Cheap energy being framed as some kind of problem is a great demonstration of why we need a free press that isn’t solely owned by billionaires
They could always just close their coal power plants. Idk why they don’t.
My guess is that in a climate like Germany’s, solar isn’t consistent enough to provide the steady baseline power that coal plants can.
One of the complexities of power infrastructure is that demand must be met instantaneously and exactly. Coal and solar typically occupy different roles in a grid’s power sources. Coal plants are slow to start, but very consistent, so they provide baseline power. Solar is virtually instantaneous, but inconsistent, so it’s better suited to handle the daily fluctuations.
So, in a place like Germany, even in abundance, solar can’t realistically replace coal until we have a good way of storing power to act as a buffer. Of course, nuclear is a fantastic replacement for coal, but we all know how Germany’s politicians feel about it…
We also know building nuclear takes 20 years and costs more than building thrice the capacity in renewables + Germany has no long-term nuclear storage, only temporary one’s a la Simpsons.
Germany had 17 active nuclear plants in 2011 and decommissioned them all by 2023.
They were already past their expiry date. Germany would face the same shit France is facing with their old reactors.
You are correct that when you build one new plant every 25 years it takes a long time to spool the industry, the skills, the testing and the manufacturing capability up to build new nuclear.
In countries that regularly build new nuclear it takes 5 years, comparable to any other power source. When France when through their mass-conversion to nuclear in the 70s (following the oil crisis), they put 2-3 new nuclear plants into operation every year.
All new western nuclear is in “production hell”. We don’t build them often enough to retain the skill set or for industry to dare invest. So they become massive state-run enterprises.
If we were serious on solving our climate crisis we would build nuclear power plans en masse.
We also know building nuclear takes 20 years and costs more than building thrice the capacity in renewables
Nonsense, https://nanonuclearenergy.com/, https://www.nuscalepower.com/, http://smart-nuclear.com/, etc.
Coulnd’t we use solar to pump water into reservoirs, and then let the water flow through hydroelectrical dams when we need the electricity?
[yes](> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity)
Taking into account conversion losses and evaporation losses from the exposed water surface, energy recovery of 70–80% or more can be achieved. This technique is currently the most cost-effective means of storing large amounts of electrical energy, but capital costs and the necessity of appropriate geography are critical decision factors in selecting pumped-storage plant sites.
Oh wow, I had no idea this existed. Awesome!
Wait Are these not common where you are?
We have a lot of dams, but I haven’t heard that we were pumping water into the reservoirs.
We also don’t have, like, fields of solar panels, as far as I know. I think it’s too cloudy here. But we have wind turbines, especially in coastal areas.
I guess I meant not all of them and especially not at the same time but that wasn’t clear in my first post. I understand that a baseline is needed but if during daytime they’re generating excess constantly then shutting down a few wouldn’t hurt. Especially since Germany is one of the biggest offenders in the world when it comes to coal. Storage is definitely a concern but in case of surges there’s other power from neighboring countries that can help with the demand. Sodium ion batteries are looking like a good possibility.
Because they would have brownouts overnight and when the weather was bad.
Obviously…
Because as the article says, consumers use more power during non-solar hours.
The Ukraine war has also caused oil and gas prices to rise in Europe, so all alternatives to those need to remain on the table until Russia fucks off.
because solar panels are not a controllable energy source, solar is great until there’s a cloud or it’s nighttime, coal on the other hand is a controllable energy source. Since we can’t effectively store energy we have to be constantly producing enough for the whole population, it’s a really hard job!
Not enough preparation for saving energy overnight.
Germany it’s more the Russian gas they get. Shit hit the fan for them when they invaded Ukraine. Germany was like fuuuuuuuu
Well it is a problem, sort of. It’s a failing of the market.
But it does open up another market for energy storage so it will save itself through regular marker forces.
But we absolutely want energy suppliers to make money off solar (over a year) or they will simply stop building more of it. I’m not sure if the German state is losing money on this though, in which case they absolutely need to build more storage.
