From a grid stability point, you can't produce more than is used, else you get higher frequencies and/or voltages until the automatics shut down. It's already a somewhat frequent occurence in germany for the grid operator to shut down big solar plants during peak hours because they produce way more power than they can dump (because of low demand or the infrastructure limiting transfer to somewhere else)
Negative prices are the grid operator encouraging more demand so it can balance out the increased production.
Spot on! I hoped this comment would be higher! The main problem isn't corps not making money, but grid stability due to unreliability of renewables.
To be fair, the original tweet is kinda shit to begin with. They've unnecessarily assigned monetary value to a purely engineering (physics?) problem.
The original commenter's (OC's) point has nothing to do with renewables' reliability.
It is entirely to do with generation vs demand. Grid operators could ask other generators like coal, nuclear, hydro, etc. plants to curtail so inverter-based renewables can export power, but that's not likely because those producers can't ramp generation up and down as easily.
Grid stability is a problem when you have overcrowding of generation without enough demand on given feeders. This is moreso an issue with the utilities anyways and how they plan their transmission and substation upgrades.
Well I wasn't expecting to find THE right answer in the comments already. Kudos!
And to everyone reading through this post: If you have questions, need more explanations or want to learn more about the options that we have to "stabilize" a renewable energy system and make it long term viable, just ask!
Piggybacking on your grid stability point, another issue I don’t see getting addressed here is ramp rate.
If we install enough solar where 100% of our daytime load is served by solar, that’s great. But what about when the solar starts to drop off later in the day?
A/Cs are still running while the sun is setting, the outside air is still hot. People are also getting home from work, and turning on their A/Cs to cool off the house, flipping on their lights, turning on the oven, etc.
Most grids have their peak power usage after solar has completely dropped off.
The issue then becomes: how can we serve that load? And you could say “just turn on some gas-fired units, at least most of the day was 100% renewable.”
But some gas units take literal hours to turn on. And if you’re 100% renewable during the day, you can’t have those gas units already online.
Grid operators have to leave their gas units online, running as low as they can, while the sun is out. So that when the peak hits, they can ramp up their grid to peak output, without any help from solar.
There are definitely some interesting solutions to this problem, energy storage, load shifting, and energy efficiency, but these are still in development.
People expect the lights to turn on when they flip the switch, and wouldn’t be very happy if that wasn’t the case. Grid operators are unable to provide that currently without dispatchable units.
If we install enough solar where 100% of our daytime load is served by solar, that’s great. But what about when the solar starts to drop off later in the day?
Store the surprus of energy from the solar panels and use that as a buffer with batteries or gravity
But some gas units take literal hours to turn on. And if you’re 100% renewable during the day, you can’t have those gas units already online.
Why not? Just time it and start it hours before, wind energy could help in that too
One solution to what you're describing is to expand the grid. If your grid stretches half the planet, when the East starts to experience night, the West still experiences day and can ship electricity from renewables to the East to make up for their self curtailment. The same goes for wind where if one location on the planet doesn't experience wind, odds are another location does and the power can be shuffled around.
Another option is to build out more battery storage such that any clipped energy from solar or wind - that is, the energy that can be generated from your solar or wind resource but that can't be exported because it would overload your inverters or transformers or exceed your PPA agreement with your utility - is stored and can be exported for 2-4 hours as the sun goes down or wind dies out.
Not a lot of renewables sites are colocated with battery storage, but more and more are.
As someone with a technical background this is the stupidest problem with solar that I don’t get… just turn off the panels in groups until generation is closer to demand… how have engineers not figured that out. And if they have why does this still get written about.
Someone is an idiot. Maybe it’s me?
I’m adjacent to this problem, so I have a little context, but am not an expert at all.
To my knowledge, we don’t have granular control over panels. So we can shut off legs of a plant, but that’s a lot of power to be moving all at once.
Instead, prices are set to encourage commercial customers to intake more power incrementally. This has a smoother result on the grid, less chance of destabilizing.
A customer like a data center could wait to perform defragmentation or a backup or something until the price of power hits a cheap or negative number.
I'm in solar/BESS, and I mean more and more DER sites are making use of string inverters which break out arrays into greater chunks than with central inverters. With those, you have more granularity of control where you can drop entire blocks/strings at a time to fall to your curtailed export rate.
You might ask yourself though why DERs can't just ramp inverter outputs up or down to match curtailment automatically across a whole site. You can absolutely do that, but what happens is your solar or wind resource stays high on the DC or low frequency (LF) AC side, respectively, while power frequency AC is low on the other side of the inverters. This is referred to as DC:AC ratio in the biz, and the higher that ratio, the more losses your inverters experience and less efficient they are. This also puts a huge strain on your inverters and can lessen their operational lifetime.
But really, DERs tie into the grid at distribution level and so they don't fall under the regulations of FERC & NERC (at least in North America). This means that smaller producers don't have the same requirements for control as do utility-scale players, so the incentive to control these string inverters at that granular level isn't there. It's much easier to just trip the main breaker and wait until the utility gives you the go ahead to turn back on.
I suspect that at lot of producers may want to look into greater control capabilities in the future, but this also depends on inverter OEMs too allowing that control.
But the thing is, you CAN simply turn them off at the press of a button (or an automated script) so its really a complete non issue. As long as big solar installations control systems are accessible by the grid operators, it should be fine.
Ok, but what do you do when you're short of power at night? Keep in mind to turn on conventional power stations it's expensive & time consuming. Once they startup they need to stay on for a long while to be efficient & cheap.
The real solution is to store excess power in batteries. Lithium ion is too expensive to scale, Sodium ion batteries are economically & capacity viable AFAIK.
You can do more with them too actually. You can ramp down the AC power production incrementally to meet curtailment requirements, in theory. When you do that though you subject your inverters to greater strain/losses and less efficiency which shortens your lifetime.
If inverter-based producers in solar, wind, and/or BESS want their sites to last for 30-40 years so that ROI is achieved via operation, then it is in their interest to protect their equipment and operate as much as possible at rated conditions or de-energized conditions.
You might think that it would make sense to have more of a slider control between ON and OFF to save everyone, from producers to grids to consumers, but my guess from being in the industry is that grids don't really supply incentives for that kind of operation. If they did, maybe you'd see more variable control at utility- and community-scale levels.
