Literally should be the point of renewable energy. The point of society in general should be to make as many things cheaper or free as possible.

Nerds in the 1950s: Nuclear power is going to make electricity so cheap that no one will even bother metering it.

Nerds in the 2020s: solar power would make electricity too cheap in Arizona so we can’t build it uwu

It’s not like people could adapt to the cheaper electricity at a specific time of day by changing power-hungry processes to take advantage etc., no, the current consumption pattern is set in stone by divine decree

“Too cheap to meter” is way better than what’s happening to solar, which is too cheap to not meter

Negative prices are exactly like positive prices except in the other direction - you have to get rid of the power or it will overload your system, so you’re paying people to take it off your hands.

1950′s nuclear dreams are “what if electricity was like air, free and plentiful”

2020′s solar is “Air so plentiful, we’re dying form pressure induced narcosis”

This is a real problem that really needs to be solved, not an artifact of the evil capitalists sad they can’t make money.

Kirchoff’s laws are an evil capitalist invention by billion dollar corporations uwu

yeah the tweet here is not saying the important thing: if there’s too much supply in your grid, things catch fire.

I propose that we solve this by giving every small town a couple of those gigajoule capacitor banks they have at the National Ignition Facility. Maybe throw in the laser too so they can burn off the energy.

Though I will say: I’ve never understood why you couldn’t just punch excess power into a big resistor and waste it - yeah the numbers are Big but are they that big? (This is mainly me not understanding resistor design, not so much me not understanding power production)

why can’t they just disconnect the solar? is there no mechanism to signal producers to stop?

the issue is that the solar panels continue to run even if disconnected, and so the energy has to go somewhere. a simple solution would be to (if you had suntracking) tilt the solar panels out of the way of the sun and (if you didn’t) just cover a bunch of them in the middle of the day, but both are Very Silly things to do that decrease capacity factor of solar even further below the already low-ish number it is (about 50%, because the sun doesn’t shine at night)

my conclusion from a cursory search is that it’s fine to short circuit solar panels and that leaving them open circuit might possibly lead to some degradation in the long term, but in any case I think it’s perfectly reasonable to require electricity producers to take care of their overproduction instead of forcing the grid to take on energy that isn’t needed

Correct me if I’m wrong but can’t you just ground solar power output automatically if it reaches dangerous levels, a bit like a PWM / control system where it switches between your system and the dirt in your back yard