[HN Gopher] Maximizing Battery Storage Profits via High-Frequenc...
___________________________________________________________________
Maximizing Battery Storage Profits via High-Frequency Intraday
Trading
Author : doener
Score : 197 points
Date : 2025-06-12 09:43 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
| dachworker wrote:
| I'm not at all familiar with this whole field, but why would you
| publish a trading strategy if it has potential? Why not sell it
| to a hedgefund, at least? Or is this research formally publishing
| what industry is already doing?
| h4kor wrote:
| This isn't a trade "just on paper". You need real hardware
| integrated into the grid.
| throw-qqqqq wrote:
| Seemingly profitable strategies are actually published all the
| time in finance literature.
|
| Some also work (usually only for a short amount of time if
| profitable), most don't really work at all for various
| technical reasons (lookahead bias, model doesn't account for
| slip/trading costs or assume infinite liquidity or a portfolio
| too large to realistically rebalance etc.) and some again work,
| but have unfavorable risk-adjusted return profiles compared to
| simpler strategies.
| yxhuvud wrote:
| Or in the case of batteries: Requires a whole lot of hardware
| to be bought to get a reasonable economy of scale.
| Gys wrote:
| Is the trading strategy making substantial returns (at least a
| few percent) on the full investment (batteries, electronics,
| subscriptions)? Otherwise this is only relevant for battery
| owners that benefit already by other means (using the battery
| at night for home owners, for example).
| Energiekomin wrote:
| The authors are from universities. Publicly funded.
|
| And its not like they can just do that and get rich. Its
| particular for/with battery storage systems.
|
| Basically making battery storage systems more interesting for
| investors to invest into.
| loehnsberg wrote:
| There's still a lot of work left to do to go from an academic
| prototype to live trading: real-time data, market access,
| SCADA, compliance & legal, security, ... Also you must be a
| physical player that owns the battery and/or right to use it
| and not just do paper trading.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| There is "virtual" (paper) trading in the day ahead markets
| in the US, but it's just for amounts of energy. You can't
| make a fake battery for the grid operator to optimize.
| chardz wrote:
| On top of what others have mentioned, this paper also sidesteps
| forecasting electricity prices, which is already a very
| complicated problem (particularly in U.S markets where we have
| zonal pricing) needed to build profitable battery systems that
| actually operate on the grid.
|
| I've had a few chats with some folks working on battery
| startups, and I think the more conventional approach is to
| forecast prices + run an optimization to find optimal storage
| decisions. You could measure the system's performance by
| looking at how well the algorithm does when it has perfect
| information about prices (obviously, when you have perfect
| information about prices it is trivial to optimize the
| battery).
| dschaurecker wrote:
| Our two follow-up papers are addressing exactly this (for
| Europe)! We are extending our high-frequency continuous
| intraday approach (CID) with a forecast-based day-ahead
| bidding stage, and subsequent CID forecast updates.
|
| I'd also be quite interested in strategies for grid-scale
| BESS trading in the US' real-time markets. Do you know more
| about it, or could forward me to someone who would be willing
| to talk about it? ;)
| chardz wrote:
| I'm afraid I'm not too familiar with BESS in particular,
| and the people I spoke to are probably not too keen on
| sharing much (which is generally true of those who work in
| U.S markets). Unfortunately it's all very opaque.
|
| I'd be happy to provide you the names of the firms I spoke
| to over email, if that would be of use!
| dschaurecker wrote:
| Most real-world optimizations for flexible storage assets
| currently work across multiple markets, sometimes also with
| more sophisticated boundary conditions. What we show is that
| high-frequency trading on the continuous intraday market is
| relevant, especially when training for more optimal
| parametrized strategies.
|
| It also seems like a sensible idea to publish details and
| theories about an idea, not necessarily a finished trading
| product though ;)
| buu700 wrote:
| This sounds similar to something I suggested at one point:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38669706
|
| _Imagine software that could run on EVs, Powerwall-type
| batteries, computers /tablets/smartphones, and so on, which would
| automatically charge and discharge for passive income.
| Essentially algorithmic trading, but with power instead of stock.
| You'd just have to configure any necessary time ranges and charge
| percentages, e.g. maybe your EV needs to be at 25% by 8am and
| again by 5pm on weekdays in order to make your daily commute._
|
| _Maybe some EVs will start to come with built-in crypto miners
| to burn negatively priced power when the battery is at capacity.
| Maybe Lyft /Uber and Waymo/Cruise will take advantage of it by
| increasing and lowering rates based on the price of power (if
| they don't already)._
| Energiekomin wrote:
| Thats what bi-directional charging is for and its already
| becoming political to force the industry to support this.
|
| And we already have energy provider which provide a tarif for
| exactly this.
|
| The only idea i hate is the mentioning of crypto. Not only is
| it waste, it converts the energy in heat which needs to get
| disipated and potentially wastes even more energy to get this
| heat away from the current location (ac).
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but this isn't novel and
| something that's been talked about for a long time. The
| industry term I've most heard is "prices to devices". You of
| course need retail to participate more in the wholesale
| markets, but there are a lot of barriers - some technological,
| some regulatory. Some companies did this in ERCOT, but there
| was a big backlash when customers got $20k bills after Winter
| Storm Uri as they didn't understand what they were signing up
| for.
|
| The FERC passed Order 2222 which is a bigger step in that
| direction by forcing the regional wholesale markets to allow
| aggregators to aggregate up the smaller stuff that is normally
| considered noise.
| buu700 wrote:
| Interesting, thanks. That doesn't sound like bad news at all.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| No I guess not. It can sometimes be a little sad though
| when you think you've come up with some grand new idea and
| it's been done.
| infecto wrote:
| And while not making money, there has been a lot of talk
| around Virtual Power Plants, that is unifying the larger
| demand devices to help stabilize the grid in times of peak
| demand.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) are essentially the same thing
| as the Distributed Energy Resource Aggregators (DERAs) I
| mentioned above. I guess a VPP is technically a more
| general term and could also refer to the same concept under
| different structures like in a micro grid.
|
| The industry has a ton of jargon (literally thousands of
| acronyms amongst the US regional markets) and in many cases
| there are 8 terms that mean the exact same thing.
| infecto wrote:
| Not sure I follow but seems like a weird thing to
| mention. The DERA is the who, the VPP is the what.
| Similar but far from essentially the same thing.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| The DERA is frequently discussed as being both the market
| entity as well as the collective what. Language is weird.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| I wrote a book on this in 2020 and was already somewhat late to
| the party, as people were running actual pilot programs a
| decade earlier!
|
| Also large industrial consumers have been participating in
| similar approaches for decades. See the crazy clever trading
| schemes that Enron used to do fraud and drive up prices.
| bfayers wrote:
| I run predbat (https://springfall2008.github.io/batpred/) to
| achieve something like this with my Home Assistant install to
| manage my home battery. It can also manage EV charging but I
| haven't needed to do that yet due to how my tariff works. (Very
| cheap fixed period overnight).
| rtuin wrote:
| This type of service is becoming increasingly prevalent among
| European energy suppliers for their residential customers.
| Beyond providing a revenue stream for consumers this model
| aggregates distributed energy resources (home batteries, EV's,
| PV systems) into a one virtual power plant. This enables the
| storage of surplus energy generated during solar peaks and
| dispatch back to the grid during periods of high demand. I find
| it a fascinating domain to work in!
| amluto wrote:
| > However, because it is physically not possible to charge and
| discharge the battery at the same time, such trades have to be
| prevented.
|
| The authors are observing that, if electricity prices are
| negative and your battery is not perfectly efficient, then you
| would like to charge and discharge simultaneously to get paid for
| wasting energy, but you can't.
|
| This is a silly limitation. Surely the power electronics or even
| just the control algorithms in a BESS could be slightly modified
| to consume power, get warm, and not transfer any current to or
| from the battery cells, effectively taking advantage of the
| BESS's heat sink to sink excess power and sell that service.
|
| More seriously, in a world with occasional negative prices, you
| would want your battery to be able discharge itself, without
| exporting power, in a controlled and power-limited manner so as
| to avoid overheating. And the optimization algorithms should
| factor this in. I wonder if real grid-scale BESS systems have
| this capability.
| looofooo0 wrote:
| Good luck trying to get rid of such an amount of heat anyway
| near your batteries.
