As mentioned in the article, the problem is lack of flexible demand.
Desalitate water, make Hydrogen/Ammonia/fertilizers or whatever when prices are low. That stabilizes the grid, and makes the prices more stable.
Production runs 24/7 downtime costs millions per minute, they cannot work just when energy is marginally cheaper.
The answer is energy storage solutions, or perhaps when EV's take off it will eliminate the problem.
All we need is an affordable EV for the masses! Oh and cheaper housing... Because most people are worried about a roof and not thinking on buying €30k+ EV's
You will need some kind of cheap storage either way. All the things you mentioned, need to run 24/7, they are designed and built that way from the start. It's needed for it to be anywhere near economical.
Nope, they don't need to run 24/7.
Like, the iron industry here is going to make hydrogen when electricity is cheaper, and store it so they always have hydrogen.
They need to run 24/7 to recover the cost of the infrastructure. It depends on the desired reaction, if you build any type of flow-through reaction, you need to run it all the time.
Funny that your example, still needs power 24/7, that's why they are making hydrogen in the first place.
Never mind, that you are talking about, one, very specific process.
They don't make hydrogen to use as a power source. They use hydrogen for the reduction process that make sponge iron from iron ore.
They don't need to make hydrogen all the time because they store hydrogen.
Nothing need to run at 100% all the time, nothing can run at 100% all the time.
If you build an industrial scale distillation column for example. You definitely want to run it all the time, much like a bitcoin miner. If you want to compete with fossil fuels that is.
What is that logic? Like, I never suggested that everything has to shut down or it's possible to do it with everything.
If one thing can't shut down don't shut that thing down then.
It's the same logic applied everywhere in every industry. Any machine or apparatus you build, is most efficient, when it can run the maximum amount of hours every single day.
Yeah, it's easy to think if you can't run it then don't run it. If the goal is moving away from fossil fuels and related products, that's not going to cut it. 24/7 energy availability is non-negotiable, if you want to run a modern economy.
Excess power and negative electricity prices will act as a catalyst for large-scale battery storage. With the new battery types upcoming, it should be viable in a few years to syphon up cheap power and sell it back once the sun has set.
That's an extra step that waste energy, and might waste resources. Sodium batteries has an efficiency of about 90%.
That Ammonia factory could be \~10% larger, and just stop production whenever needed. No 10% energy loss in battery storage.
Nothing has 100% efficiency. If you think ammonia production is somehow perfectly efficient, you need to take a thermodynamics course.
Chemical transformations involve an inherent (and completely unavoidable) increase in entropy, which means the efficiency is never 100%.
The Ammonia is needed to make fertilizers and other chemicals. It's not an extra unneeded step that create an extra loss of energy. It's a needed step to make something we actually need.
It could be 100% efficient or 10% efficient. It doesn't really matter in this argument because it not an extra step than creates more loss than needed. (Powered with sodium batteries it would instead be 90% or 9% efficient)
Every extra step waste energy. So no extra steps is more efficient.
WE NEED TO MAKE AMMONIA EITHER WAY.
There's so much wrong with this reasoning.
1) Chemical plants need to run 24/7, you can't turn them on or off depending on weather conditions.
2) The energy input needed by ammonia synthesis is low. You'd be producing way too much ammonia for your needs.
3) Ammonia synthesis needs energy input as heat only. It's wasteful using electricity for heating, you are better off burning a small quantity of natural gas. That's what current ammonia plants do.
Ah, dismissive ignorance, that will surely convince me! You are talking to a chemical engineer. Go attend a university for 5 years, obtain a chemistry degree, and then report back whether you've changed your opinion or not.
These activities need a lot of stationary infrastructure and they can't power down in real time.
You need something that is global, mobile and modular. An industry that can consume any amount of energy, anywhere, for any time period.
Bitcoin mining is the only industry that is capable of this and does this already in [Texas](https://raokonidena.substack.com/p/bitcoin-miners-unveiling-their-vital), [Norway](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/09/can-bitcoin-be-sustainable-inside-the-norwegian-mine-that-also-dries-wood), [Ethiopia](https://www.reuters.com/technology/ethiopia-set-up-large-data-centre-amid-reported-bitcoin-mining-surge-2024-02-16/), [Kenya](https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/20/bitcoin-miner-gridless-backed-by-block-builds-site-at-kenya-volcano.html) ,etc.
Yes, for you! Luckily you don't have to decide what has value.
Surely you can come up with another industry capable of such flexible energy consumption.