If only there were some way to take energy made from sunshine and store it in some form for later. Like in a battery. Or as heat. Or in a flywheel. Or just use the energy for something we'd really like to do as cheaply as possible. Like sequester CO2. Or desalinate water. Or run industries that would otherwise use natural gas.
Seriously if it was free for me to run a hot tub I would be a more relaxed person…but somehow these negative power prices never seem to trickle down to the consumer 🤔.
In that case it would even fix their negative price cost “problem”
This is what gets me. Relative efficiency of stuff is pretty much nullified when the energy used is free. Total power use still matters because it will determine the total size of the array of solar panels to generate the power needed.
But this is near and dear to my heart. I like hydrogen as energy storage. If you burn it, you get water. Natural gas is just CH4, so the output of burning it is 1CO2 + 2H2O. But a lot of natural gas stuff can also use hydrogen with little modification, so we don't have to upend entire industries to adapt. Machines can be updated to use the new fuel type with little expense and we're not throwing out entire production lines to replace them with ones based on electricity.
Why hydrogen? Simple, hydrolysis. Using power generated for free from the sun, you can split water into its base components. Hydrogen and oxygen. With some fancy knowledge, you can capture pretty much all of the hydrogen and none of the oxygen, and store it for use.
It's inefficient compared to some other technologies, in that it takes a lot of power compared to how much hydrogen/oxygen you get, but bluntly, if it's coming from solar, who cares? Not like we're paying for the power anyways.
I keep thinking about this in the form of industry. Say a factory uses natural gas in boilers to make something hot. Whatever the material, whatever the reason, that's what they're doing. With little modification, the system can be adapted to hydrogen, and the company can build a hydrogen hydrolysis reactor on site using either city water, rain water, lake or river water.... Even an underground well. The reactor runs all day and generates hydrogen, stored in a large, high pressure tank, also on site, then pipelines run it to the machines, boilers, whatever, to run the production lines. It's free to run, and only requires a single capital investment.
Hydrogen, also, can be stored indefinitely and not "lose charge" unlike other, battery-based storage systems (or heat, or flywheels). So hydrogen is ideal for long term energy storage. Fuel cells are still the most efficient way to convert hydrogen to electricity, and yeah, you lose a lot of potential energy in the electrolysis/fuel cell conversions, but the energy input is free in the first place, so who cares?
I'm not saying we should go all in on hydrogen. I'm just saying that it's worth continuing to develop the technology for it. Batteries, capacitors, storage via heat or flywheels, they all have their place in the energy future. At least until fusion makes them all obsolete (once we find a way to make that self fueling or use materials that are not extremely limited. IMO, we're making good progress but we're decades, if not centuries away from something practical, given our currently known planetary resources).
And yes, battery EVs are a good thing. Hydrogen electric vehicles... Let's just say "too soon", and leave it at that. Batteries for daily charge/discharge for home use, absolutely. Larger scale heat/flywheel storage, absolutely. But longer term than days to months, hydrogen may be the better option. It's certainly a good option for industry that currently relies almost exclusively on natural gas.
Hydrogen is troublesome as an energy storage. The roundtrip efficiency (electricity -> hydrogen -> electricity) is just... very not worthwhile compared to batteries. Then beyond efficiency there is still the question of "how do we store hydrogen safely?"
Storing energy indefinitely is not a problem for electricity storage, since we are pretty much guaranteed to use the stored energy up in a single day.
I agree that H2 can have certain applications as a bridge technology in some industries, but there is a very important parameter missing in your premise.
Even if solar power seems "free" at first glance it really isn't. It needs infrastructure, e.g. Photovoltaic Panels and lots of it. So just having H2 instead of a battery for an application means, it needs thrice the PV capacity or even more and with it the grid capacity. Now add to that, we aren't just talking about replacing electricity from fossil fuel plants by PV, but about primary energy as a whole, which makes the endeavor even more massive. Also H2 will not magically become much more energetically efficient in its production, transport, storage and usage, because there are physical limits. (Maybe with bacteria for production) The tech could and should get better concerning longevity of the electrodes for example. Also as the smallest molecule out there, storage will never be completely without losses. And long term storage requires even more energy and/or material.
All this is to say, that efficiency is still paramount to future energy supply, since also the material is limited or just simply because of costs of infrastructure and its implications on the biosphere. Therefore such inefficient energy carriers as H2 or what people call "e-fuels" should be used only where the enormous power and/or energy density is critical. H2 cars should therefore never be a thing. H2 or e-fuel planes, construction machines or tractors on the other hand could be more appropriate uses.
Or as heat.
We already have too much of that.
Or use it to generate hydrogen for simpler, cheaper, more reliable, sustainable hydrogen powered cars.
We don't even have enough lithium to replace the average country's existing cars, let alone all of them, or literally anything else that requires lithium.
Not sure where our good buddy @[email protected] went, but let me assure you. As of right now, 100% of available hydrogen stocks are fossil fuels derived.
Hydrogen vehicles being green is a fantasy pedaled by fossil fuel companies to not have to move away from natural gas. While it is possible to generate hydrogen through electrolysis, functionally, none actually is. It's far far cheaper to do so from natural gas, and probably always will be.
Promoting hydrogen as a "solution" is basically promoting fossil fuels green washing.
And I'm not sure where you are getting you information on lithium, but it's probably the best short and medium term option. Beyond that, gravity storage (pump water up hills, and maybe some kind of hydrogen system that doesn't require transporting the stuff where it can be made and stored in place when solar or wind energy is abundant.
Most battery chemistries are moving away from rare earth metals like lithium. Solid state batteries are the next step, and they use things like sodium cloride, I.E salt, as their base.
There are a lot more ways to store energy other than lithium and hydrogen.
Pumped storage, vanadium redox battery, sodium battery, ... I'd even say they are most suited for grid-level energy storage.
I have doubts that hydrogen will ever work in any industry, but it definitely won't work for cars. The storage and distribution challenges are never going to make it cost competitive with just regular lithium batteries on a marginal per-joule basis. Even if the energy itself is free, the other stuff will still be more expensive than just charging car batteries off the existing grid.
Literal free goddamn energy from the sky and these greedy fucks are going to burn the world down because they can't flip it for a buck
It sounds dumb, but because you can't turn off solar power, if it produces more then you need, you have to use it somehow or it can damage equipment. Hence the driving prices into negative territory. It's a technical problem more than it is a financial one.
