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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.
No, it is literally free.
In a free (as in freedom) or "perfect" market, price is determined by offer and demand. If you *have* to get rid of a good (like solar energy), and you can't store it (like with energy, in connected energy networks the produced energy always has to be exactly the same as the used energy otherwise the frequency goes awry), and nobody wants to pay you for it, you either have to give it for free, or even pay for it.
I guess OP refers to Orwellian twisting of word's meanings. "Freedom is slavery" like stuff.
Don't mix it with the popular use of Orwellian, meaning a surveillance state. But his book was about much more than that.
Wind is extremely unreliable. Look at Britain when they had a two week spell with zero wind generation because of a country-wide lull in wind. At least solar you can bank on being there in advance. Check the weather forecast for the next few days, and you know roughly how much you can expect to be produced. And if it's in a region such as a desert where cloudy days are a rare occurrence, you can guarantee daily production for 350+ days of the year.
Your model of energy usage is lacking the majority daytime use: commercial and industrial. These uses match insolation (and therefore available solar-based power) pretty well, it turns out.
Here's a very, very simple part of it: cooling office buildings. Mostly, that needs to happen when the sun is shining, because that's when (a) the building is being warmed by the sun, and (b) the building is occupied by people who want it cooler.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Has happened on a small scale in the US. In central Washington, where the dams on the Columbia River and an abundance of wind power occasionally produces a "perfect storm" of spring snow driven runoff from the Cascade Mountains driving the dams to max production and spring winds producing more renewable power than the region can export with existing transmission lines the result was predictable with zero cost exchange power and conflict over who gets to export their power. The region already has a large pumped storage facility on the Columbia complex, but we still need more storage and transmission capacity.
The solar panels don't break if you don't consume the electricity.
Not immediately. But if you shutdown the inverters, the voltage builds up in the cells until the backflow of electrons cancels out the solar induced flux, generating heat. Hotter cells have a shorter lifetime.
Aluminum refining is energy intensive. Recycling, not so much. Recycling scrap aluminium requires only 5% of the energy used to make new aluminum.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
It's my understanding that "renewable" applies to energy sources that are continually replenished (over human timescales) and are *literally* renewable. The sun's energy is not being replenished as it burns, and so is not really "renewable".
The combustion of hydrogen could be considered renewable in this sense, because burning it creates water vapor, and you can extract hydrogen from water. Energy sources that depend on the hydrological cycle would be considered renewable because that process ensures that the supply remains steady, even while it may be continually being used.
Hydrogen is not "renewable energy" source. Hydrogen is effectively a "battery" as it stores energy in chemical form. You have to put in energy to extract hydrogen from water. You recover the energy when you burn hydrogen. If you burn it with oxygen and you recapture the resulting water back you can recycle to extract hydrogen from the water again.**
Renewable energy is really a code word for energy sources that are converted into commercially viable form from large energy sources on human timescales. On earth, the "large" sources are basically solar, geothermal, nuclear, inertial/gravitaional. PV, wind farm, hydro-electric, and petroleum are all basically "solar", the only difference is the conversion timescale which is what distinguishes renewable. Commercially viable petroleum doesn't get conversion from "solar" in human timescales and is not renewable.
**Theoretically, you could do the same with methane. You can put energy into making methane from CO2 and H2O (basically what some bacteria like Archaea do) and then recover then energy when you burn the methane. If you recapture the resulting CO2 and H2O, you can recycle to reform the methane. The main differences are that currently we don't recapture because it's "cheaper" to get new methane than to put energy into making methane, or similarly recapturing the water to resplit to extract hydrogen isn't as cheap as it is to make new hydrogen from methane.
Last year I saw a presentation by the head of Technology Development of Hydro, which has aluminium electrolysis as one of their core businesses. He proposed the same thing you do, using aluminium as an energy carrier: make aluminium (primary production though, not recycling) where you have power, then transport aluminium instead of setting up expensive DC subsea cables.
Since I work in renewables and hydrogen, I asked him if this could be done for wind power; it could not, because aluminium factories require an enormous amount of steady power. If power is interrupted, not only production stops, but the electrolysis cells solidify and cannot be restarted: this is a damage that requires hundreds of millions of dollars and months of lost production to fix. For example, this happened when the Qatalum, Qatar plant went offline.
So, intermittent renewables such as solar and wind are not a good match for aluminium, because it requires constant power. Hydro power is a better match.
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