I’m getting really worried about how energy is going to be generated in winter once solar and batteries completely dominate energy production in the summer.
But it does open up another market for energy storage so it will save itself through regular marker forces.
This is the market working properly.
Well yes.
But having to pay people to take a good/service from you is really/ really weird. Not really sure how to describe it.
Happens all the time. My employer pays a company to come collect our e-waste, which they then sell to a recycler who strips it and sells the recycled metals. One company’s trash is often another one’s treasure. Or better yet, one company’s liability is another company’s asset. Excess electricity is a liability to the electric company so they pay to get rid of it. The amount they’re paying for disposal is less than the potential cost of keeping the liability around (equipment failure in this case).
But you company isn’t producing e waste.
To have a good that is both sold for profit and you pay someone to take it is weird.
It doesn’t matter anyway, we both agree market forces will solve the problem.
Build sufficient storage capacity and prices will not turn negative.
Huh? What do you think a parking space is?
The thing is that it does represent some problems. First of all if Germany has already reached the limit of what it can do with solar then that’s sobering news because it is far from 100% sustainable. More solar than it can use? We should ask why. Not enough storage capacity: that’s a problem when consumers use more power in solar off-hours. And if energy prices become too volatile or even negative, that could harm the non-solar energy provider who provide the backup that solar requires.
I get the anti-corporatist message and all, but really we should look a little more deeply than our favorite narrative if we want to understand things. Reddit also needs to realize that business pages cater to business interests and investors, so not every headline is framed in terms of consumer benefit. News outlets can publish articles for business readers whether or not they are owned and puppeted by them.
Reddit?
it an old site like, kinda like Digg. all the brains left about a year or so ago when they made some horrible business choices and then IPO’d. a lot of the users came here to lemmy.
The problem isn’t that the energy is too cheap, it’s that there’s too much of it, which is why it’s so cheap. An electrical grid can only support so much power and there is no cost effective way to store enough energy to run the grid for any appreciable amount of time, so it all must be used or else the system becomes unstable.
That’s so. At the same time I’m seeing heaps of stories about me ways to cheaply store power with cheap and common materials lately, so it seems like more of an engineering and infrastructure problem
What you’re hearing about is lab experiments. Moving something from the lab to something in production, with the reliability and life span required to participate on the public grid is hard.
I can hear Nikola Tesla rolling over in his grave
Can we use him to generate power?
Hook those coffins up to generators for infinite free electricity.
Make it output only DC and watch it churn!
Not to be too much of a contrarian, but it sorta is a problem if it is too cheap to support the people that are required to repair it and the parts/replacements for stuff that has failed. Plus, in 20-30 years you are going to have to have enough money on hand to replace todays panels, which if energy costs are almost free/negative, you might not. These are somewhat solvable problems (make energy costs just a tax to support the grid and cut out profit from the equation for the public good), but it is a bit of an issue that probably needs to be planned for.
Then it’s not “too cheap”. Charge the price it takes to maintain the production.
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I mean… Good? Shouldn’t that be the goal, electricity at no cost to the people?
Won’t someone think of the poor capitalists who can’t love better lives then those around them!
/s, just in case.
Well in a very basic way, more solar than we can use means there is waste. Too many panels produced and installed. And if solar generation capacity is going to waste, that means Germany doesn’t have enough storage to keep it in, and that’s a problem. And who knows what negative energy prices will do to the other power producers who back up solar (which, you know, doesn’t produce at night). That would be a problem. So there is a little more to this than just the headline. Also, Reddit needs to learn that business stories are written for investors and business readers and they don’t frame everything in terms of broad human interest.
No such thing as too many solar panels, only not enough storage.
There’s no upper limit on either really. But why would you ever install more than you can store? That’s still waste. Solar panels have nonzero cost and environmental impact.
It is in some cases economical to install way too many solar panels, because production is variable. If you install enough for 100% production on a sunny day, then on a cloudy day you only have 70% of what you need. So instead you install 150% of what you need, so you never go below 100%.