"Damaging equipment" is just nonsense. I've got an off-grid solar system. When the battery is fully charged the solar panels simply stops producing. It has potential (voltage) but no current until you draw power. Just like a battery is full of energy but it just sits there until you draw power from it.
All solar systems could have smart switches to intelligently disconnect from the grid as needed, some inverter already do this automatically. So it's not a technical problem. It's a political problem.
Factorio players: hold my beer
you know we could just put our collective foot down and take the power away from them.
In this thread: a bunch of armchair energy scientists who think they've solved the energy storage problem all on their own.
Theres tons of ways that people with even a little brains could figure out, the problem is often cost or feasability.
A big burried water tank in my yard could be heated during the day and used to warm the house via underfloor heating at night, could do the reverse with chilled water in the middle of summer plumbed to an air recirculator with a heat exchanger. Its really simple engineering but expensive to implement.
I think an awful lot of people just dont understand the sheer scale of a lot of these problems, not the fundamentals.
an awful lot of people just dont understand the sheer scale of a lot of these problems
Sheer scale is why we're in this mess to begin with. Coal power for a population of 50M people living on either side of the Atlantic isn't what caused climate change. It's the scale up to provide power for 8B people that's broiling the planet.
"Ah, but you don't understand! There will be engineering obstacles to upgrading the grid!" is shit you can say when you aren't spending billions to maintain the existing fossil fuel infrastructure that's currently in place.
We have the capacity to reorient our economy around a predictable daily regionally glut of solar electricity. We already exploit time variable ecological events to optimize consumption. And we built out a global grid 40 years ago to handle logistics at this scale. You can move electricity from coast to coast and we routinely do. This isn't an impossible problem, it's just one that Western financial centers in particular don't want to invest in solving.
It’s always economics.
There’s a joke I’ve heard that says something like anybody can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build one that just barely stands (i.e., one where the materials and labor actually cost money).
That also reminds me of my first router - it was my PC. 10x the cost and 1/10 the features of a purpose built router, but I already had the computer and just needed to provide internet to 1 or 2 more via Ethernet.
Likewise, it’s easy to design energy storage concepts of all kinds. It’s a lot more tricky if you want it to be economically viable and see mass adoption.
A lot of energy storage solutions do exactly that - use heat as energy. i.e. solar heads rock, sand, salt etc. and then later on that heat is turned back into useful energy - either pumping water around households to heat them, or to drive a steam turbine. The bigger the volume of rock / sand / salt, the more efficient the process is.
Solution: Don't be fucking greedy. Take what's you need. Stop taking when you've got enough.
Do you think energy company scientists are gonna tell you what's real, or will they tell you what their boss pays them to say? I'll take the armchair scientist. YouTuber scientist preferably.
Managing an energy grid is an incredible feat of engineering and the fact that some countries have basically 24/7 constant voltage electricity is nothing short of a miracle.
And yes I will trust the academics and engineers who have spent ages documenting these processes and building the solutions. I studied this for a while at university. Every professor in that field is an environmentalist and guess what they still taught us about the issues with solar and wind instability and energy storage.
most armchair ass comment I read all day lmao
This is idiotic. The fact is your electricity transmission system operator has to pay a lot of money to keep the grid stable at 50 or 60Hz or your electronics would fry. With wind and especially with solar power, the variable output is always pushing the frequency one way or the other, and that creates a great need for costly balancing services. Negative pricing is an example of such a balancing service. Sounds good, but for how long do you think your electricity company can keep on paying you to consume power?
People also don't realize that too much power is just as bad as too little, worse in fact. There's always useful power sinks: pumped hydro, batteries, thermal storage, but these are not infinite.
Solar panels are easily disconnectable. Unlike conventional power plants it does not have spinning rust, that can walk away entire building.
Sure, but for all the times my electricity goes negative for half an hour, the monthly bill indicates that is vastly outweighed by all the times that it isn't.
Why isn't this as easy as storing some of that excess energy in a home battery and letting the rest down in a wire into the ground? Then if it's smart enough it could only give back energy when needed.
The easiest solution is to send the power somewhere else where it can offset the use of fossil fuels. This solution is fraught with political hurdles, subject to market forces (due to privatization) and often grid compatability issues(looking at you Texas). It is, however, a time tested and common method for mitigating excess production.
While water in pipes is often a metaphor for electricity, it's not particularly useful here. You can't ground out part of a charge. Energy storage is the solution though. Batteries are good, pumping water up back up into dams to be regained from a hydro plant when needed is ideal, as I understand it.
Well, that's what they're doing some places. The batteries assets are not in private homes usually though, they're by themself or run by power-consuming industries. Batteries are expensive though, and they degrade quickly if you use them wrong. In the EU, ENTSO-E defines the market rules, trade systems and messaging systems that energy companies and asset owners play by. Sometimes the revenue-generating asset is a battery, sometimes it's a hot water boiler, wind park, factory, hydro plant etc.
Just have few percent of spare capacity. If suddenly it will become too sunny, you can just disconnect solar cells. If not sunny enough, then connect them back.
Obviously I'm talking only about day - the only time when solar panel output can fluctuate.
This whole thread has way too many people who see the price as some kind of made up number that dictates how people behave, rather than recognizing that the price is a signal about the availability of useful real-world resources.
Even if the prices were strictly mandated by a centrally planned tariff that kept the same price throughout the day, every day, we'd still have the engineering challenge of how to match the energy fed into the grid versus taken out of the grid.
The prices are just a reflection of that technical issue, so solving it still needs to be done.
You're answering the wrong questions. I don't think people are assuming that it's simple to manage the power grid (if so, they shouldn't be...) but rather why are we locked into a system that lets business profit motive be responsible for the continued existence of the ecosystem.
pay a lot of money to keep the grid stable at 50 or 60Hz or your electronics would fry
Absolutely not. Please don't make things up.
With wind and especially with solar power, the variable output is always pushing the frequency one way or the other, and that creates a great need for costly balancing services.
Speaking as a flashlight enthusiast...there's many different ways to get a constant and consistent current. Sure we'd need to scale it up from a pocket-sized device to a whole fucking power grid, but with a big enough driver with the right arrangement of capacitors and all that, you'd easily be able to get a totally consistent current out of wind or solar
Having knowledge in power electronics i can confidently say the DC output of solar is easily and regularly inverted in phase with grid. In fact, DC is often used for undersea cables switching AC to dc then back to AC, All at extremely high voltage and varying demand(up yo 600kV/600MW but varying by installation).