| doener wrote:
| Well in times of negative energy prices wouldn't it even be
| good if the air conditioning ran at full capacity?
| Energiekomin wrote:
| In summer? If its not getting to cold for you.
|
| In winter yes also if its not getting to warm for you, but
| also heating water is easy enough. But you don't need that
| much hot water
|
| Potentially also cooling down your fridge more and your
| freezer. But that is not that much energy.
|
| While that works, it would still be quite a waste. It would
| be a lot better to save it and discarge it later
| WJW wrote:
| Depending on how powerful your air conditioner is, it would
| rapidly start cooling down the building to a temperature
| which is too low to still be comfortable. You could maybe
| buffer this with more thermal mass, but then you are back
| in the game of storing energy and might as well just get
| extra batteries.
| sib wrote:
| Why not place the air conditioner next to a large
| electric space heater?
| amluto wrote:
| Many heat pumps already have a mechanism for deliberately
| wasting energy for defrosting the coils. I bet that the
| same hardware with a different control algorithm could be
| convinced to heat out the outdoors without much net
| change in indoor temperature. (The solution involving the
| smallest amount of extra hardware is to run the system in
| reverse periodically. There are other solutions.)
|
| Whether the negative energy price is enough to balance
| wear on the system and potential noise is a different
| question.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Yes, it's not much of an issue if you have free energy.
| lazide wrote:
| It only makes sense if you have 'more than free' energy
| you need to get rid of, because not getting rid of it
| causes problems. Similar to flaring natural gas, but for
| actual electricity.
|
| This is not a common occurrence or situation, or
| shouldn't be anyway, or someone is screwing up pretty
| badly somewhere.
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| With variable sources of electricity it can be cheaper to
| have capacity at a level that you sometimes overproduce
| than to have a capacity that produces at a lower level,
| and so mostly needs a backup source of power.
| infecto wrote:
| It's actually quite common. You have base load generation
| stations and your highly variable solar and wind. There
| are often times when the power at a wholesale rate dips
| below zero. It's too costly to turn off your base load
| plants and maybe both solar and wind are generating above
| normal.
| lazide wrote:
| Solar inverters can just not draw the solar current, and
| wind can generally just change the pitch on their rotors
| at the individual level. The only ones that generally can
| not help 'over produce' are baseload power stations as
| they have actual physical inertia in very large turbines
| and can't respond as quickly to demand.
| infecto wrote:
| Right but keep in mind these events are generally short
| lived and depending on the market there may be
| reliability guarantees that keep these open or specific
| federal funding rates.
|
| But like I said before when rates go negative you will
| typically see it in occurrences where you have abnormal
| conditions (wind and solar generating at the same time)
| or aggressive night winds. And it does not happen long
| enough to need to curtail generation.
| petertodd wrote:
| Baseload power stations sometimes over-produce on longer
| timescales than just a few seconds because they'd rather
| not turn them off for maintenance/operational reasons.
| E.g. imagine you have a big biomass boiler feeding a
| steam turbine. Turning it off for an hour or two means
| everything cools down, which is a thermal stress,
| reducing lifetime compared to keeping it at constant
| power.
|
| But yes, certainly poorly managed solar/wind that doesn't
| have good mechanisms to turn off in response to lack of
| demand is mainly the issue. In the future, when control
| systems are better, I'm sure negative pricing will be
| much less common.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Electricity prices around here (Austria) are negative
| around noon on most summer days. They pay you to waste
| all that solar energy people are feeding into the grid.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Is it really screwing up? If solar panels are cheaper
| than batteries, then you can over-provision the solar
| panels and then you won't need to use the batteries as
| much, so you can probably get away with smaller
| installations.
|
| My gut would expect it to approach $0 if full
| communication were possible, based on the instinct that
| most people would run their dishwashers if the energy
| cost was $0.
| lazide wrote:
| Solar panels don't produce excess power that needs to be
| dissipated - just don't invert the unneeded current, and
| that's it.
|
| 'Overproduction' in this sense is from something like a
| spinning generator which starts to overspin, or an
| inverter which oddly starts to overvolt the output for
| some inexplicable reason.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| That only works if the grid operator has control over the
| inverters, which they often don't have.
|
| We currently have the situation where operators of solar
| farms of all sizes get a fixed amount of money for each
| joule they feed into the grid. Of course those people
| have zero interest in turning down their inverters when
| the sun is shining and there's already a surplus in the
| grid.
| _trampeltier wrote:
| Some years ago, I helped with battery load tests in a nuclear
| power station. The constant test load was just a big (~500kW)
| heater. We burned the battery energy for 5 hours. So it's
| easy possible to do such things.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Exactly this.
|
| And the same thing for residential scale is literally just
| a ceramic space heater running at ~1500w.
|
| They're dirt cheap, usually have temp safety checks built
| in, work on a residentially sized circuit, and are
| available everywhere.
|
| I needed a cheap and consistent load to do LFP battery
| testing, and I could spend $5,000 for a real test unit, or
| $21 for a ceramic heater that will do basically the same
| thing.
|
| If you've already got the monitoring for the
| batteries/inverters, a heater is a GREAT load choice.
| petertodd wrote:
| HAAS CNC mills are famous for using electric stove
| elements for the spindle brake resistor: https://www.redd
| it.com/r/CNC/comments/1es1d01/someone_didnt_...
|
| I'm not sure that this really is a completely off-the-
| shelf stove element. But obviously, the technology is
| basically identical to what you'd have on your stove.
| _trampeltier wrote:
| It is cery common for Frequency Inverter for AC Motors to
| have a break resistor. It's expensive to push energy back
| to the grid with from an inverter. So in most case just a
| break resistor is used. Just if you break a lot and a
| long time it is worth to buy an inverter who can do it.
| If you have multiple axis in a machine, often they are
| coupled with DC, so the break energy is used by another
| drive.
| petertodd wrote:
| Yup. On a much bigger scale it's common for the power
| supplies going to electric trains to do this too. They
| like to use regenerative braking because it's efficient.
| But the electricity grid can't always handle the extra
| power, so in some designs they have a backup mechanism to
| dissipate the power if needed; diesel-electrics usually
| just have a big bank of air-cooled load resistors on the
| roof.
|
| A neat example of regenerative braking being important is
| the London Underground: they've had a persistent problem
| with high temperatures in the subway, of which a decent %
| is actually heat from trains braking. By using
| regenerative braking rather than putting that energy into
| the tunnels as heat, they can transport that energy
| outside the tunnels, keeping them cooler.
| jordz wrote:
| I work in the industry making hardware and software for large
| scale commercial and grid scale storage.
|
| There are several challenges with this, safety, thermal
| runaway, and life cycle of the asset which has a limited amount
| of cycles.
|
| Also the architecture of the system for the AC inverters and
| the DC side can come from very different places in the supply
| chain and aren't as vertically integrated leaving you in a
| position where you can't actually make this work without
| compromising something in the supply chain. That being said we
| are talking about a LOT of energy in these systems and to
| dissipate that much heat you'd need a load bank.
| raphaelj wrote:
| Couldn't the battery just do, as an example, 1 minute long
| charge then discharge cycles?
|
| For example, if the electricity price is -28EUR/MWh (like today
| in Germany), and your battery efficacy is 80%, you could get
| paid 28EUR/MWh charging, then only pay back 22EUR discharging,
| generating a 6EUR/MWh profit.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| The wholesale energy markets don't have sub 5-minute
| granularity anywhere that I'm aware of. In the US, 1-hour is
| standard in the day-ahead markets and 5-minutes is standard
| for the spot markets.
|
| There is also the problem that your battery would likely
| degrade fast depending on the technology.
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| The solution is actually what's called a "dummy load". Get paid
| to waste energy and heat up the planet a tiny bit more, gotta
| love it.
| thebruce87m wrote:
| Can't we power a big laser and point it at space or something
| instead? Anyone got a dumber idea?
| beAbU wrote:
| There are so many things that are energy intensive and not
| really economically viable: co2 capture, crypto mining,
| "green" hydrogen, we could see a world soon where a large
| scale BESS would have an on-site dummy load that does
| something useful with that electricity
| Analemma_ wrote:
| The problem with all those things is that they are
| ridiculously capital intensive to set up, and then they
| sit idle 80% of the time Worse, the whole point of
| negative electricity prices is that they're an
| inefficiency in the market which ideally will eventually
| be optimized away. Then what do you do with your billion-
| dollar plant that can only run with negative prices that
| no longer exist?
