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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.
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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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.
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.
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"
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
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.
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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.
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.