As someone with a technical background this is the stupidest problem with solar that I don’t get… just turn off the panels in groups until generation is closer to demand… how have engineers not figured that out. And if they have why does this still get written about.
I’m adjacent to this problem, so I have a little context, but am not an expert at all.
To my knowledge, we don’t have granular control over panels. So we can shut off legs of a plant, but that’s a lot of power to be moving all at once.
Instead, prices are set to encourage commercial customers to intake more power incrementally. This has a smoother result on the grid, less chance of destabilizing.
A customer like a data center could wait to perform defragmentation or a backup or something until the price of power hits a cheap or negative number.
Solar plants can be reduced to rationalize supply.
To my understanding. The bigger issue is you can’t as effectively do this with other non-renewables like coal/gas… so this not a solar problem but a problem of legacy power plants.
Yea, more control over the panels will help with the overgeneration issue.
But there’s other issues like ramping supply to meet peak demand and general generation during non-solar hours that still have to be addressed.
Each have interesting proposals on how to solve them, but they haven’t been developed to the point that they’re ready to be put onto the grid at a large scale.
As someone with a technical background this is the stupidest problem with solar that I don’t get… just turn off the panels in groups until generation is closer to demand… how have engineers not figured that out. And if they have why does this still get written about.
Someone is an idiot. Maybe it’s me?
I’m adjacent to this problem, so I have a little context, but am not an expert at all.
To my knowledge, we don’t have granular control over panels. So we can shut off legs of a plant, but that’s a lot of power to be moving all at once.
Instead, prices are set to encourage commercial customers to intake more power incrementally. This has a smoother result on the grid, less chance of destabilizing.
A customer like a data center could wait to perform defragmentation or a backup or something until the price of power hits a cheap or negative number.
Thanks that’s helpful.
But right…?
Solar plants can be reduced to rationalize supply.
To my understanding. The bigger issue is you can’t as effectively do this with other non-renewables like coal/gas… so this not a solar problem but a problem of legacy power plants.
So stupid. The narrative as well.
Yea, more control over the panels will help with the overgeneration issue.
But there’s other issues like ramping supply to meet peak demand and general generation during non-solar hours that still have to be addressed.
Each have interesting proposals on how to solve them, but they haven’t been developed to the point that they’re ready to be put onto the grid at a large scale.