- cross-posted to:
- aboringdystopia@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- aboringdystopia@lemmy.world
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I saw some context for this, and the short of it is that headline writers want you to hate click on articles.
What the article is actually about is that there’s tons of solar panels now but not enough infrastructure to effectively limit/store/use the power at peak production, and the extra energy in the grid can cause damage. Damage to the extent of people being without power for months.
California had a tax incentive program for solar panels, but not batteries, and because batteries are expensive, they’re in a situation now where so many people put panels on their houses but no batteries to store excess power that they can’t store the power when it surpasses demand, so the state is literally paying companies to run their industrial stoves and stuff just to burn off the excess power to keep the grid from being destroyed.
Lol
I just love when large organizations (governments included) skimp on something for monetary reasons, and get fucked down the line.
Too bad citizens pay the damages.
Wish there was just a faster way to get citizen input.
“Hey folks, this is going to be a cost overrun for this very very good reason, please vote yay or nay in the weekly election”.
Don’t see how it could work now though, given that half the citizens are deeply committed to destroying everything to prove gov doesn’t work.
Batteries are more than likely another type of pollution. I’m sure they can and will be recycled but just like the problem with our current capacity to recycle things it probably becomes untenable (guessing).
The state just needs to find ways to convert that energy into something else. I suggest desalinating sea water and pumping it up stream.
You can’t just say battery. There’s tons of energy storage that isn’t chemical based. Thermal sand batteries, pumping hydro up a hill, flywheel energy storage, etc.
Energy storage doesn’t inherently mean pollution
I can only assume op meant a lithium ion battery. Based on context.
Yeah, the cobalt and lithium is quite nasty to mine
You gotta say what kind of battery when you make a comment like that. A bottle of pressurized gas is a battery. Not very polluting though.
Sure you can buy a compressor and some air tanks. I imagine the turbine you need to purchase might be midly expensive. The real issue I think would be the size of the pressure vessel you would need to make it worth it.
Right. That’s why this method is used at large scale in salt mines.
That’s not what I got from the article. (Link for anyone who wants to check it out.)
My interpretation was that decreasing solar/wind electricity prices slows the adoption of renewables, as it becomes increasingly unlikely that you will fully recoup your initial investment over the lifetime of the panel/turbine.
In my mind, this will likely lead to either (a) renewable energy being (nearly) free to use and exclusively state-funded, or (b) state-regulated price fixing of renewable energy.
Also, let’s be real here. The Lion battery farms, defeat any sort of environmental benefit. It is a total shot in the foot, which is why governments, and solar companies don’t advertise the concept.
For a moment I was thinking that lion battery is some brand, until it clicked in that you are talking about lithium ion batteries
Sorry, I should have put a dash in :D Li-ion. Also another i.
Rawr!
Just send the electricity to a neighbouring state. Sure, it’ll be really inefficient to pass it through that massive length of cable, but that’s fine, we don’t care about that. If the interstate power infrastructure doesn’t have enough capacity then first priority should be to upgrade it.
America is severly lacking in UHVDC.
The peak of power demand is behind the peak of production. So sending power east makes so much sense.
That’s one of the options they mention as a solution.
Basically store it, use it, ship it, subsidize it or pay someone to waste it are the options.
Right now they pay someone to waste it, which is the option that makes adoption the most difficult, so it’s a problem.
We own the factories building the panels.
Solar cells don’t really grow on trees.
Solar cells don’t really grow on trees.
Are you talking about
A scalable self replicating and self sustaining carbon capture technology that uses a mix of highly specialized biological processes to turn CO2 into engineering grade composite construction material, fuel and fertilizer.
?
You can’t earn the big money with it, so the capitalism isn’t interested. Planting a tree is almost for free. Maybe if we could file a patent on trees or something like that. Let’s ask Nestlé how they did it with water
A more apt comparison would be Monsanto with corn.
I think they’re talking about chloroplasts. The cell component trees grow to collect solar energy.
Photosynthesis - provided by the OG solar cells.
Yeah it won’t power my computer, just found the irony comical.
You could theoretically build a coal pit in your back yard to turn the wood into coal, then power a steam engine hooked to generators to make electricity to run your computer. If you wanna be super “efficient” you can route the gasses from the coal process through the steam engine too to get power from that as well
Probably cleaner and less work to do almost any other kind of power though
All power on earth is solar if you dig far enough.
Almost… Nuclear comes from super-novae, therefore not strictly “solar” (in the sense coming from the sun) but loosely yeah everything comes from stars and star formation
Geothermal energy isn’t solar.
The majority of panels produced in the world right now is China. Like dwarfs the other countries.
Big oil currently does not own the factories.
Well yeah, but that’s like a one-time purchase (for years) compared to coals/etc. where they can charge for the “amount” used
In the case of Spain, at least, they own the grid, so all solar energy that you sell to distributors because you have no use for it yourself, they’ll only pay you peanuts for it and they will still make a devious profit.
The two solar panels companies that I got in contact with weren’t interested in selling me a quantity small enough that was coherent with my needs, and they’d charge me a premium if I wasn’t willing to make a contract with them to sell them specifically the excess energy.
But if you have batteries at home you almost don’t need the grid. Add an EV and you hit two birds with one stone.
i wonder if the battery in an ev can be used as a house battery?
It’s certainly possible, but is it worth it?
EV batteries tend to use some of the best technology available in order to get power density and energy density where they need to be. A house battery can be much bigger and heavier if that makes it cheaper.
Somebody at work was just telling me about some efforts to reuse e.g. Tesla battery packs for home or grid storage rather than recycling them. Even if the pack can only hold 80% of its original charge, that’s fine if you can just buy a few of those cheaply.
Yes, but it tends to be the largest ones, like the F150 or the Hummer. In other words, the ones that FuckCars hates the most, and for mostly good reasons.
You also need to setup the charger right to make it work, but that tends to be secondary.
Many can
Yes absolutely, and some have this as an advertised feature.
I don’t see it. Better use less density (and cheaper) ones. Like the salt ones Chinese are developing/selling.
The first factories were powered by waterwheels. Those were subjected to seasonal variations and limited geographic possibilities, what gave negotiating power to labor. Therefore the industry switched to fossil fuels, so they could run when and where they wanted, preferably near a city with excess labor force. It made it more expensive to run, but it was easier to exploit labor so more profit.
If there was room they’d put the factories as close to the coal fields as possible, and let the workers live in shanty towns.
Rent seekers always keep their hands on the tap.
To be fair, having a mismatch between when energy is available and when it is needed is going to be a problem under any economic system, since it’s a fundamental inefficiency that must be worked around with additional effort and resources
You gotta recharge your phone battery sometime though - and if electricity had a different cost for nighttime vs. daytime, you can bet that people would choose the day option whenever possible.
(I chose a mobile device here bc it doesn’t need any “extra” battery or technology beyond what would already normally be at hand.)
Thats basically how its done in most of Europe. Price changes every 15 minutes and some smart system starting washing machines etc if a certain threshhold is reached.
Of course you can also get a hedged contract where you pay a fixed price and don’t need to care about it, but you have the choice.
Uh, in my part of Europe we don’t have 15-minute changes, that would be a nightmare.
You can have a contract where the day is split in 3 or 4 different rates, so that it’s cheaper to run your washing machine at night for instance.
I don’t get why that would be a nightmare. In my country the electricity prices change per hour for dynamic contracts (they just follow the energy market) and with normal usage it’s cheaper on average than fixed contracts, including those with peak and off-peak rates. For gas it’s a day price, again same as the energy market. For both electricity and gas the prices for the next calendar day are published in the afternoon (that’s how the energy market works). The companies charge a little extra per unit and a small fixed fee per month.
Contracts with fixed rates (including nighttime and daytime rates) have to buy in advance, which means that unforeseen circumstances are included in the price and they also have to account for the fact that they might need to buy extra or sell off their excess based an actual usage.
It’s priced per hour, and fairly low slopes, I think. Haven’t looked at actual smart grids, though. Basically you’ll know that electricity will be cheap (or even negative net) the following night or day or that there will be certain very expensive peak times from 8-10 and 15-17 or so.
In places like Spain, there are different energy plans and some do include “Peak” and “Valley” price variances. Peaks are high demand, like when cooking dinner, “Valley” are the opposite.
