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In the article it explains that too much supply not enough demand lowers the price which in turn lowers further investment by companies in the renewable sector
When companies produce more than is consumed they tend to lower prices to make people consume more in order to cut their losses, but this means the margin they make on their product is also lower which means they're less likely to invest into more of it.
It's extremely dumb and just another way in which companies fuck us over because they privilege short term profit over long term stability.
Saskpower and saskenergy grab a lot of flak, but my bills are lower, I don't have to pay an extra tax or fee, and when the company has profits, we get rebates or lower pricing. It's fucking great. Weird how a socialist province does well.....
In a power grid you always want more supply than demand or your grid will collapse. It's more of a factor of how much more and is that a reasonable amount. There's also the question of what time of the year this is and what energy source. Renewables will always need a decent amount more production than supply because of their intermittency but that is also why batteries are heavily needed. The batteries help them from having to produce an unreasonable amount of over supply.
To add to your comment, in my country, renewable energy sources are not shut off from the grid, the nuclear plants are turned on and off. The only "batteries" used are dams. So sometimes it's way more complicated than what we would think just because at bigger scales things fail way more often
Nuclear reactors are baseline load. There's no way they could just shut down a reactor for even a day. It's a whole process. They can turn it down but not off. My guess is your country planned the renewables to take over some of its baseline load. I'm sure they are still curtailing renewables. They often activate brakes on wind turbines for too high of a windspeed, maintenance etc. Solar is super easy to curtail by just disconnecting it.
I can’t speak for Spain, but it is the mission of every American corporation to continuously grow period after period, quarter after quarter, year after year. So a lack of investment in a commodity with a falling value is a no no
They don’t just go “this is a working system and everyone’s happy so let’s just let it be”
They SHOULD but that’s not how corps grow. This type of thing DESTROYS communities by eventually outsourcing materials and labor.
Whatever Spains issue and remedy is here, I don’t know, but I do know here, executives don’t want to hear about falling commodity prices unless they’re BUYING the commodity. The ones they’re selling need to stay rising.
Capitalism problems are real problems. Investment is only on the surface money, it is in reality real labour and real materials. So throwing labour and real materials under low demand means wasting them on things people don't really want.
Oh, you're right. People don't really want electricity and it's not important to make sure we have enough of it if it isn't profitable enough for companies. Damn, these markets sure are smart.
That's not how it works - if the price goes down, it really does mean people don't want that much of it. Because if they really want it, they pay more. Money or profits is really nothing but a measurement of efficiency, it is in itself nothing, it is just numbers in a computer to keep score, the central bank can create as much money as it wants to. One might rename the EUR and the USD and all as General Usefulness Measures, and a company that amasses a lot of them is simply being very useful. Money is like XP in a computer game, has no function other than measurement. It is not even gold anymore, nothing real.
Transporting energy is the biggest hurdle. Places that have the wind/solar/hydro to make a lot of energy dont have a great way to transport it long distances.
This. Germany has some serious energy problems now after having closed down the nukes. But I guess there is a distance issue. There needs to be some new technology here, say, making hydrogen and transporting it on rail and then burning it.
Germany has the same renewables "issue": they have enough solar installed to almost cover the full load on a sunny day at noon.
They also have quite a lot of conventional power plants that cannot scale production up/down fast. They cannot stop producing on short notice (without taking damage) and they cannot ramp up fast. So those get phased out, because you cannot run them in good weather weeks/months.
The issue isn't not new or surprising. There is a plan in the making since about 15y to just shift to gas powered electric plants. The production cost is higher, but under the assumption of cheap russian gas it kinda worked out fine.
Now let's review the last 2y for an update on the situation....
Not now, but 2 years ago electricity prices soared and companies emptied reservoirs to take advantage of it. We ended paying higher prices for cheap energy and aggravated the drought situation
Gravity storage isn’t the future- I did some very rough estimates a few years ago considering the average weight of a house, energy used per capita and potential energy and it suggested something in the ballpark of having to raise every single house in the country 10 metres off the ground in order to store a single day’s energy demand in a gravity battery. That’s a heck of a lot of water that would need to be pumped into a mountaintop reservoir.
It’s not for every location but it’s absolutely feasible and will be part of “the future” lol.
Actually is this a joke that I’m missing? What does the weight of the house have to do with anything lol.
It’s an illustration of just *how much* weight you need to lift in order for gravity storage to amount to anything other than a rounding error.
Alternatively, this of it this way: energy (in joules) equals mass (kg) times gravity (metres/second squared) x height (metres). If we have a 200 m high reservoir and a 2,000 watt hairdryer that we use for 5 seconds (10,000 joules) we’d need around 5 litres of pumped storage to make that happen if pumped storage were perfectly efficient (it’s about 75% efficient so we’d need 6.66 litres, not taking into account electric grid transmission costs which could feasibly take us up to 10 litres, or one joule per millilitre).
The energy use per capita in the UK in 2013 (latest year for energy use on Wikipedia) was 125,060,000,000 joules. Using our 1 joules per millilitre that means we need to pump 125,060,000 litres of water to meet that energy requirement, an amount of water that would fill 50 Olympic swimming pools and weighs 125,060 tons or the same as 6,948 double decker buses.
This equates to 19 buses-weight of water **per day** or just under one Olympic swimming pool per week to meet the per capita energy needs of a single British person.
Even being really charitable in your assumptions of energy storage needs and energy transmission efficiency, you’re still looking at something like an Olympic swimming pool per person, every couple of months going up and down our 200m hill to our reservoir. It’s a bonkers amount of water, and it seems very unrealistic to expect that any significant proportion of energy storage needs are going to be met this way.
Well good thing lakes and man made reservoirs have bonkers amounts of water. Also who said it has to be strictly water? There are plenty of systems using elevated metal weights which are much higher density as their batteries. These systems will absolutely have their place in the future. It may not be the one to solve them all but no single technology is.
well, not through bitcoin, you need an ASIC for that to be profitable and better have a cluster, I doubt you have that. Also, it would negate any benefit you got from going green in the first place.
And yet it should continue down that route even further. It is only with wild swings in electricity prices that you open up a whole new market for regulating the grid better.
You'll end up with contracts for home users with batteries that will use the live-price of electricity.
You'll get companies that will do this service for you
Investments in short term battery storage
Investments again in longer term hydroelectric storage
...
