The problem is that that’s not what politicians want tho. Unless the have stocks in the company providing the hardware.
Yeah, I was wondering what politicians in the last 50 years legitimately cared about their constituents’ utility bill. I could probably count them on one hand. It’s all just saying what the people want to hear and meaning none of it while collecting their lobbying money.
Yes. But do listen to the experts, else you might get screwed (see Portugal and Spain)
what happened with them over solar? i assume you mean photovoltaics? because Spain is fucking winning with concentrated solar thermal
Because there wasn’t enough mass in the system due to excess solar, during April, a wobble in solar production quickly escalated triggering a massive blackout throughout both Spain and Portugal. This lack of inertia due to few more traditional energy sources had been identified previously and the Portuguese national grid had plans to install artificial ballasts of sorts to create that inertia (plans which were delayed multiple times iirc)
Ah gotcha, yeh afaik that was definitely a grid failure rather than renewables failure in any form.
It was a grid failure triggered by a poor management of one of the problems of solar, which is NOT being produced with turbines
Correct me if i’m wrong, it’s been a while since i watched this grid engineer’s explanation, but my understanding was it has nothing to do with PV itself, it began with IBR misconfiguration which under “unusual circumstances” cascaded due to further grid mismanagement.
yes the misconfigured IBR were at a PV plant, but thats where i think the media runs with the story without really communicating clearly to the public. IBR misconfiguration, even at a PV plant, is not a technical failure of PV technology itself, at all. IBR misconfiguration also effects turbine outputs with HVDC feed for example.
where i think the story gets further jumbled is alot of the “unusual circumstances” involved issues which were traceable (under current implementations) to a renewables dominant grid state. so the news story seems to become “PV/renewables trouble”, whereas afaict in reality it’s more like “renewables dominating to unexpected levels + misconfiguration/mismanagement”.
imo the distinction is important, it’s not a PROBLEM with PV, it’s a problem with previous assumptions about renewables capacity & grid state no longer being true, and the ways bureaucracies & their infrastructure decisions can lag behind that change.
You see, they didn’t use the fossil fuels that Jesus loves, so when anything at all goes wrong it is the fault of the Jesus-hating non-gas-burners.
ok. I have questions. 1> who even mentioned Jesus??? 2> even if Jesus was mentioned and I just didn’t see it, how does Jesus have anything to do with fossil fuels??? 3> where, in the whole frickin Bible, did it mention Jesus talking about which energy source he preferred most??? 4> how are the people who want to use renewable resources to power their cars, homes and such, Jesus-haters??? 5> what part of the Bible states that if somebody doesn’t like Jesus, doesn’t believe in Jesus, or has a different religion, gives you the right to-- I’m going to be very elementary school here, but-- bully them??? wasn’t Jesus like “we should all love each other, and everybody is equal no matter what they believe or who they are”??? I don’t really expect an answer, but that would be nice
They need to fight all the ghosts that are coming through?
Energy is cheap when I don’t use much of it and expensive when I need a lot.
Famously, energy was cheapest when we used candles sparingly and is expensive now that we have always-on LEDs.
This doesn’t make utilities cheaper. Utility prices are almost universally set, in one way or another, by the government. If the government wants to lower utility prices, they can do so easily by just voting.
This ignores the issue of how we actually pay for the actual cost of utilities. That’s a whole other thing. But long story short - NO, you should not expect utility prices to come down if your government builds solar capacity.
can you pls explain what you mean?
is this another way of saying ‘greed’?
or are you making a point about energy generation, storage and distribution infrastructure?
Utility prices are almost universally set, in one way or another, by the government.
Eh. They’re supposed to be set by the government. But of late, governments have outsourced regulatory authority to auction markets. And that’s created ample opportunity for price fixing and arbitrage. Texas’s ERCOT system is a great example. During peaks in demand, gas plants will coordinate delayed production of energy until the auction price of electricity exceeds several hundred dollars a Mwh. Consequently, they can burn a limited amount of gas and generate an enormous windfall, while coal and nuclear plants generate a constant base load at much lower rates over the course of the week, month, and year.
