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.

Re:Can we have this problem, please?

[MountainLogic]

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.

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

[NotInHere]

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.

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.

Aluminum

[Scottingham]

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.

Re:Aluminum

[orzetto]

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.

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.

Re:This is the problem.

[pz]

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.

Energy Storage Solutions

[ytene]

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...

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.

Neither scale at all. Do what nature does

[raymorris]

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.