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| You're assuming the way they get optimized away isn't by
| these sorts of plants.
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| I guess the problem with building a pure energy waster is
| that it could only operate every now and then, and it's not
| guaranteed to see negative prices in a few years from now.
| So, might not be all that profitable.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Use the electricity to heat up a lump of iron to a very
| high temperature, than use electromagnets to fling it into
| space?
| yetihehe wrote:
| If you heat up iron to very high temperature (>770degC),
| it's much harder to fling it using electromagnets.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Ah that's annoying. Fine, we use the electricity to
| heat...uh...molten salt encased in stone, and to pull
| back a very big heat-proof slingshot, and after a
| threshold it lets go and launches it into space.
| noitpmeder wrote:
| Isn't this the basic description of what a gravity battery
| should provide?
| horsawlarway wrote:
| No, because his situation is basically that the gravity
| battery is already sitting at its max height.
|
| He's just trying to burn energy because a negative rate
| means he's getting paid to use it.
|
| So sure - it's great to give that energy a functional use
| first (ex - charge his batteries) but eventually he runs
| out of functional ways to use the energy but could still be
| making money by using it.
|
| Enter the desire for a dummy load.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Pumped hydro could do that if they had a way to bypass
| (either physically or electrically) their turbines on the
| downhill portion of the loop. Just pump water up and back
| down without extracting the energy. Then you have a dummy
| load that isn't just a power sink and is already designed
| to handle the relatively rapid switches on and off.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Yeah, but dummy loads are cheap. Probably cheaper than
| changing any designs in other places.
|
| It's straight forward to add a giant resistive load that
| just converts electricity back to heat.
|
| I can get 10kw heaters for just a couple hundred bucks or
| 1.5kw heaters for literally $20 usd. And that also
| switches on/off easily.
|
| For hydro... just boiling water with a heater is going to
| be pretty much unbeatable if we're playing the "waste
| energy" game. No need to approximate it slowly with your
| pump motor and risk other infrastructure.
| fer wrote:
| >"dummy load"
|
| You mean crypto miner.
| michaelt wrote:
| Surprisingly, not always.
|
| If I buy a device for $100 that, given free electricity,
| will mine $500 of cryptocurrency in its useful life - I can
| easily lose money if I run it less than 20% of the time.
|
| And I doubt electricity is negative priced >20% of the
| time.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Yeah, there are a ton of plans in this thread for what to
| do with excess energy. The problem is, that's the wrong
| question. The goal is to answer the question "what should
| we do with excess energy where we don't mind building the
| capacity, but then only rarely running it."
|
| Rather than coming up with some grand scheme, maybe it
| would be good if our dishwashers and washing machines
| could listen to the grid and activate when power cost was
| negative. (We may need to coordinate a bit though, so we
| don't all activate at once).
| rtkwe wrote:
| In some areas negative prices account for up to 25% of
| hours so it's a decent number but still a rough number of
| spins up and down and a lowish duty cycle. A solution
| might be to build battery capacity along side these loads
| to effectively buffer the negative cost power to be able
| to run continuously. That would skyrocket the initial
| capital investment though.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Yeah, batteries are just the sort of
| expensive/straightforward solution.
|
| If you think of it, a dryer is sort of a combination of a
| flywheel and a heating element, so it _should_ be the
| over-provisioner's best friend. IMO a real failure has
| been not taking advantage of our appliances.
| rtkwe wrote:
| The issue there is connectivity and most residential
| customers don't pay spot prices so you need to upgrade
| their meters as well or build metering into the appliance
| so they can get credit for the energy they burn off. Plus
| you're looking at putting a lot of extra cycles on
| equipment not built as well as it used to be so you're
| burning the useful life of a hard to repair device and
| probably not getting paid enough to cover that, plus they
| more and more designed to burn as little energy as
| possible.
|
| I know there are some places where this happens though
| but it's more along the lines of the devices delaying
| their start until energy is cheap rather than being used
| as loads to shed excess capacity afaik.
| bee_rider wrote:
| > I know there are some places where this happens though
| but it's more along the lines of the devices delaying
| their start until energy is cheap rather than being used
| as loads to shed excess capacity afaik.
|
| This is what I meant, sorry for the ambiguity. Load the
| washer up and kick it off whenever energy is cheap. I
| don't care when it happens other than, like, that it
| happens once a day, so why not defer this to the power
| company, right?
| rtkwe wrote:
| Like I said support isn't really there for a lot of
| electric customers. I pay a single flat rate for
| electricity so there's no point in time shifting
| consumption.
|
| Also there are downsides to having clothes just sit there
| for hours potentially before you dry them. They can get
| pretty dank from the moisture and for dryers some clothes
| need to be removed immediately when the cycle finishes.
| wcoenen wrote:
| I have an electricity contract with dynamic pricing that
| changes every hour based on the day-ahead electricity
| market for Belgium. I know what the prices for the next
| day will be around 13h10. I charge the car whenever the
| prices are lowest: around noon in the sunny months, at
| night during winter, preferably weekends. I save around
| 25% of my electricity bill like this. (More in summer,
| less in winter.)
|
| So it's already possible to incentivize people correctly
| with price signals, at least in some regions of the
| world. But people are not yet familiar with this. I guess
| that will change as the pricing between dynamic and
| traditional contracts keeps diverging. With a traditional
| contract, you are essentially paying the average evening
| peak price all the time. With a dynamic contract, you get
| access to the cheaper and even negative rates.
| wcoenen wrote:
| Presumably the negatively priced energy came from solar
| panels, so those sun rays were going to heat the planet
| anyway. The same still happens with a dummy load, just with
| extra steps in between to convert to and from electricity.
|
| With enough solar panels deployed, you could still argue that
| they change the albedo of the Earth and therefore it's
| temperature.
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| Not necessarily. There's also reflection involved.
|
| Now to figure out how much exactly you need to take into
| account the solar panel absorption spectrum & the albedo of
| the earth.
| eisa01 wrote:
| Related, do Solar PV panels need any extra equipment to
| curtail instead of feeding into the grid?
|
| Aside from software integration to remotely control
| household PV systems, is there anything else needed to
| curtail during negative price events?
| nick3443 wrote:
| If the inverter is smart enough, nothing else would be
| necessary
| eisa01 wrote:
| Thanks! Google managed to find more details on Reddit
| when I searched now
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/energy/comments/1iu2kkz/solar_cu
| rta...
| triceratops wrote:
| Could we use it for some kind of carbon capture process?
| Leherenn wrote:
| I think it's pretty clear with the constantly increasing
| durations of negative prices, so far we haven't found a way
| to do so profitably. Carbon capture or anything else for
| that matter.
|
| Anything that would really love free energy also cost a lot
| to build and maintain/operate besides electricity. So much
| that a few hundred hours of free (or even better than free)
| energy a year is far from enough when you need >90% uptime
| to make sense. Maybe it makes you go from 95 to 85%, but
| still clearly it's far more than there are sunshine hours.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| It's basically the idea behind things like hydrogen
| electroysis with excess energy.
|
| The problem is that things that can use bulk energy
| productively like electrolysers, hydrocarbon crackers,
| smelters, AI training farms, etc. are very expensive and
| having them on warm standby but idle most of the time
| waiting for good grid weather makes for bad returns on the
| capital expenditure and operational costs.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I know this is grossly pedantic, but not matter what that
| electricity is used for, it will end up "heating up the
| planet a bit more". Energy is a waterfall whose base is heat.
| pomerange wrote:
| _Technically_ if you power a laser shooting into space with
| solar panels you are cooling the planet, but you are
| ofcourse right in practice and on the scale of the
| universe!
