Solar will get too cheap to connect to the power grid
Solar power’s rapidly falling costs are raising the prospect that panels and local batteries could make traditional centralized grids and fossil backup plants less essential, especially during sunny daytime peaks when wholesale prices can even turn negative. Commenters debate how to handle this oversupply—through storage, flexible demand, new industrial loads, and grid expansion—while weighing land use, subsidies, and the roles of nuclear, hydrogen, and synthetic fuels. Underneath is a broader question: whether policy, market design, and infrastructure can adapt quickly enough for cheap renewables to displace carbon-intensive generation without undermining reliability.
Solar economics & negative prices
- Surplus solar and wind can drive wholesale prices to zero or negative.
- Some argue this is “bad for everyone” because producers must recover costs at other times; others see it as a useful market signal.
- Negative prices are linked to inflexible thermal plants and policy designs like guaranteed feed‑in tariffs, not inherent to solar itself.
- Past policies (e.g., German EEG) are debated: credited with global PV cost declines and lower spot prices, but also described as costly for the host country.
Storage, flexible load & market responses
- Many expect negative prices to incentivize storage (home batteries, grid batteries, EVs) and flexible loads (HVAC, industrial heat, data centers).
- Examples: using batteries with dynamic tariffs, bulk resistive heat storage up to very high temperatures, ice or thermal storage for cooling, and demand-response programs.
- Some think we’ve moved from “build more solar” to “build more storage next to solar.”
- Idea of EVs and home batteries acting as virtual power plants is popular, though not yet mainstream.
Grid vs off‑grid and microgrids
- Question raised whether cheap solar + cheap batteries could make the traditional grid partially obsolete.
- Skeptics point to seasonal variation and high-latitude winters: diurnal storage is plausible, seasonal storage with current batteries is not.
- Microgrids and community solar are seen as complementary, not full replacements; cities will still need large shared infrastructure.
Land use & siting
- Concern over solar farms displacing agriculture, especially in SE England.
- Counters: solar land share could be under 1% nationally; agrivoltaics and grazing under panels can coexist with farming; offshore wind and rooftops reduce land pressure.
- Nuclear is far more land‑efficient but faces cost, planning, and political barriers.
Alternative sinks & fuels
- Ideas for soaking up surplus: hydrogen production, synthetic hydrocarbons via captured CO₂, desalination, sewage treatment, industrial furnaces, and compute workloads.
- Debate over hydrogen vs synthetic hydrocarbons: hydrogen is harder to store/transport but zero‑carbon; e‑fuels can use existing infrastructure but reintroduce combustion CO₂ unless feedstock carbon is captured.
Policy, subsidies & market design
- Large energy subsidies in Europe, especially during crises, raise questions about whether markets alone can handle volatility.
- Some see reserve payments for gas plants and connection fees as necessary reliability tools; others want faster phase‑out and better incentives for storage and demand response.
Nuclear, CCS & SAF
- Nuclear is portrayed by some as economically undermined by cheap daytime solar; others point to low‑carbon grids built with nuclear (e.g., France) as proof of concept.
- Carbon capture and storage is criticized as politically unattractive because it doesn’t reduce fossil extraction.
- Sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) exists at modest scale; producing it purely from electricity and air (via CO₂ capture) is seen as technically possible but currently uneconomic and policy‑dependent.
Bitcoin and speculative energy sinks
- Using excess energy for Bitcoin mining is raised and largely criticized as wasteful and socially harmful compared to productive uses like storage, hydrogen, or industrial processing.