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.
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.
Yes, and plenty of companies are doing just that. The effect is that as they charge the batteries, they increase demand and that increases the electricity price a bit. Grid doesn't tip over and everybody wins!
Trouble is that at some point they run out of batteries. Batteries are expensive. And when they run out of batteries, the demand drops and the grid has to figure out where to dump the excess. And the price drops again.
Pumped hydro is a more scalable solution, but it's slow to react and even that has its limits.
What you are saying is factually correct, why the down votes I don't understand.
Load dumping is not really a big problem as any fail over solutions have some dumping capacity. Just let it heat a big ass resistor somewhere.
Lots of people are offended by people speaking in un-convoluted, direct ways. I've made that experience many times.
This process is called "arbitrage" btw. Take one thing when it's cheap and sell it some other time/place where it's valued at a higher cost, and make a profit that way. It's one of the foundations of trade in general.