You can adapt to these inefficies, sure, but doing so still takes more planning and effort (in this case in carefully timing one’s phone charging, and in avoiding power using activities like that during non ideal times) than if there was no mismatch of availability and demand. It lessens the impact of the problem, but does not entirely remove it.
it’s a fundamental inefficiency that must be worked around with additional effort and resources
In the OP the use of the word “problem” rather than something like “challenge”, and referring to the problem being the pricing structure (negative) makes it seem like we’ve switched topics slightly, but if you are just referring to the foundational inefficiency of energy distribution then yeah I agree it is definitely a challenge. However, that challenge need not be so overwhelming (even perhaps solely wrt pricing) that it negates the benefits of having that form of technology available altogether. e.g. if the power company itself, or each recipient building individually, had its own battery (if let’s say those were cheap & sustainable) then that could work, without the users needing to care much. I forget which city but one example in Germany iirc pumps water up a mountain during the day, then at night or on a cloudy day that potential energy falling back down generates electricity again. So yes a “challenge” for sure but not necessarily an insurmountable one!:-)
Also, there are “problems”/“challenges” wrt use of fossil fuels as well, which have implications for climate change, and therefore even purely from a profit perspective there’s government laws & subsidies and public perception that can affect it, which could push the overall net towards being beneficial to store that energy for later.
The answer to this is local energy storage. It could be at the home level, but doing it by neighborhood/industrial block would be better
Then, you lessen the strain on the grid at large, and you also capitalize on the periods of low demand. This means less spot energy production and built in storage, making it easier to make the most of renewables while minimizing the need to fire up a natural gas plant to make up the difference
Most places in the US have peak and off peak hours with different pricing already. Certain smart thermostats can take advantage of this for running your AC and such.
Like turning them off… Which is fine. Turning off solar panels is literally built into the systems and can be automated
Sure, but you’re not getting as much output from your panels as you could in total that way, making them less efficient overall. I’m not saying you can’t run a power grid on this stuff, just that the adaptations to use them in a grid effectively have costs, and those costs are not exclusive to capitalism
Enter nuclear fusion… unlimited energy always and forever.
It’s pretty easy to imagine fusion being great - but it’s still just in our imaginations. No one has yet been able to build a working fusion power plant. There has been progress over the decades that people have tried, but its still a way to go yet. So although we can imagine that it could produce clean and plentiful energy, we just comparing sci-fi tech to current tech. The future reality might not be so great, and the current reality is that fusion power isn’t possible at all.
To illustrate my point, lets imagine solar power from a ‘theoretical’ point of view, like fusion is described. Solar power uses no fuel; gets its power from sunlight. There is enough energy coming from the sun to meet the whole world’s energy needs with just reality small amount of area. Solar power produces no waste biproducts… So if we just imagine the benefits of solar power, it sounds pretty much perfect. In in reality though, although solar is very good, it is still far from perfect. Construction, maintenance, and disposal of the panels are where the costs are. And so to compare to fusion, we’d need to know what it would take to build, maintain, and disposal of the fusion power plants. Currently we can’t do it at all - so the costs are basically infinite. But even if our tech improves to the point where it is possible… it’s hard to imagine it will be easy or cheap - especially because there will be radioactive waste. (Radioactive waste not from the fuel, but from the walls and shielding of the reactor, as it absorbs high-energy particles produced by the operation of the power plant.)
Every previous adoption of technology has taken - what, 50 years? - between having the technology and being set up to make use of it. Gasoline did not immediately have car engines to put into, nor kerosine a whole city’s worth of lamps set up to receive them, etc.
Though at first, if fusion could power up the existing electrical grid then it could e.g. make electrical cars more efficient in the net/overall sense, even if vehicles operating directly on fusion power themselves would take many more years. So fusion really might be different than those that came before, if we are anticipating and more ready for it than previous technical advances?
Though yeah, it will have its own challenges e.g. the radioactive wastes, so fusion would not begin to replace greener energy approaches such as solar, wind, and geothermal, only perhaps supplement them.
radioactive wastes
afaik, this isn’t a thing for nuclear fusion. fission, to a very limited degree. yes, but fusion, no, not really.
Not for the direct reaction itself but I thought there was something about spraying the container down or some such… I am probably entirely BSing here:-). In any case, whenever someone figures out a method to make it practical, then we’ll see whatever downsides there may be to that:-P.
Just 20 more years of research. At least text was predicted 1990. And 2000. And 2010. And 2020. And last year.
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my pet theory on the “nuclear fusion is coming in the next 20 years” thing is that science journalism has reported on every minor breakthrough related to fusion technology. being able to theoretically confirm it, being able to actually accomplish a test run, being able to use some other forms of nuclear fusion (like a tokamak vs a stellarator), being able to very recently, break even. Earlier on, in the optimistic post-war nuclear period, some dipshit probably gave an estimate that we’d have it in the next 20 years because everyone was so optimistic, and ten it stuck around. so every time someone brings up nuclear fusion, which happens a decent amount, the “it’s only been 20 years away for the last 80 years” remark gets popped off and spreads around without any really clear origin point. I think probably also the sheer number of breakthroughs reported over time means that people are going to be skeptical, since everyone interprets science journalism as always reporting on the one life-changing breakthrough, rather than just being a kind of steady background noise, like any journalism.
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I’m personally very excited about how it does seem to be finally making progress if slowly, but realistically, I’m less convinced that it’ll be the solution to all our energy needs than many are. The physics of the process itself is very efficient, sure, but the kinds of machines needed to harness it are literally among the most expensive and complicated things built by humans, and they don’t even produce net energy yet. Granted, the cost of such things should be reduced once they are industrial machinery and not exotic scientific instruments loaded with experiments, but I’d bet that the reactors themselves will still be incredibly expensive and complex (and therefore have expensive maintenance). This doesn’t say good things about the actual cost of the resulting energy, even if the fuel is quite abundant. We could get abundant energy with a similarly high if not quite as much fuel efficiency with advanced fission reactors and fuel breeding, but the cost of those kinds of plants has been relatively prohibitive, and the costs of renewables has been falling. I could certainly see it possible for fusion to reach net energy, only to get used only on specialized roles or for base load power because solar panels end up being cheaper. In a sense this has already happened. It is theoretically possible, if not practically desirable, to use fusion energy in a power plant already, by detonating fusion explosives in a gigantic underground chamber full of water to heat it up, and harnessing the steam. Such ideas were considered during the cold war, but never developed, at least in part because it was calculated that they wouldn’t be cost competitive compared to other power options.
That’s not really net energy gain from a practical standpoint. Technically yes, they get more energy than was present in their lasers, but those those lasers aren’t created perfectly efficiently, and so the actual electricity needed to create them still is much higher than the energy output of the reaction
I agree with you, but I don’t think it means we stop the pursuit. It won’t be viable or cheap enough in time to help in the transition off fossil fuels. If it does pay off the way some people think it may be a viable energy source for carbon sequestration to undo some of our stupidity though. I think it’s worth that moonshot.
Oh I wasn’t suggesting we should stop the pursuit. I just think it won’t be a magic bullet for solving our energy needs the way some proponents seem to suggest it will be.
not exactly but for all practical purposes might as well be
Solar power is just really inefficient nuclear fusion
Giant rubber bands.
You’re welcome
It’s definitely a problem with the grid, since too much supply is at least as big a problem as too much. Hopefully we’ll get things like molten salt batteries so we can soak up this excess and decarbonise heavy industry.
Why couldn’t the solar panels simply be turned off - is that not an easy solution to having too much intake?
You’re wasting energy then, and you also need to have some controller on each one to communicate with the grid. No country has a smart grid yet.
Yeah but you said it was a “problem” - like I dunno, likely the excess energy start a fire or something? - whereas turning them off seems like it would reduce that to the system merely being less efficient than would otherwise be possible.
Anyway, definitely some kind of energy storage battery seems naively to me like it would be the best solution, even if used in conjunction with several forms of energy production (solar, wind, geothermal, maybe biomaterials etc.).
They do shut off (“curtail”) renewable energy because it is a problem - excess power can destabilise the grid, causing brownouts and blackouts and also physically damage grid equipment like transformers and transmission lines over time.
If the excess energy cannot be stored, it should be used for something energy intensive like desalination or carbon capture.
Or just fill debts. Overclock every air conditioner freezer and industrial coolant system for those hours, store that not-heat. Do cpu intensive processes, time industrial machinery to be active during those hours, Sure, desalination, but pumped hydro(even just on a residential scale, more water towers, dammit!) or… Anything.
OR we could just decline to build them because they’re… Sometimes too good to make a profit off of?
Or heck, have fun with it. It’s leftover
Like a Phase Plasma Rifle with a 40-Watt range.
Even simpler than that - set your house to heat or cool based on the timing of the cheap energy (as explained by Technology Connections)
Heck pumping water uphill for all I care. The more potential energy the better.
Hydrogen production
Bitcoin mining
Aluminium Smelting and recycling.
Both of the statements in that screenshot are just so inane.
Frequency has to be maintained on the grid. It’s the sole place where we have to match production and consumption EXACTLY. If there’s no battery or pumped storage storage available to store excess energy, the grid operators have to issue charges to the producers, in line with their contracts, to stop them dumping more onto the grid (increasing the frequency). The producers then start paying others to absorb this energy, often on the interconnectors.
