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Chile Has So Much Solar Energy It's Giving It Away for Free (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Bloomberg report: Chile's solar industry has expanded so quickly that it's giving electricity away for free. Spot prices reached zero in parts of the country on 113 days through April, a number that's on track to beat last year's total of 192 days, according to Chile's central grid operator. While that may be good for consumers, it's bad news for companies that own power plants struggling to generate revenue and developers seeking financing for new facilities. The main culprit is the northern part of the country, in the Atacama desert. Chile's increasing energy demand, pushed by booming mine production and economic growth, helped spur the development of 29 solar farms, with another 15 planned, on the country's central power grid. Now the nation faces slowing demand for energy as copper production slows amid a global glut, and those power plants are oversupplying a region that lacks transmission lines to distribute the electricity elsewhere.
Too much clean, renewable energy? That's a problem I'd like the US to have.
With free power I could possibly generate a profit mining bitcoin!
And must people keep using the normally beautiful word "free" in such an Orwellian context? There is literally a whole world of unseen (a la Bastiat) opportunity costs behind this overbuilt boondoggle, especially in a country largely still mired in poverty.
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I thought copper was going up in price.
It is nice to see this, and I assume it is foolish to ask this, but is Chile selling energy to neighboring countries or do they have plans to make longer term electrical storage so that these cheap days can buffer the more expensive ones?
In germany, they send exceeding energy to the neighbouring countries without having them asked. The neighbours really don't like it but germany does it anyways because its cheap and the network maintaining companies can't refuse to take regenerative energy.
Its part of why their energiewende appears to work so well (that, the strength of the german government over corporations, and their giant wealth).
Let's see what happens now when the neighbours add those devices on the border to restrict this unwished flow of energy they were announcing.
This is going to be a real challenge to people want to build new renewable sources. Would you want to build a solar plant if it produces energy at a time that you can't sell it, and produces little at times when the prices are highest. (Nice if you want to sell storage systems though).
Why not create some aluminum recycling factory? Those are pretty energy intensive. They could scale their operations based on excess demand. Perhaps even solely to create aluminum-air batteries.
Doesn't this mean Chile could get into a business of creating energy for export? For example, I frequently see criticism of hydrogen fuel cell technology that it takes too much energy to create the hydrogen gas. Couldn't Chile use their excess solar resource to create products which store energy in a usable form, like hydrogen gas. Then ship this commodity to countries that would import it?
We don't have a way to integrate solar resources into the global economy, but this story highlights an opportunity.
and they didn't even need space.
And neither do we...
http://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Solar-Energy/Solar-Space-Race-Already-Underway.html
Oh wait, the Solaren promise for 2016 never happened... Now it's 2030!!!
People see this as a good thing but it actually points out the big problem with solar.
It produces a lot of power at non-peak times and almost no power at peak usage time and none at other times.
So in the morning when everyone is getting up and turning on TVs and cooking solar makes very little of power. At noon it makes way more power than is needed. Then in the evening when people are coming home, doing laundry, cooking, and taking showers solar makes little to no power. Then over night you get no power.
Frankly solar is just not going to be practical until a storage method is worked out. IMHO Solar is about useless except in some specific locations. Wind is a much better bet for renewables. Hydro is great but we have really used most of it.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Funny, whenever I have chili, I produce natural gas. I also give it away for free, by the way.
How about they build a massive copper cable to the other regions of the country that don't have as good an electricity source. Then they get to recoup their costs on building the solar plants, and they get to run those copper mines.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
Why not make it into H2 and export it?
there is over supply due to lower demand from copper mines.
that does not mean cost of production is zero.
they are simply selling at a loss, because demand dried up.
if this is not temporary, they will stop producing.
as such this is not a good example advocating increasing sustainable solar energy.
I guess we've known this problem would come along at some point...
With absolutely no knowledge of the technical feasibility of them, how about applying these two solutions?
1. Split Water Into Hydrogen and Oxygen
Could they use the electricity to store energy in the form of hydrogen? This could then be burned in fuel cells to generate electricity more readily, i.e. on demand, perhaps through the night when solar doesn't work? I guess the two issues with this are (i) the volatility/inflammability of hydrogen; and (ii) the fact that burning the hydrogen is exothermic and therefore contributes to warming...
