This gets posted regularly on Lemmy, and while the economic take is tone-deaf at best, there’s a real issue with generating more power than you can use. You can’t just dump grid power — it needs to go somewhere. The grid needs to consume as much as it generates at all times or else bad things happen.
There are of course solutions, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an engineering challenge to implement.
Figuring out what to do with kilowatts is easy, but figuring out what to do with megawatts, at the drop of a hat, is substantially harder.
this is not the intractable problem you make it out to be.
there’s a fantastic way to smooth out production peaks, and hey, it fixes the lulls - it’s called storage. battery storage can take all kinds of forms, from pumped hydro to large stationary chemical batteries. we’re finally starting to see large rollouts of storage and it’s one of the few bits of light in a dark future.
The extra power issue is not that hard to solve, when you get close you can start mandating the inverters to have smart connection to the grid, so they stop providing power to the grid if demand is satisfied.
Sorry, but Johnny Oil with a shotgun to my head disagrees with your math. and while I never looked at the numbers myself, I am inclined to agree with him that such a plan would be disturbingly “unprofitable”.
-anyone around western spheres of influence in the vicinity of any sort of lever of power to authorize such changes in infrastructure investment
Given the price of RAM and graphics cards, it is obvious that running LLM is at least somewhat limited by the amount of hardware available. So having that hardware sitting idle, except when there is too much solar power, is obviously not economically viable.
Power and grid infrastructure is a limitation that can exceed hardware availability in some regions. Musk has a datacenter with 20-something methane gas generators running throughout the day to power his mini-me sycophantic AI, Grok.
At the cost of a cultural deficit, solar could provide an environmental benefit there during the day.
Gotta admit, didn’t think about that. Maybe the solution was a few guillotines all along. (This solution has its own problem tho, see the Robespierre gambit)
There are only so many places where grid level pumped storage hydroelectricity works, and the capital and environmental costs are non negligible for most new locations.
The problem we have to solve is that the energy storage that’s built into the grid was built before widespread home solar adoption. We need new energy dumps, and those cost money. Of course the obvious answer is taxes, but good luck convincing Americans to pay for vital infrastructure
shit like this burns power fast if you need to clear capacity. just ground it. i’m not that smart of an engineer and this is not that hard of a problem. the hard part is the grid, the interconnectedness, the load balancing, and that’s already done.
Short term is grounding the power. Medium teen is building up storage or electricity intensive industries that can start up and shut down based on electricity swings.
You can dump megawatts. But there is no need for that. It’s not like solar panel inverters will just keep increasing voltage until they can push the power into the grid. They have an upper limit.
Distributed vs centralized has no impact here. It’s all about excess power across the entire grid.
Sure, the solar system I own generates a few kilowatts and if I’m home cooking or running AC, I use almost all of it. But if I’m not home, my AC is off, fridge isn’t running at that moment, all of that power gets dumped onto the grid. My neighbor’s down the street do the same thing, their next door neighbor, the houses all in my neighborhood, and across the entire city, we’re all doing this. A hundred or thousand homes generating excess few kilowatts adds up to megawatts
Sure, the energy company pays a pittance for the energy I put onto the grid, but it’s still payment. I’m not gonna put a dummy load on my house to not export power
But if I’m not home, my AC is off, fridge isn’t running at that moment, all of that power gets dumped onto the grid.
And if it couldn’t do that, your solar panels would warm up a little bit and nothing else of consequence would happen. Ditto for your neighbors’ solar panels, and everybody else’s. Whoop-de-do.
It wouldn’t even cause a net increase in the urban heat island effect, because if that energy weren’t hitting solar panels it would just be heating up people’s roofs instead.
Sure, the energy company pays a pittance for the energy I put onto the grid, but it’s still payment. I’m not gonna put a dummy load on my house to not export power
You’re conflating an technological problem with an economic one. The only reason you claim my proposal wouldn’t work is because you don’t want it to because it cuts into your profit.