It’s a marketplace that works (but is under HEAVY strain because there’s so much intermittent production coming online). When was the last time you had a device burning out because the frequency was too high?
Turning the electricity grid into some kind of allegory about post-scarcity and the ills of capitalism (when in fact it’s a free market that keeps the grid operating well) is just “I is very smart” from some kid sitting in mom and dads basement.
Your explanation works very well, but completely falls apart in the last paragraph.
Solar power production clearly is (at least in part) a post-scarsity scenario, given we literally have too much power on the grid.
Furthermore, calling the power market anything like “free” is just plain wrong. A liberal approach to market regulation here would have led to disaster a long time ago, for the reasons you described at the beginning of your comment.
The market “works” because of, not inspite of regulation.
And negative prices are a good thing for consumers, not market failure.
But too much power on the grid isn’t “here, have at it”. It’s fried devices and spontaneous fires breaking out. The grid can’t “hold the power”, only pumped and battery storage can, of which we have nowhere near enough. The grid literally cannot work if other producers put more electricity on to it.
If you have smart meter, you can literally be paid to use power at that point.
Nobody said it can hold power
I think we’re quite a long way off from “too much power on the grid”, no? Even in America we regularly over-strain our grids. My power provider has even started discouraging folks from using their power as much, and charging more, because they simply decided not to do this work of increasing the amount generated. Like my bill has never once gone down, this paying people to use power concept is completely unheard of in practice.
That said I’m willing to be wrong. If you can show me evidence we have “too much power” I’d be happy to take that to my elected officials, insist I should get paid to heat up my noodles or whatever.
We don’t have too much power overall, but there are moments where solar and renewable production in a region exceeds usage in that region.
Where I live at the moment (UK), people with home batteries are regularly paid for storing excess energy from the grid. I haven’t got a clue about the American energy market, but intermittent energy production is causing huge strain on European grids.
Interesting… Can y’all make room for one more over there? The bill for my 3-bedroom home is around $150 per month T_T
wait until you figure out how we solve this problem…
wait for it…
You just don’t produce that energy.
lol. Yes, it’s that simple.
that’s how we’ve been doing it for the past 2 centuries, it’ll be how we continue to do it for the next 2 centuries.
A liberal approach to market regulation here would have led to disaster a long time ago, for the reasons you described at the beginning of your comment. The market “works” because of, not inspite of regulation. And negative prices are a good thing for consumers, not market failure.
Regulation of a market by the government is liberal politics. A laize faire approach is conservative lol.
Somehow internet populists have become convinced that liberalism = the government never does anything. Ask literally any economist and they will tell you government intervention and regulation are needed in many things.
For example, read this study on the policy views of practicing economists: https://econfaculty.gmu.edu/klein/PdfPapers/KS_PublCh06.pdf
You will find that most economists strongly support things like environmental, food and drug safety, and occupational safety regulations.
Convincing people liberalism is an evil capitalist ploy to deregulate at all costs is a conservative psyop, and judging from comments like the one to which you’re responding, it’s working.
Somehow internet populists have become convinced that liberalism = the government never does anything. Ask literally any economist and they will tell you government intervention and regulation are needed in many things.
ah yes, the classic laissez faire interpretation of libertarian.
Neo liberalism is the core ideology of modern conservatism. For example, both the republican and democrat parties in the United States adhere to Neo Liberal ideology. They are both conservative.
Neo liberalism is the ideology of deregulated capitalism. Neo liberalism holds that everything should be marketable without government interference, including healthcare, real estate, power generation, water, etc. Pioneered by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, it is the dominant political ideology across Western democracies. Liberals and Conservatives are both adherents of Neo Liberal capitalist ideology. Leftists are those who support regulation, they are definitionally anti-capitalist. When people refer to the democrat party as socialist or democrats as Leftists, they’re just misusing those terms. Democrats are Neo liberal conservatives who, by and large, support deregulated capitalism.
Okay, and?? None of that goes against what I said. In the scope of us politics, Deregulation of markets in the US is Republican platform. Regulation of markets is Democrat platform. Democrats in the US are more liberal than Republicans even though, as you said, they are far from real leftists.
Their platform at times advocates regulation, but they don’t do much in the way of it. They are largely still in favor less regulation. We have had Democrat presidents since Reagan, quite a few actually and despite that unilaterally regulation had decreased pretty constantly over that time period.
There’s no post scarcity. The power available on the grid must always equal the power consumed. Or all the hell will break loose.
That’s wrong and it’s simple to explain why.
If the grid allows negative prices, grid storage becomes a profitable business opportunity.
The power consumption will always go up or production will go down if prices go negative.
We are missing a key piece of the puzzle to decarbonise the grid and that’s storage of the abundant renewable power we could easily create.
This is a sign the market is ready for investment in storage.
The person you’re responding to is talking about physics, not economics.
They’re mixing the two to attempt to make a point. “Post-scarcity” is an economic concept, and I’ve never heard that term used in physics.
It’s two separate statements. We don’t live in a post scarcity world. Power grids have physical limitations regarding power in and power out.
Ah then it’s just two non sequiturs that don’t relate to each other
ah yes the physics concept of “post scarcity”
Power plant operators are known to have dreaded this inevitability. There will be no more electrons.
There’s no point about talking about the physics of the grid without the economics.
The story of the New York blackouts is not one of groundbreaking physics.
It’s the story of two lightning strikes, some very basic physics, and a systemic failure.
Understanding the systemic failure is not a physics question. Electricity is already well understood and that physics isn’t changing.
A renewable grid is not a physics question either. It’s one of regulation, redundancies and the end goal hasn’t changed.
Saying “production and consumption on the grid must match” might as well be put in the pile with statements like “wires must be made of conductive material”. They’re just 2 things that haven’t changed.
If the grid allows negative prices, grid storage becomes a profitable business opportunity.
in fact, if the price of electricity on the grid changes at all. Storage becomes a point where money can be made.
Question: Who do you think is paying these “negative prices”. Spoiler: It’s the TSOs. They can’t do that for long, or simply go bankrupt.
Yes, “storage of the abundant renewable power” is a key piece of the puzzle, but “The power available on the grid must always equal the power consumed” is something that can not be broken. If it does, equipment will break, people will be without power, and it’ll cost the TSO tons of money to repair.
There’s post scarcity, but only during a short time of the day, when power consumption is relatively lower (it spikes when people come home, because everyone turns their lights and machines on around the same time).
Oh, and I don’t know about the USA, but the Dutch grid is pretty much overloaded, so there is no space to move the power to the storage units (whether the storage exists or not doesn’t matter ATM). We’re working on it, but here’s we’re kinda fucked ATM.
Bankruptcy is seen as a bad thing. In reality it’s the part of market forces everyone has forgotten is important.
If something we need becomes unstable in the market, the government has to provide it and usually does on a break even basis.
Base load electricity will likely have this future.
Additionally, this has been a known issue for decades. If only there had been investment in handling it…
Isn’t there any kind of economic activity that could make use of this excess energy, even if it isn’t very profitable?
You can pump water uphill back into reservoirs so that you can use it to generate hydro-electricity later https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ffestiniog_Power_Station
Yes. Desalination or hydrogen separation via electrolysis
Both uses are productive, one generates fresh water, the other can be a form of energy storage.
Both are extremely energy intensive for the yield, making them unprofitable, but are extremely useful things to do with a glut of electricity.
There is, but you have to set it up and link it with the central control system of your grid, similarly to how power generators have an automatic generation control to balance the network.
Yes there is. So consumers (with the right kind of smart meters) are paid to use energy and we are slowly moving from pilot plan into small scale production of hydrogen. But there’s nowhere near enough and the grid will literally fry itself unless producers stop pumping more onto the grid (during windy and sunny days, in areas with high penetration of intermittent production.
the grid will literally fry itself
I don’t believe this is true for three reasons.
#1 it’s glossing over the mechanics of how equipment will get damaged
#2 the people that own the equipment have ways of managing excess capacity.
#3 minuscule increases in grid frequency result in devices using power less efficiently, so they use more power. There’s time to adjust power generation in surplus events.
Central heating
Frequency has to be maintained, and it is trivial to do so when you have excess renewables because inverters are instantly throttle-able. The reason why you’ve never heard about devices failing because frequency is too high is because it is and has always been such a non issue to shutter unneeded generating capacity.
Typically with fossil fuel plants, when the price drops below the cost of fuel for the least efficient plants they drop offline because they are no longer making a profit on fuel and the price holds. Because renewables have upfront cost to build but are free to run on a day to day basis, when there are a lot of renewables the price signal has to drop all the way to nothing before it is no longer profitable to run them.