Then the question is what to do with the excess during sunny days. Storage didn’t used to be a problem because early solar adapters could sell it to other parts of the grid who are still using fossil fuels, and fossil fuel production plants can ramp down as needed (natural gas especially).
It’s only now that renewables are becoming such a large portion of the grid that it’s getting difficult to ramp the remaining fossil fuels down and up fast enough that we need to look into storage. Current storage options are extremely expensive though, similar in cost to a solar panel installation (at least on the residential side).
It costs something to build and maintain the infrastructure to distribute power. Typically that cost is recovered through payments for the generation of the power, which becomes a problem if generation costs get too low. It suggests that we should probably consider a different model of paying for that infrastructure now that the reality of generation has changed.
Oh well. I guess they will just have to municipalize the grid.
No. That’s like saying the UK has too much wind power because our prices occasionally go negative. What Germany might not have enough of is battery and other storage
Did you know that the best way we currently have to store energy are dams? In most dams you can install a pump to take water and store it higher, then when energy is needed you simply open the turbine.
The problem with dams or pumped storage is it only works in specific places where you have a higher place to put lots of water.
Yep! I suppose we could build a huge Tank or something XD
Decommissioned mines can be used as gravity batteries.
I would be all for that, but I think a lot of smaller tanks of compressed air might be better or easier.
A dam would be a huge natural tank. I can’t think of a similar structure that is safe enough to prevent widespread destruction.
Seems like dams should only be used in those situations then…
You need a certain kind of landscape for that. I think the UK only has a couple of pumped storage power stations due to lack of suitable sites
Pretty sure geographically germany still has a few nice spots for it. Allgau, Schwarzwald, Pfälzerwald …
It’s just all these damn people with their damn towns and livelyhoods that are in the way.
Hydrogen and Methane Power-to-gas can store more power for longer than hydro pump
I’m not sure why you’re getting downvoted, but companies are looking to use hydrogen fuel cells for 18 wheelers for just this reason. They won’t have to stop for gas even on long trips because the energy density is very high and the weight is less.
Here are a few charts about it from the DOE: https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/articles/fuel-cell-and-battery-electric-vehicles-compared
The downvotes are because almost all of the global hydrogen production is made either with natural gas, as a byproduct of oil drilling or through coal.
In its current state, it is a fake green product pushed by the oil industry to hamper the transition.
Ah - that makes sense, thank you. You’re correct, but I work in the aerospace industry with hydrogen fuel cells and green hydrogen is all I’m familiar with, but I realize now that this was bias on my part.
Is hydrolysis not cost-effective? If we have excess electricity, as in this case, can we not use that to get hydrogen?
On the recent lemmy topic of using up votes and down votes incorrectly.
Literally just stating a verifiable fact, not in support or against the technology, and I get down voted lol.
huh i hadn’t heard of this one? I went to a dam last year and that’s what the guide told us…
I think it’s the physical size of the reservoir that is the limiting factor. You can’t reasonable expand most reservoirs, but it’s relatively easy to create new hydrogen/methane storage tanks.
Yes but pumped storage is about 80% round trip efficiency vs power to x which is barely touching 20% out of the lab. And power to X needs an epic fuckton of very clean water, which also isn’t easy to find.
At huge inefficiency loss though. Denmark is probably further with this than anywhere else in the world and even they are sputtering on getting this going.
Seems like a great profit opposite grid storage!
Oh no, it’s too bad Germany isn’t surrounded by other countries it could sell that excess power to!
Germany has lots of grid connections to other countries, and are pretty surely selling off what they can get rid of, but France has nuclear, Sweden and Norway have hydro, Denmark has wind and solar. All these markets are also currently negative. We’ve had negative prices for almost 14 days now, but somehow they went into plus today here in Denmark, although we (personally) had lots of sun and could sell 61,9 kWh from our solar panels.
I just checked, and the prices are near identical between: Germany, Belgium, Poland, Austria, France, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
Oh no, it’s too bad Germany isn’t surrounded by other countries it could sell that excess power to!Your sarcasm is misplaced.
