this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
1662 points (96.3% liked)

Microblog Memes

7492 readers
3638 users here now

A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.

Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.

Rules:

  1. Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
  2. Be nice.
  3. No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
  4. Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.

Related communities:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
(page 2) 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] hildegarde@lemmy.blahaj.zone 184 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (24 children)

I see this posted a lot as if this is an issue with capitalism. No, this is what happens when you have to deal with maintaining the power grid using capitalism as a tool.

Power generation needs to match consumption. Always constantly the power grid must be balanced. If you consume more than you can generate, you get a blackout. If you generate more than you use, something catches fire.

Renewables generate power on their own schedule. This is a problem that can be solved with storage. But storage is expensive and takes time to construct.

Negative prices are done to try and balance the load. Its not a problem, its an opportunity. If you want to do something that needs a lot of power, you can make money by consuming energy when more consumption is needed. And if you buy a utility scale battery, you can make money when both charging and discharging it if you schedule it right.

That's not renewables being a problem, that's just what happens when the engineering realities of the power grid come into contact with the economic system that is prevalent for now.

[–] Wanpieserino@lemm.ee 8 points 23 hours ago

I can't ragebait if you people are being logical 😒

load more comments (23 replies)
[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 75 points 1 day ago (8 children)

Ughh, no, negative prices aren't some weird "capitalism" thing. When the grid gets over loaded with too much power it can hurt it. So negative prices means that there is too much power in the system that needs to go somewhere.

There are things you can do like batteries and pump water up a hill then let it be hydroelectric power at night.

[–] Natanox@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Except the grid overload thing isn't even an issue with renewables, since wind can be shut down in a matter of 1-5 minutes (move them out of the wind) and solar literally just be disabled. Any overload they produce would be due to mechanical failure, where you can cut them off the grid since they're in the process of destroying themselves anyway (like in those videos where wind turbines fail spectacularly). Otherwise renewables are perfect to regulate the grid if available.

In a hypothetical grid with an absolute majority of many badly adjustable power sources (like nuclear) you'd have to work with negative prices to entice building large on-demand consumers or battery solutions. So far nobody was stupid enough to build a grid like this though.

tl;dr, this whole problem indeed is about economics and therefore may very well be a "capitalism thing". Renewables do not overload the grid.

[–] racemaniac@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 15 hours ago (5 children)

That's also a pretty naive take on it.

First of all, you can indeed shut of the renewables easily. But that means that adding renewables to the grid is even less profitable, making renewables less desired to be built.

Hence in for example Germany a law was passed that prevented renewables being shut down in favor of worse energy sources, but that then leads to the issue we mention here.

It's a tricky situation with renewables. But on the other hand, society is slowly adapting to using them & improving the infrastructure to handle such issues, so we'll get there eventually :).

[–] njm1314@lemmy.world 1 points 9 hours ago

I don't understand why it's profitability is my concern. Or anyones.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] PumpkinSkink@lemmy.world 70 points 1 day ago (8 children)

But it doesn't say "it can generate too much energy and damage infrastructure", they said "it can drive the price down". The words they chose aren't, like, an accident waiting for someone to explain post-hoc. Like, absolutely we need storage for exactly the reason you say, but they are directly saying the issue is driving the price down, which is only an issue if your not able to imagine a way to create this infrastructure without profit motive.

[–] loopedcandle@lemmynsfw.com 21 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Yeah mate. The people writing here are economists not engineers, and that's the professional language for what they're talking about in their field. It's like if a nuclear engineer said "oh yeah, the reactor is critical" which means stable.

I hear the point your making and the point OP made, but this is how really well trained PhDs often communicate - using language in their field. It's sort of considered rude to attempt to use language from another specialty.

All of that context is lost in part b.c. this is a screenshot of a tweet in reply to another tweet, posted on Lemmy.

The way it's supposed to work is the economist should say "we don't know what this does to infrastructure you should talk to my good buddy Mrs. Rosie Revere Engineer about what happens."

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (7 replies)
[–] technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

negative prices aren’t some weird “capitalism” thing.

lmao.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (5 replies)
[–] Rooskie91@discuss.online 256 points 1 day ago (4 children)

If you're describing nearly free and unlimited electricity as a problem, you may want to reconsider some things.

[–] technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

It's how capitalists think about land, water, air, etc.

... And violently attacking people by depriving them of these needs.

[–] MartianSands@sh.itjust.works 169 points 1 day ago (59 children)

It's a very capitalist way of thinking about the problem, but what "negative prices" actually means in this case is that the grid is over-energised. That's a genuine engineering issue which would take considerable effort to deal with without exploding transformers or setting fire to power stations

load more comments (59 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›