All this means that all that happened was that for a few hours, solar production was actually enough to satisfy demand for that region. Along term, if low wholesale prices can be counted on midday then people will build industry, storage, or HVDC transfer capacity to take advantage of it.
If these prices are sustained for enough of the day that it is no longer profitable to add more solar farms, then they will stop being built in that area in favor of was to generate power at night such as wind, hydro, and pumped hydro while the panels will instead go to places that still don’t have enough solar to meet demand.
Also as an aside, the wholesale electricity market in north america is by definition about as far from a free market as it is possible for a free market to be without having exact outside price controls. It is a market built solely out of regulation that only exists at all because the government forced it to exist by making it illegal to not use it, either by making contracts off market or by transmission companies in-houseing production, or use it in any way other than as precisely prescribed by the government.
Now we can argue whether or not the wholesale electricity market is well or poorly set up or even if it should exist in the first place, but I don’t think that anyone can argue that it is a free market. At least not without defining the term free market so broad that even most of the markets in the USSR qualify as free markets.
Also, free markets and capitalism are very distinct concepts with no real relation between each other. You might argue that free markets tend to lead towards a capitalist system, but given free markets existed thousands of years before capitalism was invented I don’t think many people would say it was a very strong relationship.
in fact it’s a free market that keeps the grid operating well
Like how in Texas’s even freer market the power grid is even more stable than in evil communist California.
No idea about the US. My frame of reference is an integrated European market in general and the Nordic integrated spot market in particular, which uses Swedish hydro and Danish wind on top of nuclear, biogas and wood pellet market.
Seems to work well enough: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?tab=chart&time=1961..latest&country=USA~DNK~SWE~NOR
Which I think reinforces my point. The Nordic states are much more highly regulated than the US, and Texas went so far as to disconnect their grid to make it even less regulated. So now it collapses at the drop of a hat, and people get electric bills in the thousands of dollars.
Usually too low frequency is issue, I can’t imagine why even double frequency can damage PSU.
There’s a reason why the frequency is exactly 50hz or 60hz, and it’s not “at least 50hz or 60hz”. You can’t just have 55hz on the grid, you’ll destroy half a country.
That’s why I say low frequency is problem, but high is not as much.
I don’t think you said why?
It’s not just about frequency - though that is important for devices that synchronize using the grid. When your frequency is going up because of too much power so will voltage. Think about that for a minute.
Not necessarily(see field windings), but higher voltage is indeed a problem
Not everything on the grid is a motor. Even if it was you would still need to rebuild the motor to change field windings.
some clocks are bound to grid frequency. It’s the easiest most accessible way to clock time semi accurately.
Ok, your particular device may handle a wide band of frequencies. Congrats.
But do we agree that not all devices can? What about sensitive devices keeping patients alive in hospitals?
lol If you think hospitals don’t have managed power systems you shouldn’t be contributing.
Also lol if you think medical equipment isn’t required to be robust, have you ever read a supply tender spec for a hospital?
Those would not be plugged straight into the grid but with a power conditioner inbetween
Oh ok, I guess frequency maintenance on the grid isn’t a problem then and all the pumped storage and battery installations can shut and all the grid planners can go home and the spots markets can close and we can just dump as current as we see fit onto the grid and you’re right and I’m wrong.
All of that matters, but I think the parent post was only calling out the hospital equipment as a bad example. Like how your keyboard and your SSD don’t care what the grid is doing as long as the PSU can handle it.
But back to maintaining the frequency on the grid, along with keeping it within tolerance don’t they also have to make sure that the average frequency over time is VERY close to the target? I believe there are devices that use the frequency for timekeeping as well, like some old plug-in alarm clocks.
Fair enough. I was getting frustrated because I was trying to make a larger point about the fact that the grid can’t endlessly handle production. At some point the grid has to say “it will cost you to dump this onto the grid”. And suddenly I found myself discussing PSUs. I mean, yes, I’m aware there’s equipment on the grid that can handle different frequencies better than others but I felt we were discussing the bark of a single tree when I was trying to talk about the forest.
Also fair enough!
It really is a good point you make though. There’s a large balancing act to produce the right amount of power at exactly the time it’s needed. I think in our daily lives, and especially for non-tech/STEM folks, electricity is just taken for granted as always available and unlimited on an individual scale. I think people don’t envision giant spinning turbines when they plug something in, just like they don’t think of racks of computers in a data center when they open Amazon or Facebook.
Maybe it will be less like that in a couple decades when there is distributed energy storage all over the grid, including individual homes & vehicles.
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But do we agree that not all devices can?
By not all you mean motors with windings connected to grid? Well, they still will work on higher frequencies, but on higher speed. Real problem is low frequency, not high. Well, 0.5kHz not all devices can handle, but most consumers(even conumer electronics, no pun intended) even rated to 50-60Hz range. So 46-64Hz should be fine for them.
What about sensitive devices keeping patients alive in hospitals?
Sensetive devices that can’t handle range bigger than ±0.4Hz? Are you kiddding me? How does that even pass certification?
Most frequency-sencetive devices are not consumers, but transformers and turbines.
Transformers are very important for the grid though. You also have large synchronized motors connected to the grid.
Well, you have to handle excess power produced, you can’t just dump it on the ground.
If the grid produces too much power in excess of what’s being consumed, parts of it need to shutdown to prevent damage.
That’s why the price can go negative. They’ll actively pay you to use the power so they don’t have to hit emergency shutdowns.
As we build more solar plants, the problem gets exacerbated since all the solar plants produce power at the same time until it’s in excess of what anyone needs. Unlimited free power isn’t very helpful if when it’s producing it’s producing so much that it has to be cut from the grid, and when demand rises it’s not producing and they have to spin up gas turbines.
That’s before the money part of it, where people don’t want to spend a million dollars to make a plant that they need to pay people to use power from.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/14/1028461/solar-value-deflation-california-climate-change/
They go on to talk about how getting consumption to be shifted to those high production times can help, as can building power storage systems or just ways to better share power with places further away.
Government should invest in more energy storage so the excess can be used later, like at night
That and incentivise smart devices like water heaters that run when power is cheap, which is effectively a rudimentary battery
If all grids did was put high resolution pricing data on the wire we could make those decisions for ourselves.
It still takes upfront investment. that’s easy if you’re wealthy but a lot harder if you’re pay check to pay check + there’s no reason landlords would do it. part of it is the high resolution pricing data, but we need more than just that
Everything is a cost.
It could quite easily be cheaper to pay people to use energy than it is to store it. Once that equation changes then hopefully they start buying storage.
Problem is that storing electric energy at a large scale is really difficult, with lots of engineering and research effort going into finding solutions. Investment into storage is good, but it’s still an area of active research how to even do it.
This is interesting in the UK because the government agrees on a set a price it will pay wind farms for energy.
If power is expensive the wind farms lose out and get paid less than the value of energy. But when wind power is high and prices low they get paid the guaranteed price at the goverments expense. The government even tells them to turn of the turbines and they still get paid.
Bare in mind peak wind can last weeks rather than solar hours. But this system is one of the main reasons UK is a world leader in wind.
People struggle with the economics of losing money being the optimal solution and they want some magic situation where nothing is wasted at 0 cost but provides all demand exactly when required. Nothing works like that.
We could do so much good with excess power generation if we wanted to. We could produce hydrogen. We could electrolyse CO2 out of the air. We could filter the plastic out of ocean water. We could analyse space radiation. We could run recycling plants. We could flood the bitcoin market. We could run a desalination plant. Why does this have to be a problem?
Because we’re not doing those things at the moment?
Having a solution available doesn’t make it not a problem.
Something having a problem doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing, and not all problems are bad things, they’re just things that need figuring out.
People too often think that identifying an issue with something means that it’s being argued that we should abandon it or that it’s unfixable.
Solar is not a perfect technology, because there are no perfect technologies. It has solvable problems are or will need to be addressed as we keep using it. That’s fine and normal.
It is normal, but this particular “problem” looks more like an opportunity than most. Seems silly to be complaining about it.
Anyway, is it “Fish and a …” ?
Who’s complaining? Read the article I linked, it’s what the quote came from. Informing people about an issue, discussing it’s consequences and listing some solutions is hardly complaining.
I’m not sure why you put problem in quotes, it’s an issue that has to be resolved which is the definition of a problem. It’s not silly to me to talk about an issue.
You think we should do carbon sequestration with the power. That’s a great notion. Should we tell the solar plants they need to do that, should the public build them, or should we incentivize companies to do it somehow?I just can’t see how people are this upset about an article explaining how “more than we can handle” means “people might stop making more” and “we need to figure out how to handle it”.
I’m not sure what you’re talking about with the fish?
You quite literally could dump it into the ground (wire).
As some other comments have explained in better terms, you can hook it to ground directly, technically. But you can’t if you like, want things to be good and not broken all to hell.
You can’t.
“Can” and “should” are different things.