Gee, you mean some internet rando didn’t figure out a solution that no one in German energy could think of?
I think he was suggesting that it’s not actually a problem and this whole article was penned by someone with an agenda to paint renewables as bad.
Which is a totally reasonable assumption honestly.
Wait. You know they were being sarcastic right?
I thought you really just wanted to show your knowledge until that last part.
Of course it was sarcastic, which is exactly why it doesn’t make any sense. The sarcasm is what’s idiotic about the comment I replied to. Because it indicates that Germany isn’t using obvious options. Of course they are using those options, as are all other European countries.
Edit:
I’ve changed the last part of my comment above to show that I responded to the original comment understanding it as sarcasm.
It probably wouldn’t be negative prices if they could. I’m guessing it can’t be sold easily due to distance or some other factors? Which is why it maybe has to be used. But I’m just guessing.
The US is split into three power grids: Eastern interconnected, Western interconnected, and Texan (because Texas’ strident Independence forbid them from connecting to other states, even though their power grid has failed spectacularly in recent years). (I bring up these three delineations to show that energy can be transferred over pretty large distances.)
As we know, the US is a geographically large country. But technically, power can be transferred from the middle of Utah, across Nevada, and into California. So power transmission distances can be pretty large.
There is energy loss for sure, so it’s not always especially efficient. But if Germany is generating so much solar power that it’s impacting their market costs, that shouldn’t be a massive hurdle. In essence, they should be able to sell electricity to Poland or Austria or other neighboring countries.
Maybe there are other reasons that restrict Germany from selling their surplus power. But I don’t think distance is it.
The thing is, it is not a German-only topic. There is the same discussion ongoing in Austria. There is a lot of solar already in place. That is really great! Now we need good storage solutions as a next step
Interesting. Yes, this is a good problem to have.
The whole European grid is connected (which is a miraculous feat). And yes, there is a European market for energy where countries can sell surplus and buy in high demand situations.
I don’t know how EU grids interoperate so this could be irrelevant:
There is a fear, with this sort of thing, of falling into the innovators curse. By moving first/fastest (especially when it comes to infrastructure) you make all the mistakes, have the oldest equipment, and the most technical debt. Now if Germany is able to make a market (that didn’t previously exist) out of this excess daytime generation they could get undercut by a neighbor who learned from all of Germany’s mistakes and who bought newer, more efficient panels. Which would effectively take Germany’s costs associated with making the new market and set the money on fire.
Basically the fear of capitalism can be as detrimental as the capitalism.
Fuck that title. No such thing as too many solar panels. The only thing that is bad is how the energy is used or if it’s wasted. Free energy should mean algae production which would mean carbon negativity. Negative energy price should mean negative carbon emissions, get on it.
You are right, this is BS.
I recently researched this and Germany’s grid is quite “smart” (the oldest technologies involved, such as DECABIT or VERSACOM over PLC, very much predate the term “smart grid” but whatever) and power plants and households are connected for production and load control. Power plants are required to participate but households can use a load management system for water tank heating (the basic premise is that specific frequency impulses are sent over the power grid for primitive (originally relay-based!) logic in DECABIT meters to switch depending on the assigned device group, and meters count in lower-price mode while the load is activated for a guaranteed number of hours each day; you can manually override the switch for expensive on-demand water heating) and/or HVAC (here, a smart thermostat is usually used that gets real-time energy prices and decides based on its temperature range settings if it saves money to run heating/cooling).
People in Texas apparently hate this (muh freedom), and look how reliable their grid is!
Anyway, solar, unlike coal or nuclear, is absolutely capable of going off-grid if necessary. There is an MPPT system in their inverters that usually works to operate the panels at the optimal voltage & current so that it can suck the most power out of them but it can be overridden to work at below 100% efficiency, or even 0%. This will cause the panels to run with no current draw and get about 20% hotter but they are designed to withstand this. Similarly, wind turbines can be braked, water can be passed outside turbine shafts and so can pressurized steam if you really need to cut production quickly. Still, this is an emergency condition, it is preferred to use pumped hydro (responds in 1 minute, limited capacity) or batteries (respond in seconds, very limited capacity) or lower coal/gas-based production (responds in 3-20 minutes for as long as you wish) or load-side management to regulate the grid, as it wastes no power.
