on internet forums.

On a wholesale level, electricity prices are highly dynamic already, and highly demand based.

Aluminum smelters. If you have lots of cheap power you can always smelt. The raw materials are everywhere and everyone needs aluminum products. Fill the pots and spark up the electrodes as soon as power gets cheap.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_smelting

Yes, all true. But, you also need to keep the "pots" quite warm (at least 960 degrees C) in order for the electrolyte to be liquid. Keeping them that temperature while not actually producing any product (while electricity is expensive) is a waste. The article you cite says that the Australian smelters that are used to iron out changes in electricity demand can't be switched off for more than 4-5 hours, or they may be damaged by the liquid solidifying.

You can get a better price if you can guarantee availability, but there is also a market for variable supply.

In particular those investing in utility grade batteries are playing the low price/high price arbitrage game.

Blockchain, obviously. /s

"Maybe Canada needs power."

Maybe mars needs power, but neither of them is going to get any of it from britain.

Laws of physics take precedence over 'free trade'

This was a joke about the UK not getting a good brexit deal and instead trying to get a deal like Canada, and therefore not being able to sell its excess electricity to somewhere closer, like the EU.

Exactly. The "super canada" concept. Anyone who thinks Canada is in any way comparable to Europe as a UK trading partner doesn't know much about geography. Maybe if Britain hadn't had a hissy fit they could now be selling that extra power across the channel.

Well I believe the UK and EU are working on the agreements necessary for cross border trading of electricity: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/trading-electrici...

There's no reason to believe that something won't be worked out in time.

So if by "hissy fit" you mean the people of the UK looked at the pros and cons of EU membership and narrowly decided that the cons can be lived with then.. yeah sure.

Huge amounts of power are already traded every day between the EU and UK.

Live view: https://www.electricitymap.org/map

The UK is selling extra power across the channel. There's currently 5.5 GW of interconnect with the EU, with almost 18 GW expected by 2023. Brexit isn't going to change that.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-55750411

At least we ended up with Canada - some were trying for an 'Australia' deal.

I think OP was being quite dry with those two last lines. At least, that's what I upvoted them for.

That's what I said though. There is 5GW of HVDC import/export capacity to Europe. By 2025 maybe 10GW. These places are likely to be windy when we are windy, so they won't want the power.

Better batteries may not be the answer. Possible other options

- electrolysis of seawater https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258929912...

- scrubbing carbon from the atmosphere directly https://cen.acs.org/synthesis/catalysis/Electrochemical-meth...

Neither of these is energy-efficient, but if the energy is negatively priced they don't need to be

These tend to be capital-intensive, though. The big problem with most of our solutions is that you spending $50MM on a hydrogen plant and then leaving it idle half the time costs you $25MM amortized over the lifetime of the plant, so you need to be saving that much on your power bill. It's likely more economical for you to just run it on full all the time, regardless of the hourly energy prices.

We do this some with aluminum smelting, but it's not as free as it initially appears. You need a high energy usage to capital cost ratio for it to be economical. (Ideally, you'd also be able to ramp up and down somewhat quickly as-needed. IIRC, there's a big aluminum plant in Germany that can do this, but it's unusual.)

I think the solution is keep building those continental grid connections. Norway can with its substantial hydro work as a battery, for example.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/aug/18/brexit-loom...

It not only misleading, it is intentionally mixing of fungeable and non-fungeable goods in order to turn something obvious dirty as being clean.

If Scotland exports of wool exceeded the amount of imported cotton, then we can pretend that the cotton import never existed. Cotton and wool is pretty interchangeable as textile fibers. This then allow us to purchase cotton that is produce by child labor, because the cotton didn't actually exist because look, wool production exceeds the demand for textile fiber.

It pure silliness. If a country buy energy produced from fossil fuel then that country is responsible for the pollution. No amount of exporting clean energy will erase the pollution. Its there, it is being generated, and the customer who pays for it has a distinct responsibility.

So the producer of the pollution gets off scot free? Or are you going to count the pollution twice?

I would rather count pollution twice than zero, but in the example of abusive labor, we definitively do count it twice. Companies should be called out if they buy products produced by forced labor camps, child labor, and conflict diamonds, and sweatshops. At the same time, the companies that actually do the forced labor or employ people under abusive conditions are very much also guilty.