Wind turbines go online after the blades start spinning and connect to the grid in the same way as any other generator, controlled by internal electronics. Power is regulated through blade feathering and can be turned off as supply exceeds demand. This, other than for maintenance reasons, is why you might see one turbine spinning while the next is standing still. This capability actually means the grid is MORE stable with wind power.
Any further fluctuation is managed in the same way as conventional power generation.
This reminds me of a quote (that probably isn't real) from Westinghouse to Tesla in regard to wireless energy transmission he was trying to create.
"This is wonderful, but where would we put the meter!?"
This is a real problem for renewables.
You don't get paid when the sun shines, and you don't get paid for when it does not.
You had to pay for building the solar panels and maintaining them. Corporate greed aside none sane would like their tax money either to be spent on producing electricity when it's not needed.
Next step for renewables must be storage that is cheap enough for it to beat having fossil fuel on standby.
I feel like energy storage has been the challenge since I learned what a computer is, it really is the 3rd wheel of the cab
If you passively produce more energy than what you actually need, that excess energy can be stored. And even if the stored energy won't be 100% efficient, it's still passively produced and can offset the peak hours consumption as needed.
We have a lot of energy storage solutions l, let's stop the fossi fuels subsidies and spend them on scaling power storage.
Corporate greed aside none sane would like their tax money either to be spent on producing electricity when it’s not needed.
You need to set the corporate greed aside in your own mind, too (not saying you're greedy, saying you've been indoctrinated to only see life in capitalist terms). Stop thinking in "cost" or "profit", start thinking in "benefit" and "use". Producing electricity when it isn't needed is only a problem when someone is looking to make money off of it.
Changing the words does not change the meaning.
It’s valid to think in terms of cost IMO even when trying to drive the concept of profit out of the discussion. It’s just a matter of using limited resources in efficient way that leads to more benefit.
The cost units don’t need to be dollars or euros. It could be in tons of a natural resource or some other thing that’s more tangible than money. But as long as those resources are limited in some way, it would be great to get more MW or MWh for the same resources put in.
The sick corporate greed part affects which costs get ignored though, like the externalities. They think “sure I’m poisoning our food supply and killing people every day, but nobody takes money out of MY bank account because of it.”
You don’t get paid when the sun shines
You get paid when people on your grid demand the electricity your plant produces. That's true whether the electricity comes from the sun or fossilized trees.
Corporate greed aside none sane would like their tax money either to be spent on producing electricity when it’s not needed.
A/C usage peaks during the day and wanes at night. Laborers in virtually every field tend to work during daylight hours and sleep at night. We use more electricity when the sun is shining.
Even before you get into battery power, we have ample opportunity to grow solar inputs into the grid before we get to the point where its being wasted. At peak capacity, we're using far more electricity than current renewables provide.
Batteries are a late stage solution to a marginal problem.
Storage needs both supply and demand. Demand is easy. However storage would be even less likely without an excess of solar supply to feed it
To be honest, at grid scale, I don't see why the answer to this today isn't that the government/energy companies just build a shit load of gravity batteries and use the basically free power times to build grid supply for when the sun's gone down.
Paying billions for mega projects to save millions on cheap electricity makes no sense.
Napkin math gravity battery Last figures I found are from 2022 the costs storing 1GW 24 hours is $150 per installed kWh
My apartment has an estimated electricity consumption annually of 2000kWh, I'll need to store half that for $150 per kWh in a structure that lasts 100 years without maintenance, then crumbles into dust and needs to be rebuilt. It would average out to $1500 per year.
My current electricity bill is about $600 per year.
Because "gravity batteries" is a stupid inefficient concept peddled by techbros to solve a huge problem with "a magic solution". In reality, they require either digging straight down like a mine shaft, but at huge scale, or a high rise building with all the weight concentrated on its top floor when the batteries are "charged". Wind would sway that shit left and right, the weight concentration would undermine / damage the building if it even was possible to build at scale.
With the situation in Ukraine, we really should spend on home scale storage for the resiliency against any disaster, even though it’s not as cost efficient
Didn't China have a community use lots of solar and they ended up with such a glut of excess power that they didn't know what to do with it?
All communities should have that. Electricity should be free and it would be plausible to make it free. Except for maintenance costs, but that would be peanuts compared to what we pay now.
Would it really be peanuts? Solar panel manufacture isn't exactly cheap, nor entirely sustainable (see, for instance, the black market for sand; and economics/politics over lithium mining). Solar panels also degrade; new technology replaces old and has to be paid for and made and installed; the infrastructure tying it all together isn't free either...
I feel like solar power, for all its excellence, is not as simple as upgrade as my rts-/tycoon-/sim-gamer's mind thinks it should be.
The "problem" of negative energy costs is easy to solve, but quite costly.
Build water desalination/carbon capture and storage/hydrogen generation plants that only run when the price goes below 0; even though these are very energy intensive, they would help stabilize the grid.
Then build more solar; you want to try to have the daytime price stay in the negative as often as possible.
The solution we're using instead of course, instead of all that environment crap you suggested, is running huge crypto farms only during the hours when the energy is in surplus.
So if a large region (say europe, or USA + canada) is cloudy and without wind, then all transactions must stop and the remaining countries are susceptible to represent over 50% of the hashing capacity. A perfectly sound system I'm eager to see.
Build water desalination/carbon capture and storage/hydrogen generation plants that only run when the price goes below 0; even though these are very energy intensive, they would help stabilize the grid.
Basically opportunistic energy consumption.
you want to try to have the daytime price stay in the negative as often as possible.
That's not exactly conducive towards people building more solar.
The solar isn't the goal; the energy is enabling the value in other parts of the economy.
In fact; energy supply is so important to the reasonable functioning of the economy. It should be taken out of the profit driven cycle of business.
Look at what happened with WPI in Ohakune and PanPack when energy prices sky rocketed a few months back.
So what they are saying is that our current financial system is too focused on short term gains to cope with short term losses?
Sigh, when I grew up, I was allways taught to save money so that I have a buffer to fall back on. This concept seems to have completely gone out the window for busniesses lately.