The system is very complex and robust, the frequency (the variable most dependent on production/load balance) only dips below 49.8 Hz about once per a few years (the emergency value that was reached in February 2021 in Texas and can only be sustained for minutes before total blackout is -1% from nominal (49.5 or 59.4, respectively) and has never been touched in Europe’s modern history).
(You’d think it would be voltage what falls in case of too little power but it can be readjusted quite easily with switched transformer taps and, oddly enough, reactive power management (connecting a few capacitor/inductor banks to mains) when necessary, however frequency control is the difficult part.)The grid needs the supply and demand to be balanced for the power to be stable. Otherwise you get fluctuations in voltage and frequency which are both bad for anything connected to the grid.
There can absolutely be an oversupply of energy. We need to either find ways to store that surplus energy, or use it for something positive like desalination or carbon capture.
There’s been more solar and battery storage capacity installed this year+last year in USA than all prior years combined. And those investments are happening because the return of investment is huge. Those batteries are there to smooth out the supply and helps keep the grid stable.
Free energy should mean algae production
This is a jump I’m not understanding. Do you mean that energy having no cost would mean that the electricity generated can be used to make algae? Or that it’s a byproduct of?
Do you mean that energy having no cost would mean that the electricity generated can be used to make algae?
Yes. Make algae with energy that produces no carbon dioxide = carbon sink.
There’s just no economic incentive to do so. (yet?)
The economic advantage is that our grandchildren might be able to have an economy if we don’t crash and burn this place before we die.
I agree. Unfortunately that is too abstract a factor for most peoples present investment decisions.
Exactly! Put a real price of carbon and this will start to chance.
Germany actually spends money to stop Denmark producing power on windy days when prices get too low. Instead we could be making hydrogen and storing it in so many creative ways
Its ‘free’ anyway so there should be no concern about how much of it is lost in conversion
Nothing is free. Equipment costs money and time to build, operate, maintain, and repair.
The equipment to harvest energy, is built already and is practically being held inactive, because companies can’t make money off it. If we could invest in ways to convert even some part of that excess energy into energy that could be sold later, I can’t see why this should not be feasible.
The way I see it, companies are interested in making money on energy and not supplying affordable energy
Maybe we’ll get to the point. This news just shows us, that solar power can really be very impactful, even in not-so-sunny Germany. And that we’ve reached a turning point, where we can no longer ‘just’ put up more solar panels, but also start developping systems to store this excess energy in an economically feasible manner.
But actually, that’s nothing very new either. At least for home owners, who just put solar panels on their roofs, also investing in battery storage to use most of the produced energy themselves has been the economic strategy for a few years, since the price gap between what you got for putting energy into the grid, and what you had to pay for taking energy out of the grid was the only thing left that (economically) incentivized people to install solar power ever since the so called “Einspeisevergütung” subsidies have been dropped.
I imagine solar panels and wind turbines will become a lot more expensive when batteries (and other energy storage options) become available, as they will be a lot more useful. It only makes sense to build as many as possible before the storage option become available
Could you elaborate how to grow algae with electricity?
Turn excess electricity back into heat and light.
Input heat, light, water, air, and nutrients.
Output oxygen and carbon (algae biomass).
It gets even more absurd. The southern states blocked building large power lines to transport cheap wind energy south. Now they struggle because the chea renewable energy cannot go there. So while there is plenty of renewables in the north the south still runs coal plants to provide local energy. But then the people in the north have to pay for “network fees” because the South couldnt take their energy.
Because of this it was suggested to split the German energy market in two, where the south which fought against renewables would have to pay the actual electricity costs instead of leeching of the North that properly build up renewables. This was fought teeth and nails because the South of Germany is like Texas but with an even worse superiority complex.
