this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2026
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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.
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
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)
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!
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.
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.
we figured out this problem centuries ago it is called capacitors. long term it is called batteries
Of course. Like I said, we know how to do it, but it's still an engineering feat to get it done.
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.
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
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
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?
That's exactly what is done. The electricity market operator orders solar farms to limit how much they generate, home solar gets told not to export any power, it is done automatically
It is much easier to stop or limit solar power production compared to other technologies
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.
It's not only possible but also required already. The system needs to be able to shut itself off to protect the grid.
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.
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?
No. No no no. You can literally turn solar generation off, nearly instantly. It's called curtailment and it's done all the time in saturated markets. Older residential inverters don't have the reactive technology, but residential solar is a drop in the bucket compared to utility-scale solar.
The economics of that are great. Negative power prices are an incentive to store energy and get payed for that. Then release the energy again later in the day or at night to earn money on it again.
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.
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.
Why wouldn't batteries work?
Oh they absolutely do! My only point is that grid supply must equal grid demand. There are many ways to achieve this, as folks here have pointed out.
Throttling power generation (turning off/disconnecting PV from grid for example), and storage (chemical, heat, or hydro battery) are all established technologies, they just need to be implemented properly to avoid supply/demand mismatch.
Solar panels don't care if the energy they could produce isn't consumed.
Wind generators can be feathered and breaked until they stop rotating and generating.
Hydro-generation dams can simply close their water intakes and stop generating.
The things that have problems stopping generation are not renewables, they're things like nuclear power plants.
Negative energy prices are not a technical problem - if the decision to do so is made, renewable generation systems can quickly stop producing.
Negative energy prices are due to Market systems being used to decide who stops generating if supply exceeds demand - instead of some centralized entity deciding who will stop, the individual suppliers look at the market price for their product and decide themselves to stop/start producing or not.
Because electric power supply/demand balance changes way faster than said market signals are produced and processed ultimatelly to decisions to stop or start generation, you end up with prices overshooting and undershooting the ideal price point which is in equilibrium with the supply/demand balance, and sometimes the undershooting results in negative prices.
So negative energy prices are the result of the political choice of using market systems rather than some kind of centralized control - a system with centralized control would respond far faster to falls in demand and would thus not generate more power than demand to the point that somebody is actually paid to consume power.
So yeah, the idea that it's solar panels that are the problem by causing negative energy prices is complete total bullshit - the choice of a market system to regulate supply and demand is the source of the problem and solar, because it has very low operational costs and thus the price solar operators are willing to sell their product for is lower, just means that when the market at times naturally undershots (because it's SLOW at responding to changes in supply/demand) it will do so against an equilibrium price which is lower because solar is cheaper, and will thus more frequently end up going below zero price and into negative territory before bouncing back and stabilizing at the price which is in equilibrium with the current supply/demand balance.