this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
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Literal free goddamn energy from the sky and these greedy fucks are going to burn the world down because they can't flip it for a buck
It sounds dumb, but because you can't turn off solar power, if it produces more then you need, you have to use it somehow or it can damage equipment. Hence the driving prices into negative territory. It's a technical problem more than it is a financial one.
Can they not route excess electricity into the ground?
No, unfortunately, you can't.
Ground doesn't typically dissipate power, rather, power is dissipated in the circuit/load
so if you just hook a wire to ground, you're dumping gobs of power into the wire. If you do this in your home (DON'T), best case it will trip the breaker, worst case it will melt and catch something on fire.
It's easy enough to burn a kilowatt
just boil some water. But it's entirely something else to burn megawatt, or yikes, gigawatt scale power.
It seems braindead simple to me to work some controls into an industrial scale solar array to manage its output by regulating its input. Like, rotating the panels to put them out of their optimal alignment with the sun or mechanically partially covering them with shutters.
Simple but extremely expensive.