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Fossil fuels contain energy that are not in the form of
| heat, so electricity from fossil fuels would heat the
| planet even ignoring greenhouse effect. If from renewables,
| however, the energy has been previously extracted from the
| environment, thus being neutral in terms of heating the
| planet.
|
| Not that it matters, because the effect would be miniscule
| in any case.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Not sure if it's discussed in the paper but apparently in
| Australia there have already been recorded instances of
| batteries charging with negative price electricity and then
| selling back that electricity at a still negative but closer to
| zero price and so profiting.
|
| When I first heard it, it seemed wild that they couldn't hold
| on for the price to go back above zero, but I guess if we're
| talking high frequency trading it makes more sense. They might
| have bought and sold many times while the price is different
| levels of negative before switching to charging up in
| preparation for the later price rises.
|
| And the round trip inefficiency helps too.
| petertodd wrote:
| That's not as ridiculous as it sounds!
|
| As you know, negative electricity prices mean that someone is
| willing to pay you to dispose of electricity they need to
| generate for some reason. For example, a conventional steam-
| turbine-based electricity plant might prefer to just keep
| running for a brief period of time when demand is low, rather
| than subject their equipment to a power cycle, which
| increases their maintenance costs. There's other, dumber,
| examples based on stupid contracts and badly designed
| solar... but this example is a reasonable one that exists for
| good engineering reasons.
|
| The battery provider in this circumstance is profiting from
| their ability to accept power when demand to dispose of
| electricity is particularly high. When that need goes down,
| they can reasonably profit by dumping that energy on someone
| else who is _also_ able to dispose of the electricity. But at
| a lower cost. E.g. imagine an big industrial refrigerated
| storage facility that can consume _some_ excess energy by
| supercooling their refrigerators. But they can 't consume
| unlimited excess energy, because at some point their
| warehouse just gets too cold, and they don't have unlimited
| refrigeration capacity anyway.
|
| So in this simplified example, the battery storage service is
| getting paid a lot of money to quickly absorb a lot of
| energy, which they then dump more slowly to the refrigerated
| warehouse (and similar providers) as the surplus diminishes,
| in anticipation of another surplus in the near future.
| kurthr wrote:
| If it was so profitable, why wouldn't the electricity
| utility do it themselves? Certainly, they have the scale,
| infrastructure, and pricing power to do it.
|
| Oh, that's right. This is supposed to be wealth transfer.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| Someone at the generation facility ran the numbers and
| found that the grid was able to dispose of excess energy
| for peanuts but installing and maintaining a dedicated
| electronic load cost more than peanuts.
|
| I'd recommend digging elsewhere for conspiracy bait. This
| is a mild curiosity at best.
| hinkley wrote:
| This is why we don't move data center load to the coldest
| available data center to reduce the AC power fraction of
| the cost. The cost of electricity is a significant
| fraction of the overall cost but not high enough to make
| up for stranded assets. Computers not running during
| their best years is expensive.
|
| But I'm not sure that's entirely correct, and maybe it's
| time to revisit this.
|
| Any system that is selling responsiveness as part of
| their service has to keep a certain amount of equipment
| sitting idle. That's just how queuing theory works. So
| while you cannot move all server load to the coldest
| available zone, we should still be able to run that
| center near capacity and use the hottest one for all
| reserve capacity.
|
| Power plants also have to deal with fines for exceeding
| emissions limits, but I suspect the problem here is that
| Bayesian analysis tells them that if a plant has to kick
| on early for some reason (early school release day, or
| another plant exceeded a maintenance window), it will
| still be needed for sure an hour from now, so it's better
| to leave it running for 45 minutes doing nothing than to
| cycle it.
| petertodd wrote:
| > This is a mild curiosity at best.
|
| Exactly. There are genuine economic/engineering reasons
| for negative prices to occasionally exist. But in a well-
| designed, well-run, grid price will be negative only a
| small minority of the time. It just doesn't make sense to
| install a bunch of expensive equipment to provide this
| service when sufficient capacity exists from "happy
| accidents" like spare battery storage.
|
| In the long run, better managed solar and wind should
| make negative prices a fairly rare event.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I'm just guessing but it probably isn't _so_ profitable.
| More like a "you already have the batteries, so why not?"
| type thing.
| pfdietz wrote:
| One reason, that I understand has applied in Germany, is
| when taxes are applied both to the electricity the
| storage firm buys and to that which it sells. This puts a
| damper on the whole thing unrelated to any actual
| technical or economic realities.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Even if the arbitrage exists, it does not mean you are
| equipped to profit from it. Furthermore, the rapid
| installation of battery capacity means that the profit
| margin for this activity is likely to dwindle as more
| entrants try and do the same thing.
| jandrese wrote:
| Your electric utility could be doing this if they were
| more forward thinking and installed grid scale batteries,
| but that's not their business model so they don't do it.
| rcxdude wrote:
| What do you mean by electricity utility? Which
| organisation specifically? The electrical supply is
| usually formed of multiple organisations with different
| responsibilities, which usually works pretty well, but it
| generally means that e.g. storage, transmission, and
| generation are not one single organisation.
| nwbort wrote:
| Yes, including because firms at one level of the supply
| chain (eg, transmission) are in many countries precluded
| from operating in another level (eg, generation).
| foobarian wrote:
| > and then selling back that electricity at a still negative
| but closer to zero price and so profiting.
|
| How is it not better to discharge the batteries instead? I
| guess if you don't have that hardware option integrated into
| the platform maybe, but otherwise...
| _trampeltier wrote:
| I know a country, the national train company turns lots of
| outside lights on (daytime), if the price is negative.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Great for the local insect population.
| cyri wrote:
| Yes that is the SBB in Switzerland but they do not turn the
| lights, instead they turn on the heaters for the track
| switches. Not sure if that is all rumours.
| hwillis wrote:
| > Surely the power electronics or even just the control
| algorithms in a BESS could be slightly modified to consume
| power, get warm, and not transfer any current to or from the
| battery cells, effectively taking advantage of the BESS's heat
| sink to sink excess power and sell that service.
|
| Unless you specifically design for it (specifically, with a
| dummy load), the efficiency of the system is inversely
| proportional to its ability to do this. You need a secondary
| system.
|
| The power system can connect the battery terminal to in or to
| out, so if you switch both on at once you effectively bypass
| the battery. It's called shoot-through current and is generally
| considered a destructive process. If you can switch on and off
| fast enough you could limit it to a non-destructive level, but
| in practice most systems will not switch fast enough. They are
| designed to operate with the battery load, which is at minimum
| ~10x higher resistance than the transistor itself. In practice
| it is often 100s of times higher.
|
| That's where the efficiency comes into it. If a power system is
| 98% efficient (pretty normal- this does not include power lost
| to heat in the battery itself), that means the electronics can
| only burn 1/50th as much power as normally passes through the
| system. Worse, when you put the switch into shorted position it
| will try to pass 50x its rated current. You need to switch much
| faster - _certainly_ more than 50x faster- and that will
| probably put it outside its operating region.
|
| It is relatively easy to just have a large resistor, but it is
| not very well suited to use battery power systems. Batteries
| are very low impedance, and the power system exists to
| transform to a lower voltage and higher current. Resistors are
| cheaper when they are higher voltage, so the power system is a
| hacky kludge.
|
| The overall solution is just more batteries. Oversupply is a
| transient problem and always will be.
| ACCount36 wrote:
| > Unless you specifically design for it (specifically, with a
| dummy load), the efficiency of the system is inversely
| proportional to its ability to do this. You need a secondary
| system.
|
| Many multicell BMS already have this kind of "power shedding"
| capability. They use it for cell balancing - to equalize
| voltage between cells with slightly different
| characteristics. This is desirable despite the power waste,
| because it reduces wear, increases charging efficiency and
| allows battery packs to last longer.
|
| Some battery packs are also designed to be able to dump
| enough power into heat to be able to keep the batteries warm
| during extreme cold.
| ranma42 wrote:
| The amount of power you can dump for balancing is just a
| fraction of the charge/discharge power (because it only
| needs to offset differences in self-discharge rate). So you
| still need a proper dummy load when you want to dump more.
|
| Similarly, the heatsinking capacity of the battery is
| designed for charging/discharging losses (say 5% of
| charge/discharge power).
| andoma wrote:
| Our house have geothermal heating (heatpump conncted to 160m
| drilled hole, pretty common in Scandinavia). The heatpump
| supports having a coolant loop for cooling the house in the
| summer. Thus the heat pump pretty much exchanges heat from the
| house to the well (heating it up ever so slightly). It would
| certainly be possible to insert a resistive dummy load on that
| loop and just store that heat in the bedrock as well.
