this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2024
248 points (98.4% liked)
Technology
59377 readers
5739 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Because it is not cost effective. Simple as that.
The problem is that we don't have enough demand shaping to shift night time loads to day time, and we don't have enough storage to shift production to overnight. The result is that daytime generation is regularly going into negative rates (you have to pay to put power on the grid, which melts the returns on your investment into solar.
As far as problems go, it's a good one to have, as it will eventually result in lower prices for daytime generation.
Isn't A/C a huge power consumer though? And because most lights are led now, except for northern countries the day time would be higher energy use right?
We have incentivized night time consumption. Base load generation (nuclear, coal) can't ramp up and down fast enough to match the daily demand curve. They can't produce more than the minimum overnight demand, but they have keep producing that around the clock. To minimize the need for "peaker" plants during the day, they want the overnight demand to be as high as possible.
So they put steel mills, aluminum smelters, and other heavy industry on overnight shifts by offering them extraordinarily cheap power.
That incentivized overnight load needs to be shifted to daytime, so it can be met with solar and wind. Moving forward, we need to minimize overnight demand.
I understand your point now