Maybe I don’t know enough about electricity at large scale, but at small scale you can just cut the circuit. Electricity isn’t like water that just sits in the pipe when you close a valve, right?
It is a lot more like water than you think. The solution of “just cut the circuit” is like solving the problem of overflowing storm drains by “just plug the pipe”.
The power has to go somewhere. If you don’t do anything about it, the voltage in the cables will rise until things start to fry. Real world power balancing involves adjusting the output of power plants (e.g. how much fuel to burn) in response to changes, and in some cases, dumping power into the ground as safely as possible. This problem gets complicated when power grids span vast distances and involve many different power plants that all need to be in sync or things catch on fire.
In the case of solar power, this is part of why improved large-scale battery technology is so important. It lets you absorb the excess power at peak generation times, and then release that power at night.
Can’t you cut the power at each individual solar panel? I assume that the amount of electricity out there is low enough to not cause that kind of problems?
You’re pretty much describing what hybrid inverters do for home solar panels. They can disconnect and not export to the grid when you don’t need it and just power your house and charge your batteries.
But hybrid inverters are quite a bit more expensive than standard grid-tied inverters that are always pumping into the grid.
For instance, I just had to replace my home inverter that died and I got a cheap 6 kilowatt inverter for about $1,300. A hybrid inverter would be at minimum 3 or 4k.
Im not that guy, but im picturing moreso just that solar panels come preinstalled with the glass that turns opaque when it recieves voltage. When your batteries are full and the grid isnt pulling power, that would progressively look more and more like either a short citcuit or, more likely, an open circuit. When the voltage rises too much due to na open circuit, the solar panel shuts off by turning the glass opaque, which also adds a load to the battery hopefully trickling its voltage down.
Again, that would increase cost significantly. I didn’t think of this at first because my array doesn’t have RSD because it’s older but all new solar arrays in the US and elsewhere have what’s called rapid shutdown technology for firefighter safety and it is a device that is mounted to each solar panel and does effectively reduce the output to zero or near zero on each solar panel in the event grid power is lost or somebody hits the rapid shutdown emergency button. So the technology is already in place to do what you’re describing but more cost-effective and less elaborate.
Also, something I should have mentioned is that newer inverters like my own, even though they are grid-tied, can be configured to export nothing and only power the home even without a battery. But the problem with this whole line of thinking is that it would screw over homeowners who should be getting money for the solar they put into the grid, but would be getting nothing in these scenarios.
You can cover them with a sheet
You can pump water. You can do desalination. You can overcool houses during summer so the house is pleasantly chilly when you get home. Plenty of industrial processes already set the machines in-phase. You can do cool displays arcing it through the fucking air.
Youre inventing problems so your stonks stay valuable.
Like any hydroelectrics it has large environment impact and dam failures tend to be the deadliest industrial disasters when they happen.
Also most good locations have already been used. You cannot just build it wherever (without insane costs). Pumped hydro is hardly a solution here.
Pumped hydro isn’t the same as a hydroelectric dam. Because both reservoirs are engineered and you don’t have the concrete wall as the single point of failure, you don’t have the same risks involved. Pump Hydro can be whatever size you want and spread out to distribute the grid load.
Also, are dam failures worse then Climate Change or are they just more dramatic?
You could store solar energy as heat in sand and use turbines(if you have water) or Sterling Engines(if you don’t) to spine a generator. Peltiers are a solid state method to convert heat to electricity, but they aren’t very efficient.
When you short something to ground, it’s everything in between that needs to dissipate the heat. Think about what “sending it to ground” means—it means you connect the hot to the ground. But with what do you connect the two? A wire? Sure, but you better hope that wire can dissipate all that power, because that’s what it’ll try to do.
You can’t just “dump power on the ground.” That’s not how it works.