Physicists are warry about splitting atoms; historians are warry about splitting Germany.
Idk, we could have saved millions of people if we had done this in 1918
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Yeah there are already a few splits. The Aldi equator, the Weißwurstäquator.
“South Germany” Du meinst Bayern, oder ist Hessen auch dabei? xD
Hauptsächlich Bayern, aber Hessen und BaWü haben sich mWn. bei Netzausbau und Ausbau erneuerbarer Energien bisher auch nicht mit Ruhm beckleckert.
Aktuell wird doch ne Stromtrasse durch BW gebaut. Diese lächerliche Nummer von wegen, wir hätten gerne Strom, aber keine Trasse, war eine astreine CSU Nummer.
Too much clean energy that is nearly free sounds like a much better type of problem to solve than most.
Sounds like Germany can start exporting said energy and make even more money. How is this a bad thing?
It’s bad because the owning class has less control.
Oh no!
Anyway…
It must be a lot of work to see everything through this lens, all the time.
If you look at the states surrounding Germany, and the inter connectors they have, you’ll understand better why this isn’t just a simple thing to do and why it doesn’t relate to income level differences.
The only region that has managed to build a perfectly integrated spot market for electricity is Scandinavia. Every time you want to enable something like this, you’re in difficult negotiation territory; politics, unions, local government, NIMBYism, technical difficulties etc play a huge part.
This is why the US is working so hard to stop renewables. Rich people don’t make any money when power is free.
Sure they do all they need to do is a bit a regulatory capture and free electricity for them means more profits while you continue to pay the same or higher prices.
Good. Cheap electric will help more transition from more polluting energy types. Electric cars, ovens, steel, etc.
Stop burning coal then
German power plants communicate with each other and coal power can go to 50% capacity in 15 minutes, during which the excess power can be sucked up by pumped hydro, for <1 minute long deviations there is enough battery and flywheel storage too. And most people in Germany have utility-controlled tank water heaters, which can be turned on not just at fixed hours but also based on the grid status (this causes the meters to go into Low-Tariff mode too), and sometimes even smart thermostats, enabling remote load management.
In emergency power excess, solar can go off grid safely or brakes can be applied to wind turbines, which wastes power but is preferred to overheating transformers due to higher mains frequency (yes, power overproduction causes the frequency to go up, not so much the voltage).
But maybe the coal lobby keeps convincing the distributor that operating plants below 80% doesn’t do their workers justice, or some nonsense like that
… Consumer water heaters in Germany are built in as demand shaving??? That is so damn cool.
Oh boy, you just triggered my nerd infodump mode. Brace yourself.
Disclaimer: I only researched the practical applications in the Czech Republic. I’d guess Slovakia’s situation is 99% similar, the neighboring Germany is 95% similar (just with more solar and no nuclear power) and most of Europe is 80% similar (with varying energy mixes). Similarly to Teletext, I am pretty sure Alec from Technology Connections (YouTuber from Chicago) would have made a video on this if it was widespread where he lives.
Basically yes. Residential boilers in Germany are part of load management.
Technically, the electric water heaters themselves are not “smart” in any way, they are just resistors and thermostats in a water tank. The “smartest” units you’ll find use a decades-old trick with two thermostats and heating filaments to achieve a larger virtual tank size. Turn them on, and they’ll do their best to maintain a steady 70 °C (or whatever) at the output. Similarly, gas furnaces are all rather dumb too. There are two contacts on the units; bridge them to allow at most 100 mA to flow, which will energize a contactor (big relay) to switch the heating element or signal to the furnace electronics to go through the ignition routine. Air conditioners typically have another contact for cooling.