2. Potential Energy Pumps
In the UK we have some minor success, with power stations like Loch Awe in Scotland, in which the turbines can be reversed into electric motors and can be used to pump water up a gradient. To make this work you need 2 lakes, one above the other [i.e. on sides of a mountain]. With a solar surplus in the day you use the energy to pump water from the lower lake to the higher one. When you have an electricity shortfall you allow the process to reverse, using gravity and falling water to generate electricity via hydroelectric power.
Both of these solutions are flawed and, to variable extents, inefficient. But they do work. If we put investment into good R&D on these sorts of challenges today, then they will become more refined with time...
Use some of that surplus copper to build new transmission lines
I mean seriously. Invest in the infrastructure to build high capacity, high efficiency transmission lines to other regions and even countries and sell that power instead of give it away for free.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
"Chile can't figure out an economical way to store solar energy"
In the long term this may make sense. In the immediate case, there are a number of practical problems. The two big ones are:
1. There isn't an infrastructure to use hydrogen,
2. Hydrogen electrolysis on an industrial scale isn't a well-developed technology (because there's no push for it-- current hydrogen production is by stripping H from methane, and right now methane is very cheap). Since it's not a commercial technology, there hasn't been a development process to make it cheap and efficient.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I wonder why they don't sell it to another country?
OOH! Or, use it to electrolyse hydrogen and sell it for extortionately large amounts of money to fuel stations!
What this means is that in a couple of years they will dismantle a lot of it and the used panels flooding the market will drive the solar panel prices down even further. When I had a solar powered home I had some used panels from south america and got them at 10% of the price of new. This was in the days before ebay and internet and I had to pay for trucking and customs to get them here.
This is a WIN-WIN for the small guy!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
A warm light for all mankind
...worthless copper for worthless electricity?
No?
Maybe they can use some of the glut copper to create transmission lines to distribute the electricity elsewhere and solve two problems at once.
Maybe we should all adjust and get up at noon.
Meh, how does it compare, in terms of orders of magnitude, to waste heat from thermal powerplants?
Heat is radiated out as well, even from dark objects that absorb visible light.
If you have a thick atmosphere with components that reflects heat back to the Earth, then you have conditions known as a green house effect.
Your solar panels absorbing light and transforming it into useful electrical energy, will also radiate some heat due to their inefficiency and the electrical energy will be transmitted and used at another location and eventually become heat as well.
To avoid global warming, you want that waste heat to go out into space. Rather than bounce around a lot to be reabsorbed until it increases the average temperature.
Do they change every hour? Every minute? Free electricity sounds great in a headline unless you find out in the small print that it was only free for 30 minutes starting at high noon.
It's bad news for companies that own power plants struggling to generate revenue?
I can see if the government is killing off business but why wouldn't business's buy into it? Why wouldn't government give them the option?
Our local power company here has solar and wind plants along with coal and natural gas. It sure isn't free. There is still maintenance on solar and wind. Still need people to clean/repair/replace dirty/corroded/broken/damaged/out_dated parts. Power companies will need to adapt or go under. Power for free is a myth someone paid for the panels. And like I said there is still maintenance and cost of new installs and upgraded lines and parts; it's not free.
Did a robot revolution take place that robots are doing it all and get enough energy to self sustain by mining materials and manufacturing their own parts indefinitely on their own? That might make power for free and everything else free, but that hasn't happened yet as far as I know.
If it has send some my way here in Albuquerque. I want free stuff too.
Why the heck don't they export the surplus energy?
Electricity is traded across national borders in other parts of the world; is a big deal in Europe. So why not do it here.
Sure you always lose some power when you send it long distances over pylons, but that's got to be more economically sustainable than giving it away?
I am sure the oil companies & their politician pets already have a few plans in motion to invade if this silly little nation keeps up with 'cheap energy'.
There. Problem solved.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
This doesn't mean they are producing too much power. They're just producing too much during peak production times.