So, I’m not good at these things, what you’re saying is that if I take a 240V cable in the street and just shove it into the ground, the cable will end up uh… melting? Trying to saturate itself until it matches the resistance of the ground or something?
If it’s a low resistance path to ground, it’ll get very very toasty! If it’s a lousy ground though, then it won’t…but it also won’t consume any power, so it’s not an effective way of scrubbing off electricity.
A good ground (low resistance) is found in your household wiring (the ground and/or the neutral). Of you short to that…well…you can guess what will happen! (Let’s hope you have proper circuit breakers.)
This gets posted regularly on Lemmy, and while the economic take is tone-deaf at best, there’s a real issue with generating more power than you can use. You can’t just dump grid power — it needs to go somewhere. The grid needs to consume as much as it generates at all times or else bad things happen.
There are of course solutions, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an engineering challenge to implement.
Figuring out what to do with kilowatts is easy, but figuring out what to do with megawatts, at the drop of a hat, is substantially harder.
Channel it to an underground phase change storage.
this is not the intractable problem you make it out to be.
there’s a fantastic way to smooth out production peaks, and hey, it fixes the lulls - it’s called storage. battery storage can take all kinds of forms, from pumped hydro to large stationary chemical batteries. we’re finally starting to see large rollouts of storage and it’s one of the few bits of light in a dark future.
The extra power issue is not that hard to solve, when you get close you can start mandating the inverters to have smart connection to the grid, so they stop providing power to the grid if demand is satisfied.
Peak energy production would be a good time to train the damn llms instead of building natural gas power plant I guess.
Sorry, but Johnny Oil with a shotgun to my head disagrees with your math. and while I never looked at the numbers myself, I am inclined to agree with him that such a plan would be disturbingly “unprofitable”.
-anyone around western spheres of influence in the vicinity of any sort of lever of power to authorize such changes in infrastructure investment
Yes but that would be woke soy and gay. You dont want to get gay woke soy in your ai. Thats against like the entire point of the thing!
Given the price of RAM and graphics cards, it is obvious that running LLM is at least somewhat limited by the amount of hardware available. So having that hardware sitting idle, except when there is too much solar power, is obviously not economically viable.
Power and grid infrastructure is a limitation that can exceed hardware availability in some regions. Musk has a datacenter with 20-something methane gas generators running throughout the day to power his mini-me sycophantic AI, Grok.
At the cost of a cultural deficit, solar could provide an environmental benefit there during the day.
Then you use taxation to change the viability. Make the non renewable energy so expensive for that usage that they’re better just to shutdown.
Gotta admit, didn’t think about that. Maybe the solution was a few guillotines all along. (This solution has its own problem tho, see the Robespierre gambit)
we figured out this problem centuries ago it is called capacitors. long term it is called batteries
Neither of which grow on trees.
Edit: well I guess lemons grow on trees and those are batteries if you try hard enough…
my dude gravity is a battery if you know how to use it
There are only so many places where grid level pumped storage hydroelectricity works, and the capital and environmental costs are non negligible for most new locations.
Of course. Like I said, we know how to do it, but it’s still an engineering feat to get it done.
The problem we have to solve is that the energy storage that’s built into the grid was built before widespread home solar adoption. We need new energy dumps, and those cost money. Of course the obvious answer is taxes, but good luck convincing Americans to pay for vital infrastructure
That relies on them not already being full and enough of them existing
shit like this burns power fast if you need to clear capacity. just ground it. i’m not that smart of an engineer and this is not that hard of a problem. the hard part is the grid, the interconnectedness, the load balancing, and that’s already done.
That would actually be sci-fi as fuck, and I’m now 100% for it. I want power plants to have constantly zapping Tesla coils
i was mostly just thinking arc gap sparking bullshit but tesla coils playing music for the workers and running the PA system. yesss now we are cooking
Reverse lightning rods.
Short term is grounding the power. Medium teen is building up storage or electricity intensive industries that can start up and shut down based on electricity swings.
