This doesn't even pass an econ 101 sniff test. The market should self regulate by increasing electric usage during the day and scaling down at night. Alas the free market cannot manage such an ideal scenario.
this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2026
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Hear me out: we build a literal iron dome over the entire world and sell sunlight to people regardless of whether they use it for solar energy or not!
Someone else will then build a Dyson Sphere & sell property on it while killing your scheme.
Sure, but that’s far enough future beyond my idea that I’ll have years of profits from selling sunlight to people that won’t matter because I’ll be long dead.
Plus, it really just shows that my idea could be extended to instead be a solar panel dome so that not only do I steal all of the sunlight from earth, but also harness a fraction of the energy a Dyson Sphere would provide which I can also use to further profit off of the sunless world beneath me that’s now forced to either pay for the privilege of receiving their own sunlight or for the privilege of the energy I generate so they can run their artificial sun lamps.
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"The problem with solar panels is that, besides being extremely clean, they also provide extremely cheap electricity"
Statements made by the utterly deranged.
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The problem with nature is it causes negative money in our market design somehow
Batteries can be used to store excess power until needed
ideally you want to use not batteries as they have to be replaced - a physical "battery" using two lakes that pump between each other for example would be a better potential energy store than a battery imo
It's fine. Unlike fossils, the lithium isn't burned and released into the air. The resources can be reclaimed. It's not an infinite cycle of extraction.
Lithium woulndt be needed for grid batteries at all. Weight doesnt matter for som permanent stationary installation.
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shit, at least Mr. Burns' provided nuclear power as an alternative instead of coal 
I've seen that post a few times now and I still don't get what they're trying to say like how could that possibly be a bad thing?
Energy prices being driven into negative territory means that energy providers (and thus households with solar panels) have to pay for energy they provide to the electricity grid because the grid is almost at capacity. It’s a measure to discourage electricity production and encourage energy use for these periods.
Solar energy has the characteristic that it provides lots of energy during a sunny summer day, less in winter and none at night. So it’s not a constant or controllable flow like nuclear or fossil energy. To be able to completely switch to green energy, (afaik) either the grid capacity has to be increased tenfolds, or energy suppliers need huge batteries to store energy during supply spikes. Batteries are not super durable and their production not green at all so that has to be taken into account when determining the ecological footprint and material cost of solar energy.
This all is not to say that solar is comparably bad to fossil energy, I’m just explaining the hurdles that need to be taken care of when switching to solar.
Oh what a shame I guess it makes economic sense to nationalize utilities then
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I mean it's a thing and it has effects.
Some people financed them under the obviously flawed assumption that they would always get like 10c/kWh for their excess electricity.
In some countries (
) pension funds are pretty bought into conventional energy production, under the assumption that this is a save investment with consistent returns. So this will be a bit of a blow to an already crumbling system.
That's not an accurate way to paraphrase what MIT Technology Review is saying.
Yeah what MIT is actually saying here is that because solar creation is too efficient it is actually creating an economic situation in which switching to solar costs more than the profit that would be made from it.
That wouldn't be an issue if they just allowed Chinese solar panels but without Chinese production it's an economic issue with capitalism.
Yeah what MIT is actually saying here is that because solar creation is too efficient it is actually creating an economic situation in which switching to solar costs more than the profit that would be made from it.
Not only that, but it reduces the profitability of other forms of generation too.
The major issue is of course capitalism, because everything has to make a profit. But what they really want is to socialize the losses encurred by solar onto us so they can continue to profit.
Our options are to either subsidize, or behead all the private energy company execs and subsidize it without profit.
There are a ton of non-private energy cooperatives around the US that do actually invest heavily in solar because of this though, so maybe as time goes on the "third position" is that power co-ops win out in the marketplace because they don't have a profit motive/burden
Addendum: It's insane that systems like MISO and ERCOT exist. Both of those systems but the reliability of the grids of 60% or more of Americans in the hands of a closed "free market" of energy trading to help stabilize the grid. It's absolutely amazing that it has continued to function at all, and that system is the exact issue that prevents wide adoption of solar due to the negative prices causing the whole market to start collapsing in on itself until they get bailed out by a State or Federal entity.
If power coops can generate more than they need then they could aggressively expand by swallowing up whole neighbourhoods on the basis of being able to provide power at a lower cost than the grid.
If you can work out a model for it you could even take on new clients and offload the infrastructure cost to banks via loans to buy more panels for each participant. The coop essentially providing all the panels to a new participant on the guarantee of them staying in the coop for x amount of time. This isn't even a loss if things go wrongly because the coop still owns all the panels even if a participant runs off or breaks contract or something.
The difference with co-ops is that they don't necessarily have to participate in the fake energy markets if they have control over the grid in a region.
So they don't have to do the ridiculous negative price energy thing that everyone else does to keep the market functioning as both an economic entity and a grid management system.
They just need to measure usage and charge based on operating costs. It doesn't matter if energy prices would have technically been negative for a few hours, because their motivation isn't market price, but just operating cost. You measure usage from co-op partners, then send them a monthly bill based on how much your costs are. It's incredibly simple.
The confounding factor is the MISO and ERCOT markets that you may need to interface with (say there's a disaster and the co-op needs power from another provider). To interact with those you need to basically destroy any logical system of pricing and management that you may have.
Basically this meme is doubly wrong because a monopoly would actually be better than the current status quo in a lot of the country. Duke sucks, but their monopoly allows them to do basically whatever they want without having to worry about copetition or weird market rates for energy that are also meant to be grid management signals, since they run those two departments separately.
The same thing happened with Ma Bell. It turns out that for large scale systems/utilities like water, power, telecom, etc. (I'd even include web services infrastructure now), having a single central body managing and developing it is good. Breaking up those monopolies just sets us back decades and creates an unmanageable chaotic market system that should have been replaced by a non-profit centrally managed one.
We know this works. It's why we don't really do militias anymore and even the national guard is basically subservient to the central governing body of the military.
Basically central planning good. Markets bad.
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Is their concern inherently driven by a a capitalist profit motive?
If so, and I suspect it is, then it’s accurate enough.
Even if you were in a cashless planned economy, dumping excess watts into a grid when they're not required would be creating negative value. Solar plants would avoid that by curtailment or diversion, but this is still defined as a problem that needs solutions like load shifting and storage.
storage
That is the obvious solution to variable demand not correlated with variable output, yes, so is MIT saying that “the problem with solar is that we aren’t building enough storage capacity to manage peak usage that occurs outside of peak production times”?
No?
Why not?
The MIT article is pro solar and pro renewable, and does discuss storage, hvdc transmission, load shifting and subsidies to reduce costs.
storage and system costs rise sharply once renewables provide the vast majority of electricity on the grid.
Why is that? Perhaps the problems the article poses with storage solutions boil down to:
inherently driven by a a capitalist profit motive
I mean, the real problem here is storage. Solar works great in Phoenix but not so much in Seattle, cuz you know, clouds.
There are already solutions to this issue the problem is most of them are kind of expensive.
It always did this. It’s part of the natural fallout from thinking you could evolve on a world with an unabundant resource.
Fucking preposterous
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