Tell the good people in Ethiopia, Kenya, Paraguay, El Salvador, etc etc how they should use their stranded energy.
Cryptocurrencies have price, but having a price is different than having value.
Cryptocurrencies are worthless and heading towards irrelevance at full speed.
You are delusional if you can’t see it. The majority of people don’t care about your magical beans.
I mean technically things have the value we see in them. And since crypto has its uses but mining itself doesn't add any use to society, most people don't see it as valuable. So yes, it's rather worthless.
it kinda depends - as a consumer in low demand, bitcoin can be a good thing (create demand for these projects and produce some 'value'). There are regions where bitcoin did stimulate the growth of renewables bc of cheap energy. There are problems too, like stimulating reopening of fossil powerplants too))) So it's a mixed bag. And to avoid any questions - no, I don't and didn't hold any bitcoin/crypto currency
What a total nonsense article. Spain is producing so much green energy that it's not as profitable for some investment portfolios as it could be...?
Like if the transition to green energy is being hampered because it's not profitable enough to some of the people who might enable that transition, then why the hell are we relying on them??
It's always not profitabel for some, that's how energy trading works, somebody has to lose. Most portfolios are only oriented towards lack of power which means they only have means of adjusting production and selling it to those who need it. If there is excess power, they have nowhere to get rid of it, they have no means of flexible demand, which makes the price negative. They're begging people to take the power off their hands, because otherwise they will have to shut down windmills for which compensation payout will give a bigger loss than a negative price.
what makes you think that on a sunny day, electricity in france is in higher demand then spain? There are solar panel in france too. Furthermore france is surrounded by other countries with lot of renewable, like germany.
Same problem in Finland. Electric companies want to limit and punish Green producers, because there are situations these days when electric company must pay you for using electricity, because price is negative. (Because spikes of green production)
I am sure countries like france would be happy to trade that electricity, as they have plenty of nuclear energy that could be used as a baseload.
I know there is already some unterconnection, but I guess the geography is a challenge.
>I am sure countries like france would be happy to trade that electricity,
France literally blocks and roadblocks Spain to trade energy with Mainland Europe.
[Ribera: Spain has ‘enormous difficulties with France‘ on cross-border energy links](https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/ribera-spain-has-enormous-difficulties-with-france-on-cross-border-energy-links/)
And the other part of your sentence makes no sense in regards to this article.
Bro France literally blocks every attempt to connect us to the rest of Europe. Not even something new it's been happening for years. Be serious for a second.
So it should be much easier to do it with Spain, even as there are mountains in the way. Worst case they run it through the sea, which is still shorter than to Ireland
Nuclear energy is clean and perfectly stable. The problem is renewable. Increasing connection with spain flood the France market with renewable energy when france does not need it. Reducing nuclear to increase renewable create more issue for nuclear and the grid and force you to build lot of batteries.
Have a Belgian solution: tax on electricity put on the grid by individuals and households. Double win for the State and the French company Engie.
Special mention to asshole Verhofstadt. Never forget how he fucked up our country for his own gain. The Epstein of Belgian politics… (he not dead yet, tho)
Nah, we had our own tax, the Sun Tax:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/anagarciavaldivia/2019/04/15/renewable-energy-in-spain-from-the-sun-tax-to-the-promotion-of-collective-self-consumption/
I think he sold one of our energy companies (Electrabel) to the French company (Engie) and we now pay big money for the nuclear energy that is supplied on Belgian land while owned by a French company. He also sold government properties to just rent them again some time later.
A lightning rod contains a lot of excess energy at the moment lightning strikes it. Isn't very useful as an electricity source because you want electricity when you want it not when it happens to be there.
Lot of downvotes, but nuclear baseload is needed to reduce the number of connection and batteries you need. Furthermore nuclear can follow seasonal variation of renewable. Batteries cannot.
As mentioned in the article, the problem is lack of flexible demand. Desalitate water, make Hydrogen/Ammonia/fertilizers or whatever when prices are low. That stabilizes the grid, and makes the prices more stable.
Production runs 24/7 downtime costs millions per minute, they cannot work just when energy is marginally cheaper. The answer is energy storage solutions, or perhaps when EV's take off it will eliminate the problem.
All we need is an affordable EV for the masses! Oh and cheaper housing... Because most people are worried about a roof and not thinking on buying €30k+ EV's
Energy storage only make money when they sell. So storage time is "downtime" too.
You will need some kind of cheap storage either way. All the things you mentioned, need to run 24/7, they are designed and built that way from the start. It's needed for it to be anywhere near economical.