Batteries? Boil water? Anything?
Use excess to boil water for steam turbines. Solved. Big oil has INSANE propaganda.
I have played factorio so im an expert. Just boil billions of gallons of water and store the steam for as long as you need with zero loss of enegry.
Bam
You just took the excess energy to generate more energy with it?!?
Steam store in tank. Tank lose little-to-lot depend on how long. Use steam night when no sun.
Or
Move water to higher tank from lower tank. When needed pour high tank through generator to low tank. Repeat.
Batteries are usually to expensive to have standing by on this scale.
Is it more expensive than excess production harming the grid or the economic impact of recurring blackouts?
Solar panels need an aperture.
Again, though, using gravity batteries or pumped hydro is a great way to manage excess juice, though these are expensive options.
They still cost much less than evacuating the entire coast line of the world when we finish melting the Greenland and Antarctic land ice.
You can dump megawatts. But there is no need for that. It’s not like solar panel inverters will just keep increasing voltage until they can push the power into the grid. They have an upper limit.
Basically I don’t see your point
So what you’re saying is that if it’s distributed enough (say, on the roofs of houses, sized to serve the needs of the occupants) it’s not a problem.
Distributed vs centralized has no impact here. It’s all about excess power across the entire grid.
Sure, the solar system I own generates a few kilowatts and if I’m home cooking or running AC, I use almost all of it. But if I’m not home, my AC is off, fridge isn’t running at that moment, all of that power gets dumped onto the grid. My neighbor’s down the street do the same thing, their next door neighbor, the houses all in my neighborhood, and across the entire city, we’re all doing this. A hundred or thousand homes generating excess few kilowatts adds up to megawatts
Sure, the energy company pays a pittance for the energy I put onto the grid, but it’s still payment. I’m not gonna put a dummy load on my house to not export power
And if it couldn’t do that, your solar panels would warm up a little bit and nothing else of consequence would happen. Ditto for your neighbors’ solar panels, and everybody else’s. Whoop-de-do.
It wouldn’t even cause a net increase in the urban heat island effect, because if that energy weren’t hitting solar panels it would just be heating up people’s roofs instead.
You’re conflating an technological problem with an economic one. The only reason you claim my proposal wouldn’t work is because you don’t want it to because it cuts into your profit.
Maybe I don’t know enough about electricity at large scale, but at small scale you can just cut the circuit. Electricity isn’t like water that just sits in the pipe when you close a valve, right?
It is a lot more like water than you think. The solution of “just cut the circuit” is like solving the problem of overflowing storm drains by “just plug the pipe”.
The power has to go somewhere. If you don’t do anything about it, the voltage in the cables will rise until things start to fry. Real world power balancing involves adjusting the output of power plants (e.g. how much fuel to burn) in response to changes, and in some cases, dumping power into the ground as safely as possible. This problem gets complicated when power grids span vast distances and involve many different power plants that all need to be in sync or things catch on fire.
In the case of solar power, this is part of why improved large-scale battery technology is so important. It lets you absorb the excess power at peak generation times, and then release that power at night.
Can’t you cut the power at each individual solar panel? I assume that the amount of electricity out there is low enough to not cause that kind of problems?
You’re pretty much describing what hybrid inverters do for home solar panels. They can disconnect and not export to the grid when you don’t need it and just power your house and charge your batteries.
But hybrid inverters are quite a bit more expensive than standard grid-tied inverters that are always pumping into the grid.
For instance, I just had to replace my home inverter that died and I got a cheap 6 kilowatt inverter for about $1,300. A hybrid inverter would be at minimum 3 or 4k.
Im not that guy, but im picturing moreso just that solar panels come preinstalled with the glass that turns opaque when it recieves voltage. When your batteries are full and the grid isnt pulling power, that would progressively look more and more like either a short citcuit or, more likely, an open circuit. When the voltage rises too much due to na open circuit, the solar panel shuts off by turning the glass opaque, which also adds a load to the battery hopefully trickling its voltage down.