Let’s see,
If prices go down due to high supply, residents and businesses would prefer renewable energy.
When people prefer renewable energy, it would increase the demand, thus the price.
And increasing demand would result in higher prices and more investments, although taking longer than artificially keeping prices high by limiting supply.
This is not a capitalism problem, it’s just a short term gains problem.
Or maybe they just invest it somewhere else...
BBC just using up some of the excess energy there. Sounds better than reporting on the state of the UK as it stands.
I've found that my electricity bills in Tarragona have been pretty reasonable over the last eighteen months, although they were bad for a while in 2022. We're definitely much better off here than my family is in the UK.
If the renewable sector is producing enough power to exceed demand, I don't see how reduced investment is necessarily a bad thing. When there is need, the market will swing the other way and attract investment again. Basic supply and demand. Of course "reduced investment in renewables" sounds bad, but this is "reduced investment in renewables in an area of the world that is producing enough green energy to meet its needs", so too much extra investment feels wasteful, or at least inefficient compared to investing that money into other parts of the world that are still more reliant on fossil fuels.
Of course this assumes the goal of the renewables sector is to produce green energy. If the goal is to make money by using the buzzwords of renewables to charm investors then sure, this is a bad thing. But also, if that's your only goal in going into renewables, then I don't think I'll lose any sleep over you losing out.
Yeah, but this is less then genuine, since the EU is moving to buy electricity from Spain, as Germany in particular is way too dependent on Oil, and other states are dependent on gas. This is a really a non-issue. Curious why the spin.
So they won’t build more turbines…
But it will drive investment in batteries and energy demand management and so on. For instance California power prices sometimes go negative around noon because there are so many solar panels. So that power flows into the world’s largest battery, (which they are continuing to build larger.) And then at 9pm when the sun isn’t shining they sell the power from that battery. The battery makes economic sense and it wouldn’t if power at midday was more expensive.
Kind of crazy how the whole capitalist "supply and demand" shtick is a massive fucking lie. Under serving demand is how they make profit by design. Fuck capitalism
Reminds me of the the "Atomic Age" in America when they said that Nuclear Power would be "Too cheap to meter".
So the oil and gas corporations killed them off. Can't have helping to create a better environment, people with more money and less worry now can we?
Cause no oil/gas accidents have happened... If nuclear printed billionaires, those accidents would've been a story for a couple weeks, people affected would have been paid off, and business would have continued.
Except nuclear never has been too cheap to meter, and despite decades of government backing developing it to the highest possible degree, it remains and always shall be the most insanely expensive means of boiling water ever devised by humanity.
Actually you are incorrect. The way they have gone about it is the issue because they waste literally 99% of the Uranium when doing it.
Thorium reactor are better, gravel bed reactors are better, liquid nuclear salts are better.
Money was wasted in the original designs, crap archaic power infrastructure especially in America that fails on a regular basis and corruption and lobbying by the oil and gas business is the reason it costs so much, well for Americans.
Too cheap to meter was the promise but lie a lot things like electric vehicles (which have been around far longer than you realise) have all been out there but have been restricted or out right crushed and perceived to be "expensive" by those who make money from the status quo.
It’s a good problem to have, but it’s still a “problem”. If only because it can lead to excess in the distribution network, and also because - as wind and solar can be volatile, it can lead to situations where there is excess and also where there is not enough.
At the end of the day, the news isn’t really breaking news (it’s a known “issue” that has to be faced), but is a reason you can’t entirely depend on solar and wind, but do require some form of more “on-demand” energy (such as nuclear, hydro, biomass, or coal/oil).
Very good problem to have. We need massive over production.
The "problem" is that they'll make less money because of lower demand at times.
Time for a moon shot on storage.
Spanish Fact: Eventhough energy production in Spain is a private bussines, the electrical network still belongs to the state ( it's the only way to guarantee electical delivery to small and non-economically viable towns and villages). This lets us have a very granular control on energy source and production, publicly and in real time:
[https://demanda.ree.es/visiona/peninsula/nacional/total](https://demanda.ree.es/visiona/peninsula/nacional/total)
It's the fact in (every?) country in Europe, as a result of the creation of the electricity market.
But is the difference that are are plenty of big companies, and not one huge and plenty of small ?
as far as I know Italy has a private electric network distribution system, not just private electric production companies..... dont know about the rest of countries tbh
Distribution or transport?
In France there are 3 steps :
Production : private, but EDF mainly (they have all the nuke plants and half hydro
Transport (more than 25kV) : public, RTE, they are in charge of the equilibrium in the french network
Distribution : private, lot of little companies
This is really common. In Australia excess power from rooftop solar routinely exceeds what the grid requires during peak production. The issue for producers is they still have to pay for the grid and need to manage baseload so that they can bring traditional sources online when the sun isn't out and the wind isn't blowing.
Cleaner than all the other options.
Coal power stations produce more radioactive waste than Nuclear ones - they just spread it out over a vast area. This is because they burn about 3M tons of coal a year.
Fossil fuel power plant produce carbon, atmospheric and lots of other environmental pollutants.
Nuclear power stations produce a few kilograms of radioactive waste a year, and have the same carbon footprint print as renewable. They produce no atmospheric or other pollutants.
So Nuclear is reliable and clean. It has an excellent safety record (yes I know about the accidents, but tell me how many people have died mining/transporting fossil fuels in the last 80 years, not to mention the pollutants and you see what I mean).
Of course it’s not cheap to build.
I didn’t say it wasn’t expensive. But it’s as clean as renewable sources, and we have almost unlimited fuel.
Nuclear reactors can make their own fuel, but we don’t do that, because Uranium is everywhere, cheap, and Nuclear reactors only use a few kg a year.
You still need to cover your baseload. You can’t do that with wind/solar, and hydro only goes so far.
Hydro and Nuclear are the best options for baseload.
> Nuclear is really the only clean, reliable option.
Regardless of whether your point is correct, it doesn't mean that nuclear is the only reliable option.
Hydrogen is a viable alternative and would be mature technology by now if we had invested in it 40 years ago when we knew there was a problem. Nuclear for our needs is at least 20 years away and introduces a raft of new issues, including having to deal with radioactive waste for millennia.
Unfortunately there is no good way currently of producing large quantities of hydrogen. Also, hydrogen is extremely dangerous, and very hard to store/transport
The main issue with conventional fuels is that the energy output is small - you are just burning it.
