I’ll note that right now, this is a seasonal issue, associated with moderate springtime temperatures when there is a lot of sunshine available.
I’ll note that right now, this is a seasonal issue, associated with moderate springtime temperatures when there is a lot of sunshine available.
I’m not familiar with how power grids work, is an excess of power bad for the grid if it isn’t used?
No. They constantly monitor it and keep it in line. The power grid itself is totally fine. Completely.
The only “problem” is they cannot easily turn on or off huge old power plants, so if the sun is blazing, they might have to direct excess old generation power to batteries or other grids.
The only “problem” is the power companies don’t get to charge much for simply managing the grid. They charge mostly for power generation, so it ends up costing them money. If they were simply a government paid service, they wouldn’t have to care what so ever which direction power is flowing as long as it has somewhere to go.
The main power company in CA (PG&E) has built tons of other things into the bills aside from power generation, so I expect my bill (which has gone up 300% since 2018) to continue to climb despite this.
my utility charges $25 a month just to be hooked up. then there’s taxes and some community bullshit fees on top of the actual electricity usage. so even though my usage has dropped quite a bit over the years, and the base rate hasn’t really gone up that much (about 10-12% total, over two decades)… my bill is still more than double what it used to be.
Seriously, i found an old bill from a decade ago, it was like $54 for my 1 BR apartment. It’s now usually over triple that…
PG&E charges me more to deliver power ($0.18/kWh) than it does to generate ($0.12/kWh) that power. That’s f’ed up.
Kind of, yeah. But excess solar can be turned off almost instantly so it isn’t like it’s an impossible problem.
Sorry for asking all these questions, but how do you turn off solar? Doesn’t it keep generating while there’s sunlight?
If it’s turned off, it’s like a battery that isn’t connected to anything. You have a voltage across the positive and negative terminals, but power can’t actually flow unless there’s somewhere for it to go.
Just disconnect the panel.
Yeah, various power generation techniques (e.g., big industrial power plants) do not want to run without a load. And switching them off temporarily isn’t really feasible (shutting them for good would ultimately be nice, but that’s another topic…).
And you can’t just “dump” huge amounts of excess of power — it needs to go somewhere.
Tesla coils?