Grid storage is such an interesting topic to me. We are all used to energy storage at a small scale (phone batteries, even electric cars) but the challenges of needing to store such vast amounts of energy seems like an almost impossible task, even the large Tesla battery in AU only seems to be used to help smooth the grid supply. It seems that the Scottish landscape might lend itself to more Hydro but that'll be an uphill fight with locales/environmentalists.

Sometimes I wonder if it would make more sense for individual properties to have their own powerwall type devices to soak up the oversupply during those windy days but in reality the cost of getting one installed is so high that I can't imagine enough people ever doing it, let alone the organization and co-ordination that would be needed from the energy companies.

There hasn't been nearly enough done on demand shaping.

Rather than wondering how we can store all the excess capacity it's probably more cost effective to wonder how we can shift demand.

Aluminum smelters in Germany use gargantuan amounts of electricity, for instance, but they can use 3x as much on Friday when power is cheap than Monday when it's not with relative ease.

Using a powerwall to keep production steady would be a ridiculous waste of money.

Storage heaters need to make a comeback, as well.

Storage heaters, more efficient refrigerators, smart washers that turn on when electricity is cheap.

I really hope these kinds of things start to increase in popularity, but I think it needs more government intervention for it to happen.

The only really critically necessary government intervention is making sure the grid can handle this.

It would probably help if they mandated smart electric storage heaters on new builds but beyond that I'm not sure you need to do much more.

You can rely on people's self interest to buy a new washing machine that saves them money, for instance.

I was thinking more along the lines of international standards for how the appliance could tell that it was in a period of low electricity pricing.

Also, since green tech often saves fewer actual dollars from a consumer's pocket than the "real" cost of the externalities saved, subsidies and/or eco-friendly certification would also be good.

> I was thinking more along the lines of international standards for how the appliance could tell that it was in a period of low electricity pricing.

The obvious solution to this is grid frequency. It's already a requirement for solar grid tie invertors for example.

Demand shaping generally reduces the peak demand so the grid can usually handle much more power on average than before.

The challenge with this kind of stuff is that capital costs are a big part of the cost for large industrial plants. A plant which is only using 25% of its capacity is going to be unprofitable.

When the biggest input cost is energy you are wrong. A plant that is 10% capacity by running only when energy is cheap is more profitable than a plant at 90% running at whatever energy prices are. (in the real world take my numbers and reduce by 75% - between nights, weekends, and maintenance shutdowns a real industrial plant at 25% capacity is already common)

The company I work for has two plants near each other, where one is run in winter, and one in summer, each producing a different product. The workers alternate between which plant they work at depending on the season. The other plant is shutdown for maintenance. By replacing the conveyor belt every year we ensure production never shuts down unexpectedly while people are working, and this more than makes up for the cost of a factory that is idle half of the year.

We have a lot of factories. The above two plants are not the foundry where we pour iron which I talked about in a different thread.

Without knowing what industry you are talking about it's hard to engage in any meaningful dialog.

It clearly doesn't matter what percentage of the input cost is energy to whether the plant is profitable. So long as that percentage is non-zero there will always be an energy cost at which the total cost to produce is higher than the market price to sell (ask any industry in Texas).

Clearly there are other factors too, in your example it seems like labour costs are very high or perhaps contractual demands on output mean down time is unacceptable.

Input costs and final price are what matter to profitability. The machines are part input cost, but they are spread across many different products, often over years.

The reason an idle machine is bad is because you have to pay interest on the loan (write downs and all that complexity). You also have to pay rent (taxes) on the building they are in. You need to do basic maintenance (HVAC so they don't deteriorate). You need to ensure the machine operator (which might be a rare skill) is available when you put it back to work, which might mean paying the operator to do nothing just so he doesn't find a new job while laid off. All of these raise the input cost of restarting after a long period of being idle - sometimes you are better off scraping the machines and buying new if you need them.

Against that you have demand and ability to store the finished product. Some things can be stored up (just in time calls this bad, but it isn't always a bad thing), while others degrade quickly. Some things your customers will order well in advance so you can plan around demand, while others you get an order for "yesterday" (if only you had a time machine).

Depending on how all of the above work out idle factories have different economics.

I completely agree. This is a bit of a process though, look at how Texans with variable rates responded to extremely high (90 times normal rate) prices: some just said f*ck it and managed to use 10-20K USD electricity in a few days.

