It’s still not earning you money to spend electricity because you still have to pay the transfer fee which is around 6 cents / kWh but it’s pretty damn cheap nevertheless, mostly because of the excess in wind energy.

Last winter because of a mistake it dropped down to negative 50 cents / kWh for few hours, averaging negative 20 cents for the entire day. People were literally earning money by spending electricity. Some were running electric heaters outside in the middle of the winter.

  • frezik@midwest.social
    2·
    3 months ago

    Ignoring the paragraphs of mansplaining about how nuclear works . . .

    As for wind, i’m not sure what the effects on it during the day/night cycle is, but i imagine during the day they generally produce more power, though they will also produce some power over night.

    Wind speed at 100m tends to drop in the late afternoon and pick up during the night. See page 49 here:

    https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy15osti/61740.pdf

    Even in the event that you have a total grid blackout, nuclear plants are a potential source of blackstart power sources

    What? No. Much of the Ercot failure in Texas to deal with the 2021 winter weather was nuclear plants being knocked offline.

    • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      Ignoring the paragraphs of mansplaining about how nuclear works . . .

      homie that’s just me being autistic.

      Wind speed at 100m tends to drop in the late afternoon and pick up during the night.

      that’s interesting, though i was speaking as an average throughout the whole day. Could very well still be true though.

      What? No. Much of the Ercot failure in Texas to deal with the 2021 winter weather was nuclear plants being knocked offline.

      yeah idk about that one chief i mean, you can clearly see it’s combined cycle gas causing the problem primarily, there’s also a bit of drop in gas, and it appears other sources also do, but that appears to be a graphing artifact more than anything.

      It was literally reported that gas plants couldn’t fire due to the pipes being frozen, while nuclear may have contributed, i believe the plants in question were already shutdown for maintenance or non operation to begin with. Also compounded with the grid being excessively depended on, due to electric resistive heating.

      https://energy.utexas.edu/sites/default/files/UTAustin (2021) EventsFebruary2021TexasBlackout 20210714.pdf

      in fact scrolling through an investigation in what happened it appears about 1300 MW of nuclear went offline, which is the collectively equivalent of, one plant. And it looks like it was an automated shutdown, which should’ve been expected.

      In fact, considerably more coal, gas, wind power died out. The only thing less significant was solar power.

      And if we go forward in history just a year we can find an example of similar grid mismanagement, though this time it was during the summer and due to improper grid configuration, nearing a potential grid outage. And with solar instead of gas.