I dislike the talk about how capitalism is bad as a general concept, but when seeing stuff like this I do agree with it in parts.
Ok, so let's solve the issue.
There is too much electricity, so generating power to transmit to the network will cost us money.
This has an easy solution, just don't transmit it to the network.
Build a battery facility where you store the power instead, infact if the price of electricity is negative, use the power on the grid and charge your batteries as well, I mean, when the electricity cost is negative, you are being paid to consume power.
Then when the sun goes down, and the electricity price goes up, you sell the charge you have in the batteries.
Depending on your location you could even set up a pumped storage system, where instead of batteries getting charged, you use the cheap excess energy to pump a resarvoir full of water, and release it when you need the power.
This is exactly what we're gonna see on a large scale in a few years.
This is generally the right idea of a solution, but it’s a difficult engineering problem.
It’s not “just an economics problem” despite the headline.
The “cost of power becoming negative” is phrased in an economic way but what it really means is the grid has too much power and that power needs to go somewhere or it will damage infrastructure.
I know that, and to incentivice people to use the power, they pay you to do it.
Yes but there are many solutions already to that problem.
The first one being to shutdown a few stations production when overproducing. The second one being a myriad of storage solutions that already exists and scale them.
It is an economic problem because we already have many ways to skin the cat, but it won't produce shareholder value in the short term.
Why are individuals expected to have an emergency fund yet corporations get money from the government?
That's really not an easy solution at all. It's simple, conceptually, but it's a huge series of projects. And expensive.
I know that, but with long term planning its fine.
Early adopters will profit the most, it's a non-issue.
This has an easy solution, just don’t transmit it to the network.
It's the base load providers that don't like this. Coal and nuclear don't like to ramp down. They can't shut down easily and their installation keeps costing money but stops bringing in money in that period. They'll go complain to daddy government how unfair it is.
Until batteries start replacing them by being cheaper.
it's long past time we took businessman out of control and replaced them with scientists.
In which case they would choose Nuclear over Solar 9/10 times. I'm onboard
Nuclear has few advantages over solar.
Solar + batteries.
~$1000/kW vs $6 - 10,000/kW in 2018, it is cheaper today; projected costs to drop to as low as $560/kW in 2050.
Add in the ~$150/kWh of grid scale storage with the associated switchgear to connect it to the grid.
For a 10MW + 20MWh solar system; you are looking at approx $13,000,000 + install costs of probably $2-3,000,000.
I'm on board with whatever the scientists conclude. I'm not a scientist, so if they say nuclear, I'm behind nuclear. If they say solar, I'm behind solar. If they say wind, I'm behind wind. Trust scientists. If you're trained in science, definitely verify - there's some bad science out there for sure. But if you have no expertise in the area, just trust the scientific community.
This might not be the case anymore, now that solar is dirt cheap.
But, as another commenter said, I'm onboard with any decision that scientists (including both energy and climate sciences) and engineers come up with working together.
The real issue isn't the overproduction per se, but that we (globally speaking) don't have enough cheap scalable responsive distributed storage. I'm writing this from a privileged position since Switzerland has loads of dams and can pump water during such peaks. But it's clear that's not the solution everywhere. I hope a good cheap mass producible battery tech with less rare earth metal requirements comes along soon.
I applied to a company called Form Energy with a really interesting solution. They use the cheap simple ingredients of iron and water to rust and de-rust iron to store and release energy. It's less efficient than lithium-ion batteries but the cost is low and scalability is enormous. If it can make it past all of the hurdles and regulations it could be the solution to the energy storage problem for wind and solar.
Looks like the US has one in Tennessee, place called Raccoon Mountain, in the 1970s. At the time, the power source was to be nuclear. Another large scale project is being built near Seattle, with enough stored energy for 12 hours of electricity for every residence in Seattle. Pretty cool that such a conceptually simple technology can solve these problems.
The real special bit is that this crap isn't coming from, say Harvard, who one expects is all about business, but MIT which is supposed to be about Science and Engineering.
The media arm of MIT has been steaming garbage for years and constantly misrepresents the studies from their own researchers for clickbait.
But that aside, even though the engineering work out of MIT is solid, their economic opinions heavily reflect the fact that it’s an institution full of trust fund nepotism.
Well then there is another way of seeing this: there is an engineering/difficulty with such large power fluctuations that "drive electricity prices negative" because it implies a much more variable demand on existing power infrastructure.
You’re way better at this than the clowns in the MIT press department and you only tried for a few seconds. Which means the people who wrote the headline are either so stupid they can’t tie their own shoes, or they have a malicious agenda. I lean towards the latter.
The grid needs to balance input and output. You can't just "throw away" power.
It's a real problem --- not the "electric companies are losing money" part, but the "we need to keep the grid balanced" part.
That can indeed be a problem.
It is however not what the MIT guys wrote as being the problem: they quite literally said the problem with too much solar generation at peak times is that it drives prices down.
Also, curiously, the prices being driven down actually helps with the real technical problem that you point out: those consumers who can move their consumption times will tend to move them to those hours when the prices are lowest thus helping solve it. Same thing goes for investors: the more the price is pushed down at peak solar production times, the more appealing it is to invest in things like storage or even solutions with lower efficiency (such as green hydrogen or electricity transportation cables to markets less well served by solar).
The low prices aren't the problem from a technical point of view, quite the contrary: they're an incentive to invest in solutions (which is going to employ a lot of techies, so supposedly MIT would be all in favor of it)
That's not what they were saying, they were saying that it's not economical to have an abundance of electricity when people need it the least, and little or no electricity when people need it the most. It would be one thing if utilities could sell solar electricity at peak demand hours for a higher price, to make up the difference, but that's just when solar generation is slowly down significantly or stopped entirely.
And, yes, I know that battery storage could theoretically solve this, but battery technology is not currently capable of providing electricity for the entirety of the time we need it. New technologies are being developed right now with the goal of achieving long term grid storage, but they are still in the R&D phase. I'm confident a suitable storage technology, or multiple technologies, will eventually come to market, but it's going to take a while.
Regardless, it is likely we will always need some kind of on-demand power generation to supplement renewables and maintain grid stability, and I think nuclear is the best option.
But we shouldn't act like the problem is that utilities are just greedy. Many utilities aren't even for-profit companies, as many are either not-for-profit cooperatives or public entities. Sure, there are also many for-profit power utilities as well, maybe even some with connections to the fossil fuel industry, but generally power utilities are not some great villain.