Please send Chile a boatload of servers to fold some DNA or mine some bitcoin.
If you look at a map, Chile borders three countries.
Argentina -- you would have to build transmission lines over the Andes, good luck with that. Also the power is in the north of Chile and Argentina borders the more southern parts of Chile. It would make more sense to build long transmission lines to Santiago and that would be over 1000 miles, a damn long transmission line.
Boliva -- The Andes are in the way and Bolivia and Chile still aren't the best of friends. Something about who should own the Atacama mining regions and access to the Pacific. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Peru -- See War of the Pacific and it is still a long haul from the Atacama desert to any Peruvian population centers.
If energy is cheaper, everything we use to live on might be cheaper too from manufacturing to transportation costs. If only there was an economical electric car, things could be even better.
The real problem with solar is the areas of the world that are the best for producing solar energy are a long way from the population centers that that would consume the energy, requiring the construction of massive power transmission lines, can you say NIMBY, or the creation of some other way to transport the energy, maybe hydrogen if someone can figure out how to scale hydrogen production and the logistics of transportation.
Yes, Germany has many small scale solar production facilities near population centers but for now they are the outlier and yes Cairo is close to the Sahara.
So why don't they take all that excess copper and build the transmission lines to export their surplus power? Or am I just being uninformed here?
you'd think that people be saying "Hey Chilli, this is exciting" instead people who have invested in old methods of power production are complaining prices are too cheap. "we're losing money" Well...that is called risk. Hard to believe they didn't see this coming. No one is talking about people getting so accustomed to cheap power, or becoming gluttons with power, it's other people's bad investments first. the innovation we truly need right now is public awareness and social responsibility. instead, when something comes along that could be an overall public good, people come in and say, but it's not good for me. We have a long way to go as a species.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
Horseshoe sales are down with the introduction of automobiles. A confidential source within the horseshoe industry said "This automobile industry is bad for the economy and costs jobs." A spokesman for a local political party Donald Duck echoed the sentiment of horse industry heavyweights. "This automobile industry is being forced on us by leftists and foreigners. We prefer classic conservative horses over these faddy foreign aut-o-mo-biles. The foreign rapists our taking our jobs. Besides If mules were good enough for the crusaders they are good enough for us."
Free Bitcoin mining during peek hours? Maybe Chile can get some startups moving into that space.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Copper and other non-ferrous metals (including gold) are a huge part of the economy of northern Chile. Which also happens to be where you find the Atacama, one of the places on Earth where sunshine is most reliably abundant. Oh, and vast stretches of unpopulated coastline where you can pretty much stick a pin anywhere and build a shipping terminal without there being any neighbors to complain about it.
And there happen to be methods for efficiently and relatively cleanly separating valuable metals from ore using electricity -- gobs and gobs of electricity so it had better be cheap. It has to be competitive with the nastier, cruder methods like mashing the ore into a pulp with lots and lots of cheap cyanide. So it's real easy to picture a future in which ore from the mountains is processed essentially on site using cheap solar electricity from nearby desert power stations, and then is shipped out in refined form.
But there's a catch-22. You can build your giant electrowinning plants until you have a big, cheap, reliable electricity supply. You've got to build that first. Which means there's a period between when you build your big solar plants and when investors build their electricity-hungry plants where you get a hell of a lot of kilowatt hours of electricity being generated that nobody has a use for. You literally can't even give it all away, but that generation capacity will have you rolling in pesos in a few years.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
As you mentioned, pumping water up hill requires specific geography - the same as hydroelectric, basically. Hydroelectric is pretty cool, so that's been done in the locations it can be done. It covers 1%-2% of our energy needs. For the US as an example, 48 hours of energy storage would require flooding most of the US west of the Mississippi river. It works on a small scale, can't ever be a primary source of energy.
In 7th grade I wrote a paper about splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen and I was excited about the prospect. Since then, I've learned that hydrogen is a bitch. Without going into details, it's a bitch to store, a bitch to transport, and not particularly efficient. However ...