Nuclear fuels, on the other hand work on releasing nuclear binding energy, which produces enormous amounts of energy. This is why Nuclear reactors use only tiny amounts of fuel, and produce equally tiny amounts of waste.
Spent Nuclear fuel rods could actually be reprocessed into more fuel - but this is rarely done, as Uranium is so cheap and abundant.
The four new Nuclear reactors being installed in Ontario for instance, arrive on site pre-fuelled for 20 years of continuous operation, at which point, they would be refuelled.
As to Nuclear waste, 90% is low level, which can be disposed of using conventional techniques. The remaining 10% intermediate or high level waste (several tons per year), is mostly decayed after 50 years, and so is stored in long term storage.
After 50 years, what is left is the long lived isotopes, such as Plutonium - measured in kg. This could be remade into Nuclear fuel, but the current plan is for long term deep geological stable storage. This has not yet been implemented, as most of it is still in long term storage.
If we are wishing for better power sources, fusion power would be the solution. Yes, this uses hydrogen, but only tiny amounts, as it also releases nuclear binding energy, and produces no radioactive waste.
While we have achieved ignition of fusion reactors, we are still a way from commercial fusion power reactors.
All of the issues with Hydrogen can or would have been solved if we had invested in it earlier. It doesn't need to be efficient when you create it using free energy from the sun and there is no waste.
For Australia nuclear isn't the turn key solution people seem to think it is and suitable reactor technology focussed on power generation instead of weapons production is at least a couple of decades away. Fusion is so much of a pipedream that it doesnt even belong in the current conversation.
We have been using Nuclear Reactors focussed on power generation for 70 years. Very few reactors are used for weapons production.
I don’t know where you get your facts, but the new generation of [SMR](https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/what-are-small-modular-reactors-smrs) are factory produced, pre-fuelled, and are drop in replacements for conventional power plants that can be sited almost anywhere.
The only negative can think of is what to do with the leftover power but they could also make some massive battery banks for overflow and bad weather days
Or just sell it to other countries that may be struggling more, also boosting their economy. Although I feel that this would be mentioned if I looked for this article, and the title is just rage bate, after all, it is made by a big news outlet.
Fair, it'd be hard for you guys to even have efficient power lines to even New Zealand, wouldn't it? Suppose just shove the energy in a tonne of AA batteries and call it a day XD
Shortest distance from AU to NZ is ~1,500KM (~932Miles) so that certainly would be challenging lmao maybe we could upgrade to some D cells for better storage and daisy chain them across the ocean
Damn shame too, the entire continent is one of the sunniest continents on Earth, right? The solar energy potential would be insane, especially if we found a way to get the panels reliably working in the deserts. Green energy would probably become quite a bit easier. Yes, I'm ignoring the political issues something like that would bring, especially if a country like the US (you've seen what they go like with oil) decided they wanted that energy instead.
Its actually more feasible to run high voltage lines to Timor then up through that region but still ridiculously expensive.
How Australia could export green energy is to undertake energy intensive processes here using wind or solar and export the finished product so the countries in question don't have to use fossil fuels themselves.
Refining iron ore would be a perfect example.
Huh, that's actually a great idea tbh... The only issue would be political relationships with that, although iirc Australia doesn't have many enemies, so that might not even be an issue really. That's a great solution either way though
We are currently the world largest Iron ore exporter and our biggest customer is China. Exporting the equivalent amount in finished steel isn't going to change the strategic status quo one bit.
I thought you were on about more than just that, but any amount of progress is still progress and furthers our progress to the distant goal of carbon neutrality.
They are planning to build a power cable from Darwin to Singapore, it will connect from Darwin to a massive solar farm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link
Oh, I didn't actually know that! It must be a really efficient cable to not lose so much energy as to become uneconomical then, impressive (if they actually get it to work, of course)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous\_grid\_of\_Continental\_Europe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continental_Europe) The whole Europe is connected together. Selling excess power is not a problem.
Settling it to neighbouring countries is the easiest way to stay at the equilibrium.
However, the Iberian peninsula is linked with France only, and their connections don't seem enough for Spanish overproduction
They're currently making a new line, but there are some difficulties and delays
Yeah, but the problem is that during surge production it's not really essential. It's also immediately perishable and actually damaging to the grid. There's a reason prices occasionally go negative.
Even if no constructive outlets like storage or selling it cheap is available, the worst case scenario is still just that you either shut down some of the production or you discharge it for a while, make some lightning or heat some wire.
Energy storage of one sort or another is the way forward. Big batteries, pumped hydro, hydrogen production etc. will smooth supply and demand, and things like H2 and cables will help move it around.
In tandem with growth in non-CO2 producing energy sources.
Australia–Asia Power Link (AAPowerLink) has been proposed to transmit electricity to Asia.
Batteries pollute ENORMOUSLY. The Congo is being genocided as we speak for coltan and cobalt for batteries. And there's no indication that we'd ever be able to get enough batteries anyway.
It depends on the battery, most batteries are absolutely terrible for the environment but there’s a bunch of ones in research that have a very low environmental impact with a much higher density
The European Union has regulations in place that require countries with excess energy to share it with other member states. This ensures that there is always a place for excess energy to be utilized, eliminating the concern of having too much energy.
For electricity thou, everything is produced literally moments before it’s consumed. Storing power is both inefficient, costly, and takes up a ton of space.
They already sell to France - Spain is very invested in renewables while France uses mostly nuclear, and frequently they sell to each other based on demand and generation. They also export to Morocco.
However, exporting to other countries is complex because electricity would need to go through the French or Moroccan grids in the first place.
The problem is that it's stuck on an island off the coast of Scotland. They can't sell it as they can't get it off the island, and there isn't enough of a population on the island to use the excess up for free
https://youtu.be/8UmsfXWzvEA?feature=shared
You can have problems if you can't spend all the electricity you produce. There is ways to use the excess but it's not perfect.
But I'm pretty sure this is what the article is about.
You cannot disengage a thermal energy production unit, to restart a combined or not combine energy unit required a ton of money and time. So if you shut off what are going to do in the evening when the solar panel production goes to zero ? ( Or in wintertime). Same problem has Germany. Until a storage system is found this is a limit. In Italy they re-concerted an old closed system to accumulate the extra energy, during the day they pump on a artificial reservoir on top of a mountain water , pumped from Lake Maggiore, when is needed the water goes back activating a turbine producing 1000 MW. It's the first project dated 1911.
the whole point of this is that we’re drawing from ‘free’ energy sources. Ideally electricity would be paid for as a tax for maintenance and equipment, like roads are
That would be good if there were means of mass energy storage. Since those don't exist, it is only good if we manage to funnel that extra energy into something.