For those that still had power, I don't think they were thinking about the price, they were busy trying to make sure their pipes didn't freeze or to find clean drinking water if they already had. And inviting neighbors over that didnt have water or power and maybe had flooding with burst pipes and icicles on the ceiling. A couple blocks from me there were people building trash can fires with people huddled around them and further off in the neighborhood someone froze trying to sleep in their car instead of driving on the frozen roads. I can see skyscrapers from my front lawn, its not like its rural, we just weren't prepared. Lifesaving resources like shelter, heat, water, or medicine for that matter don't play nicely with the free market. Infinite demand...

one of the most interesting strategies for grid storage I've seen is just pumping water up a hill. Then, when you want to get the energy back, just let it flow back down through turbines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...

One of the potential strategies for dealing with grid storage in Europe is to turn Norway into a battery:

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/experts-respond...

Very neat engineering.

In theory. Turns lout building pumped hydro is really hard. Finding suitable locations is a big challenge https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSgd-QhLHRI&ab_channel=RealE...

Neat, but we need thousands of Hoover dam's, including the lake at the top and bottom, to store enough energy just for the US. Or to put it a different way, imagine completely draining lake Superior in just two weeks, and then over the next two weeks completely refilling it.

I'm not saying it isn't neat, but it doesn't scale to as much storage as we need.

I read about a similar idea using abandoned mine shafts.

https://www.theengineer.co.uk/abandoned-mine-shafts-energy-s...

oh I've heard about that one too actually - don't they suspend a large weight and use its potential energy as storage?

I'm a sucker for these back-to-basics engineering projects. High tech batteries be damned, let's just use potential energy for storage!

There is a German company suggesting to cut a large piece of rock (think: hundreds of meters in diameter and depth) lose and lift that by pumping water beneath it. A moving mountain, it would be. Totally crazy stuff, I should check if that ever made any progress.

Here is a German article about it. As far as I remember, the real issue is that pumps/generators with the required powers are very expensive. https://www.ingenieur.de/technik/fachbereiche/energie/lageen...

Omega Tau Podcast had a great episode about this company and project:

https://omegataupodcast.net/299-gravity-storage/

I did not know that yet, thanks for pointing it out!

> but the challenges of needing to store such vast amounts of energy seems like an almost impossible task

Only if you don't look at all available solutions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas "P2G is often considered the most promising technology for seasonal renewable energy storage"

I dunno why this is such an unknown technique, natural gas storage is a very old and proven technology. Yet it is ommitted from almost any discussion about the subject...

Power to gas needs a source of carbon to produce methane. No, the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is not a good candidate for this, since it's at very low concentration. Theoretically one could use biomass, but thats a very inefficient method of carbon collection.

Also, exist prototype power to gas facilities are ~50% efficient, just for the power-to-gas step. Even with a 66% efficient combined cycle gas turbine, which is the best we have, net efficiency is ~33%.

> Power to gas needs a source of carbon to produce methane. Only if you want to produce syngas (methane).

If you store the resulting hydrogen directly, no carbon source is needed. That makes storage more location dependent, because the cost-competitive options are salt-caverns, but we are talking about long term storage here...

Production of SynGas is more important to replace the current use of ground-pumped methane with CO2 neutral variants.

> Also, exist prototype power to gas facilities are ~50% efficient. Even with a 66% efficient combined cycle gas turbine, which is the best we have, net efficiency is ~33%.

Which is why there are proposals to go purely via hydrogen and reversible oxidation cells. That way you can get up to about 70-80%.

But again, we are talking about long term storage. ALL other options of energy storage are more expensive when you reach the "weekly to monthly" storage timeframe. At that timeframe, the low efficiency becomes irrelevant, as storage cost ($/kWh) is dominating, and we are talking about renewables anayway.

The whole point of power to gas (methane) is that we can reuse the existing natural gas storage, distribution, and generation infrastructure. Hydrogen brings with it other challenges. Namely grid scale deployment of energy cells, storing hydrogen. Basically it's swapping one set of challenges with a different set of challenges. Maybe it's easier, maybe it's not. Neither of these two solutions have been deployed at any significant scale so we really don't have a good idea.

> Hydrogen brings with it other challenges. Maybe it's easier, maybe it's not. Neither of these two solutions have been deployed at any significant scale so we really don't have a good idea.

