So it looks like California (USA) has so much excess solar power, they are paying other states (AZ) to take it away

their infrastructure was obviously going to be damaged if they didn't get the electricity out of their market, so they paid Arizona to take it, which would have been cheaper than having their infrastructure fail and have to be replaced.

Would have been even cheaper not to make (green) incentives which enticed suppliers to generate (over-supply) the solar in the first place.

Barry Bandwidth wrote:

Excess solar should be diverted to a project that stores energy - for example, pump water uphill into a retention basin, then release it later creating hydro power with it when it's dark or solar isn't otherwise available.

Eh? Why didn't anyone else think of this? You're a genius!

Hindsight is 20/20 wrote:

their infrastructure was obviously going to be damaged if they didn't get the electricity out of their market, so they paid Arizona to take it, which would have been cheaper than having their infrastructure fail and have to be replaced.

Would have been even cheaper not to make (green) incentives which enticed suppliers to generate (over-supply) the solar in the first place.

But then they'd miss on benefit of virtue-signalling.

When you're trying to be a smarta** and you're not very smart, you end up just being an a**

"Newton's law works for any object, at any place of the known universe, at any time. The laws of supply and demand are restricted to individual markets."

No. You don't have a clue what you're talking about. Google quantum mechanics.

I'm guessing you know next to nothing about physics. Or about scientific "laws"

in general, as they are often prone to being amended in a way that creates exceptions/adds complexity.

Moral of the story is, shut the fvck up.

Barry Bandwidth wrote:

Excess solar should be diverted to a project that stores energy - for example, pump water uphill into a retention basin, then release it later creating hydro power with it when it's dark or solar isn't otherwise available.

Or maybe, you know, cover the solar panels when it is not peak time???

Just give Tesla a couple weeks to come up with a way to store the excess, and then please allow California to become its own country just because.

I'm a gay/trannie.

goobers everywhere wrote:

Barry Bandwidth wrote:

Excess solar should be diverted to a project that stores energy - for example, pump water uphill into a retention basin, then release it later creating hydro power with it when it's dark or solar isn't otherwise available.

Or maybe, you know, cover the solar panels when it is not peak time???

Because that doesn't reduce the reliance on gas?

CA secedes in 2019, and then? wrote:

From the AZ standpoint, It's more cost-effective to allow others to pay you for using their electricity, rather than produce it yourself.

Meaning the AZ is trapped being CA's lapdog. It will really suck to be an AZ Republican once they realize that CA controls their future.

I just clicked on this thread. My first job out of school involved a lot of work with electricty deregulation.

You'll laugh when you see the author of this paper:

https://www.academia.edu/6170867/Lessons_from_the_First_Year_of_Competition_in_the_California_Electricity_Markets

I'm surprised 18 years later they're having to pay someone else to take the power. But back when that paper was written, you were paying people a ton of money to be able to ramp up and ramp down, so paying someone to take your power is just another form of this.

Also I'm a bit surprised that there aren't unused resources that don't ramp up when power is free.

And instead of paying someone else to take your power, could you sort of just dump it in the ground? I'm far from an engineer but I guess this isn't feasible? Or is it just not seen as a net benefit for society to just burn off the electricty and waste it. Now they are in essence paying Arizona to act as their ramping agent to keep everything in balance. So net/net Arizonans are getting their power cheaper during these hours, Californians are having to pay a little something for Arizona to take it, so is that the same as just if they could dump it somewhere in the ground?

I'll need to read that paper again but my takeaway on that first year of the deregulated California power markets was that that humans design markets with inefficiencies and utilities were great at exploiting them.

I don't think it is, at least not easily. Frequency elements, on/off capacitance, etc., make this not cost-competitive with paying others to take it. Once it's generated, you are stuck with it, kind of. The wastage issue (net benefit to society) is also there, but you'd think that one of these companies will just build some large energy sink (even a poor man's battery) if there was that much excess.

I do remember once sitting on the Vegas runway for about 15 minutes when the pilot came over the intercom: "There's no problem up here, we just have to burn 50 more pounds of fuel to make our legal take-off weight."

Wasn't the Brattle Group involved with uncovering the Enron manipulations a couple years later?

The real "hidden cost" in solar is the toxic waste emitted in produced panels (300x more than nuclear).

While nuclear waste is contained in heavy drums and regularly monitored, solar waste outside of Europe today ends up in the larger global stream of electronic waste.

Solar panels contain toxic metals like lead, which can damage the nervous system, as well as chromium and cadmium, known carcinogens. All three are known to leach out of existing e-waste dumps into drinking water supplies.

It happened in Germany a year ago too, but the media tried to spin it as "87% of the power was by renewables" or something.

https://qz.com/680661/germany-had-so-much-renewable-energy-on-sunday-that-it-had-to-pay-people-to-use-electricity/