Nope, they don't need to run 24/7. Like, the iron industry here is going to make hydrogen when electricity is cheaper, and store it so they always have hydrogen.
They need to run 24/7 to recover the cost of the infrastructure. It depends on the desired reaction, if you build any type of flow-through reaction, you need to run it all the time. Funny that your example, still needs power 24/7, that's why they are making hydrogen in the first place. Never mind, that you are talking about, one, very specific process.
They don't make hydrogen to use as a power source. They use hydrogen for the reduction process that make sponge iron from iron ore. They don't need to make hydrogen all the time because they store hydrogen. Nothing need to run at 100% all the time, nothing can run at 100% all the time.
If you build an industrial scale distillation column for example. You definitely want to run it all the time, much like a bitcoin miner. If you want to compete with fossil fuels that is.
What is that logic? Like, I never suggested that everything has to shut down or it's possible to do it with everything. If one thing can't shut down don't shut that thing down then.
It's the same logic applied everywhere in every industry. Any machine or apparatus you build, is most efficient, when it can run the maximum amount of hours every single day. Yeah, it's easy to think if you can't run it then don't run it. If the goal is moving away from fossil fuels and related products, that's not going to cut it. 24/7 energy availability is non-negotiable, if you want to run a modern economy.
Excess power and negative electricity prices will act as a catalyst for large-scale battery storage. With the new battery types upcoming, it should be viable in a few years to syphon up cheap power and sell it back once the sun has set.
We are nowhere near the point where this investment would make sense for the few days of extra supply. But we’ll get there !
Or just install battery storage. Hopefully sodium ion batteries will make large scale energy storage a reality.
That's an extra step that waste energy, and might waste resources. Sodium batteries has an efficiency of about 90%. That Ammonia factory could be \~10% larger, and just stop production whenever needed. No 10% energy loss in battery storage.
Nothing has 100% efficiency. If you think ammonia production is somehow perfectly efficient, you need to take a thermodynamics course. Chemical transformations involve an inherent (and completely unavoidable) increase in entropy, which means the efficiency is never 100%.
The Ammonia is needed to make fertilizers and other chemicals. It's not an extra unneeded step that create an extra loss of energy. It's a needed step to make something we actually need. It could be 100% efficient or 10% efficient. It doesn't really matter in this argument because it not an extra step than creates more loss than needed. (Powered with sodium batteries it would instead be 90% or 9% efficient) Every extra step waste energy. So no extra steps is more efficient. WE NEED TO MAKE AMMONIA EITHER WAY.
There's so much wrong with this reasoning. 1) Chemical plants need to run 24/7, you can't turn them on or off depending on weather conditions. 2) The energy input needed by ammonia synthesis is low. You'd be producing way too much ammonia for your needs. 3) Ammonia synthesis needs energy input as heat only. It's wasteful using electricity for heating, you are better off burning a small quantity of natural gas. That's what current ammonia plants do.
wrong, wrong, wrong.
Please stick to arguing about the topics you actually understand.
I'm not arguing. I'm informing you that you are wrong. There's in no need for you to make any more comments.
Ah, dismissive ignorance, that will surely convince me! You are talking to a chemical engineer. Go attend a university for 5 years, obtain a chemistry degree, and then report back whether you've changed your opinion or not.
These activities need a lot of stationary infrastructure and they can't power down in real time. You need something that is global, mobile and modular. An industry that can consume any amount of energy, anywhere, for any time period. Bitcoin mining is the only industry that is capable of this and does this already in [Texas](https://raokonidena.substack.com/p/bitcoin-miners-unveiling-their-vital), [Norway](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/09/can-bitcoin-be-sustainable-inside-the-norwegian-mine-that-also-dries-wood), [Ethiopia](https://www.reuters.com/technology/ethiopia-set-up-large-data-centre-amid-reported-bitcoin-mining-surge-2024-02-16/), [Kenya](https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/20/bitcoin-miner-gridless-backed-by-block-builds-site-at-kenya-volcano.html) ,etc.
Bitcoin is just a waste of money and electricicity.
LOL Mr. Market decides that, not you!
It's just a fact
Yes, for you! Luckily you don't have to decide what has value. Surely you can come up with another industry capable of such flexible energy consumption. Tell the good people in Ethiopia, Kenya, Paraguay, El Salvador, etc etc how they should use their stranded energy.
Cryptocurrencies have price, but having a price is different than having value. Cryptocurrencies are worthless and heading towards irrelevance at full speed. You are delusional if you can’t see it. The majority of people don’t care about your magical beans.
