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.

Comments

Can we have this problem, please?

[Anonymous Coward]

Too much clean, renewable energy? That's a problem I'd like the US to have.

Central planning failure

[ErikTheRed]

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.

Re:Central planning failure

[fibonacci8]

Free as in, "already paid in full by taxation, then handed back to taxpayers without additional charges." So "marketing department" free (as in buy one get one free, or free with any purchase of at least $20), so sure it's literally free in that sense. A "perfect" market doesn't contain a step where a government takes full credit for the productivity of the citizens it's meant to represent. The taxation step suggests it's not free as in freedom or free market.

Re:Central planning failure

[Anonymous Coward]

With solar it's actually quite simple: You turn off the inverters. The solar panels don't break if you don't consume the electricity. Of course there's a capitalist incentive not to do that and to give away the electricity instead. If you can't make a buck, at least you can prevent the competition from making a buck.

This is the problem.

[LWATCDR]

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.

Simple Solution

[pastafazou]

Use some of that surplus copper to build new transmission lines

This is not necessarily a miscalculation.

[hey!]

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.