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replies(7):
Your other comment probably got flagged because it started with a huge straw man and had multiple unwarranted jabs in it.
Also, have you read after the market part? Please watch this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7G4ipM2qjfw if the last quote is gibberish to you. It discusses somewhat different issues, but the point still stands.
Why is the problem the cheap source of supply rather than the market rules and incentives that made everything act the way it did?
Your comment suggests move back to good ol' expensive fossil generation instead of looking at how to bring the market rules up to date with evolving technologies.
I explicitly mentioned this line of argument in the GP. The problem is that renewables only sometimes cheap and plentiful and often not when we want it. Even without accounting for the politically-driven preferential treatment covered in the sibling comment, from the purely technical point of view intermittency above certain threshold wreaks havoc in the traditional grid architecture designed for the traditional easily controlled "rotating" generation. It becomes really hard to manage the grid with existing tools when you have too much of intermittent highly distributed generation and in the extreme it leads to collapses like this.
As I wrote, yes, you could upgrade the grid, increase transmission redundancy, add battery/pumped/flywheel storage, introduce "smart" tools to manage the grid, and do a plethora of other things to accommodate renewables. Hell, you could even migrate the grid to DC!
But the cost of doing it is substantial. It's effectively a form of externalities of renewable generation, which are not accounted for in naive "cheap" $/kW metrics. Properly accounting for those externalities and adding them to the cost of renewable generation is possible, but politically unappealing.
>Your comment suggests move back to good ol' expensive fossil generation instead of looking at how to bring the market rules up to date with evolving technologies.
No, I believe we should remove the politically motivated shoehorning of renewables at the cost of grid stability. There should be a limit on how much intermittent generation we can have depending on the preparedness of the grid and we should pay less for power from such sources, not guarantee purchase from them!
As you say, we should have proper incentives structure which accounts for various externalities (including CO2 emissions!). We need to remove the existing subsudies on renewables which made sense in the early days, but not now. Let the generation sources play at the even field.
> Properly accounting for those externalities and adding them to the cost of renewable generation is possible, but politically unappealing.
Implying this was/is not done and should be done. As a certified fan of looking out for (cost) dependencies, I agree with this to put it very mildly. I find it unlikely this wasn't done however, rather, I think renewables were likely onboarded harder than the externalities were taken care of to allow for it, possibly due to political pressure and/or mismanagement. Or at least, that rings all too familiar to me personally, not just from real world topics, but even from work. But then what you actually propose is:
> There should be a limit on how much intermittent generation we can have depending on the preparedness of the grid and we should pay less for power from such sources, not guarantee purchase from them!
Which is a different concern.
Also, this reads to me awfully like just flowery language for "hey, what if the obviously bad thing that happened wouldn't be allowed to happen anymore" with the logic retconned into it, but then I'll never have a way of proving or demonstrating that conclusively.
Finally,
> We need to remove the existing subsidies on renewables which made sense in the early days, but not now. Let the generation sources play at the even field.
This further doesn't follow from even your own explanation (i.e. "which made sense in the early days but not now" is not a substantiated claim). It's just your own political stance on the matter to the best I can tell.
This is also factually incorrect (unless Spain are now doing some country level subsidies on renewables). Fact is, new solar and new wind offer the lowes average power generation costs of any method. Regular market forces (without susidies) will favor renewables over anything else. Hydro being the most profitable.