A thing you can use which gets forgotten often in the conversation is "natural" / physical batteries, or better put stores of latent energy. Essentially, "push heavy thing up hill, make it come down later".
I know little about it, but you can release the kinetic energy stored in heavy objects at higher altitudes basically whenever, using say a dynamo on the wheels of a wagon of heavy rocks you previously pushed uphill.
There have been proposals for technology like this. Putting a motor above an abandoned mineshaft and suspending a weight. Charged by raising the weight, discharges by lowering against a load.
The issues is the capacity ends up being pretty tiny, not really at a grid level.
You’d need a TON of motors to get to something a grid could actually use to stabilize, and by then the economics don’t work out. Let alone the actual space requirements of that many motors
Additionally, a lot of the advantages of batteries come from local storage, where you don’t need to transmit the energy long distances anymore, and these “natural” batteries tend to take up a lot of space.
A better and more accessible form of “natural” energy storage are already in most homes. Heat pump water heaters in homes could do things like make the water extra hot during solar hours, when power is cheap, so they can make it until the next morning without turning back on.
Or with better building envelopes (insulation) we could run more cooling during solar, maybe even make a ton of ice. Then later in the day, when solar drops and the grid load peaks, you can still cool the building with ice.
abundance of electricity when people need it the least
Isn't peak consumption around middle of the day for most countries?
it's not economical
Mfw electricity being cheap to generate is not economical
No, peak generation in most countries is in the late afternoon when people come home from work, the ac kicks on, people start to cook + do other things around the house. You typically see a double- peak, one in the morning and one in the evening, although it varies based on the seasons. I'm an engineer who works in renewable energy and the stated problem is real- solar generation doesn't line up very well with grid demand. You can work around this with energy storage but that is an expensive solution
Isn't peak consumption around middle of the day for most countries?
I can't speak to other countries, but in the US peak electricity demand generally occurs in the early evening.
Mfw electricity being cheap to generate is not economical
Cheap electricity is great for consumers, but not necessarily for producers. Some people might say, "well, screw producers," but even if you take profit out of the equation, electric utilities need to be able to at least cover their expenses, and you can't do that if the amount of electricity you're generating relative to the demand is so high the price actually goes negative (meaning the utility is actually paying the consumer). Again, that's good for consumers, but I'm sure you can see how that's not a sustainable business model. And, like I mentioned before, it would be one thing if utilities could make up for this by selling for a higher price during peak, but by that point the sun is either setting or already set, depending on the time of year, so there's just no solar electricity to sell, at any price.
I mean, "economy" fundamentally is the allocation of limited resources, if something is limited at a point when it's needed, then economical doesn't sound like the wrong word to use? (I'm aware economical means cheap, BTW)
I really like your response. Right behind you about energy storage.
Whoever cracks that nut is an instant billionaire in my opinion. The first cheap, effective, and practical storage technology is going to change the world. But we’re not there just yet.
I’m curious on your statement about nuclear. While I do think nuclear is a great energy source, I’m not sure I agree on the on-demand part.
Our current nuclear plants take hours or even days to start up and wouldn’t provide enough reactivity for a highly renewable grid. Are you referring to a future Small Modular Reactor technology? One with a significantly faster startup and ramp rate?
For the longest time I thought people who had solar panels had a battery on their property somewhere, they're panels would charge battery and they would only switch to the grid if their battery ran out.
I don't know much about it, but this seems like a pretty viable solution and I still can't believe this isn't how it works.
Yeah you can do that. Not everyone does
that requires specialized equipment other than the battery. you need to generate AC from the DC of the panels and battery, and the easiest way to do that at the right frequency and phase is to follow the grid. that's why most solar installations stop providing power without a grid connection; you need a wave to sync with.
if you want to be truly independent you need your own wave forming equipment. and not the cheap stuff either, like the 12V inverters for cars that give out square waves. that's fine for like a drill, but plug a computer into that and there's a chance it fries. it won't charge, at least not for long.
also you need extra safeguards to not fry electrical workers when they disable the grid and your power comes flowing the other way.
"For years, mankind has yearned to destroy the Sun." - CM Burns.
Ya know what, I'm gonna solar even harder
puts on sunglasses 😎
Before commenting, you should know there are 2 types of solar panels:
- the ones owned by people (which may or may not feed into the grid)
- the ones owned by corporations
The article is probably about the 2nd kind (if you can only sell energy when there is a surplus, your company will fail), while the twitter user makes it seem like the 1st kind was meant. We probably need to built more of both types. Identify what type the other commenters are talking about before getting in any arguments here.
You have also made a good argument for socialized energy production. Any time you run into these situations where the optimal solution for a good society requires and is anti-profit, that's a good place for socialized ownership.
It would be nice if anyone linked the actual article instead of just guessing based off of a screenshot.
Edit: This is the actual Twitter thread... and this is the article referenced. They're saying that since solar plants all generally generate electricity at the same time, high enough solar adoption would mean prices would been driven down during those hours, which lowers the appeal of creating new solar panels over time. Which has implications for clean energy goals.
Negative prices are an opportunity and people will take advantage. This would be the perfect time to change batteries, make hydrogen, send compressed air into an old mine or refill a dam
of course it's a furry shitposting about it.
They aren't wrong though, storage technology is only starting to come to market in significant enough capacity to be beneficial.
And for storage plants to be financially viable energy costs during the day need to be really cheap, so they can raise them at night and make a significant enough profit to break even.
Solar generation is kinda saving our asses here in Ukraine though, and was even more in the summer. So I guess all you need for solar to be viable is to have most of your other power sources to get bombed
this is actually something that still fascinates me. The fact that i can just buy a market accessible product, point it towards the sun, and i just get electricity is fucking insane to me.
We truly live in the best timeline.
2 giant lakes. 1 uphill from the other, or one underground. When there's excess energy you pump water uphill. When you need more you let it back down
We can use Niagara Falls for that!
yeah, good luck with that one though. it tends to be ecologically problematic, and very, very hard to find places good for this. It has happened, but you can't just build these things as demand desires.
This is why battery based and thermal based energy storage is taking quite the aggressive focus on research and development right now. Batteries are more of a side effect, and very easily accessible, and thermal storage is probably a lot less popular than it should be.