And that’s why you can’t.
Well, you have to handle excess power produced, you can’t just dump it on the ground.
Thats literally what a “ground” is electrically. The ground.
We literally design electrical systems to do exactly this, all day long. You can literally “dump power into the ground.”
No, you can’t.
The ground in a circuit doesn’t dissipate energy — the energy gets dissipated elsewhere. That’s what ground is: it’s what we call the electrical part of a circuit where the energy has already been dissipated (I’m being a little casual with my electricity, but I think it’s a valid statement nonetheless — ground is defined as the zero potential).
You can try this out by plugging a wire from hot to ground in your house (please don’t do this). The energy gets dissipated in the wires. This is bad, because it is a lot of energy dissipated very quickly. Best case you throw the breaker. Worst case you burn down your house.
You can run it through a very large grid of aluminum fins which get hot, and you know, I don’t know, boil water with it or something to be used for uh, purposes, such as heated water. :)
So… You can use it. As exactly described. By the description of the problem.
Sorry for being snarky, but this is exactly what the “paying people to use your energy” part of this situation is.
Yep absolutely — a few kW? I can burn that no problem. A MW? Well…that takes a little more thought. A GW? That’s a whole different ballgame.
Haha, thanks for taking my comment with humor and stride. Yeah, you’re right. I still think having too much energy is a good problem to have overall.
I do microsolar and when my batteries are full (rare), I just unplug them. The solar panels just sit baking in the sun, and then cool off at night.
What is microsolar? Tried looking it up, didn’t come up with much.
It’s having a very small (typically less than 2 kW) solar system
It’s weird that that’s possible as such an easy solution, and all those electrical engineers never thought to use it, instead putting in load banks and all sorts of contrivances to heat metal in an emergency, or find complex ways to hide excess production in normal load and balance production by managing the generators.
Even weirder that the people who run solar grids opted to pay people to take excess power rather than just dumping it on the ground, although a lot of them have also taken to heating metal instead, or water for smaller home setups.Yes, you can technically connect your generator directly to the ground. This isn’t something people want to do because it can damage equipment.
It’s why that heating metal trick is used as part of the emergency shutdown rather than as part of load regulation, and they don’t want to use it because they have to make sure the right bit of metal melted.None of this has anything to do with people needing to react to excess current in an electrical grid, and not just let it be a situation that happens. It requires intervention was the point of the phrase.
As a professional engineer who literally designs solar power plants for a living, this is not how electricity works. It is true that solar inverters can throttle their output by operating at non-optimal voltages, but you can’t just dump power into the ground without causing major issues to the grid infrastructure.
Why?
I’m not doubting you, I’m just a big curious nerd
In an ideal picture, ground isn’t where energy gets dissipated — there’s no such thing as “dumping energy to ground” (or if you prefer, everything is “dumping energy to ground”).
If ground dissipates significant energy, this has all sorts of Very Bad implications. For starters, the ground can no longer be at uniform potential if it dissipates — so now we have a ground that isn’t actually at ground! (This just follows from Ohm’s law.)
Another way of stating this is to imagine what sort of circuit you need to “dump energy to ground.” This is probably just a wire connecting hot to ground — but what happens if you do this in your home, i.e., plug a wire from hot to ground (please do not do this!)? It gets really, really hot, and will probably either throw the breaker, melt, or start a fire. The reason it gets hot is because it’s the wire that dissipated the energy.
Ok. So the reason the wire gets hot is because it has finite resistance. So what if we choose an imaginary superconductor instead? Well, now we’re trying to draw infinite power, which is bad! In practice of course it won’t be infinite, and will be determined by the resistance of the power lines feeding it. But remember that wire that got really hot? Now we’re treating the power lines that way. So this is really not good, and besides, we wanted to use a controlled amount of power, which this clearly isn’t.
So, we can be smarter here and add some resistance to our load — instead of a wire from hot to ground, we now have maybe a coil of low-but-finite resistance wire. This works great, and it’s just a resistive heater.
The problem isn’t dumping energy at a human scale (e.g., an individual space heater) — the problem is when you have excess power on an industrial scale.
If all the energy is actually being released by the wire through resistance, then why’s the potential of the ground changing?
The potential at the ground isn’t (or shouldn’t) be changing — which is the same thing as saying the power isn’t being dissipated in the ground. So the power isn’t being “dumped to ground,” it’s being dumped through the wire.
So basically, two options: 1) you dissipate power in the load, which is what should happen, and everyone is happy. 2) you dissipate power across your ground, which means ground is no longer really ground, and all sorts of nasty and dangerous things can happen.
Does lightning cause those nasty things to happen?
If you could do that there’d be tones to research going on about how to extract the energy stored in the ground as the storage capacity would in many orders of magnitude greater than we have now. We’d also be probably capturing the energy released in thunderstorms.
A chance for @bradorsomething, son of Gondor, to show his quality!
When we refer to the grounded conductor (the neutral), it does have a reference to the ground potential of the building receiving power. But the current generated by the power plant seeks the least resistive path back to its source, and the grounded conductor provides a path back to the generation plant that carries no voltage potential for electricity to draw towards or away from - the wire simply accepts the flow of energy to or from the power plant, to complete the circuit without changing the voltage potential.
There is also a grounding wire, which is green or bare, which is present in building in the US to allow anything electrified by stray wires to complete the circuit and trip the breakers in the panel. This wire joins to the grounded conductor (the white colored neutral) at the main panel where the utility provides power… utilities use the neutral as their ground, so current completes the circuit back to the power plant through the neutral.
When I say “the circuit looks for a path back to its source,” I’m playing a little fast and loose here… the current seeks the most potential to complete the circuit pathway. This path is almost always the return path to the power plant.
Join us next week, when I explain that lightning doesn’t care much about our wire at all, because at that scale it’s like the ocean caring about a moat at a sand castle!
My favorite solution for storage of excess power is closed loop pumped hydro. Two bodies of water of different elevations are connected by a generator/pump. When there is too much power, the pump moves the water to the higher lake. When the power is needed, the water flows through the generator to the lower lake.
This could also be made more “local” with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed-air_energy_storage or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage and not reliant on the difference of elevations.
I was talking with an engineer about using a closed loop hydro system at home, maybe in a tower. He said the water wouldn’t have enough head to generate electricity. But that compressed air energy storage just might be the solution I was looking for.
the other arguably more effective option for home use is dumping it into heat. Heating up water is a great heat storage solution for radiant heating for instance. Getting that energy back out is arguably harder, but hot water is also pretty useful, so.
Hydrogen fuel cells also. Use the excess to make hydrogen which is simple to store and then use it as a fuel to burn when you have demand. These have started to be put at the bottom of wind turbines so they don’t need to be stopped when the wind is blowing but there is no grid demand.
All these systems help balance the grid too meaning these renewables can be used as base loads instead of dirtier base load generators like coal or gas fire stations.
hydrogen which is simple to store
Hydrogen is famously not simple to store. This is part of the reason that SpaceX rockets use kerosene instead of hydrogen despite the better performance.
Be careful that other rockets run on liquid hydrogen, which should be kept extremely cold. That is the main problem for them. That being said, hydrogen is indeed not easy to store and transport.
True. Liquid hydrogen takes something that’s already difficult to work with and adds even more complexity to the system.
i mean, conceptually it’s simple to store, you put it in a container, the tricky part is doing it effectively, in a way that won’t create a massive bomb. And also at density.
Conceptually, yes, it’s like putting it into a container. But it’s also made up of the smallest atoms possible, which means it leaks out through a lot of materials. It also reacts with other materials - which makes it a good rocket fuel - but it also corrodes materials it comes in contact with in innovative and frustrating ways.
tell that to the big hydrogen storage industry, im sure they’d love to sell you a subscription for hydrogen storage vessels :)
This is like the gravity generators they’re looking to use old mines for.
It’s exactly like gravity batteries, but do get fooled with fancy renders and inspirational music.
Lol that’s great, and I was more talking about the ones for mines that already have deep holes, this one is hilariously stupid though. Water does make a lot more sense though, only issue I can see with it would be evaporation.
It’s easy to use closed tanks. Mines are still a good site for energy storage, but using water instead of weighted sleds still makes more sense. Simpler over all system.
That’s my second favorite solution. One of the cons of the mines is they tend to be too remote from urban areas. But if that’s not a factor then you’re golden.
pumped hydro is pretty slick but incredibly dependent on geology and ecosystem.
Thermal storage is a similar vein, you can even use water, we do use water for this even. Compressed air as suggested, i believe there’s a mine somewhere in the US that’s used a compressed air storage plant. And of course, motion, flywheels go hard i hear, but i find those to be less preferable, even if high energy density. I imagine those would work better at scale.
That was a very cool read!