| frabert wrote:
| This! Or, if you don't have geothermal heating but have an
| electric water heater, maybe temporarily increase the
| temperature it goes to: maybe it's normally set to go to 65C,
| then when you detect that you have negative prices and your
| batteries are full and your water already hot, maybe heat the
| water to 70C and store that little bit of extra energy as
| heat! If you have thermostatic valves in your bathrooms, you
| won't even notice the difference except by the fact that your
| water heater now can apparently hold a little bit more water
| than usual :)
| cogman10 wrote:
| Assuming regular negatives (more than once a day) you could
| also tie the heating to the grid prices with maybe an hour
| buffer around your high water usage times to make sure you
| are up to temp.
|
| Modern water heaters will keep temp for a shockingly long
| period of time.
| triceratops wrote:
| If you have free energy the obvious thing to use it for is
| carbon capture.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I wonder if desalination would be another good use. But,
| yeah, it is probably just a matter of how fast the processes
| can absorb extra power.
| cogman10 wrote:
| District heating and cooling would be an excellent sink for
| the power.
|
| Water needs a lot of energy to cool or heat, concentrated
| at a district, you could easily absorb a lot of energy at
| negative prices.
| rtkwe wrote:
| The big problem there is you have these intensely capital
| expensive capture plants sitting idle around 75% of the time.
| Also the processes may not gracefully start and stop though
| maybe you could smooth that out by building a huge battery
| bank along with the CC plant to effectively run a full duty
| cycle with 'free' energy. That bumps the capital costs up
| again though so the economics get tricky.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Yeah. Anything that's designed to use nearly-free or
| negative-priced energy from the grid needs to be cheap to
| build and easy to start and stop (The former being one of
| the main issues with the 'bitcoin mining as grid
| management' idea).
| rtkwe wrote:
| In theory if you run it using negative priced energy you
| could maybe run with older less efficient hardware that's
| not viable for current mining that would be much cheaper,
| if you can source it. I'm thinking older ASICs for BTC
| for example where the best in class kHash/W has moved on
| and the price doesn't support running the older devices
| but the negative price would offset that by giving a
| reliable return on time to offset the extra energy
| burned.
|
| It'd take a far amount of math to figure out if that tips
| it over though I don't feel like tackling haha.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| Wouldn't that discharge the battery and hence contribute to
| battery wear, by wasting a charge cycle?
| borner791 wrote:
| Balancing.. thats probably 1-0.5% of the BESS capacity. The
| impedance of LFE cells are so high when charged pretty small
| amounts of energy can slosh around before a protection
| disconnect, over voltage for example
| adiabatichottub wrote:
| I don't know why it rankles me to think that generated power
| should be fed into a dump load just to make the storage owners
| extra money. Even though it's inefficient at the system level,
| it shouldn't be harmful releasing energy that would have been
| eventually dissipated as heat anyways. And yet it still just
| feel wasteful to me.
|
| I had to go search my bookshelf for this one:
| "There has been an increasing awareness among engineers of the
| last two decades that machines can perform a useful purpose in
| many applications, even though their characteristics do not
| conform to the orthodox standards of goodness. The main
| objective of the engineer is to make money -- to exploit
| economically the physical properties of materials. Economic
| considerations, however, do not stop at the first cost of an
| article, nor at the running cost, but extend to everything
| connected with that article in the situation in which it is to
| be used."
|
| Eric R. Laithwaite, _Induction Machines for special purposes_
| colechristensen wrote:
| >I don't know why it rankles me to think that generated power
| should be fed into a dump load just to make the storage
| owners extra money. Even though it's inefficient at the
| system level, it shouldn't be harmful releasing energy that
| would have been eventually dissipated as heat anyways. And
| yet it still just feel wasteful to me.
|
| This is one of those efficient market things where you need
| to manage the market in order that wasteful things happen
| sometimes... but that waste is an opportunity.
|
| If you and your competitor are both in the business of
| dumping energy into heat, you're going to compete with each
| other for access to that money.
|
| Then one of you is going to try to find a way to make _more_
| money with that energy and find something quickly scalable
| with not-too-high idle overhead costs to do with that energy
| besides just flowing through a resistor.
|
| Negative prices are a sign of an inefficient market or just
| the lag time between a changing landscape of resources and
| someone to utilize them.
|
| If there's a free resource someone's going to figure out how
| to use it, just let it hang out for a while and the problem
| fixes itself.
|
| Especially with solar energy, this is just going to be a
| thing. There's a certain balance where overprovisioning is
| cheaper than storage and so you just do that. Then you wait
| for industry (or consumers) to figure out how to take
| advantage of the intermittent cheap energy.
| nhecker wrote:
| My shallow understanding is that utilities and grid operators
| need to manage the supply/load ratio carefully to keep the
| grid's operating frequency in a very narrow band, centered
| around 50 or 60 Hertz. If supply outstrips demand, and
| assuming supply can't react [quickly enough], the operating
| frequency starts to rise as all the rotating masses connected
| to the grid gain momentum from the additional power. If the
| operating frequency increases too much outside of design
| parameters that could end badly.
|
| So one solution is to incite demand (with negative rates) for
| folks to ramp up their use of electricity (into e.g., a dump
| load resistor bank), bringing demand back in line with
| supply, and bringing the operating frequency back under
| control.
|
| I hate the waste, agreed. But it would be irresponsible of
| the operator to bank that extra supply energy into the
| momentum of spinning things owned by the consumers just so
| they could pull it out later by intentionally under-
| supplying. E.g., an aquarium's big water pumps designed to
| spin only so fast or produce so much pressure might not like
| being operated at 110% the rated speed at random times of the
| day.
|
| related links:
|
| https://fnetpublic.utk.edu/frequencygauge.html (you can watch
| the grid frequency fluctuate in real-time, here!)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_frequency
| fluorinerocket wrote:
| Find area near shore, stick two big electrodes in water a mile
| apart, energize circuit when price is negative, profit!
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I am in the power generation industry and I have honestly
| wondered why nobody does this. I figure getting the
| interconnect big enough to make meaningful money is both
| prohibitively expensive and a lengthy delay.
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| there are no circumstances under which it makes sense for
| energy prices to actually be negative. it is a sign of a market
| behaving very badly. propping up prices by intentionally
| wasting energy only treats the symptom not the cause.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| It's only ever brief and essentially a penalty to power
| generators for not turning off the generation in a reasonable
| time
| elzbardico wrote:
| Jesus! Why finance people are so hell-bent in extracting rent
| from every single thing, pervert it, make sure the incentives are
| all pointed to the shortest run while socializing all the costs
| to the rest of us?
| lazide wrote:
| Smart People with money are willing to give it to people if
| they can make them more money.
|
| Why would anyone give them money if they were just going to
| throw up their hands and go 'well, nothing we can do I guess!'.
|
| There is of course the risk that the money gets burned instead
| of more money getting made, which is the risk in risk/reward.
|
| Rent seeking type behavior tends to happen when there are no
| obvious 'green field' type endeavors to invest in. Or when risk
| appetites are trending negative.
|
| Note - many of those people with money that want to use it to
| make more money are retirees, pension funds, etc.
| ic_fly2 wrote:
| More money made with batteries means more batteries installed.
| How is that a bad thing?
| cess11 wrote:
| Profit motive commonly has obscene consequences, like
| destroying food instead of using it to feed the hungry.
| yxhuvud wrote:
| While true that it happens in certain cases, the onus of
| showing that it would be the case in this specific case is
| still on you.
| cess11 wrote:
| I basically just did, that's how markets of this kind
| work. If it is more profitable to warm the wind along a
| mountain side than some cold person, then that person
| will stay cold.
|
| Poverty and misery in the world are mainly caused by this
| kind of mechanism.
| yxhuvud wrote:
| If it is profitable to produce heat, it means prices are
| negative. If prices are negative, then that is true also
| for cold people.
|
| On the other hand if prices are high, and someone has
| sells electricity that was bought when prices were close
| to zero, then the cold people will get warm for cheaper
| than if there wasn't a battery.
|
| Sorry, but you really make no sense.
| cess11 wrote:
| Manufactured scarcity and related phenomena are really,
| really common. You should probably look into themes like
| the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and planned
| obsolescence and so on, and then explain why this
| specific case of coked yuppie market would be immune to
| them.