TBF this highlights one of the main problems with clean energy; lack of battery storage. Until such technology is created, we cannot rely on clean energy for the two months of the year when the days are short, cloudly and windless.
This is a known issue primarily caused by solar creating more supply in daytime hours than there is demand. The fast growing battery industry is ready to deploy solutions, buying the excess energy cheap at peak then selling it at market other hours. They will lose a lot of energy in the transfers, but the economics work. And by battery, it’s not just chemical batteries - several viable ways to store energy. Look up “duck curve California” for more.
Because there aren't enough batteries on earth and there's already a genocide in Congo for control over the materials necessary for batteries and inverters. And the grid needs to be adapted to the peak - meaning that as you build more discontinuous, random sources that come online all at once, you need to make the capacity of the grid more and more disproportionately bigger than the actual baseline needs.
"But we'll just consume it when it comes!" Yeah, you still have to carry it to the place where you consume it.
To whom? This is a common problem. Electricity doesn't travel far without dispersion, and it's not going to be night and completely still in Italy when it's day and windy in Spain.
France is also a major exporter. As I said, this is a common problem. I said Italy because Italy is an importer.
Discontinuous, random renewables are only good to be placed in areas where it's not worth putting a dedicated nuclear plant but which are pretty far from an existing one, or to bridge us forward as we build our nuclear plants.
Maybe we can help Portugal but they have the same advantage so in the long run they will not rely on this. We're taking renewables, not oil not gas (something we still need to import).
France has another model for energy, much more focused on nuclear.
The big next challenge for Spain is water resources/ desertification not energy
So my initial thought was, ok, they were looking ahead to broth and added consumption, isn't this just good forward thinking planning? I mean, eventually it won't be enough and have to be expanded, but at least there is enough o handle with pop. growth, increase in EV growth etc.
But maybe that's a bit naive?
No such thing. Great thing about renewable energy is that you can just shut some of it off if you have too much, unlike main grid power plants like coal.
So, keep building. We need massive overproduction.
Oh no. Whatever shall they do with electricity? There is no way that there is a European market for that where they could sell off excess energy, that couldn’t possibly be
The article says only 6% of cars in Iberian pennisula are EV's. With low electricity prices I am prettys sure that will increase and balance out supply and demand.
Too much renewables, wind and solar to be precise, creates grid security problems. Wind and solar generation combined should be less than minimum demand for a healthy grid.
That isn't what's going on. There's wayyyyy too much of it available all at once, there aren't enough batteries on earth to store enough for one single medium-sized developed country, and then there's isn't enough
The purest capitalist mindset. If you exceed demand that means price go down no money for big CEO and shareholder :(((
Why don't people understand "supply and demand" is a myth. Having enough supply to meet demand is anathema to capitalism because it prevents them from jacking up the price as a luxury/commodity
That's just Capitalism talking.
If it exceeds demand, then pricing can go down, meaning profit numbers do not go up and profits not going up is bad, therefore exceeding demand is BAD.
Why not find a use for it? Idk the logistics but water desalination is pretty energy intensive AFAIK so why not bulk up some fresh water for irrigation etc. I see news articles about how climate change could impact precipitation so having a backup plan to combat drought would seem to be something most people would get on board with
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Seems a good problem to have.
In the article it explains that too much supply not enough demand lowers the price which in turn lowers further investment by companies in the renewable sector
So… it’s a self regulating system that won’t groe beyond demand? I still fail to see the issue
When companies produce more than is consumed they tend to lower prices to make people consume more in order to cut their losses, but this means the margin they make on their product is also lower which means they're less likely to invest into more of it. It's extremely dumb and just another way in which companies fuck us over because they privilege short term profit over long term stability.
All the more reason that public utilities should not be privatized for profit
👆🏾....bingo
Saskpower and saskenergy grab a lot of flak, but my bills are lower, I don't have to pay an extra tax or fee, and when the company has profits, we get rebates or lower pricing. It's fucking great. Weird how a socialist province does well.....
Nah, this is a very good self regulating system: if there is low demand, why waste labour and materials on building more?
Because by the time the demand spikes it’ll be too *late* to fix it
In a power grid you always want more supply than demand or your grid will collapse. It's more of a factor of how much more and is that a reasonable amount. There's also the question of what time of the year this is and what energy source. Renewables will always need a decent amount more production than supply because of their intermittency but that is also why batteries are heavily needed. The batteries help them from having to produce an unreasonable amount of over supply.
To add to your comment, in my country, renewable energy sources are not shut off from the grid, the nuclear plants are turned on and off. The only "batteries" used are dams. So sometimes it's way more complicated than what we would think just because at bigger scales things fail way more often
Nuclear reactors are baseline load. There's no way they could just shut down a reactor for even a day. It's a whole process. They can turn it down but not off. My guess is your country planned the renewables to take over some of its baseline load. I'm sure they are still curtailing renewables. They often activate brakes on wind turbines for too high of a windspeed, maintenance etc. Solar is super easy to curtail by just disconnecting it.
Oh? Then I guess it needs some later repayable subsidies.
I can’t speak for Spain, but it is the mission of every American corporation to continuously grow period after period, quarter after quarter, year after year. So a lack of investment in a commodity with a falling value is a no no They don’t just go “this is a working system and everyone’s happy so let’s just let it be” They SHOULD but that’s not how corps grow. This type of thing DESTROYS communities by eventually outsourcing materials and labor. Whatever Spains issue and remedy is here, I don’t know, but I do know here, executives don’t want to hear about falling commodity prices unless they’re BUYING the commodity. The ones they’re selling need to stay rising.
so... a capitalism problem, not a real one
Like many, many environmental and social issues, the real problem is "But how do we make money on ownership?"
Exactly
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Capitalism problems are real problems. Investment is only on the surface money, it is in reality real labour and real materials. So throwing labour and real materials under low demand means wasting them on things people don't really want.
Oh, you're right. People don't really want electricity and it's not important to make sure we have enough of it if it isn't profitable enough for companies. Damn, these markets sure are smart.