Generally you can do a similar thing with traditional hydro anyway, plus it produces a base level of power anyway.
Call me stupid, but why don't they just charge enough to cover costs and a bit of profit? The current pricing model is broken if you can't run a solar plant profitably.
It is all quite complicated.
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A renewable producer (e.g. solar panels) cannot produce energy 24/7. And when it produces energy, you are not guaranteed the production is stable.
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A consumer cannot consume energy 24/7. And when they consume energy, you are not guaranteed the consumption is stable.
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To make the issue worse, a producer may not be producing energy when the consumer wants it, and vice versa.
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Currently, energy storage is not widely installed. Hence any produced energy must be consumed at the same time.
The factors above combined means that there will be a mismatch. If the production is too great, your electricity appliances will probably explode and whatnot. If the consumption is too great, you experience blackouts. Neither are desirable.
Now consider there is a middleman. The grid. Producers sell energy to the grid. Consumers buy energy from the grid.
At some point in time, due to the factors above, the grid will need (A) zero to negative prices to encourage consumers to buy & use more energy from it, and to encourage producers to produce & sell less energy to it. Or (B) increased prices to encourage consumers to buy & use less energy and producers to produce & sell more energy. A flat price is not realistic. (Residential users only have a flat rate because our demand patterns are more stable.)
But due to the production patterns of renewable energy and consumption patterns of our society, there is a not-insignificant risk that renewable producers will consistently face scenario (A) above making it difficult to cover back the costs.
Number 2 is not inherently true. We can incentivize time-of-use, and push it to time-of-generation. Not with all loads, of course, but with a lot of them, and a lot of very heavy loads.
Our old nuclear/coal model pushes a lot of these loads overnight to reduce daytime demand and "level the curve". Steel mills and aluminum smelters often operate overnight and shutdown during the day, because that is what nuclear and coal needed.
With solar and wind becoming predominant, we need to reverse those overnight, "off peak" incentives, and push consumption to daytime hours.
The concept is known as "demand shaping". It is an underutilized method of matching production and consumption, but it is essential if solar and wind are to become our primary source of power.
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why don't they just charge enough
Because who would pay 10 cents per kilowatt hour when there's someone else who will pay someone to take that energy off their hands?
The problem is caused when the market clearing price is lower than the cost it took to produce it, and some of those costs are in the past.
It's like getting a boat and going fishing. If you pay $10,000 for the cost of the trip, and bring back $8,000 worth of fish, you can't just force people buy them from you for a 25% markup.
The state of California has a great live and historical dashboard of power production and consumption that you can click around in to get an intuitive sense of where the problems arise. We have more batteries than anywhere else in the world but it’s still nowhere near enough. CAISO daily outlook
Edit: the supply dashboard is more useful for this discussion: CAISO supply
It takes hours to days to start, stop, or change nuclear and coal generation rates. You can't just turn it on and off as needed. If you need coal or nuclear to meet overnight demand, you have to leave it running during the day as well. If you need 2MW of power overnight and 5MW during the day, you can only add 3MW of solar generation before you are putting too much power on the grid. If your solar puts out 5MW, you have to find out something to do with the extra 2MW that your nuclear plant needs to output continuously.
If you size your solar plants to produce 3MW in the middle of winter, then in summer they are putting out about 9MW. What can you do with the 6MW excess?
There is no single solution to manage every issue, but the single most important is "demand shaping". We need to reduce demands that can only be met with baseload generation. We need to move that demand to peak solar production times. We need to increase daytime demand to incentivize greater investment into solar. We need east/west transmission lines across every continent, shifting power from wherever the sun is up to wherever the sun is down.
Storage has to be a very distant second. Every 1 MW we time shift from night to day takes 2MW of load off the grid.
Every time someone mentions "oh no solar is producing too much energy" I think of this deranged Forbes article from a few years back.
alt-text
Microsofts billionaire founder Bill Gates is financially backing the development of sun dimming technology that would potentially......{blahblah global cooling}
This is obviously in the context of attempting to mitigate global warming, which was caused by... you guessed it, mostly fossil fuel use.
Nobody is proposing blocking out the sun like Mr. Burns. More like reflecting a tiny percentage of solar radiation to prevent our oceans from boiling or once-in-a-century superstorms that, oh I don't know, flood the mountains of Tennessee from becoming yearly occurrences.
Yeah yeah down with capitalism rah rah but if the electric company makes no money, how do they afford infrastructure maintenance?
Ok so we nationalize the electric company. Now taxes pay to keep up the electric grid?
I'm down for all of that, by the way. It's a great solution. But there is absolutely, indisputably, 100% a problem here, and it's childish to pretend that if evil corporations would stop being so greedy everything would magically fix itself. It's completely valid to discuss this issue in terms of problems and solutions.
There's absolutely a problem with how MIT Tech Review has phrased it. It could've been phrase like "modern power generation requires innovate solutions to the gride and large scale grid upgrades." But no they blamed it has a Solar problem, not a grid problem.
I see headlines all the time such as "The US highways need a 1 Trillion investment in the next decade". How come they aren't phrased like "The problem with trucks and cars is that they destroy roads, leading to Trillions of cost to the taxpayer". They've decided that transportation is non-negotiable and it's needed. But renewable electricity is not?
That's a fair point.
If evil corporations stopped being greedy everything would literally fix itself, and it would not be magic.
Imagine getting electricity from solar as what it cost to deliver and not having a price set by a market at all.
Imagine if the corporations were not allowed to extract profit from you’d to give it to the shareholders and banks.
There’s an almost uncountable amount of spare money, when you remove ‘profits’ and put it back into the service .
That just economically does not work on a large scale.
But sure, I could see it for one industry. That's government ownership.
Does the price I pay for electricity not already include the cost to maintain the infrastructure needed to deliver it?
Funny enough, no. Although that's changing in some places, with electric bills being split into a base fee for everyone hooked up and a variable fee based on usage. Obviously, this pisses off home solar users because they expected to pay nothing.
But most places use the same old model that charges you solely based on usage and was not designed with consumers also being producers.
Home solar aside, significant upgrades to the grid will require higher prices. Introducing large grid-scale solar is a significant upgrade.