| yxhuvud wrote:
| Again, more players in the market (both batteries and the
| renewables they enable) and the base fact that batteries
| pull prices toward the mean means that if anything, they
| would be exactly one of the mechanisms to avoid
| manufactured scarcities.
| rcxdude wrote:
| In this case there are two things that contribute: one is
| cost of distribution, which means that it does in fact
| cost something to get the electricity to the cold person,
| and the second thing is the kind of structures which help
| insulate consumers from extreme prices: most people pay a
| fixed rate for electricity despite the variation in the
| wholesale price, which means that while they may pay some
| amount while the price is negative, they are also not
| paying a small fortune when the price goes up massively.
| This could probably be done better, though, and things
| are changing which would do make electricity free or
| negatively priced for some end-users when there's excess
| in the grid, while still insulating them from extremely
| high prices (they're still going to be paying something
| for the insurance, though).
| daedrdev wrote:
| When the grid has to much money for 10 seconds, the cost
| of finding an having a productive asset that is ready to
| accept such a short burst of energy means that paying
| people to throw it away can easily be cheaper, leaving
| you with net positive money that can be used towards
| keeping people warm. Real systems involve tradeoffs, and
| so there will always be some short enough time frame
| where throwing away energy is better for society and
| human welfare than building infrastructure to use it.
| Everyone already using the energy gets it for free when
| prices are negative.
| rcxdude wrote:
| This tends to more to do with food supply security and
| costs of distribution than anything else (as well as
| political opposition to socialising food supply).
|
| i.e. if we want to avoid food shortages, we need to
| overproduce the raw goods and therefore waste some.
| Transporting and transforming those raw goods into food
| that someone can eat still costs money, it's not just so
| farmers can get paid. We probably should still actually
| make sure no-one goes hungry, but that does actually
| involve some cost and effort on the part of the government,
| and the challenge there is mainly political elements who
| don't like the idea of someone getting something for free.
| aitchnyu wrote:
| No need of speculators. A utility purchases cheap off peak
| power and extremely costly peak power and pass the costs to
| the consumer. If the utility pays homeowner with BESS
| something comparable to peak power rate, they can recover
| their investment quickly.
| yxhuvud wrote:
| Such an utility would be a speculator.
| yxhuvud wrote:
| If this was implemented in full scale, then it would ..
| stabilize energy prices towards the mean, and make the energy
| transmission more stable and resilent in general. I'd happily
| pay some overhead for that, as it also mean the network can
| accept more cheap energy sourced from wind and solar.
| baq wrote:
| Capitalism is the only form of communism that works on longer
| time frames. Periodic resets are still needed, otherwise the
| monopolist becomes the ruler.
| driverdan wrote:
| Except this is exactly what you want to happen. The reason
| electricity prices range is because of supply and demand.
| Batteries help smooth out the supply curve.
|
| In the short term adding more batteries may allow someone to
| generate income using this strategy but long term what it will
| do is push electricity prices down and prevent power generation
| from being overwhelmed. As the battery "market" gets crowded
| profit margins will fall and everything will reach an
| equilibrium.
|
| This is a great demonstration of how capitalism works and why
| it's beneficial.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Negative prices are mostly caused by unreasonable terms towards
| generation plants. E.g.: requiring the grid to take every kWh
| generated and paying a fixed price over a 20-year term. This of
| course encourages capacity to be built with no flexibility. Why
| not dump your solar power into the grid? You're getting paid,
| the state guarantees for that... the negative prices are
| someone's elses problem.
| rcxdude wrote:
| This is the kind of thing that is funding the massive expansion
| in renewable energy build-out at the moment. The whole reason
| there's an energy transition happening is that solar and wind
| and batteries are cheap enough you can make a lot of money
| building them, and that'll remain true until basically the
| whole grid is renewable (finally kicking out the expensive gas
| turbines), and the average price drops to reach cost of supply.
|
| (And the kind of optimisation that happens with this kind of
| paper is really in the margins stuff. It generally helps the
| predictive power of the grid, and usually doesn't make much
| money once more than one group starts doing it, since it's
| pretty cheap to run and the margins shrink quickly)
| mellow_observer wrote:
| A world where individuals are incentivized to use some wasted
| space to place low maintenance automated trading batteries to
| make a little money on the side seems like it'd be an interesting
| solution to the renewable energy storage problem. Put a few units
| in otherwise useless locations like on roofs or in between
| highways and make some cash, sounds like a decent investment.
|
| Would there be any expected problems in doing such distributed
| power storage on a very large scale around the grid that you'd
| have to account for? Perhaps issues with synchronization, power
| flow or the possibility of large scale drops in avaialble stored
| power at times?
| fifilura wrote:
| Or preferably your EV? Requires no extra space or extra
| investment...
| soared wrote:
| Outside of the grid level, maintenance, security, and safety of
| batteries is important. Many Americans have a garage to
| securely store their $30k+ car, bike/etc - similar security may
| be necessary (literally or for the feels) for expensive
| batteries.
| ic_fly2 wrote:
| I have programmed batteries / algos to do this in some European
| markets. This is being done right now.
|
| The yield you could make from batteries in the UK dropped from
| double digits to 2% in 8months once some hedge funds figured out
| how to build and bid (or commission companies like my employer)
| batteries in the UK short term reserve market.
|
| There are a few firms in northern Jutland and London specialised
| in this sort of trading.
| Horffupolde wrote:
| That's yield over what base?
| baq wrote:
| At least the grid is better off and it's not all approximately
| zero sum...
| bob1029 wrote:
| I'd make the same argument for the other markets they operate
| in.
| baq wrote:
| The REIT ones e.g. are much less clearly positive than this
| and e.g. the variance swap and co. folks at least have the
| decency to be so exotic that nobody cares either way.
| azernik wrote:
| Sometimes the efficient market happens to you (and that's good)
| dschaurecker wrote:
| Are/where you already trading at a second to sub-second level
| on the continuous intraday markets? How did you backtest your
| strategies then, if so? Or is backtesting, e.g. for parametric
| extensions of the optimization, not yet quite relevant?
| ada1981 wrote:
| If anyone is interested in Batteries, I highly recommend
| following NAATBATT.org on LinkedIn and joining their newsletter.
|
| Obama set this org up as a senator to help bring lithium ion
| batteries supply chain to the US and it since evolved into the
| trade association for all things batteries.
|
| https://www.linkedin.com/company/naatbatt-international/
| saltspork wrote:
| In Australia 5 minute spot pricing is now accessible to many
| residential customers via retailers like Amber electric. With
| volatile pricing and a large home battery subsidy from the re-
| elected government, batteries can quickly pay for themselves
| through arbitrage alone.
|
| EMHASS is an interesting tool to perform the optimisation.
| jakewins wrote:
| Similarly in Europe; spot market with a big single pay-as-
| cleared spot auction for every quarter-hour, and then a
| continuous auction for the same periods closer to delivery,
| similar to the normal stock market. Millions of residential
| devices are traded there right now
| philjohn wrote:
| Yep, been using EMHASS for the last couple of years in the UK.
|
| I have a large array (12.8kWp east/west split) but a low export
| limit of 5kW. In the winter it's charging overnight at 7p per
| kWh (Intelligent Octopus Go) and then using that stored energy
| during the day to avoid importing at peak rates, and in the
| summer it makes sure to discharge most of the battery before
| the peak generation hours so that battery charges from power
| which would otherwise be curtailed (discharge to minimise
| import on my SolarEdge system, but charge from clipped power
| would also work).
| potatoicecoffee wrote:
| seems dumb to have electricity needing to be wasted when there is
| seawater to desalinate
| Majromax wrote:
| > seems dumb to have electricity needing to be wasted when
| there is seawater to desalinate
|
| That's a much more complicated problem. On an energy market,
| you have only one price to look at, and the battery operator
| can always buy, sell, or hold energy. The article here talks
| about optimizing this problem at 5-minute to several-hour
| intervals.
|
| If you drop excess power into desalination, however, now you
| have _two_ prices to worry about: energy and water. I also
| doubt we have 5-minute spot markets for water, so the operator
| must probably commit to some medium-term water delivery
| regardless of price.
|
| This means that a desalinating firm takes on much more risk.