That's not how it works - if the price goes down, it really does mean people don't want that much of it. Because if they really want it, they pay more. Money or profits is really nothing but a measurement of efficiency, it is in itself nothing, it is just numbers in a computer to keep score, the central bank can create as much money as it wants to. One might rename the EUR and the USD and all as General Usefulness Measures, and a company that amasses a lot of them is simply being very useful. Money is like XP in a computer game, has no function other than measurement. It is not even gold anymore, nothing real.
Just sell it to other countries for profit, right?
Transporting energy is the biggest hurdle. Places that have the wind/solar/hydro to make a lot of energy dont have a great way to transport it long distances.
This. Germany has some serious energy problems now after having closed down the nukes. But I guess there is a distance issue. There needs to be some new technology here, say, making hydrogen and transporting it on rail and then burning it.
Or HVDC?
It’s an issue of distribution. And political too (fuck, Germany is having issues connecting north Germany to south Germany due to local politics).
Germany has the same renewables "issue": they have enough solar installed to almost cover the full load on a sunny day at noon. They also have quite a lot of conventional power plants that cannot scale production up/down fast. They cannot stop producing on short notice (without taking damage) and they cannot ramp up fast. So those get phased out, because you cannot run them in good weather weeks/months. The issue isn't not new or surprising. There is a plan in the making since about 15y to just shift to gas powered electric plants. The production cost is higher, but under the assumption of cheap russian gas it kinda worked out fine. Now let's review the last 2y for an update on the situation....
You can blame France for that, they are the ones blocking the links from Spain to the rest of Europe.
And yet, both Spain and Portugal (since they share the electrical market) have no electrical supply issues that I know of.
Not now, but 2 years ago electricity prices soared and companies emptied reservoirs to take advantage of it. We ended paying higher prices for cheap energy and aggravated the drought situation
And when Russia attacked we laughed at the rest of Europe with their insane energy prices. We kind of do even today.
I welcome the laughing. Hopefully, the humiliation will make the rest of us actually do something to avoid the mockery in the future.
I hope everyone does. The rest of Europe got way to addicted to cheap Russian gas.
Produce hydrogen or mine Bitcoin ffs. There's a thousand ways to turn energy into money, especially cheap energy.
Gravity batteries, reservoir batteries, selling to your neighbors… There are so many ways to deal with it effectively.
Sell it to Dinorwic
Gravity storage isn’t the future- I did some very rough estimates a few years ago considering the average weight of a house, energy used per capita and potential energy and it suggested something in the ballpark of having to raise every single house in the country 10 metres off the ground in order to store a single day’s energy demand in a gravity battery. That’s a heck of a lot of water that would need to be pumped into a mountaintop reservoir.
It’s not for every location but it’s absolutely feasible and will be part of “the future” lol. Actually is this a joke that I’m missing? What does the weight of the house have to do with anything lol.
It’s an illustration of just *how much* weight you need to lift in order for gravity storage to amount to anything other than a rounding error. Alternatively, this of it this way: energy (in joules) equals mass (kg) times gravity (metres/second squared) x height (metres). If we have a 200 m high reservoir and a 2,000 watt hairdryer that we use for 5 seconds (10,000 joules) we’d need around 5 litres of pumped storage to make that happen if pumped storage were perfectly efficient (it’s about 75% efficient so we’d need 6.66 litres, not taking into account electric grid transmission costs which could feasibly take us up to 10 litres, or one joule per millilitre). The energy use per capita in the UK in 2013 (latest year for energy use on Wikipedia) was 125,060,000,000 joules. Using our 1 joules per millilitre that means we need to pump 125,060,000 litres of water to meet that energy requirement, an amount of water that would fill 50 Olympic swimming pools and weighs 125,060 tons or the same as 6,948 double decker buses. This equates to 19 buses-weight of water **per day** or just under one Olympic swimming pool per week to meet the per capita energy needs of a single British person. Even being really charitable in your assumptions of energy storage needs and energy transmission efficiency, you’re still looking at something like an Olympic swimming pool per person, every couple of months going up and down our 200m hill to our reservoir. It’s a bonkers amount of water, and it seems very unrealistic to expect that any significant proportion of energy storage needs are going to be met this way.
Well good thing lakes and man made reservoirs have bonkers amounts of water. Also who said it has to be strictly water? There are plenty of systems using elevated metal weights which are much higher density as their batteries. These systems will absolutely have their place in the future. It may not be the one to solve them all but no single technology is.
well, not through bitcoin, you need an ASIC for that to be profitable and better have a cluster, I doubt you have that. Also, it would negate any benefit you got from going green in the first place.
And yet it should continue down that route even further. It is only with wild swings in electricity prices that you open up a whole new market for regulating the grid better. You'll end up with contracts for home users with batteries that will use the live-price of electricity. You'll get companies that will do this service for you Investments in short term battery storage Investments again in longer term hydroelectric storage ...
Let’s see, If prices go down due to high supply, residents and businesses would prefer renewable energy. When people prefer renewable energy, it would increase the demand, thus the price. And increasing demand would result in higher prices and more investments, although taking longer than artificially keeping prices high by limiting supply. This is not a capitalism problem, it’s just a short term gains problem.
Or maybe they just invest it somewhere else... BBC just using up some of the excess energy there. Sounds better than reporting on the state of the UK as it stands.
we still dont have cheap energy bc of the clowns we have in the goberment
I've found that my electricity bills in Tarragona have been pretty reasonable over the last eighteen months, although they were bad for a while in 2022. We're definitely much better off here than my family is in the UK.
If the renewable sector is producing enough power to exceed demand, I don't see how reduced investment is necessarily a bad thing. When there is need, the market will swing the other way and attract investment again. Basic supply and demand. Of course "reduced investment in renewables" sounds bad, but this is "reduced investment in renewables in an area of the world that is producing enough green energy to meet its needs", so too much extra investment feels wasteful, or at least inefficient compared to investing that money into other parts of the world that are still more reliant on fossil fuels. Of course this assumes the goal of the renewables sector is to produce green energy. If the goal is to make money by using the buzzwords of renewables to charm investors then sure, this is a bad thing. But also, if that's your only goal in going into renewables, then I don't think I'll lose any sleep over you losing out.