This is great: the protocol basically every heater uses could not be simpler and that allows anyone to build a thermostat, so available products range from the most basic bimetallic units (temperature knob and manual day (T)/night (T–5°C)/off switch) to AI Smart Home Automation IoT Buzzword Salad™ devices. The most common kind nowadays has two AA cells, a thermistor, a simple LCD display, rubber buttons to temporarily adjust the temperature manually, and a flap to reveal more buttons that set the time and weekday, create the weekly temperature schedule, adjust hysteresis, start Vacation Mode etc. There is either a set of wired contacts and a latching relay for the aforementioned wired “protocol”, or a wireless transmitter that controls a wall-plug-based receiver close to the furnace.However, a ripple control system receiver can be connected in series to the thermostat, only allowing heating at certain times set in your energy contract. Or more often, people hook it up to the boiler. All energy you consume at these times is metered separately and up to 2x cheaper so the system saves you money at rare discomfort, you can use a switch to override it at any time if you accept the extra cost.
Various companies use ripple control system receivers for energy intensive, time-independent operations, such as
- water tower pumps
- baking, annealing furnaces
- computationally heavy tasks (rendering)
- heating water for swimming pools
- charging electric vehicles
All such uses have different tariffs, hours (pltheirntractual limits to unscheduled switches) and thus need different RCS channels. Also, RCS receivers can control municipal lighting etc., and at higher frequencies that don’t propagate too far, power plants would call each other but that’s obsolete, now we use that band for smart city LAN (traffic lights, various sensors, parking ticket vending machines). This is called Power Line Communication (PLC) and the railway uses it too. I’ve seen a claim that such system caused an aircraft (Invicta International Flight 405 on 1973-04-10) to crash into the Alps after misinterpreting it as a radio beacon at Basel Airport but that person did not cite sources (interference was likely involved but nobody else claimed it was from PLC).
First dual-tariff systems used switching clocks inside the tamper-proof electric meters. This did not allow for regulation so a simple device with mechanical logic (rotary decoder of series signal) was introduced, with a starting tone (3 seconds of an approx. 250 Hz “tone” on top of the mains voltage) followed by a series of 44 gaps or tones (1 second long, 0.5 s apart) that signalled on/off states for each of the 44 channels. This was later revised into a “1 of 4” + “1 of 8” coding for 32 device groups, each then having 16 channels controlled by 2 bits each, with “10” meaning ON, “01” meaning OFF, any other means ERROR; ABORT RECEPTION. This division of the 44 pulses into groups of 4+8+2x16 allowed for 512 channels and more robustness. This protocol from the 1980s is used to this day, and so is a similar one in Germany called DECABIT. The later VERSACOM, used in both countries, then uses proprietary licensed data schemes with up to 128 bits and allows addressing individual customers. It always starts with 4 “1” bits so that dumb receivers expecting their “1 of 4” code (0001, 0010, 0100 or 1000) abort reception. VERSACOM receivers have clocks synced by special transmissions and keep a regularly broadcast weekly schedule in memory so that the bandwidth is free for the old protocol commands at switching times. Every household is assigned one of the 512+ channels and these groups switch minutes apart to prevent jumps in mains load. For some reason, frequencies used to send this signal sometimes differ between or even within control regions and sometimes not, and include 🟪183⅓ Hz, 🟨191 Hz, 🟩216⅔ Hz, 🟦283⅓ Hz, 🟥760 & 1060 Hz (no, the image doesn’t exist in better quality other than cropped versions, I’ve looked everywhere).
If you want to look up info for Germany, the keyword is Rundsteuersystem; for Czech Republic and Slovakia it’s Hromadné dálkové ovládání.
But mains beeping is not where the future lies. Our ripple control device is built into the meter and uses 2G, I imagine newer IoT protocols are being used too. People in the US have started opting into dynamic-pricing contracts and using smart thermostats that download info on quarter-hour prices 1 day ahead and switch accordingly. There are various settings that trade off comfort and cost but I think significant savings can be achieved with negligible discomfort. Some Americans would say that the utility controlling their meters feels like communism but participating in the free market and chasing discounts doesn’t, even though the result is the same. EV owners charging overnight will probably soon be able to choose between options like
⚪ charge ASAP (higher battery wear, estimated cost $3.11)
⚪ charge by ➖6 am➕, constant power (lowest battery wear, estimated cost $2.81)
🔘 charge by ➖6 am➕, lowest energy cost (higher battery wear, estimated cost $2.07)Target state of charge: ➖90 %➕ (250 km, battery wear ▓▓▓░░)
☑️ Remember selection
Many Texans are installing battery backup solutions and maybe will realize they can make money off them by “renting” them to the utility company in seasons when blackouts are unlikely. Or will just save money by smart-charging them at the price dips, which has the same effect but with less “communism”.