Again, that would increase cost significantly. I didn’t think of this at first because my array doesn’t have RSD because it’s older but all new solar arrays in the US and elsewhere have what’s called rapid shutdown technology for firefighter safety and it is a device that is mounted to each solar panel and does effectively reduce the output to zero or near zero on each solar panel in the event grid power is lost or somebody hits the rapid shutdown emergency button. So the technology is already in place to do what you’re describing but more cost-effective and less elaborate.
Also, something I should have mentioned is that newer inverters like my own, even though they are grid-tied, can be configured to export nothing and only power the home even without a battery. But the problem with this whole line of thinking is that it would screw over homeowners who should be getting money for the solar they put into the grid, but would be getting nothing in these scenarios.
Another point of failure, another cost… do you retrofit old panels? There are challenges with this at scale
It’s not only possible but also required already. The system needs to be able to shut itself off to protect the grid.
You can cover them with a sheet You can pump water. You can do desalination. You can overcool houses during summer so the house is pleasantly chilly when you get home. Plenty of industrial processes already set the machines in-phase. You can do cool displays arcing it through the fucking air.
Youre inventing problems so your stonks stay valuable.
a giant flywheel for every town!
Pumped Hydro is a pretty safe storage method using preexisting technology if you have hills in the area.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PH0IJ-_qOI
i don’t want safe, i want DANGER!
Store it as compared air in steel tanks buried underneath your home. No protective coating.
why not hydrogen?
Already done and he hasn’t blown himself up yet.
https://hydrogenhouseproject.org/index.html
sounds like he’s not even trying then
Giant flywheels are also safe. Great for smoothing out energy generation from a fickle source as well.
not if you leave them uncovered!
Like any hydroelectrics it has large environment impact and dam failures tend to be the deadliest industrial disasters when they happen. Also most good locations have already been used. You cannot just build it wherever (without insane costs). Pumped hydro is hardly a solution here.
Pumped hydro isn’t the same as a hydroelectric dam. Because both reservoirs are engineered and you don’t have the concrete wall as the single point of failure, you don’t have the same risks involved. Pump Hydro can be whatever size you want and spread out to distribute the grid load.
Also, are dam failures worse then Climate Change or are they just more dramatic?
Apparently you can do something similar with sand if you live in a desert.
Thermal sand batteries are a thing, I think?
That was some solution talked about on Undecided.
Gravity Batteries? They’re much, much easier using water compared to solid masses.
You could store solar energy as heat in sand and use turbines(if you have water) or Sterling Engines(if you don’t) to spine a generator. Peltiers are a solid state method to convert heat to electricity, but they aren’t very efficient.
You can store it in batteries, what are you on about?
We don’t have that many batteries (yet).
Oh no, I have too many megawatts, and somehow no batteries, turbines or any other shit, what could I possibly send it to
The humble ground:
Why waste it on the ground when we could start desalinating seawater
That is not how it works.
When you short something to ground, it’s everything in between that needs to dissipate the heat. Think about what “sending it to ground” means—it means you connect the hot to the ground. But with what do you connect the two? A wire? Sure, but you better hope that wire can dissipate all that power, because that’s what it’ll try to do.
You can’t just “dump power on the ground.” That’s not how it works.
So, I’m not good at these things, what you’re saying is that if I take a 240V cable in the street and just shove it into the ground, the cable will end up uh… melting? Trying to saturate itself until it matches the resistance of the ground or something?
If it’s a low resistance path to ground, it’ll get very very toasty! If it’s a lousy ground though, then it won’t…but it also won’t consume any power, so it’s not an effective way of scrubbing off electricity.
A good ground (low resistance) is found in your household wiring (the ground and/or the neutral). Of you short to that…well…you can guess what will happen! (Let’s hope you have proper circuit breakers.)
Guess those SWER powerlines are just for show then