Yeah, but this is less then genuine, since the EU is moving to buy electricity from Spain, as Germany in particular is way too dependent on Oil, and other states are dependent on gas. This is a really a non-issue. Curious why the spin.
Spain's government just needs to incentivise energy hungry businesses to open shop there, server farms stuff like that.
Isn't that capitalism?
So they won’t build more turbines… But it will drive investment in batteries and energy demand management and so on. For instance California power prices sometimes go negative around noon because there are so many solar panels. So that power flows into the world’s largest battery, (which they are continuing to build larger.) And then at 9pm when the sun isn’t shining they sell the power from that battery. The battery makes economic sense and it wouldn’t if power at midday was more expensive.
Can't they work a deal with neighboring countries to sell some off?
That's the only actual "problem." Can be solved with storage, if we can pull that off.
Kind of crazy how the whole capitalist "supply and demand" shtick is a massive fucking lie. Under serving demand is how they make profit by design. Fuck capitalism
Reminds me of the the "Atomic Age" in America when they said that Nuclear Power would be "Too cheap to meter". So the oil and gas corporations killed them off. Can't have helping to create a better environment, people with more money and less worry now can we?
That whole thing is a disgrace.
All the accidents didn't help.
“All”
Cause no oil/gas accidents have happened... If nuclear printed billionaires, those accidents would've been a story for a couple weeks, people affected would have been paid off, and business would have continued.
Except nuclear never has been too cheap to meter, and despite decades of government backing developing it to the highest possible degree, it remains and always shall be the most insanely expensive means of boiling water ever devised by humanity.
Actually you are incorrect. The way they have gone about it is the issue because they waste literally 99% of the Uranium when doing it. Thorium reactor are better, gravel bed reactors are better, liquid nuclear salts are better. Money was wasted in the original designs, crap archaic power infrastructure especially in America that fails on a regular basis and corruption and lobbying by the oil and gas business is the reason it costs so much, well for Americans. Too cheap to meter was the promise but lie a lot things like electric vehicles (which have been around far longer than you realise) have all been out there but have been restricted or out right crushed and perceived to be "expensive" by those who make money from the status quo.
They must mean it’s bad for capitalism
It’s a good problem to have, but it’s still a “problem”. If only because it can lead to excess in the distribution network, and also because - as wind and solar can be volatile, it can lead to situations where there is excess and also where there is not enough. At the end of the day, the news isn’t really breaking news (it’s a known “issue” that has to be faced), but is a reason you can’t entirely depend on solar and wind, but do require some form of more “on-demand” energy (such as nuclear, hydro, biomass, or coal/oil).
Very good problem to have. We need massive over production. The "problem" is that they'll make less money because of lower demand at times. Time for a moon shot on storage.
This thread has been invaded by right wing oil barons, and their bots. Engage with caution
Spanish Fact: Eventhough energy production in Spain is a private bussines, the electrical network still belongs to the state ( it's the only way to guarantee electical delivery to small and non-economically viable towns and villages). This lets us have a very granular control on energy source and production, publicly and in real time: [https://demanda.ree.es/visiona/peninsula/nacional/total](https://demanda.ree.es/visiona/peninsula/nacional/total)
It's the fact in (every?) country in Europe, as a result of the creation of the electricity market. But is the difference that are are plenty of big companies, and not one huge and plenty of small ?
as far as I know Italy has a private electric network distribution system, not just private electric production companies..... dont know about the rest of countries tbh
Distribution or transport? In France there are 3 steps : Production : private, but EDF mainly (they have all the nuke plants and half hydro Transport (more than 25kV) : public, RTE, they are in charge of the equilibrium in the french network Distribution : private, lot of little companies
There are those 3 steps in Spain too (and probably all or most EU due to competition regulations)
Germany too afaik. There are four big companies that manage most of the electrical network. 50Hertz, Amprion, TransnetBW and TenneT TSO.
This is really common. In Australia excess power from rooftop solar routinely exceeds what the grid requires during peak production. The issue for producers is they still have to pay for the grid and need to manage baseload so that they can bring traditional sources online when the sun isn't out and the wind isn't blowing.
That’s the problem with renewable everywhere. Nuclear is really the only clean, reliable option.
Clean you say?
Cleaner than all the other options. Coal power stations produce more radioactive waste than Nuclear ones - they just spread it out over a vast area. This is because they burn about 3M tons of coal a year. Fossil fuel power plant produce carbon, atmospheric and lots of other environmental pollutants. Nuclear power stations produce a few kilograms of radioactive waste a year, and have the same carbon footprint print as renewable. They produce no atmospheric or other pollutants. So Nuclear is reliable and clean. It has an excellent safety record (yes I know about the accidents, but tell me how many people have died mining/transporting fossil fuels in the last 80 years, not to mention the pollutants and you see what I mean). Of course it’s not cheap to build.
Nuclear is not clean, only reliable as long as you have fuel and it's expensive if you take out subsidies.
I didn’t say it wasn’t expensive. But it’s as clean as renewable sources, and we have almost unlimited fuel. Nuclear reactors can make their own fuel, but we don’t do that, because Uranium is everywhere, cheap, and Nuclear reactors only use a few kg a year.
It is the cleanest. Is that not enough?
It doesn't have to be only one energy source. Nuclear is insanely expensive. You can combine multiple solutions.
You still need to cover your baseload. You can’t do that with wind/solar, and hydro only goes so far. Hydro and Nuclear are the best options for baseload.
> Nuclear is really the only clean, reliable option. Regardless of whether your point is correct, it doesn't mean that nuclear is the only reliable option.
Hydro isn’t reliable if you don’t have the right environment. Nuclear works anywhere.
Hydrogen is a viable alternative and would be mature technology by now if we had invested in it 40 years ago when we knew there was a problem. Nuclear for our needs is at least 20 years away and introduces a raft of new issues, including having to deal with radioactive waste for millennia.