You will be able to see the price graph in an app and decide what delay to use on a washing machine, dryer or dishwasher (provided they are far enough to not disrupt your sleep if the dip is at night). Maybe the machine will do it by itself, knowing when the most power-intensive part of the cycle is.
People with unused basements sometimes choose to install “sand batteries” that store heat (or “cold” in summer) from heat pumps, which can be retrieved at another time of day. These installations always come with dynamic power pricing.
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OK, I’m going to save you time because I do some controls and totally get how “easy” demand management should be given how simple most devices are.
But WHAT?! Thats all built into the grid over there??? That’s AWESOME. Let me see if I have this right: there’s essentially a small transient frequency modulation in the 60hz(?) in the grid that allows devices to receive a “off” signal?
I could be wrong but I’m 90% sure we’ve got nothing like that in the states. MAYBE there’s something like that for communicating with the meter itself but certainly not past the meter.
I think you might have it in the US but not for residential customers.
No, frequency-modulating the 50/60 Hz is not technically feasible, that would mean speeding up/slowing down lots of synchronous motors quickly. Instead, a higher-frequency low-voltage generator is connected in series or in parallel (via a capacitor) to the secondary of a grid transformer, overlaying some 3V sine wave at 216⅔ Hz (or other frequency thereabouts) on top of the 230V 50Hz mains. This does not propagate beyond 50 km or so (and higher frequencies (red on map) even worse) so multiple transmitters are required for coverage. The country’s grid is divided into districts and each gets their own RCS signal, and signal traps (low pass or band stop fiters) are used to divide them.
I suppose it exists, but I don’t think it’s actually that common. Only saw some electric storage heaters in older apartments in my city. Maybe it’s common in other cities
The nuclear reactor shutdowns were a push by the Greens in the early years of this millennium. Probably the biggest change they succeeded with in German politics, so that tells you a lot about the quality of that “party”.
Oh no! What about the executives yachts? Are they safe?
Germany pays Denmark money to stop creating wind energy when the prices get too low
Imagine having so much energy that you’d rather spend money not to harvest it, instead of maybe using it to make hydrogen or storing it on other ways
Germany has been building some really big battery installations already with a lot more to come. These things take time.
Usually investors want a business case first. Note they have free every they can sell later. Battery installations will appear.
Hydrogen generators don’t pay for themselves if they only run now and then, that’s why nobody has built one just to use the excess energy only.
Are you sure? Maybe they dont pay for themselves as fast as investors would want? Maybe its because the market for them is not ripe yet?
A manufacturing company around here is currently building their own energy solution involving solar panels and three wind generators, iirc. They do set up a hydrogen generator because they need the hydrogen for some processes but they are not building it bigger than necessary for that, citing that using it for energy storage as well would be less cost efficient than some short term energy storage using battery buffers on site and relying on the grid for the rest.
Interesting!
I only think that this proves that its can be though. Just because batteries and the grid are cheaper for their exact needs, doesn’t prove that it’s useless. Still, it the idea of stopping the harvest of energy when it is too cheap to make money on, that is wrong. There are other methods to store electricity, like pumped storage (gravity storage), heat, compressed air, flywheel energy storage etc.
People here are getting rid of their hydrogen cars, because there are no places to refuel them. (Danish articled)
Scarcity is a requirement for capitalism.
Oh for Darwin sake! This is a distribution problem, and relates to optimising efficiency.
Solar powered citizens: “Fuck you, pay me.”
