this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
1783 points (96.0% liked)

Microblog Memes

7518 readers
3212 users here now

A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.

Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.

Rules:

  1. Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
  2. Be nice.
  3. No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
  4. Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.

Related communities:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
(page 2) 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 52 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (4 children)

You can read the Technology Review article here discussing why this is problematic beyond a JPEG-artifacted screenshot of a snappy quip from a furry porn Twitter account that may or may not have read the article beyond the caption. We need solar power plants to reach net zero emissions, but even despite their decreasing costs and subsidies offered for them, developers are increasingly declining to build them because solar is so oversaturated at peak hours that it becomes worthless or less than worthless. The amount of energy pumped into the grid and the amount being used need to match to keep the grid at a stable ~60 Hz (or equivalent where you live, e.g. 50 Hz for the PAL region), so at some point you need to literally pay people money to take the electricity you're producing to keep the grid stable or to somehow dump the energy before it makes its way onto the grid.

One of the major ways this problem is being offset is via storage so that the electricity can be distributed at a profit during off-peak production hours. Even if the government were to nationalize energy production and build their own solar farms (god, please), they would still run up against this same problem where it becomes unviable to keep building farms without the storage to accommodate them. At that point it becomes a problem not of profit but of "how much fossil fuel generation can we reduce per unit of currency spent?" and "are these farms redundant to each other?".

This is framed through a capitalist lens, but in reality, it's a pressing issue for solar production even if capitalism is removed from the picture entirely. At some point, solar production has to be in large part decoupled from solar distribution, or solar distribution becomes far too saturated in the middle of the day making putting resources toward its production nearly unviable.

[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 28 points 3 days ago (7 children)

In other words… Maybe 29 word Twitter captions aren’t a great way to discuss issues?

load more comments (7 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)
[–] CalipherJones@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago (5 children)

The question comes down to this. How do you incentivize work other than with money?

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] glaber@lemm.ee 4 points 1 day ago

The capitalist class?

[–] peereboominc@lemm.ee 34 points 3 days ago (9 children)

Why not do something with all that power? In the past there were some projects where they pumped water upstream when there was too much power on the grid. Then on low energy times, the water was released making energy again. Or make hydrogen (I think it was hydrogen). Or do AI stuff

I also seen energie waste machines that basically use a lot of power to do nothing. Only the get rid of all that extra energy so the power grid won't go down/burn.

load more comments (9 replies)
[–] LostXOR@fedia.io 28 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Just install a bunch of spotlights that point back at the Sun so when power prices go negative you can return all that excess energy! Come on MIT, I thought you were supposed to be smart.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] Kompressor@lemmy.world 17 points 2 days ago

"Well you see there is generations and generations of ghouls that have made their entire livelihood off the established and continued monopolization of vital resources such as water and power and for some reason the rest of us haven't gotten together and solved that clear and obvious threat to everyone and everything collectively, I know I don't get it either."

load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›