cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/127188
Have you ever heard of “net metering”?
It means that if your electric company gives you net metering, you can connect a generator or solar panels to your house and sell excess electricity back to the utility at the same price that they bill you for.
Sounds great right?
No, actually its a major problem for the utility.
The reason is that power plants take a significant amount of time to throttle up or down. If everyone in the area has solar power feeding back into the power grid, sudden changes in sunlight can cause major fluctuations and destabilize the power grid.
So what is the solution?
Dynamic pricing. Some areas already do this. How it works is that the price you pay (or receive) for electricity depends on the conditions on the power grid at the moment, updating as fast as possible.
When the grid has a deficit of power at the moment (maybe a power plant is struggling to throttle up to meet demand) the price goes way up.
If the grid has a surplus power at the moment, the price goes down, even going negative.(meaning you must pay to dump your power into the grid, or be paid for consuming excess power)
What this does is create an economic incentive for people to invest in equipment that actually stabilizes and supports the power grid.
For example if you have an electric car charging in your garage, it knows the price of power, and it can start charging faster when the price drops, or it can dump its battery power back into the grid when the price is high. The battery in your car is actually earning money as it sits idle!
Same with solar panels. Even if the installation doesn’t have batteries, the system can choose to stop selling power to the grid when it isn’t wanted.
Likewise, your heated pool can choose to absorb electricity when the price is low.
This is the future of the renewable energy economy in my opinion.
It should be on the utility to handle the swings in load and generation. If it takes some time for your plant to start up, why isn’t there some sort of short term storage? Dynamic pricing causes solar to have a very low return and will cause us to continue to rely on fossil fuels longer. Utilities handle swings in load normally. A great example is there’s a massive peak of electric use in England during commerical breaks on the BBC. Everyone has gotten up to put the kettle on…
And responding to those swings is a major challenge and expense for the utility
But isn’t it far more efficient to solve this centrally instead of having hundreds of thousands of households solve this over and over? The complexity of such a system alone would be enormous. Just imagine how many different setups will be handled and mis-handled by amateurs, and the grid still has to deal with all that shit.
Thats the beauty of dynamic pricing- if the grid has to deal with someone’s badly configured system, it will adjust the price accordingly to the grid conditions at the moment, and the vast majority of properly functioning home systems will react in a rational way to compensate. (Very quickly)
A badly configured system would lose money and all the others on the grid will be paid to clean up the mess.
I believe the short term storage should be distributed. For one thing, moving electricity long distances over power lines is wasteful. If much of the energy is being generated, stored, and consumed locally, the power lines are carrying (and wasting) less energy.