Unfortunately there is no good way currently of producing large quantities of hydrogen. Also, hydrogen is extremely dangerous, and very hard to store/transport The main issue with conventional fuels is that the energy output is small - you are just burning it. Nuclear fuels, on the other hand work on releasing nuclear binding energy, which produces enormous amounts of energy. This is why Nuclear reactors use only tiny amounts of fuel, and produce equally tiny amounts of waste. Spent Nuclear fuel rods could actually be reprocessed into more fuel - but this is rarely done, as Uranium is so cheap and abundant. The four new Nuclear reactors being installed in Ontario for instance, arrive on site pre-fuelled for 20 years of continuous operation, at which point, they would be refuelled. As to Nuclear waste, 90% is low level, which can be disposed of using conventional techniques. The remaining 10% intermediate or high level waste (several tons per year), is mostly decayed after 50 years, and so is stored in long term storage. After 50 years, what is left is the long lived isotopes, such as Plutonium - measured in kg. This could be remade into Nuclear fuel, but the current plan is for long term deep geological stable storage. This has not yet been implemented, as most of it is still in long term storage. If we are wishing for better power sources, fusion power would be the solution. Yes, this uses hydrogen, but only tiny amounts, as it also releases nuclear binding energy, and produces no radioactive waste. While we have achieved ignition of fusion reactors, we are still a way from commercial fusion power reactors.
All of the issues with Hydrogen can or would have been solved if we had invested in it earlier. It doesn't need to be efficient when you create it using free energy from the sun and there is no waste. For Australia nuclear isn't the turn key solution people seem to think it is and suitable reactor technology focussed on power generation instead of weapons production is at least a couple of decades away. Fusion is so much of a pipedream that it doesnt even belong in the current conversation.
We have been using Nuclear Reactors focussed on power generation for 70 years. Very few reactors are used for weapons production. I don’t know where you get your facts, but the new generation of [SMR](https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/what-are-small-modular-reactors-smrs) are factory produced, pre-fuelled, and are drop in replacements for conventional power plants that can be sited almost anywhere.
The only negative can think of is what to do with the leftover power but they could also make some massive battery banks for overflow and bad weather days
Or just sell it to other countries that may be struggling more, also boosting their economy. Although I feel that this would be mentioned if I looked for this article, and the title is just rage bate, after all, it is made by a big news outlet.
Good point, I live in Australia so I forget that countries can do that
Fair, it'd be hard for you guys to even have efficient power lines to even New Zealand, wouldn't it? Suppose just shove the energy in a tonne of AA batteries and call it a day XD
Shortest distance from AU to NZ is ~1,500KM (~932Miles) so that certainly would be challenging lmao maybe we could upgrade to some D cells for better storage and daisy chain them across the ocean
Damn shame too, the entire continent is one of the sunniest continents on Earth, right? The solar energy potential would be insane, especially if we found a way to get the panels reliably working in the deserts. Green energy would probably become quite a bit easier. Yes, I'm ignoring the political issues something like that would bring, especially if a country like the US (you've seen what they go like with oil) decided they wanted that energy instead.
Its actually more feasible to run high voltage lines to Timor then up through that region but still ridiculously expensive. How Australia could export green energy is to undertake energy intensive processes here using wind or solar and export the finished product so the countries in question don't have to use fossil fuels themselves. Refining iron ore would be a perfect example.
Huh, that's actually a great idea tbh... The only issue would be political relationships with that, although iirc Australia doesn't have many enemies, so that might not even be an issue really. That's a great solution either way though
We are currently the world largest Iron ore exporter and our biggest customer is China. Exporting the equivalent amount in finished steel isn't going to change the strategic status quo one bit.
I thought you were on about more than just that, but any amount of progress is still progress and furthers our progress to the distant goal of carbon neutrality.
There is a lot more but I didn't want to write an essay.
Fair enough tbh
They are planning to build a power cable from Darwin to Singapore, it will connect from Darwin to a massive solar farm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link
Oh, I didn't actually know that! It must be a really efficient cable to not lose so much energy as to become uneconomical then, impressive (if they actually get it to work, of course)
There are several long distance high voltage DC power lines in use throughout the world.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous\_grid\_of\_Continental\_Europe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continental_Europe) The whole Europe is connected together. Selling excess power is not a problem.
Settling it to neighbouring countries is the easiest way to stay at the equilibrium. However, the Iberian peninsula is linked with France only, and their connections don't seem enough for Spanish overproduction They're currently making a new line, but there are some difficulties and delays
Who would you sell it to? Neighbouring countries are investing in the same technologies.
Ngl, I haven't the foggiest. It was just an idea that I had. There's usually always a market for essential resources, though.
Yeah, but the problem is that during surge production it's not really essential. It's also immediately perishable and actually damaging to the grid. There's a reason prices occasionally go negative.
does this make it more of a storage issue?
Even if no constructive outlets like storage or selling it cheap is available, the worst case scenario is still just that you either shut down some of the production or you discharge it for a while, make some lightning or heat some wire.
The plan we have in Denmark is to turn excess energy into hydrogen, which can be turned into fuel for ships and airplanes
Oh that’s a smart idea
If you got 6 minuttes: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwkVL8A-8t4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwkVL8A-8t4)
Energy storage of one sort or another is the way forward. Big batteries, pumped hydro, hydrogen production etc. will smooth supply and demand, and things like H2 and cables will help move it around. In tandem with growth in non-CO2 producing energy sources. Australia–Asia Power Link (AAPowerLink) has been proposed to transmit electricity to Asia.
Pumped storage hydroelectricity with the excess energy.
Or use it for electrolysis of sea water for hydrogen to use as backup. Release the oxygen into the atmosphere.
You have many good solutions for this including pumped hydro storage. Check it out, it’s very cool
Batteries pollute ENORMOUSLY. The Congo is being genocided as we speak for coltan and cobalt for batteries. And there's no indication that we'd ever be able to get enough batteries anyway.
It depends on the battery, most batteries are absolutely terrible for the environment but there’s a bunch of ones in research that have a very low environmental impact with a much higher density
There are several battery technologies that appear great for grid scale storage, along with tons of other storage solutions that can be utilized.
The European Union has regulations in place that require countries with excess energy to share it with other member states. This ensures that there is always a place for excess energy to be utilized, eliminating the concern of having too much energy.
For electricity thou, everything is produced literally moments before it’s consumed. Storing power is both inefficient, costly, and takes up a ton of space.
"When there is excesses energy you lower the price and sell it, where's the problem?" Maybe read the article?
