MakersF

Dealing with power from solar panels is easy: you disconnect them (curtailment). So it's not a problem.

Have you ever wondered how is it possible that the price goes negative? Why would someone pay you to use the energy they produce? Logically, the price shouldn't go below 0 (*) . The reason is that the government gives incentives for each kWh produ ed. So if they pay you 0.10€/kWh, you'll be happy to pay people up to 0.09€/kWh as long as you can keep producing, since your marginal cost is 0. Basically government incentives are producing this situation, paying people to produce electricity nobody wants. It's also the reason why production is far from consumption: the incentives never were designed to push to generate useful electrons, just electrons, even if they cannot be moved to where they are useful. We need to rework how incentives are provided, because this is ending up wasting a ton of public money!

(*) except for power stations were they cannot physically turn it off, but generally they wouldn't be able to produce enough energy to define the marginal price

We also have examples with this. In London shortly after covid the interest rate on mortgages increased, and as a result landlords increased rent, saying it was due to the mortgage paid. This happened throughout the city. It might be though that this happened because the supply is limited, and thus we're in the case where the increase is passed to the tenant

I think they do only a hash per request. The 160*weight hashes were done per server (per feature set), to partition the hash space. Per request you do a single hash and then a lower_bound on a sorted map to find the serving server (again, on the ring appropriate for the features required by the request, so likely a hash map lookup first)

You might have watched too much Chernobyl. It's not true that an irradiated person becomes itself radioactive. Once a potential radiation contamination (radioactive dust and material) is cleaned from a person, independently of how much radiation they were exposed to, they don't become radioactive themselves. You can easily look it up online to verify

The marginal cost of batteries grows more than linearly.

When batteries are covering 0% of the need, the marginally added battery cycles many times, so the cost is spread over many kwh produced.

When you add batteries to go from 99.98 to 99.99, the batteries cycle only for that 0.01, so the same cost to build them is spread over a much fewer kwh, making each kwh produced a lot more expensive.

Seasonal storage is madness: you charge once and discharge once per year. Pay 100$/kwh to install it, discharge 20 times (20 years, a 5% payback time, which is a bad investment), and you're paying those kwh a 5$/kwh premium on top of the cost of buying the discharged power. If the battery is instead installed to shift the production from 12.00 to 18.00, it cycles 365 times a year, so in 20 years the premium is 0.01$/kwh.

So nucleare doesn't compete with the first 40% of penetration of renewables and the first 30% of battery, it competes with the last 10%, which is still needed to get to 0.

I checked and it looks like ETS are increasing prices of gas produced electricity 20-30€/MWh. So not little (although peaks are around 140€/MWh). But these are taxes that can be used to reduce the reliance on gas (actually, it's mandatory to use them for transition projects).

It's unfair you're being down voted, you're right. I used to think that we could get by with just solar wind and batteries, but then after collaborating with people on an ideal energy mix the numbers were obvious: there is a (small) fraction that cannot be covered. Not with storage (the discharge cycles are so few that the cost is prohibitive. How can a battery pay for itself with 10-20 discharges a year? And this applies to any kind of battery that needs to be built, including hydro). Likely there will need to be some baseload nuclear (which then increases average prices, since to make it economical you need to buy all the electricity it produces, and so it partially displaces renewables). The alternative is overbuilding solar+wind+battery something like 5/8 times the average need. Maybe if the prices drop enough that could be feasible.. The big win would be if there is some way to get predictable power at a lower cost than nuclear (e.g. tidal), which could be used to smooth the troughts, or alternatively a low capex but potentially high opex solution which is turned on only when needed (gas is an option, but not co2 free. And sizing the power needed is not super cheap, although now it's not a problem since we have enough gas capacity which is going to be displaced, so it won't be needed to be built)

Capital costs starting to dominate doesn't mean that they increase.

If capital costs are 10 and operating costs are 90, but later operating costs become 1, the capital costs remain 10 and the price to recover the capital costs is the same.

Of course the capital costs need to be spread over less kwh, so the kwh will become more expensive, but what matters is the avg (and thus total) cost paid, and that would be lower.

E.g.

5B in capital cost for 25MW (amortized in 25 years), and 30 per MWh in gas cost.

If you produce 180TWh (20h daily of production) the average price cost will be (5'000'000'000/25 + 180'000'000*30)/180'000'000 = 31 per mwh.

If you produce 36TWh (5h a day) the average cost is 35, but the total cost is significantly lower.

At the limit, if the power plant produces 1MWh in the whole year, it will cost 200'000, but paying that MWh that high enabled the system to pay for all the rest of the year the electricity at less than 31. You need to look at the total cost paid in the end by users, not at the marginal costs in some situations.

It's an auction, it's called marginal pricing. Every producer bids for x KWh at a certain price (for each time slot), and the cheapest y KWh to cover all demand are taken, and all are paid at the price of the most expensive KWh bought. There is plenty of economic research on auctions and why this system is optimal: this system incentives to bid at the actual marginal cost of producing electricity, and thus allows to discover the optimal price. EU has been discussing about changing it, but there hasn't been a better system proposed yet. If you change to pay at the bid price, you'll have companies build teams of analysts to predict the market price and bit at that, they're not just going to accept being paid much less of what they could.

Instead of focusing on this, here a few more impactful things that would help: 1. Zonal pricing, so that there is an aligned incentive to build production where demand is (connection to the grid is a big limiting factor) 2. Stop providing contracts to renewable where curtailed production gets paid (curtailed energy is paid by consumers as taxes on bills normally) 3. Start allowing to build more renewable so that renewable are setting the marginal price 4. Push utilities to do PPA (power purchase agreements) with producers of RE so they can agree to a fixed price, and a smaller slice of electricity is bought at the auction

There are a few more, but these are the most important.

Regarding your edit: the gas plant is not subsidizing, the customers are paying. But of course at the moment building renewable is so lucrative thanks to this setup, that there is a big incentive to build them. Of course they need to plan for 20-30 years, and the risk of getting to big periods at 0 marginal pricing is real, so builders need to evaluate well the risk (and PPAs can help)

In a non-competitive world what you say would be true (you'd avoid filling in the remaining 1%), but there are a large number of power producers that a cartel is unlikely

Not only that, after X months of not paying the landlord can request an eviction, and from the moment the eviction is requested to the moment its executed the government pays the rent to the landlord (I believe 3 is reasonable for X, but it can be higher or lower).

I'm a renter and always have been a renter, but it has always been crazy to me that the cost of people without a house is dumped on the unlucky landlord. If the decision is that this cost must be put on society, at least it should be spread among all citizens/landlords (e.g. with a tax on rent).

Not having the government paying while waiting for the eviction is the same as now: the government can just take ages.

The risk to landlords when the renters doesn't uphold the contract needs to be limited. This is also the reason why an insurance would be an inferior solution: there is still no incentive for the government to intervene fast.

We might find out that it's preferable to build social housing rather than paying rent to landlords, and the government starts actually doing something about it