The only problem is that it is inefficient
It’s more efficient than just dumping the energy, at least some is being stored
That’s true
depends a bit on how much energy it costs to build it all, how many decades it should be used how often, and if it’s then durable enough to actually earn back the extra energy it costs. It might, just sayin’
We use gravity batteries in the UK. They work well and are pretty good at their efficiency. When you are creating massive systems they are made to last decades. There is always upkeep but it is the same with coal, gas and nuclear plants. All these renewables are far cheaper and far more cost effective than these power stations and for years the main problem has been that wind and solar cannot be used as base load, but with battery storage on a mass scale, thermal and hydrogen storage, we are now at a place where building out far more solar and wind than we need is viable and mixing in these technologies to provide base load and grid stability.
You may be interested in gravity storage. Giant crane picking up giant concrete legos. Neat concept, there’s been some pilots.
I get the sentiment in here, but the poster is missing an important point: there is a reason some group of lunatics (called the TSO or Transport System Operator or in some cases other power producers) are willing to pay for people to consume electricity when there is too much of it; They are not doing it for the sake of being lunatics, the electrical system cannot handle over or underproduction. Perfectly balanced (as all things should be) is the only way the grid can exist.
The production capacity in the grid needs to be as big as peak demand. The challenge we face with most renewables is that their production is fickly. For a true solarpunk future, the demand side needs to be flexible and there need to be energy storages to balance the production (and still, in cold and dark environments other solutions are needed).
In off-grid, local usages we usually see this happen naturally. We conserve power on cloudy low-wind days to make sure we have enough to run during the night (demand side flexibility) and almost everyone has a suitably sized battery to last the night. The price variability is one (flawed) mechanism to make this happen on a grid or bidding zone level.
Actually there is a good amount of credible economic theory which backs the idea that localized post-scarcity markets do cause capitalist influences to wither away, and that power generation is a big fucking domino in that equation. The simple version is that maintenance of artificial scarcity is modeled as capital overhead, so there will always be an inflection point where that overhead actually exceeds the value of all other inputs. The same way eg, marketing cannot create infinite or arbitrary demand.
The other angle here is how there is often incentive for alternative commodification of abundance, which in turn incentives that abundance. This is another common model for various forms of post-scarcity capitalism. Take a YouTube video for example. The commodification of content takes the form of advertising, which effectively transfers the scarcity of one market onto another. Content is basically infinite compared to viewership time inputs. The key here is that there will always exist some forms of scarcity - and time is the big one. Art, company, leisure, physical space, etc. the model here is that eventually something like energy and physical resources might be completely abundant and effectively free, but enabled by competition over attention or leisure or aesthetic experience. You can make a strong argument that this is already happening in the post-industrial world to some degree.
The final issue is that this equation isn’t unique to capitalism. Socialism mediates scarcity in more or less the same way - by transferring and meditating it across various markets using labor as the quanta of scarcity instead of capital. Indeed, many economists will argue that regulated, democratic, liberal forms of capitalism theoretically reduces to the same core basis, since “free [as in speech] labor” itself both creates the market regulation as well as provides the consumption which mediates access to capital. This is, in fact, the core thesis of “third way” market socialism, though it is obviously contentious among orthodox Marxists.
Just use the extra energy to shoot random laser beams into space… Make sure the aliens know we’re armed
This is a real problem but you can only have so many words in a tweet. Note that the price isn’t zero but instead negative. It means there is literally too much power in the grid and it would need to be used. If a grid has too much power then it is bad. It can damage it. There are things we can build that essentially amount to batteries (or natural variants like a dam) that get charged during times of higher supply than demand and discharged during times of higher demand than supply.
Scarcity is artifically created in the modern age
My local library can only lend out x copies of each ebook at a time, so sometimes I’m in a queue for the last lenders loan time to run out
Surely just pirate it so you can read it on your timetable, and take the book from the library when it’s your turn to give that author the lending stats?
cough Anna’s cough archive cough
If you need it in a jiffy, but libraries and authors could both use support.
Unfettered capitalism will be the end of us.
Capitalism can work to our benefit. It’s main benefit is incentivising people to get more, which seems to work well at encouraging people to be productive. The main idea is supposed to be efficient resource allocation, but that plainly does not work as it leads to wealth accumulation at the top.
Our problem is twofold. The first problem is we externalize negative costs onto society. So environmental damage, health costs, workers pensions, roads, bridges etc.
The second problem is efficient wealth distribution. Currently we focus on income rather than wealth. We should tax wealth just as much as income. We certainly should make any use of an asset as collateral a taxable event.
Some things that might help. We should look at changing taxation systems to be a formula rather than bands. The more income you get, the higher it goes. The lower your income, the lower you’re taxed. Same as now but rather than having to meet a threshold to move bands, every dollar is taxed based on where it falls in the distribution curve. It would be more complex for people to get their heads around at first, but actually simpler for all calculations going forwards.
UBI would also help with redistribution and make society more efficient overall.
I get what you are trying to say, but you sound like someone in an abusive relationship that still believes they can fix the abuser somehow.
I think these are reasonable suggestions to make society more equitable. Do you disagree with any of them? Or just don’t like them because they modify the existing system instead of tearing it all down?
They are reasonable suggestions if you refuse to think outside the box of capitalism.
And no, thinking outside of capitalism doesn’t require to tear it all down. That is exactly what the capitalist want us to think with their TINA.
What would you change it for? We’ve tried many systems globally and historically. Capitalism seems to be the best at reducing poverty.
No it’s not. Russian and Chinese state capitalism turned two preindustrial countries into global superpowers in a matter of decades, and lifted unprecedented numbers of people out of poverty. And they weren’t even communist! Communism has been tried in places like Catalonia and economically, it succeeded. Militarily, not so much, but only because all the capitalists turned against them. Capitalism is the bottom of the barrel when it comes to lifting people out of poverty.
Yes, China and Russia had rapid advancements in reducing poverty by embracing capitalism market principles. That’s partly the point.
Nobody is advocating for pure capitalism. No country practices it. It’s theoretical and has no restrictions, or regulations.
That’s a completely ahistorical take. Capitalism is best at creating poverty when you look at it globally. Yes it is good at concentrating riches in a few places, and from a rich western perspective it may look like it “reduced” poverty, but even that is starting to become questionable these days.
No, its really not. Capitalism increases productivity and wealth. How that wealth is distributed varies by country. Russia for instance has oligopolies that mean most goes to individuals. Europe has social programs that mean its more evenly spread. Its up to the countries and law makers to plan that well. Its not the fault of the concept if its misused. Its a tool, like any other.
Bbbut be just needs anger management classes…
40 years of néolibéralisme cannot be undone overnight, it will take small steps to reverse the damage done, and to normalise societal expectations
You just mentioned a number of ways that capitalism could be “fettered” to work more for the benefit of all. But the person you responded to said “unfettered capitalism” (unless they changed it later). :-)
They probably meant “unchecked capitalism” and it would have worked had we continued to keep it in check. The inequality is so excessive now that correction would be criticized as demotivating to industry and innovation. At this point, I think they’re just trying to run out the clock so we don’t collapse before the world burns.
Sadly it does kinda look that way, but even more devastatingly sad than that is the near certainty that we are giving them far too much credit for forethought there. To think that the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg has that level of strategic capabilities, rather than simply “gimme monay, now puh-lease”, is rather generous. More likely they will be shocked that the leopards (themselves in this case!!?!!?!!) have eaten their faces off too, and as the move Don’t Look Up perfectly illustrates, they too will be more surprised than anyone else as the world ends. But hey, at least they got theirs while the getting was good, right? :-(
i.e. Business Intelligence (acumen) is not the same thing as actual intelligence (IQ), and definitely not the same as emotional ability to empathize, with others and even one’s future self (EQ?). If these people could understand something, but it is to their financial detriment to do so hence they won’t, then it is no longer a matter of helping them understand (IQ), but rather of motivating them to care (EQ) and thereby actually do something about it (business).
I assumed they were using hyperbole as no country has unfettered capitalism. All our restrictions on it in some form. My suggestions would be one way we could do this. There are others.
One problem is that most of your solutions have been attempted before and they failed to stick - e.g. a majority of people who are alive today were present when the top marginal tax rate in the USA was 90% (I am focusing on that b/c the OP referred to MIT), and when that was true, government programs were so well & sufficiently funded that we literally went to the moon! (but how often have we been back there since? granted, there isn’t much real reason to go…:-P)
e.g. people started hiding their wealth in offshore tax havens, only bringing in what they need in the short term to get by at any given moment. This relates to globalism as in how much is a wealthy person even a resident of any one country, despite them living in it 100% of the time and getting 100% of their income from it? If you open up a broom closet and maybe assign 0-1 employees to it, but file the paperwork for thus you can make anything into your “global headquarters” even for a multi-national, multi-billion dollar corporation - Amazon does this all the time, and moreoever keeps shifting it around to take advantage of tax incentives offered to them to move it there (for awhile).