We do have a rather good idea. There are several studies and large test facilities both in Europe and the US. Specifically in the area I was mentioning (salt caverns). From wikipedia on hydrogen storage: "Underground hydrogen storage is the practice of hydrogen storage in caverns, salt domes and depleted oil and gas fields. Large quantities of gaseous hydrogen have been stored in caverns by ICI for many years without any difficulties." "Another study referenced by a European staff working paper found that for large scale storage, the cheapest option is hydrogen at €140/MWh for 2,000 hours of storage using an electrolyser, salt cavern storage and combined-cycle power plant."

There is more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage

If you convert Power to Gas in the form of LPG or methane you then burn for energy when renewables aren't working, you're kinda defeating one of the main purposes of renewables - low carbon output.

No, you are carbon neutral. The most obvious (though maybe not best) way to do this is turn separate water into H and O, then store the H in a tank. When you need more power you burn the H getting water back. This process is not very efficient, but when power is cheap who cares.

You can also turn CO2 into synthetic oil (Methane, gasoline, Jet fuel, motor oil - your choice of what you want) via known processes. Again the process isn't very efficient, but when the inputs are free who cares. The sum of is carbon neutral.

That is simply not true.

In order to convert elecricity to methane you first have to REMOVE CO2 from the enviroment. If you subsequently burn that gas, you arrive back at the CO2 level you had before the P2G process.

That of course only works out to net zero when you use co2 that was recently captured, like from waste-biogas or trees.

The big problem with fossil fuels is not directly that they release CO2, it is that they release CO2 that was captured over millenia in the comparatively short timespan of decades.

You can avoid that problem entirely with P2G systems.

Yes, at least one utility in Vermont is offering discounted Tesla Powerwall leases: https://greenmountainpower.com/rebates-programs/home-energy-.... No solar installation is required.

The utility keeps the battery charged, uses the power during times of peak load for the grid, and the homeowner can use the battery as a backup power source.

Electric cars are perfect for this. Connect them to the grid and the internet, and they’ll charge but also feed back as needed.

Have you heard of Tesla's batter in south Australia? It was recently expanded to 193 MWh. Care to guess how long it'll run at full power? Around 60-100 minutes. At its rated power of 100 MW, it can power around 25% of South Australia's lowest demand. That's it. At peak demand, the fraction is lower still.

Cars have a fraction of the energy storage capacity of a single battery site and not all cars are connected to the grid at all times and neither will all their stored energy be usable.

Batteries aren't the silver bullet many imaging them to be. The real solution is expanding transmission capacity, building more renewables and supplementing that by nuclear or hydro.

I don't know if there's enough lithium in the world to stabilize a global renewable grid and make 100 million electric cars per year forever and make 1.5 billion phones a year and all the other things we use batteries for.

Lithium is very abundant. It's the 25th most abundant element at about 20 mg per kg in the Earth's crust. It is present in seawater at a concentration of about 0.2 ppm in seawater, about 230 billion tons total.

If electricity is going to be so cheap then we can just extract lithium from seawater.

Plus dead lithium batteries can of course be used as a high grade ore.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium

Hopefully we start to recycle batteries better. Most people throw their old broken phone in a landfill from what I gather. (broken, there is a market for non-broken phones)

25% of lowest demand sounds amazing! I'm mostly a pessimist about renewables due to the storage issue so I would have guessed more like 2-5%.

Assuming lowest demand is at night, that means that building just 3 more batteries you could power the whole state for an hour at night?

Agree, I'm missing some context to see why your parent post thought this was good enough. I suspect that "Lowest Demand" is being thought of in two different ways.

even at the lowest demand, a large, grid-connected battery can only provide minutes of back up power, and that too for only a fraction of already low demand.

A storage battery is not a viable means of balancing demand and supply over a time period longer than minutes.

What's needed is not more batteries but better transmission, more hydro where possible and where hydro is not possible, more nuclear.

When you're talking about lowest demand are you talking about for the whole grid? A city block? A building? A condo?

And I agree. I worked in solar and storage for a while. It's not a replacement, it's just an extension.

It works out ok for a battery system for a building but anything larger they just don't last long enough

Only the south australian grid, which is not a relatively large grid.

South Australia's population is small, under two million and it's demand fluctuates between 400 - 3000 MW. For comparison, the Canadian province of New Brunswick has a comparable peak demand but fewer than a million people.

