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.
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.
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.
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/
https://www.indra.co.uk/v2v-grid-to-vehicle
https://www.ovoenergy.com/electric-cars/vehicle-to-grid-char...
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).
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):
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What the fuck?!
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
But the costs over time are negligible when current alternatives will eventually only go up due to scarcity. I might be missing something.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So there will be some innovation needed to shutdown (and boot up) these plants quickly, I would think?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(Besides, I grew up in Arizona, and was comfortable up to 78 or so.)
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.
Gasoline prices vary all over the place, and there's a heluva lot of expensive infrastructure for it.
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 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.
If regular people could get paid to switch on space heaters, the negative prices would soon go away.
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...
https://www.energy-stats.uk/octopus-agile-north-eastern-engl...
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.
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.
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.
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.
I know my parents got half price electric for water heating, but I don't know how much they actually saved.
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.
“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.
(I'm not in anyway associated with Octopus btw, just interested in this sort of thing)
I have my issues with this Tory decade but in this small area they've absolutely smashed it out the park.
> 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?
Bitcoin miners probably.
* Produce hydrogen for hydrogen-powered vehicles
* Bitcoin, I guess
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.