The general concept of combining hydrogen and oxygen to release energy does work extremely well, if you add one other ingredient. In fact, it is the world's primary method of energy storage and transportation. Along with the hydrogen, you add carbon, creating hydrocarbons. (Combining them the other way around produces carbohydrates, the energy source your body uses). We know hydrocarbons are a very effective way to store and transport energy, and the infrastructure is already in place. Perhaps we could do almost exactly what nature does. Perhaps we could PRODUCE hydrocarbons using atmospheric carbon and solar energy. So the produces turns atmospheric CO2 and H20 into hydrocarbons and oxygen, the car or factory burns the hydrocarbon back into C02 and water, in a cycle. That's exactly what nature does with carbohydrates - plants convert Co2 and H20 into carbohydrate using solar energy, animals convert it back, in a balanced cycle. I know of no reason we couldn't have a similar balanced cycle for hydrocarbons, using solar energy to capture atmospheric C02 into hydrocarbons.
THERE TERRERIS!
Abundance of cheap energy, Copper production, global glut of same, lack of transmission lines.
Hmm. Opportunity?
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
Extend the transmission system in stages. Don't have to do it all at once. Also look into doing pump storage. And look at integrating the hydro and the solar so they work together.
It solar there is subsidized the way it is in Italy they will keep producing because they will get paid a lot even if the market value of energy is zero.
Is that intercontinental underwater superconducting power line part of your sci-fi trilogy?
A conclusion that perfectly renewable energy does not exist would be consistent with the laws of thermodynamics.
But the earth is not a closed system; it receives energy from the Sun at a power that has varied little over human history. "Renewable" in practice refers to means of turning this power, called "insolation", into industrially usable power within a human lifetime. It encompasses direct methods (PV and solar thermal) as well as methods tied to insolation's effect on climate (wind and hydroelectric) and photosynthesis (biofuel). Petroleum and coal are not "renewable" because though they originate in biofuel, the process to produce them takes far longer than human civilization has been around.
What's that got to do with power transmission?
Don't they use steel cored aluminium?
I have read that Texas wind-power projects are giving electricity away for free at night because there is insufficient grid infrastructure to sell it elsewhere. It has changed how people behave, e.g., when they dry a load of laundry.
Aluminum smelting uses enormous amounts of electricity. If there is extra, use it to start up a smelter that closed.
Otherwise, the alumina is mined and refined, loaded on a ship, then sent to captive power for smelting, then shipped again to be made into finished goods.
This is bullshit, I live in Santiago and electricity price is rising as the winter is coming.
Don't hydro plants just dump the excess water when their reservoirs are full? Can't they just do the same thing and offer cheaper energy to use more water while still maintaining an optimal reservoir capacity?
If excess energy can not be stored then hook up some big water pumps and put very large sprinklers on the ocean surface. They can generate enough evaporation by spraying all that water in the air to help with global warming. Or they could use a lot of it to desalinate salt water and maybe that desert region will no longer have to be a desert.
I understand Aluminum refining and data-centers are very energy hungry - they can operate them for free now right?
The problem Chile's facing is a problem with their infrastructure, not a problem with solar. If they've over-invested and overdeveloped in solar, that's also not a problem with solar. The article repeatedly points this out.
Yes, the old distribution model that began 120 years ago is simply not suited to renewables. The answer is to reform the antique distribution system. The transition from the old model will not be without problems, but clearly investment in wiser, smarter distribution trumps investment in too much production. The power produced where storage has not yet been created needs to be shipped to where it IS needed. And that would be: anywhere where fossil fuels are being used.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
1) pump hydro ideal for Chile. Find a mountain with 2 lakes 1000m vertical apart. Pump water up at peak solar. Same turbines pump power onto grid after hours.
2) solar thermal - use mirrors to heat liquid salts from nominal to up to 800 degrees Celsius. Give you up to 6 hours outside solar hours to use tradition steam turbines to generate.
3) more long term - use batteries in vehicles and houses to charge in day and release outside solar hours
4) old school - use cheap power in daytime to power power intensive processes such as aluminium smelting
5) basic - heat up water in black bins on roof to provide hot water after hours
There's been a few times that Ontario has had to pay to get rid of excess electricity from it's nuclear plants.