For the comparison, average nuclear power plant produces 1000MW around the clock.

The goal of Australia batteries was to normalize short production/consumption fluctuations, not as general universal battery storage to deal with renewable uneven production.

My point was simply to illustrate that batteries are not a viable energy storage method for the scale of energy required on even a small power grid. South Australia's power grid is relatively small compared to many similar regions.

As an electric car owner, do I want to give my limited lithium battery charge cycle lifespan back to the network? This storage isn't "free" to the vehicle owner - charging and feeding back will contribute to the total charge cycles on your very expensive battery pack, which of course reduces range over time. I'd need to be heavily convinced by the economic arguments outweighing the wear on a very expensive vehicle component before I'd consider this.

When you come to resell an electric car, the condition of the battery is going to be significant in resale value too.

There would presumably be a zip code lottery element here too - would some areas of a given country make much greater demands of resident's privately owned car batteries than others?

> This storage isn't "free" to the vehicle owner

Just set the price at which you are willing to sell so that you make a profit overall.

I've seen this suggested often but I don't think I've ever seen any information about how it'd actually work in practise. Do the car companies actually want to do it, how is the car owner compensated for the battery wear and tear and who'd be in control of the management (government regulators, energy companies, car manufacturers).

Are there any examples of pilot schemes that have used cars in this way?

It isn't the silver bullet some people say it is. Firstly, as others mentioned it really hammers the battery life. Secondly, it requires cars not being full so they can be topped up, which means less range.

Not to mention I don't think the local grid to houses can support loads of cars suddenly getting charged at once, which is what you want for big wind spikes.

You could at least program the cars to adjust their charging based upon cost - e.g. if you leave it overnight and between 2-5am electricity prices go negative it could try to charge most of the battery during this period.

Additionally you could program cars to feed into the grid when the price goes high enough to justify the cost of cycling the battery. This would help deal with unexpected events.

Yeah it's very much a niche but it's possible to buy chargers that integrate with Octopus Agile and do exactly that in the UK. Alternatively some of us are doing it with automations in apps like Home Assistant.

Nissan and Hyundai already produce cars with vehicle to grid (Nissan) and vehicle to load (Hyundai).

IMO recycling batteries after use in cars is a more interesting idea. A 20% reduction in a cars range is significant but not an issue in actual power storage.

That's not ideal, as it would eat through the battery's cycle life at a much quicker rate.

> "There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices"

I'm not sure if you can call it a crisis. A problem, yes, but one that will sort itself out over time. Negative prices are a huge incentive to any form of flexible demand. And by 2030 there will be millions of electric vehicles on UK roads, representing hundreds of GWh of flexible storage. Free fuel by charging at the right time, handled automatically by your smart charger / app? Or even paid to charge? That's a pretty powerful incentive to soak up excess supply.

> "And we are still going need masses of gas backup"

We already have masses of gas backup. But it will become less important in the future as more diversity in renewables, more interconnections, more storage, more nuclear, etc, come online. We'll still need gas for the foreseeable future, but the less it is used, the better.

spot on. Every time this comes up, it's the same BS.

The actual figure for the UK grid (there is no separate Scotland grid) is just over 40% of net electrical energy demand supplied by renewable sources. If Scotland was severed from the grid it would require fossil fuels and nuclear just like the rest of the UK.

The 97% figure is arrived at by taking British renewable energy that happens to be in Scotland and subtracting that against Scottish energy use. This is in no way accurate and ignores time - there are many periods of time where Scotland's wind turbines aren't spinning and the region is drawing power from the rest of the UK grid.

I don't see the problem with this number. Scotland (seen as a separate energy economy) sometimes exports energy to England and Wales, sometimes imports it. Scotland's production of renewable energy, considered in total MWh, represents 97% of its consumption of all electrical energy. Clearly, in dollar value, the number is smaller since they usually export at times of low prices and import at times of higher prices. That isn't the comparison that's being made.

Electrical energy is always in balance. Saying that 97% of Scotland's electrical energy needs were met by renewables is highly misleading because it ignores the most important piece of context - time.

Scotland could have generated 300% of daily energy demand from wind one some days. And zero on others. The reality is that one cannot be subtracted from the other to claim that net consumption is zero precisely because there is a time when that is not true.