| This might still be profitable, but it's a long-term play based
| on a deep model of expected energy prices (i.e. knowing that
| energy is "always" almost free at noon in summer) rather than
| short-term time-shifting.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Desal plants are also extraordinarily expensive and need to
| operate at very high 'capacity factors' in order to payoff
| the capital investment that was required to build them.
| Operating for a a few hours every day because your operating
| costs are low/negative only works if you don't have a hugely
| expensive piece of infrastructure depreciating as you wait
| for those prices to come down.
| amoshebb wrote:
| could we build them different if the goal is just to waste
| excess energy?
|
| Why couldn't it just be a giant heating element and some
| sort of steam condenser at the top and some way to flush it
| periodically?
|
| It might burn some laughable 3kWh per kg of water, but who
| cares? every water utility on the coast could add a few
| megawatts of tea kettles and get opportunistic little
| splashes of water in volumes small enough they can probably
| already handle them and the brine discharge would be so
| small, disperse, and infrequent it'd be easier to deal
| with, and it'd basically cost nothing
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Industrial processes like desalination tend to call for some
| optimal amount of near 24-7 utilization (barring maintenance
| and such) for capex reasons and efficiency. You want to use it
| as much as possible to get the most bang for your buck. The
| entire reason why there are these excess power periods is
| because we cannot predict accurately how much power we would
| really need.
| lazide wrote:
| Desalination plants _really_ don't like being 'throttled', and
| are quite capital intensive. Stopping production for any length
| of time can even destroy the plant, if not done very carefully.
| Similar for geothermal, though the specific details are
| different.
|
| Even free power would likely not be worth using if it was
| sporadic, and it's extremely energy intensive. So that really
| is saying something.
| brilee wrote:
| For those of you suggesting we use the extra energy for
| $pet_topic I suggest reading
| https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/factobattery/
|
| Tldr: most applications of free energy have capital costs that
| far outweigh the free energy harvest potential.
| thelastgallon wrote:
| Just use EVs. EVs are primarily energy storage devices, some
| people get to drive them about 20 - 30 mins/day. The remaining 23
| hours, it is a energy storage device. It can absorb excess power
| when price is negative, and can even supply power back to the
| grid when prices are high!
| bee_rider wrote:
| This seems like building more batteries (just, with extra
| hardware).
|
| An EV could be good for this sort of thing, but I guess it
| would have to sit around at less than 100% charge, to have the
| capacity.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| We almost never charge our EV to 100%, to not degrade the
| battery faster.
| bee_rider wrote:
| But, if you are going to offer "absorbing energy from the
| grid as a service" the capacity you have to offer can only
| be <absolute max that you are willing to
| charge your battery to> - <minimum that you are willing
| have your battery sitting at>
|
| There definitely could be some gap there, but it does
| depend on the car sitting at less than "full" (however you
| define full).
| two_handfuls wrote:
| Yes, exactly this has been proposed with "smart car chargers,"
| along with other things you can do if the grid operator has
| some control over a bunch of grid-connected equipment. It
| hasn't taken off as far as I know, probably because that means
| the car battery wears out more.
|
| The "virtual power plants" are the closest thing to this idea
| that is actually done in practice. That's individuals who own
| batteries joining some collective that then sells to the grid
| the ability to reduce demand a bit. Tesla did a pilot program
| with its Powerwalls iirc.
| rafaelmn wrote:
| Sounds like deprecating a >10k battery pack on a >30k vehicle
| and reducing your max range with power cycles to earn pennies.
| thelastgallon wrote:
| Its more than pennies[1]. By several orders of magnitude. Car
| batteries now last longer the rest of the car lifespan, it
| will be millions of miles soon.
|
| Tesla Electric customers report making as much as $150 a day
| https://electrek.co/2023/07/05/tesla-electric-customers-
| repo...
| rafaelmn wrote:
| Lol at 5$ per kWh.
|
| In my country for home consumers the difference between
| day/night rates is 10-20c/kWh. With spot pricing I can see
| it working to cover the post commute power spike - but
| you're effectively doubling your commute discharge rate and
| pushing charge levels to suboptimal levels.
|
| Batteries might work but at 80% capacity they are worth
| significantly less than new - both in terms of utility and
| resale value.
|
| Maybe if battery range gets extended so far that even at
| 80% capacity it's an overkill - like 1000mile batteries - I
| could see myself doing something like this - but at current
| ranges and charging setups - I'll skip the few dozen euro a
| month.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Battery production rates are creeping up to multiple twh/year
| now. This is accumulating to a lot of battery sitting around in
| vehicles, domestic storage, grid storage, etc. Mostly the goal of
| these batteries of course isn't supporting the grid but some
| other use case. But if it's plugged in, it could potentially be
| available for selling power. Right now, most EVs can't contribute
| power. But that's something that is starting to change. Small
| experiments with thousands or tens of thousands of vehicles have
| already been done and seem to work fine. Now imagine tens of
| millions of vehicles being part of the grid. That's a serious
| amount of stand by power for absorbing excess power or
| dispatching power when needed.
|
| Another interesting aspect is that as grid demand fluctuates, a
| lot of cables are under utilized at least some of the time. Which
| means there is plenty of capacity for charging batteries provided
| there is excess generation and cable capacity. A lot of that
| power currently gets discarded instead. Batteries allow better
| use of this excess power. And having a lot of local battery means
| that cable capacity can be freed up as well when needed and then
| recharged when demand reduces.
|
| And then finally battery prices are coming down. With sodium ion
| cell production ramping up in several places, things could get
| quite a bit cheaper. These don't depend on scarce metals or
| materials. And they last quite long as well (relative to NMC).
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > That's a serious amount of stand by power for absorbing
| excess power or dispatching power when needed.
|
| ... and a serious issue should one of the few large
| manufacturers or remote-control dispatcher/trader companies get
| hacked. The outage in Spain a few weeks ago was just a small
| warning, probably caused by a technical malfunction. But now
| imagine this being used as a side track in an act of war? The
| first day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine was accompanied by
| the hack of Viasat satellites, which led to 5.800 wind turbines
| shutting down due to a lack of remote control capabilities [1].
| Now imagine the large Chinese inverter and power bank
| controller vendors that often enough just white-label for other
| brands? That's a whole lot of a different game now.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viasat_hack
| toast0 wrote:
| > and a serious issue should one of the few large
| manufacturers or remote-control dispatcher/trader companies
| get hacked. The outage in Spain a few weeks ago was just a
| small warning, probably caused by a technical malfunction.
|
| If everyone agrees, you can use grid frequency/phase to
| coordinate, and not a separate realtime communication system.
| Grid interactive demand/response is a proven way to manage
| supply and load.
|
| When your section of the grid is stressed, supply power or
| abstain from charging; when your section of the grid is
| abundant, charge.
|
| Coordination is useful too, of course; predictive charging is
| helpful, and you wouldn't get that only by monitoring the
| grid; you also want to know somehow that a supply or load is
| scheduled to be added or removed at time X, or was
| unexpectedly removed and will not be reconnected for some
| time. And the system operator would want to know about
| capacity in many dimensions.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| It doesn't work that way. Maybe in the US where everyone
| seems to do their own shit, particularly in Texas, but here
| in Europe our grid literally spans the _entire continent_ ,
| from Portugal through into Ukraine's front lines, and from
| Norway even down towards Africa. It's a three phase grid
| that is in synchronized phase everywhere. Like, literally
| everywhere.
|
| Grid frequency cannot be used at scale to coordinate energy
| production as a result, because the grid elements
| themselves don't know _why_ the frequency is going down on
| its own or where the cause is. For that you need to monitor
| the country or region crossing to see where energy is
| flowing and aggregate this.
|
| Drop a couple gigawatts from the production side, for
| example, all at once and the frequency will immediately
| drop, only not crashing due to the mechanical inertia of
| the large power plants. Immediately, electricity and
| physics will lead to current balances redistributing and
| automated systems will kick in (e.g. gas peaker plants ramp
| up in a matter of seconds, battery storage kicks in even
| faster). But when too much capacity gets dropped, the
| available spare capacity isn't enough and eventually the
| first lines will trip due to overcurrent or frequency
| deviation. That is what happened in Spain, made worse by
| the fact that inverters don't have mechanical inertia and
| so immediately _more_ inverters dropped out for safety
| reasons as the frequency sagged too much for their
| protection circuits. The inverse, adding a couple of
| gigawatts of consumers, causes the same effect.
|
| That's also why very large consumers such as smelters must
| contact the local electricity distributor in advance before
| any load change - dispatch must know precisely when the
| consumer will drop or add load, so that other plants can be
| regulated up or down to avoid too much of a sag or hike in
| frequency.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Minor, but it's from Denmark (Jutland) south.
|
| There's a separate Scandinavian grid for East Denmark
| (Zealand) and north.
|
| (And the British Isles are their own grid.)