Another way that people hide their wealth - Donald Trump is famous for this (among other things:-) - is to keep the actual financials low while still having the full quality of life experience. So he and his family may not “earn” much, yet still live in a fantabulous apartment that they value in the millions if not billions of dollars. Their cars, helicopters, private jets etc. also may not be directly “owned” by them, but rather by their corporate entity, which is subject to all the tax burdens and benefits of such - so even though he gets the exclusive use of all of his “stuff”, does he truly “own” it, at least as far as tax reporting purposes go?
Even UBIs have been tried before - e.g. slaves might be given their rations regardless of output, so that their families could eat even while taking care of the next and present generation of workers rather than produce work product directly.
So it is not that nobody has ever heard of these things before, it is just that they do not “stick”. e.g. Donald Trump, after taking advantage of that whole financial system, when he gets into power decides to defund the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), essentially the police who monitor for such excesses and abuses as he and others like him are exactly likely to try to get away with. (And yes, the IRS - the general taxation services & enforcement division - got its funding reduced as well, but that gets off into a whole HUGE tangent where it is not just its funding level, but direct mandates to specifically not go after the most wealthy offenders, or rather the particular style of crimes that they are able to abuse, which are more complex and can be held up in court for years and thereby take up a disproportionate amount of resources to enforce) And then on top of that, Donald Trump also lowered the wealth taxes - so both by making things legal, and also by reducing the ability to enforce certain particular styles of crimes that are illegal, he steadily moved the notch more towards “unfettered capitalism” and away from “placing restrictions on it in some form”. Nothing ofc is 0% or 100%, but there is a spectrum, and we do move along somewhere on it.
So, extremely unfortunately, it is not hyperbole at all - the most narrow interpretation of it as meaning equal to precisely 0% restrictions would be, but the common interpretation is to look at the spectrum and see the direction we are moving along it towards that particular extreme end, as in “more unfettered now than it was in the past”. You may actually therefore be in agreement with the person you are arguing with, but missing out on that b/c you keep talking about how to “solve” the crisis, as if the solution could be to simply pass a handful of laws and the problem would be over. However, pass those laws how - through Congress? And with the Supreme Court now having been stacked with judges that each day are revealed to be even more corrupt than we suspected in the past, ready to strike down any law that may cause their own personal quality of life to degrade i.e. they might receive fewer free rides on private jets if they displease the billionaires that they have befriended?
Well, anyway if you are speaking on purely theoretical grounds, or perhaps in Aussie land it may even be possible on practical ones, but in America we do tend to feel that we are well and truly and even royally fucked by the system, and any such “solution” seems unlikely to ever be possible to implement, for the simple fact that our overlords do not wish it. We may have come too far down this road, to the point where even the entire federal government cannot fight against them any longer, except in perhaps specific areas, but not overall, not anymore:-(. Ironically this illustrates the dangers of unfettered capitalism: I get that capitalism isn’t so much “good” as it is the lesser of other competing evils (socialism being demotivating etc.), but it really is like harnessing the power of this giant behemoth beast, whereas if you let the beast take over control then you can become well and truly and royally fucked…:-(. When riding a mount, one must always remain in control, or else… well, we are about to find out I suppose.
i.e. capitalism may be good, but only if properly restrained.
Capitalism is neither good or bad. It’s a tool. It’s the people that design the system that hold ultimate responsibility.
All the things you say about things having been tried previously applies just as much to socialism, Marxism and other forms of non capitalism economies.
Slow incremental improvements pay off dividends in just the same way that slow incremental worsening has made things worse.
I think faster broader changes would help more, but that doesn’t make them easier to implement.
Yes, there is a despair with how the world is worsening. We have a lot of things to blame for it. Facebook, trump tax laws, tax havens etc. Yet people continue to use facebook and continue to vote for Trump.
What needs to be done is fight and push for better candidates and better policies. Many are doing that but not at the level that is required. When was the last time you went to a political meeting? Or a rally or march? Those questions are rhetorical. I know I haven’t been in a long time. We have become complacent and despondent as a society. Things are harder, but also easier. We have lots of conveniences now that were unthinkable at the times you mentioned where things were subjectively better in the past.
Things were not better for women and minorities. Things were not better for child workers. Things were not better for lgbtqi people. Slaves were not better off by having a UBI. Please be aware that ubi means you have no obligation to work. Any income from work would be on top of the UBI. With advancement in productivity. I don’t see how society will function without UBI or cutting hours significantly. Jobs in transport, logistics etc will all go. AI will kill many more in communication.
Exactly - bad implementations of communism, bad implementations of capitalism, bad implementations of whatever utopian form of government we can dream up in theory, all suffer b/c they are bad implementations, even if in theory they are perfect. Beyond that, some theories may themselves just be “bad” overall, if the theory is too far removed from reality.
One problem that the USA has found for itself is having allowed itself to devolve to become a 2-party system, where no other parties matter. This is a fundamental phase shift b/c at that point the parties no longer try to accomplish positive aims, and instead merely try to “not” be the other side. Biden won b/c he wasn’t Trump, Trump won b/c he wasn’t Hilary Clinton, Obama won b/c he wasn’t Romney, or McCain, Bush won b/c… well it goes back many, many decades. Afaik, no democracy has ever survived that.
Nor does it seem to matter even, b/c regardless of who wins, the wealthy are in charge. School shootings are a perfect example of that - our CHILDREN are being MURDERED… and nobody gives a damn. I recall one poll result where 80% of the American people were for some form of gun control, and that rose to >90% of responsible, registered gun owners! Also that was a decade ago, so surely after all that we’ve seen since, it could be even higher? There is nothing that engenders bipartisan efforts in Congress these days - but 80-90% agreement among the American populace is astounding!!?!! However, it does not matter one bit what we want - b/c the lobbies want something else there, and they are willing to pay 10-fold more than the counter-lobby, hence children continue to be murdered all across the nation (typically in poorer schools though).
In addition to being horrific, that example also reveals that our democracy is beyond broken, it is no longer “democracy” at all, but a plutocracy where regardless of whoever votes for whatever goal to be done, the rich control what actually gets done, regardless.
So to fix something like that… assuming that it even could be fixed, would take… I have no idea. But going to a political rally will not begin to cover it. We may literally have a civil war coming up, or at least it is highly expected (among experts, it is said) to have some kind of “constitutional crisis event”, much like the January 6 protests where Donald Trump attempted the most ineffective coup that I have ever heard of, yet still was solidly an attempt.
And one potential reason for all that is that whereas the wealthy previous wanted to use middle-class workers to be the underpinnings of society - doctors, researchers, lawyers, engineers, etc. - now they gloves are coming off, and they would have divide the world into the haves vs. have-nots. That CPG Grey Rules for Rulers really helped me see this clearly, though also depresses me:-).
Yes, that’s a great response. I would disagree on some points but agree overall.
What people fail to see is that all these systems are just that, systems we use as a tool. Its up to us to design the system such that it benefits more people. However, those that design the systems have an incentive to design them to be reelected rather than what’s best. We need to overcome that. One way that can help is sunset clauses on bills. They expire after a set time and need to be devoted on. It should reduce the effect of interest groups, or at least require more funding for them to be able to intervene multiple tines over multiple years with more and more politicians and beurocrats. Basically, reduces their investment. Next one is term limits.
Its a great video, by the way, I hadn’t seen it before. It does emphasize why democracy is better, but what might be missed is capitalism as part of democracy is what also provides that extra wealth that mininoses the risk of revolt and increases number of stakeholders or power brokers.
Those whonarguse socialism or communism forget that there is still a ruling class working in their own interest and that ruling by committee is slow and inefficient. Just ask anyone on a committee.
I agree, the wealthy have an outsize influence. The wealthy is not one person. It is a constant rotation of power brokers coming in and our of power. Take the USA, the 1% is 3 million people. Sure, there are a large number who stay at the top and corrupt society with their interestd, but they don’t control all the levers. They focus their efforts on controlling the interests that will benefit them most, usually taxation.
Gun law is a great example of people wanting change but not having consensus on that change. However, much ofnthst change was thwarted nut the NRA using membership moneybfron the same people that claim to want change. We now know they also took money from Russia, in an effort to destabilise. Russia understands that a large mass of people effects vhsbge. They have weaponised it. Those seeking to stabilise and improve the world need to do the same.
The fact that Trump, who staged a shitty coup, is a horrible person and has clear mental instability is on line to be reelected is a shitty endorsement of current politics. That’s not the fault of democracy as a concept, that’s the fault of bad rules, like the electoral college, like campaign finance rules, like citizens first etc. All of which the democrats have not touched, ever.