Electrical energy is not like balance of trade i.e. it is not fungible. There is a further complication here - the assumption that there is a ready sink of generated energy. If that stops being the case, then suddenly those days of 300% demand being generated are no longer possible.

The headline is a mischaracterisation and is misleading.

The claim that 'one can be subtracted from the other' is a straw man. The words 'Equivalent of 97%' are right there in the headline.

This is something that never seems to come up in discussions on Scottish independence interestingly enough. I guess it'd be like Ireland and Northern Ireland where both jurisdictions use a common electricity market, unless politicians on either side throw their toys out of the pram which is highly likely in my opinion.

> increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices

To be specific, from https://www.current-news.co.uk/news/instances-of-negative-pr...

"Great Britain saw 80 hours of negative pricing in the first nine months of 2020": nine months is 6570 hours. So about 1.2% of the time.

One thing to also keep in mind is that it is forecast that the UK's electricity production needs to increase by 70% by 2050 just to meet demand from electric vehicles. It is said to be equivalent to 6 extra nuclear plants. [1]

As the government announced that sales of new ICE vehicles will be banned in only 9 years and most car manufacturers start unveiling their EV range in earnest I think we're going to see the shift to EV happen this decade. If so extra electricity production needs to happen now.

[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-how-much-power-will-uk...

> So we are going to have to pay massive sums of money to wind producers to shut off production. And we are still going need masses of gas backup which is going to be used increasingly inefficiently to pick up the slack.

Ireland is a good example of this. One of the reasons that Ireland has not been able to increase wind farms is because they don't have the ability to export it rapidly. The last time the interconnect with GB was cut, they had to shut down a bunch of wind farms. There was big news a while ago about building a new interconnect to France which should allow for more wind farms in Ireland while relying on french "nuclear batteries"

Most articles about generation are inaccurate in this sort of way. France has huge base load capacity thanks to its nuclear power plants, and the UK has had excess peak load capacity, and we’ve sold each other electricity via the channel DC link, but a lot has been written over the years on how the UK has not relied heavily on nuclear power, or on how France has been fine relying heavily on nuclear.

France has different problems, though. Nuclear power stations need to shut down in summer when temperatures get too high and cooling is insufficient (this is done mostly to avoid killing plants and fish in the rivers).

Whenever there's a maintenance or refuelling operation, comparatively large amounts of power generation goes offline for weeks.

While this can be dealt with through careful planning, the elephant in the room for France is the age of their nuclear reactors. The vast majority or reactors is 40 years old or reaches the end of their design-life within this decade. Even with ten year extensions, about more than half of all French reactors will have reached EOL by 2035.

At the same time there's only a single new reactor under construction right now.

Given that it takes about a decade for a nuclear reactor to go from start of construction to commercial operation, France should really start building about a dozen new reactors within the next 5 years...

PWRs actually can ramp their power up or down and the French run a number of theirs in this mode. I don't think AGRs can in quite the same way since thermal stresses on the graphite need to be avoided.

Economically, it's not clear that economically you'd want to run PWRs this way though since FuelEx is only a small part of the LCOE of a nuclear plant.

> You can't stop start nuclear like you can with gas.

You actually can. All remaining six German nuclear power plants can operate in load-following mode and vary their output power by 10%-20% within minutes.

It just makes no sense to reduce the power on nuclear plants as they don’t emit any CO2 and you don‘t save much Uranium when you reduce power.

You have to be really unimaginative to consider a surplus of renewable energy a crisis.

Everything exists in a Goldilocks Zone, too much power can be just as bad or worse than too little power. It's far more likely that the excess power causes damage or other negative results than anything good coming from it.

A really good view onto Great Britain's electricity grid is here: https://grid.iamkate.com/

or alternatively a more old school view, with analog dials!: https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

Today for example renewables have been >50% of total generation. And I've seen sometimes for as long as a week it's not broken 10-15%. Very interested as to how the grid maintains excess capacity to make up for low wind generation...

Instead of paying wind producers to stop, take the excess electricity and use it for bitcoin mining, then use the bitcoin to buy electricity when there's not enough.

(I'm joking, I think, but maybe this would actually work)

If the flaw with nuclear is that private investors won't bite unless there's a very predictable return (£90/MWh, apparently), the flaw with wind is that private investors won't cover the (at least one) order of magnitude of excess capacity needed to meet a cold snap.