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Yeah I knew about the Brits but you're correct, it
| escaped my mind that the Nordics run their own zone [1].
| But you're a bit outdated too, turns out - the most North
| point is the Baltics these days, they switched away from
| the Russian grid a few months ago [2].
|
| [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verband_Europ%C3%A4isch
| er_%C3%...
|
| [2] https://www.entsoe.eu/news/2025/02/09/entso-e-
| confirms-succe...
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Of course the Ukrainians are now much less dependent on
| central power generations out of necessity. It turns out that
| all those big power plants and electricity distribution
| centers make for nice drone targets. The Russians did far
| more damage with that than with their satellite hackery.
| Those 5800 wind turbines came back online and are mostly
| still operational.
|
| The lesson here is that distributed power is a good thing in
| war time scenarios but you might want to pay attention to
| digital security. Central power generation becomes a tempting
| target.
|
| Now the good news with Chinese stuff is that a war is not
| imminent and we have the benefit of hindsight and can do
| something about that.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Now the good news with Chinese stuff is that a war is not
| imminent and we have the benefit of hindsight and can do
| something about that.
|
| We are and we have been at war with China (and Russia and
| North Korea, fwiw) for many years at this point. The
| ongoing cyberwarfare from either country is more than
| enough to warrant this label, the problem is we were and
| are governed by chickens who refuse to accept the reality
| we are living in and still think that kowtowing to China's
| every demand will save our economies.
| HankB99 wrote:
| > A lot of that power currently gets discarded instead.
|
| How is power discarded? I would expect peaking generation to be
| cut back or perhaps even base load plants can reduce output.
| (AFAIK "base load" means they are expected to be kept operating
| continuously whereas "peaking" is designed to start up when
| needed and shut down when not.)
| qeternity wrote:
| > How is power discarded
|
| It isn't, not at scale in any traditional sense.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| wind mills are weather vaned (i.e. not broken, but
| deliberately turned off), solar panels excess energy is
| curtailed (prevented from going into the grid) and usually
| transformed into heat on the panels or in inverters.
|
| As for baseload. It's one of those waffly terms that's rarely
| specified in GW that is needed. Which as it turns out is far
| less than we used to have given that much of it was replaced
| with wind and solar over the last decade or so. The real
| question is how low can we go with this stuff before we need
| some more solutions. Some would say all the way but the
| consensus is that the last 5-10% might get very hard and
| costly.
|
| Either way, having some peaker plants on stand by ready to
| spin up over the course of hours/days while batteries slowly
| deplete is probably a good short term compromise. Replacing
| spinning mass (fly wheels) with batteries seems a
| particularly popular and very cost effective use for
| batteries.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "Right now, most EVs can't contribute power"
|
| Nor should they. People don't want to be cycling their
| batteries and reducing their life. This use case would be
| better served by batteries that are designed for that purpose
| instead of being designed to be light for a vehicle.
| wjnc wrote:
| Future: Cycle the power when profitable, replace the
| batteries when depleted enough? Batteries in cars are many
| times the domestic demand of a given home, at least in
| temperate climates.
| tomas789 wrote:
| They are almost the same batteries. Different form factor but
| same thing. They are rolled from the same lines.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Grid level batteries use many different forms. You even
| have stuff like pumped hydro and controlled drop concrete.
| Even if the battery cells are exactly the same, the
| replacement cost is much higher in a vehicle due to the
| configuration.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _People don 't want to be cycling their batteries and
| reducing their life._
|
| More battery cycles just costs money. For the right price,
| I'd do it.
|
| But more than that: I don't want to be stranded without power
| in my vehicle because someone in the electric grid made poor
| power management decisions and decided to offload that
| decision to consumers.
| eldaisfish wrote:
| as with anything, it's not just money. Losing battery
| capacity in an EV is a hassle. A hassle because you charge
| more frequently, a hassle because you will eventually need
| a battery change, and so on. What is the price of all that
| hassle?
|
| That said, most EV incentive programs use around 10% (often
| less) of an EV battery capacity so the actual effects are
| barely noticeable.
| usefulcat wrote:
| In general I agree with that, but I think it really would
| depend on the price. For at least some people it would surely
| be worthwhile for the right price.
| giantg2 wrote:
| If the price is high enough, EVs still lose out since you
| can make more profit creating battery farms with cheaper
| batteries that are cheaper to replace. You can't make it
| expensive enough to cover the replacement of a Tesla
| battery without making it attractive enough for someone
| else to use ea more efficient model.
| schiffern wrote:
| EV can grid cooperate without adding charge/discharge cycles.
| You just intelligently schedule the charging.
|
| This is how most Time-of-Use metering already works. The
| driver sets a minimum battery percentage to charge
| immediately (eg 40% range, enough to reach the local
| hospital), and then schedule a time when the car should be
| fully charged (eg 80% by 7AM). The software just Does The
| Right Thing, using the same prediction and bidding algorithms
| as stationary batteries.
|
| The search term is "V1G" (a cheeky reference to
| _unidirectional V2G_ ).
| Aeroi wrote:
| pretty sure nodal energy market trading, duck curve arbitrage is
| the whole profit play for the tesla power wall/autobidder and the
| Base Power startup coming out of ERCOT. There is definitely a
| land rush from energy firms and GIS guys to front run land
| purchasing near solar buildouts and to build as much grid scale
| battery storage as possible. The percent swings can be huge. Also
| a huge rush for this in the Northeast now that the offshore wind
| contracts have been cancelled.
| ccheney wrote:
| I find Autobidder fascinating, they've been at this for awhile.
| When I saw this HN post I thought the paper may have come from
| Tesla themselves.
|
| https://www.tesla.com/support/energy/tesla-software/autobidd...
|
| https://www.tesla.com/support/energy/tesla-software
| msgodel wrote:
| Energy futures you say? Oh boy I've heard this one before...
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| explain?
| msgodel wrote:
| That's what the infamous company Enron was running:
| simultaneous energy futures brokerage and market making.
| Their market making part blew up and they hid it from
| everyone for a while until the rest of the company did. It
| was a massive scandal. It was pretty similar to what FTX was
| doing just with energy instead of crypto.
| dschaurecker wrote:
| Thank you all for the interest in our paper, it is cool to see
| that people are interested in the topic!
| b0a04gl wrote:
| > "Our method is able to solve over 24 million optimization
| problems in less than 90 minutes."
|
| that line is doing heavy lifting. sounds insane until you look
| closer they batch out embarrassingly parallel, lowdimensional
| problems no live latencies, no network I/O, no grid API jitter.
| just hammering a static dataset in memory. real markets stall,
| disconnect, price slippage, queue delays. none of that here. so
| yeah, 24 million looks cool in the abstract, but under the hood
| it's just cleanroom compute; feels like they optimised the
| benchmark more than the actual system
| loehnsberg wrote:
| Assuming you add all the annoying details that algo trade
| execution brings, the algorithm still provides the answer on
| which position to take within a few microseconds, which is what
| you want if you trade in a limit order book.
| b0a04gl wrote:
| true, you want microsecond decisions at the core, no doubt ;
| but that's only half the game. an ideal action in clean
| memory isn't the same once it hits fragmented liquidity,
| stale quotes, partial fills. if the algo doesn't account for
| execution drift or book pressure post-placement, the
| microsecond edge fades fast. so yeah, fast compute's
| necessary but not sufficient without modelling the messy tail
| end too
| julienb_sea wrote:
| Energy overproduction is going to become a serious viability
| problem for baseload generators, which in time will significantly
| affect grid reliability. Rolling blackouts will become the norm
| unless we figure out a serious scalable solution to this.
| adds68 wrote:
| https://octopusenergy.group/kraken-flex This is already being
| done at an industrial scale in the UK
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