Green Energy

2226 readers

46 users here now

Everything about energy production and storage.

Related communities:

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

poVoq

SteveKLord

112

Rooftop solar panels are flooding California’s grid. That’s a problem. As electricity prices go negative, the Golden State is struggling to offload a glut of solar power (wapo.st)

submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by silence7 to c/energy

85 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'll note that right now, this is a seasonal issue, associated with moderate springtime temperatures when there is a lot of sunshine available.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 8 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Clearly under a capitalist vision “””smart”””appliances like your dish washer could be set to run at some point in the next X hours, and they would optimally wait until there was a local excess of solar energy in the grid to run. What would make the device “smart” is just that your device would be watching the price of electricity and have some basic rules of how long to wait before needing to run no matter what (you need your clothes clean by tomorrow).

I don’t know if that is the future I am most confident in being the best, but clearly this is VERY possible with current technology it just takes the structuring of appliance companies and software in a way that makes this not impossible for dizzyingly insane reasons.

Also, here’s an idea, use the spare electricity to charge public bicycles and put a free amount of power into them so the next random person who uses them gets a subsidized ride? Like why not have some kind of publicly owned power bank in the vicinity of surplus alternative energy sources that is known to occasionally have a lot of very cheap power that could be used to power cars, power banks or other large batteries?

Surely people are doing this right???? Right??

[–] el_abuelo@lemmy.ml 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

This is exactly what Octopus Energy are doing in the UK. You tell them when you need your car charged by and they schedule it to happen (usually overnight) so that it's done by then.

Rather than laying 30p/kwh you pay 7p/kwh.

You can of course tell it to just charge, and pay the usual rate.

[–] Raxiel@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago

Yes, and some people on Octopus Agile have been seeing negative electricity prices as consumers recently, although that was due to high winds hitting the offshore farms rather than solar.

The App for my Bosch washing machine does have links to a couple of proprietary 'smart home' solutions that can synchronise start times with solar output, but none of them are compatible with my other kit so I never looked further. It does also support IFTTT so I guess I could set something up myself if I had the skill.
Start times are better than nothing, but what would really be useful is the ability to modulate the heater output to say 1 or 0.5kW over a longer period if there's thin clouds reducing the output from the inverter. Also cross talk between appliances that allows you to turn them all on at once, and they can introduce pauses in their programmes, so they don't overlap high power tasks.

[–] captainlezbian@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago

I do think that this is a good solution. Not the best, but yeah, when there’s an excess of electricity automatically using it for tasks that aren’t time dependent is wonderful