Having to pay wind producers to power off seems like we've combined the operational flaws of both - admittedly, at a much lower price point and without the waste/accident issues.

This sounds like consumer electric rates are fixed 24/7. Fixed prices always lead to gluts and shortages.

Having prices vary minute by minute depending on supply will create powerful incentives for users to shift their demand. As I've written here many times, there are many many ways people can shift their demand.

Such as running the hot water heater only when electricity is cheap. Charging your electric car battery only when cheap. Etc.

> crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices

Yes. And this is often touted as "renewable now cheaper than..."

But those decreasing prices are not actually a sign that renewable energy is cheaper to produce, but that it is actually useless and thus worthless at certain times.

Now that may entail some business opportunities, but it's not that simple. For example most industrial applications can't easily be turned on or off as the wind blows and the sun shines.

Negative electricity prices are not inherently a problem. They can mean a nuclear plant paying a wind farm to curtail production so that it can ramp its own production slowly, but there is nothing inherently bad about that.

And they are a huge opportunity for every electricity user who can time-shift consumption: every refrigeration device, every thermal device, battery chargers, data center UPS banks, you name it.

What’s with the quotes around “exported”? Excess power is exported, which happens to be one way to manage it, reducing the need for storage.

Because Scotland isn't its own grid, it's on the UK national grid, it was to differentiate that from HVDC export.

Nitpick: it's the GB national grid, Ireland has an all-island grid which is separate.

Negative energy prices shouldn't really be a crisis, but what you're saying is, the way the whole grid works is changing due to the way that renewable energy is variable whereas traditional energy generation is constant. So this is just about "Change", and Change is awkard in the short term but can be handled in the medium term. Maybe we need new types of fossil power station that can be turned on and off faster. Maybe we need more intra-grid trading. Maybe we need more storage, or maybe we need more 'useful' things that use a lot of electricity that can be turned on to use the excess (seawater desalination, etc). The contracts with the wind producers will also need to change over time, obviously.

The problem here is not negative electricity prices - those are the opposite of a problem. The problem is the grid needs to re-adapt.

If the UK commits to their plan to convert everyone to heat pumps and electric cars, that'll take care of any excess renewable capacity. In fact, they'll be in an impossibly large energy deficit...

There are other useful things you could do with excess energy and seawater. Either a desalination plant or a hydrogen plant. If the energy price is 0 those could operate economically.

The next step is to massively ramp up Power to X where excess electricity gets converted into more tangible products, such as ship/aircraft fuel, or put into storage.

Serious question, why not simply stop generating energy by wind istead of stopping nuclear stallar ?

You „can” stop generating power using wind.

Get up to 30% from nuclear and rest from automated wind farms.

Of course, but the government has commited prices (>£100/MWh) for wind. You have to pay them at least that to compensate, otherwise they won't stop producing. Which is going to get extremely expensive quickly.

You can stop windmills. However that changes the investment nature of wind farms. There are a lot of ways to structure this, and no one answer so it is hard to type up all the different issues. I'll pick one simple case, but don't assume this applies to all.

An investor (group) gets a contract to supply wind to a utility for $x. This price is pretty low since wind is variable, but it is enough to predict over a year how much they will make and so for the investors it works out.

For the utility they need more green energy in the mix, and so they are willing to sign the contract even though sometimes they will buy electricity and they pay someone to take it on the spot market. They also know how much wind they expect to get, and so those times wind is negative are made up by times that wind is blowing when they would otherwise have to buy much more expensive peak plant power. So for the utility over the course of the year the wind power is profitable even though at some moments it is unprofitable.

The problem is in the above separation the windmill owner is paid for all power produced, and so if they shut down there is no money for them. (or they have to agree with the utility on a fair payment)

This sounds like the issue railways had in UK 100 years ago. Solution was to nationalize the infrastructure. If the nation would own the wind-farms and nuclear plants, both can be managed to the benefit pf the nation.

If we privatize essential infrastructure it means -> yea the owner will want to have biggest profit possible and will not be flexible vs rest of the grid.

National railroads don't have a good history in the US. Though here it was the cities taking over.

The difference in price, and negative prices, can make things like generating hydrogen or other energy storage more economic.

Use it to make methane, store, burn later in existing ccgts. Carbon neutral.

I assumed the UK's very ambitious hydrogen strategy was in part to address these issues?