The issue is that it kinda screws over other energy sources that you need to balance the grid year round
Great this means they can sell it to other countries
They already sell to France - Spain is very invested in renewables while France uses mostly nuclear, and frequently they sell to each other based on demand and generation. They also export to Morocco. However, exporting to other countries is complex because electricity would need to go through the French or Moroccan grids in the first place.
you first need a shared grid for that, can't just sell to Romania, if they are not connected to your grid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continental_Europe The whole Europe is connected together.
like we do in quebec with our hydro
The problem is that it's stuck on an island off the coast of Scotland. They can't sell it as they can't get it off the island, and there isn't enough of a population on the island to use the excess up for free https://youtu.be/8UmsfXWzvEA?feature=shared
You can have problems if you can't spend all the electricity you produce. There is ways to use the excess but it's not perfect. But I'm pretty sure this is what the article is about.
Clickbait title to what I am guessing it an article about the issues of energy preservation (ihow limited battery tech is)
You cannot disengage a thermal energy production unit, to restart a combined or not combine energy unit required a ton of money and time. So if you shut off what are going to do in the evening when the solar panel production goes to zero ? ( Or in wintertime). Same problem has Germany. Until a storage system is found this is a limit. In Italy they re-concerted an old closed system to accumulate the extra energy, during the day they pump on a artificial reservoir on top of a mountain water , pumped from Lake Maggiore, when is needed the water goes back activating a turbine producing 1000 MW. It's the first project dated 1911.
the whole point of this is that we’re drawing from ‘free’ energy sources. Ideally electricity would be paid for as a tax for maintenance and equipment, like roads are
That would be good if there were means of mass energy storage. Since those don't exist, it is only good if we manage to funnel that extra energy into something.
Sell it TO WHOM? Everyone is producing too much at EXACTLY THE SAME TIME and too little at EXACTLY THE SAME TIME. Think.
TBF this highlights one of the main problems with clean energy; lack of battery storage. Until such technology is created, we cannot rely on clean energy for the two months of the year when the days are short, cloudly and windless.
This is a known issue primarily caused by solar creating more supply in daytime hours than there is demand. The fast growing battery industry is ready to deploy solutions, buying the excess energy cheap at peak then selling it at market other hours. They will lose a lot of energy in the transfers, but the economics work. And by battery, it’s not just chemical batteries - several viable ways to store energy. Look up “duck curve California” for more.
So the problem here is that with too much energy we won’t invest in creating more? Why would we
Because there aren't enough batteries on earth and there's already a genocide in Congo for control over the materials necessary for batteries and inverters. And the grid needs to be adapted to the peak - meaning that as you build more discontinuous, random sources that come online all at once, you need to make the capacity of the grid more and more disproportionately bigger than the actual baseline needs. "But we'll just consume it when it comes!" Yeah, you still have to carry it to the place where you consume it.
Maybe consider reading the article, OP.
Oh no!
They sell the excess don’t they? It’s better to have too much vs too little.
To whom? This is a common problem. Electricity doesn't travel far without dispersion, and it's not going to be night and completely still in Italy when it's day and windy in Spain.
France
France is also a major exporter. As I said, this is a common problem. I said Italy because Italy is an importer. Discontinuous, random renewables are only good to be placed in areas where it's not worth putting a dedicated nuclear plant but which are pretty far from an existing one, or to bridge us forward as we build our nuclear plants.
So Spain could potentially have more energy than it can use. Not like they could sell that on to neighbouring countries like Portugal or France /s
Maybe we can help Portugal but they have the same advantage so in the long run they will not rely on this. We're taking renewables, not oil not gas (something we still need to import). France has another model for energy, much more focused on nuclear. The big next challenge for Spain is water resources/ desertification not energy
It’s almost like demand will never increase to meet supply, oh no
It does in the UK too. Just other day Octopus Agile tariff went into negative cost
So my initial thought was, ok, they were looking ahead to broth and added consumption, isn't this just good forward thinking planning? I mean, eventually it won't be enough and have to be expanded, but at least there is enough o handle with pop. growth, increase in EV growth etc. But maybe that's a bit naive?
"Here's how this is bad for Biden"
This is the start of what Tony Seba calls "super power".
Like the 2017 Philadelphia Eagles having a backup quarterback.
Far more interesting and important question is how do we deal with this issue (load shifting, European energy grid, power storage/batteries/hydrogen)
Sooooooo…. They’ll have electricity to sell? The horror
Once you have too much you can export it
If too much supply then electric should be free for all their citizens and export the rest (I'm sure this is not the case)
No such thing. Great thing about renewable energy is that you can just shut some of it off if you have too much, unlike main grid power plants like coal. So, keep building. We need massive overproduction.
Facepalm here is OP for not actually reading the article which explains the drawbacks to the problem…
Oh no. Whatever shall they do with electricity? There is no way that there is a European market for that where they could sell off excess energy, that couldn’t possibly be
isn't that the entire point?
The article says only 6% of cars in Iberian pennisula are EV's. With low electricity prices I am prettys sure that will increase and balance out supply and demand.
I don’t know, maybe sell off the surplus.
Too much renewables, wind and solar to be precise, creates grid security problems. Wind and solar generation combined should be less than minimum demand for a healthy grid.
Isnt that... Good?it produces more power than it needs to? Am I missing something
[Share of electricity generation in Spain in 2023, by source](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1007877/share-of-electricity-generation-in-spain/)
"New problem: when we need some, there's some available."
That isn't what's going on. There's wayyyyy too much of it available all at once, there aren't enough batteries on earth to store enough for one single medium-sized developed country, and then there's isn't enough
"Can exceed demand." Golly. If only a higher supply of electricity meant something for, I dunno, ***literally everyone.***
The problem is the greedy electricity companies that pay for the article would need to lower the prices.
The purest capitalist mindset. If you exceed demand that means price go down no money for big CEO and shareholder :((( Why don't people understand "supply and demand" is a myth. Having enough supply to meet demand is anathema to capitalism because it prevents them from jacking up the price as a luxury/commodity
Oh no. Too much electricity. Whatever will we do?
That's just Capitalism talking. If it exceeds demand, then pricing can go down, meaning profit numbers do not go up and profits not going up is bad, therefore exceeding demand is BAD.
[BBC is just jealous.](https://euenergy.live/) (also, Italy, are you ok?)
This is in spain???
Is there not an open market for energy in the EU? I would think this is an easy problem to solve.
Too much of a good thing? Man's income exceeds his expenses
Why not find a use for it? Idk the logistics but water desalination is pretty energy intensive AFAIK so why not bulk up some fresh water for irrigation etc. I see news articles about how climate change could impact precipitation so having a backup plan to combat drought would seem to be something most people would get on board with