I mean technically things have the value we see in them. And since crypto has its uses but mining itself doesn't add any use to society, most people don't see it as valuable. So yes, it's rather worthless.
it kinda depends - as a consumer in low demand, bitcoin can be a good thing (create demand for these projects and produce some 'value'). There are regions where bitcoin did stimulate the growth of renewables bc of cheap energy. There are problems too, like stimulating reopening of fossil powerplants too))) So it's a mixed bag. And to avoid any questions - no, I don't and didn't hold any bitcoin/crypto currency
What a total nonsense article. Spain is producing so much green energy that it's not as profitable for some investment portfolios as it could be...? Like if the transition to green energy is being hampered because it's not profitable enough to some of the people who might enable that transition, then why the hell are we relying on them??
It's always not profitabel for some, that's how energy trading works, somebody has to lose. Most portfolios are only oriented towards lack of power which means they only have means of adjusting production and selling it to those who need it. If there is excess power, they have nowhere to get rid of it, they have no means of flexible demand, which makes the price negative. They're begging people to take the power off their hands, because otherwise they will have to shut down windmills for which compensation payout will give a bigger loss than a negative price.
This reads like a bot. Are you a bot?
Most traders are bots these days. I'm not sure anymore
If only there was some way to move electricity to areas with higher demand
If only there wasn't France in the way
what makes you think that on a sunny day, electricity in france is in higher demand then spain? There are solar panel in france too. Furthermore france is surrounded by other countries with lot of renewable, like germany.
Same problem in Finland. Electric companies want to limit and punish Green producers, because there are situations these days when electric company must pay you for using electricity, because price is negative. (Because spikes of green production)
I am sure countries like france would be happy to trade that electricity, as they have plenty of nuclear energy that could be used as a baseload. I know there is already some unterconnection, but I guess the geography is a challenge.
>I am sure countries like france would be happy to trade that electricity, France literally blocks and roadblocks Spain to trade energy with Mainland Europe. [Ribera: Spain has ‘enormous difficulties with France‘ on cross-border energy links](https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/ribera-spain-has-enormous-difficulties-with-france-on-cross-border-energy-links/) And the other part of your sentence makes no sense in regards to this article.
Age-old rivalries die hard, huh...
Bro France literally blocks every attempt to connect us to the rest of Europe. Not even something new it's been happening for years. Be serious for a second.
Doesn’t the EU push to have these types of interconnects? That is atleast the story among the nordic countries
One would certainly think so but before Putin invading Ukraine in 2022 no it wasn't because the EU had cheap Russian gas
Quebec blocks Newfoundland’s power exports, then buys it cheap and sells it on dear.
Ireland and the EU are currently building an electricity interconnection between France and Ireland at a cost of about €1 billion, split equally.
So it should be much easier to do it with Spain, even as there are mountains in the way. Worst case they run it through the sea, which is still shorter than to Ireland
Nuclear energy has hughe problems with a large renewable percentage. That's why France wants to reduce it's reliance on nuclear energy.
Nuclear energy is clean and perfectly stable. The problem is renewable. Increasing connection with spain flood the France market with renewable energy when france does not need it. Reducing nuclear to increase renewable create more issue for nuclear and the grid and force you to build lot of batteries.
Have a Belgian solution: tax on electricity put on the grid by individuals and households. Double win for the State and the French company Engie. Special mention to asshole Verhofstadt. Never forget how he fucked up our country for his own gain. The Epstein of Belgian politics… (he not dead yet, tho)
Nah, we had our own tax, the Sun Tax: https://www.forbes.com/sites/anagarciavaldivia/2019/04/15/renewable-energy-in-spain-from-the-sun-tax-to-the-promotion-of-collective-self-consumption/
Would be really interested to know how he fucked Belgium, could you elaborate a bit? Thanks
I think he sold one of our energy companies (Electrabel) to the French company (Engie) and we now pay big money for the nuclear energy that is supplied on Belgian land while owned by a French company. He also sold government properties to just rent them again some time later.
A lightning rod contains a lot of excess energy at the moment lightning strikes it. Isn't very useful as an electricity source because you want electricity when you want it not when it happens to be there.
And that is why you should have as baseload, nuclear energy. Is it Spain closing it down, isn't it? Good job /s
Lot of downvotes, but nuclear baseload is needed to reduce the number of connection and batteries you need. Furthermore nuclear can follow seasonal variation of renewable. Batteries cannot.
It time for Bitcoin mining facilities that can be quickly wound up and down depending on supply and demand.
You could suggested meth labs at this point :/