That's not at all what MIT is talking about here. This goes into detail around the challenges tied in rolling out grid scale solar in a way that aligns with supply and demand curves, and how to make sure we're able to capture overproduction so that we can use it when not enough is being produced. It's a complex shift to work out in our over 100+ year grid production structure, and has been an ongoing discussion across the energy sector. But you know...memes and shit.
You're not saying anything contradictory to the criticism, You're saying the exact same shit with a more expensive vocabulary. I'm also very educated. I also agree the sun is Monty Burns greatest enemy for giving out free light.
Clearly not. The point is that grid scale deployment is not easy. It's an important discussion to do it right. The criticism is genuinely stupid and just spotlights people who clearly don't understand how any of this stuff works or what the article is even talking about. You can't just slap solar panels everywhere and call it a day.
Grid scale redundancies are important. Managing load is important. Energy storage is important. Scaling up renewables and scaling down conventional generation is important. Ensuring those who cannot afford their own BTM generation can access affordable electricity is important. That's entirely what this conversation is about.
Guys. Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. Every cell has its own power house where it stores up the molecules needed to generate ATP on the spot. Our body does this because that's very stable! Society should do it too. It's called batteries.
Based and red-pilled. (Don’t yell at me back in my day the red pill entered the matrix, instead of just meaning racism.)
I don't understand it well enough to explain it but I think that this actually is not the issue here. Something about it making the grids unstable?
Though based on their phrasing it 100% sounds like "lol how can be greedy if free"
yeah the new it only have like a billion other stocks for these scumbags to get rich off of and short into the ground
Didn't you hear? Nobody wants solar, solar panels are sitting on the lot as the customer demands nuclear
Sure we can we just don’t have the technology for a Dyson Sphere https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
I wouldn't be sure we can't. Just have to find the right "angle":
https://futurism.com/the-byte/startup-space-mirror-sunlight-night
Kinda different like during night time it doesn't really makes sense to buy sunlight to make electricity.
You're absolutely right. To be honest, I wasn't going to contribute to the main topic of the discussion. Just remembered this sunlight-as-a-service concept from some weeks before, felt it had a legitimate connection to this topic and wanted to share because it's just so bonkers.
Scientists: Hi here is a physical, technical, materially real limitation of most renewables that most of you should know about by now.
Shitforbrains shitter leftie: must be capitalism
If the technical limitation is "it drives down prices" then it is about capitalism, yes.
How do you even manage to not get that?
Energy sector paid scientists.
I'll take the armchair YouTuber scientist, thanks!
It's gonna be cheaper for me to store energy myself than it is to pay an energy company so they can profit. I may not benefit from the economy of scale that a large installation provides, but I'm not gonna benefit from that anyhow. Some rich asshole is gonna skim the cream off that. I'll benefit by not paying what they charge.
i mean yeah capitalism is a materially real limitation here ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But this basically is the reason why no one wants to build a nuclear plant. Such a power plant will basically run at a massive loss during high solar and wind energy supply. A nuclear reactor takes a long time to shutdown once the reaction has started. So it can’t dynamically scale the production based on market demands. A nuclear power plant cost at least $8 billion and 8 years to build and needs to be operating for 50 years to see a return on investment. But during those 50 years wind, solar and battery tech will obviously advance as well. It’s basically a given that a nuclear power plant is never going to make the investment back. Hence why no one wants to build one. And therefore the government should do it.
No one tell them that they can monopolize solar panels.
They can't.
Needed to double check that I'm actually still on Lemmy as so many of the top comments made sense.
A case of the quiet part being spoken outloud. That's my beef with nuclear energy as well - why? Solar power clearly work, and best of all, it isn't centralized. Same with wind power. It even works in circumstances you might have to shut down nuclear power plants due to excessive heat. You even have to worry about the increasing load on the grid because they are easier to distribute. It needs energy storage, and there's no shortage of means for energy storage.
Nuclear power plants are going to be charging you the same as coal plants for energy as long as they are owned by market tycoons. Nuclear power plants make the best sense in an ideal world where society matters and there aren't people gaming the market. We do not live in an ideal world.
If you have a solar farm, invest in LLM and bitcoin server farm. Run it whenever you can't make money selling energy.
Wasting energy isn't the same as investing
You could actually put some thought into what you devote the energy to, and if wanting to do a blockchain based system, run Stellar or Ethereum nodes. Though they don't use Proof of Work, so it would not use that much energy, relatively. You could offer supercomputing as a service that run batch jobs during the peak hours though.
President Rufas: hold my Midgar, I'm goin in
... Yet
MIT thinking they're Doc Ock
The actual problem with painel solars, is that they require an existing infrastructure to sync with the AC grid but if that infrastructure fail, or just get out of sync, it could trigger every painel solar fail safe making the damage 10x worse especially if the infrastructure depends on the solar panels to supply most of the energy
This is a solved problem.
DC-AC conversion is pretty well understood, as is electrical protection, grid frequency matching inverters are available "off the shelf" for small units and are made to order in the MW range.
In NZ we have a DC link between the islands, there have been equipment failures over the years disabling the link, but grid frequency events are not an issue. The link has been in place for almost 60 years.
Also the distributed nature of generation makes cascade failure extremely unlikely. If you have an issue in one solar farm; another solar farm a few km away is extremely unlikely to have the same issue.
The horror....the horror....
With the economic damage resulting from covid lockdowns, you’d think this “somebody think of the stock market” narrative would go away.
The economy is something everyone relies on, not just rich people.
Covid was great for rich people though, all the richest people got so much richer during covid.
The problem with solar panels is that they produce energy the most when you least need it, and they produce the least when you most need it. Fuck the market. It's a resource storage and production management problem.
that's a ridiculous argument tho. of course you can. just very selectively choose who you sell solar panels to
I know how to store excess energy from kilowatt hours to gigawatt hours without using batteries, and only using cheap, inert materials.
Concrete blocks? Springs? Water?
Having the cost of power go to zero is a bit of a problem if selling power is your business model, so it's not exactly ideal for solar providers.
Then it needs to be nationalised
Even when our power generation was state-owned, they still operated as a state owned enterprise model.
If the price of your product is going negative, you have well and truly saturated the market. Even if our generation was nationalised, no government is going to build something where you have to pay someone else to use the output.
yeah that sure is a problem with everything needing to be profitable. I wish some people thought of a different system 100+ years ago
Bet she thought she was real smart making that smarmy comment, while being completely wrong.