I don’t see a civil war coming. Society is too comfortable(even if financially very tough) for people to revolt violently end masse. I do expect some form of constitutional crisis. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened after the coup. Many of the problems identified by that, remain uncorrected. If something is tradition and not codified, it is useless as a protector of democracy.
I think the complexity of society and the intersecting interests of so many people and groups is what makes civil war so much less likely in developed countries. I can’t think of the last time it has happened. The closest thing is middle east or eastern Europe, but that was fallout from global power struggles more than general unrest.
Capitalism does not incentivize people to get more, it incentivizes a very exclusive few to get it all.
The rise in productivity, wages and wealth in most countries that adopted it would bef to differ. Yes, there is more wealth created at the top, but that can be corrected with other policies.
You’re confusing capitalism with communism.
UBI would also help with redistribution and make society more efficient overall.
UBI is a band-aid, not a solution. It’s a way to keep a broken system working for a little bit longer until it’s no longer politically expedient to help those in need. It props up capitalism in the guise of giving people a leg up.
It’s selling people bootstraps so they can lift themselves up by them.
UBI is not a band aid. It would be a complete overhaul of our economic system with a major change in how we value people, time products and services.
It is not a way to prop up capitalism, but a way to use capitalism for better equality and minimum standards of living.
What you’re describing could just as well not be capitalism. Why cling to capitalism?
Practicality for one. How do you change the world economy when they couldn’t even get together to manage a respiratory disease by wearing masks and isolating for 2 to 3 weeks.
There is nothing inherently wrong with capitalism as a concept. It’s how it’s abuses. Regulation and rules to circumbet that can help.
Communism doesn’t work. China shows some totalitarianism works, but I don’t want to lose personal freedoms for the greater good.
What system would you suggest would address capitalisms faults yet has a chance to actually happen?
Practicality for one. How do you change the world economy when they couldn’t even get together to manage a respiratory disease by wearing masks and isolating for 2 to 3 weeks.
You could say the same about UBI. Proper implementation requires wealthy to give up their wealth. Do you see that practically happening?
There is nothing inherently wrong with capitalism as a concept. It’s how it’s abuses. Regulation and rules to circumbet that can help.
Except that the system inherently causes capital accumulation and rewards abusive behavior. The kind of rules and regulations you’re thinking of work against capitalism and the wealthy are allowed to circumvent those rules anyway (see how they avoid paying tax).
Communism doesn’t work. China shows some totalitarianism works, but I don’t want to lose personal freedoms for the greater good.
I’m not going to get into the details of what communism actually is supposed to be or how the USSR or China are not necessarily the way to communism. I’m just going to point out that socialism does not have to go the way of USSR or China.
What system would you suggest would address capitalisms faults yet has a chance to actually happen?
Socialism. Not the Leninist way but the Marxist way. Marx described socialism as a process, a series of steps necessary to dismantle capitalism and establish communism. He didn’t go into details on what those steps are or how many steps they may or may not be. So to be true to Marx I’m not saying “let’s completely throw capitalism in the bin and go into planned economy” but rather lets treat it as a process. We don’t need to establish communism, but lets take step by step towards a better future.
And as such I think the smallest first step, which in many ways is already a huge step, is changing the ownership of companies. Everyone working at the company is also the owner of the company and gets a say in how the company operates. That change alone would improve working conditions and arguably have companies do less shady shit. But realistically I don’t see it happening any more than I see UBI happening in the way that you imagine.
UBI can be changed gradually. It loses some of it’s efficacy in distribution but it doesn’t need to be revolution. It can be evolution. It also does not mean a high risk of capital flight for the first movers. This means countries or areas can do it incrementally, one at a time, rather than a complete global shift at once. The wealthy won’t want to give up their wealth, that’s a given. That is the case for any change we plan for better distribution, so it’s not really an argument against or for any change.
Yes, it favours capital accumulation and rewards poor behavior. So what I have suggested adding is a method that leads to better wealth distribution and to disincentivise the negative externalities. Correct the flaws, so to speak. There is no perfect system that cannot be exploited. It’s a case of risk mitigation not elimination.
Socialism may stop companies doing shady shit, but will it make them.less competitive on the world stage? Remember, they are competing with non socialist countries initially. As you mention, it would be a means of transition. Yet, every country that has tried communism has failed, often with devastating consequences for the people there. Our world and nation state economies are much more complex and intertwined than before, yet efficient use of resources was not possible then. The problem is not the theory, it is people. Power corrupts.
I don’t have a problem with changing the ownership structure. However, can you point to any cooperative that was able to scale in the way that modern companies in a capitalist system do? Cooperatives exist and on a local scale can be beneficial. On a macro scale, they are less efficient and society as a whole is worse off for that loss of efficiency. That is the problem. Capitalism priorities profits, which require growth. The key is not to ensure broader ownership, but rather broader distribution of the wealth and profits created by that. We already have examples of that with share disbursement as a reward. Perhaps we could look at that being a regulated norm, in tandem with pensions payments etc.
The only point you have going for capitalism is the supposed productivity, but any system that has a way to reward performance can do the same just fine. There is a range of economic models between capitalism and communism, several of them very market based.
A good example which i always felt would work well with minimal systemic change is the free money system (freigeldsystem), which is largely private enterprise. The big differences are that all land and natural resources are owned by the public/the state, leasing it out to companies; and negative interest making the hoarding of wealth impossible.
These key changes give the public a large degree of power over the private sector, since they could simply choose not to lease any land to companies who are not compliant with the public needs, and largely remove the capitalist class - the owners, the profit parasites, the shareholders, the ones living off their hoarded wealth - from the system
I like this concept. I do think it would generally slow resource extraction because companies would be more wary to invest in the large infrastructure if they don’t have perpetual ownership of the land. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing, just an outcome I think is likely.
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This is a great write up. I think the problem with economic theory discussions is it is an extremely complex and nuanced topic. Saying ‘capitalism bad’ is popular, but not very constructive.
I think one big point that gets bungled in these economic debates is markets. That’s supposed to be the shining light of capitalism because of how efficient markets are at allocating scarce resources. The point that I think is missed, is that markets can be used very effectively outside of a capitalist system. They need to be designed for other economic systems, but they can easily handle the biggest argument with socialism; centralized control.
I feel that is a major point missing in these debates and I just wanted to give it some attention.
Widespread UBI in a capitalistic system would see all prices immediately rise to extract that UBI money and go back to its old ways immediately after that.
And of course the tax system should be changed, but many millions in lobbying and campaign money is used to get it in its current state and keep it there. Everything is for sale, including the law.
We need natural batteries like solar power lifting water from a lake into a reservoir so that when we need that energy and the sun isn’t making it, released water does
A cubic meter of water above your roof has the storing capacity of a AAA cell. That’s why you need huge, massive damms to store any significant amount of power. But unfortunately it’s not flexible enough (you need mountains nearby) or dense enough.
There are already companies making thermal storage systems to store excess energy. They heat sand up to about 500 degrees when there’s excess power and then convert it back to electricity or just use the heat directly for heating water or living spaces.
There’s also companies (googles do nothing but link to YouTube videos) working on scaling this down to about the size of a water heater.
What about storing energy as potential energy using some high density objects. This may work… Right?? gravitricity Check out their work.
Yes, suspended weights, also spinning flywheels, hot salt, hot sand
There’s options besides pumped hydro, hydrogen and batteriesIt’s slithly better the more dense the material, but that’s basically the same thing. You could say that depending on the location, using water is much more practical.
A much more interesting one I saw was the molten salt ones, where basically you store the energy as heat in a sealed place, and then when you need it, you use that heat to run turbines.
Interesting concept, thanks for sharing
I don’t think it’s feasible.
Yes this exists and it’s called pumped storage hydroelectricity
I did some work at a place called The hollow mountain that does this. But seeing as it looked like an underground James Bond bad guy base and I was a rope access mook in a boiler suit, I felt like I could die at any moment by tuxedo clad hero.
It wasn’t solar they used to power pump the water back up though. They just, hmm I want to say, bought cheap electricity when no one was using it.This is the imperial base from Andor, right? Cool
Holeey sheet it is! I didn’t know that! Thanks.
With an energy conversion efficiency of usually 75 to 80 % they are really efficient and don’t have as much energy loss as other types of energy storage. It’s a simple, but powerful concept and I find it beautiful. However, there is some concern regarding their impact on the local ecosystem. Not only do they need huge water reservoirs, which are artificially created and therefore might impact nearby rivers and even fish migration, but the way they are sealed with concrete or asphalt also disallows the development of riparian vegetation. From an ecological perspective they are basically dead zones.
Still, considering several alternatives, I think it’s one of the better options. Although it’s not cheap to build those, which is a problem in our current capitalitic society
Am I the only one noticing a lot of conservative economic priests in here? Is this normal?
