Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Unfortunately, the article misses the forest for the tree: it points the shortcomings of one particular electricity market model, but never acknowledge that the whole endeavor is doomed to fail: the way electricity works physically (coupled with the way societies have been built around it being readily available) makes it fundamentally impossible to manage through market forces. And as a result, every attempt results in an apparently nonsensical failure (see also how the European electricity market's "copper plate" model leads to the insanely high re-dispach costs).by stymaar
- >the way electricity works physically (coupled with the way societies have been built around it being readily available) makes it fundamentally impossible to manage through market force
This is anti-scientific woo. Both theoretically and empirically market-based electricity systems are much more efficient, that's why even China is adopting one: https://www.enerdata.net/publications/daily-energy-news/chin...
by logicchains - Not all markets, and not even all European markets, assume a single trading zone (i.e. a copper plate network). Re-dispatch costs are high because policy choices have created a physical reality that drives high constraints.
That could have been prevented by simply not permitting connections in certain parts of the network. Yes, theoretically it could also have been prevented by forcing generators to directly bear re-dispatch costs which would have led developers to build a different set of generating assets. This would have been a different set of market mechanisms.
However, if generation decisions had been made centrally, they would have been made by the same system operators, regulators, and governments that mandated the construction of the current system and they would have therefore built the same system more or less. Do you really think that if e.g. Germany or the GB network had been centrally planned by their respective government mandated regulators and system operators, they wouldn't have put all those windfarms exactly where the market-led model we actually have has put them?
by Mvandenbergh - Every "wasted $" ended up in some parasitical grifter's pocket.
Whilst these sorts of analyses are informative, they lack answers to the who profits? question.
by GianFabien - The money has gone to pay power plants that can supply winter capacity, exactly as the market is designed to do.
The intention of the payments is to increase revenue for that kind of power generation capability to encourage more such plants be constructed.
The argument in the article is dubious to me. Of course the higher price isn’t leading to more generation today, that’s not the point, the point is to reward developers that build and built capacity CA needs in winter. The disagreement then becomes which model is correct about how much capacity is actually needed.. but the fact that a tiny move in demand moves the price so substantially seems to me to undermine the entire premise of the blog post, clearly supply is severely constrained?
by jakewins - What software did they build their model in?by xeonax
- Having been in the industry for 20 years, there is a good chance it was good ole Excelby Aboutplants
- This reminds me of the 2013 finding that showed an earlier 2010 study praising austerity as a recovery mechanism was flawed because of an Excel calculation error and lack of diligence.
https://inthesetimes.com/article/the-excel-error-heard-round...
It also reminds me of the flaws in the London epidemiological model about how to respond to covid.
It just may be that these things should be reviewed a little closer by people who are obsessive about correctness
- > flaws in the London epidemiological model about how to respond to covid.
That one was fun. I got into an argument with a scientist who was (IIRC) working with or for the specific professor that made that mess, and he blamed the entire software engineering/computer science industry for making C++ too hard to use, and said it should never have been released if mistakes like this could be made. And then accused me of gatekeeping when I said perhaps they should get an expert to look over this stuff before submitting results to governments to form a policy basis.
The attitude seemed to be "I am a scientist and am clearly very smart, and therefore anything you do must be trivial in comparison. If I can't pick up in seconds what takes you years to learn and more years to perfect, you've clearly done it all wrong and it's your fault."
by Nursie - >It just may be that these things should be reviewed a little closer by people who are obsessive about correctness
No amount of review is enough. As anyone who's worked in quant science will attest, a model that hasn't repeatedly made correct out-of-sample predictions is most likely worthless, as it's far far easier to overfit a model to data than to predict the future.
by logicchains - PJM Interconnection LLC (PJM) is a regional transmission organization (RTO) in the United States. It is part of the Eastern Interconnection grid operating an electric transmission system serving all or parts of Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia. PJM is the largest power grid operator in the United States, serving 67 million customers from Chicago to New Jersey. (Wikipedia)
That was not clear in the article.
by k310 - I don't doubt that ISO models are not optimal, but the annual cost of power outages to US consumers is above 100 billion dollars last time I looked already. Electric system reliability is a place where you have to be somewhat conservative as costs rise really non-linear with outage intensity. [1]
And ISOs/RTOs/TSOs operate in complex political environments and have to ensure reliability in adverserial markets. They are often constraint in what they can/can't do.
What I will say is that their modelling should absolutely be open and transparent, and typically it's not. That would make necessary discussions around modelling assumptions, potential improvements and political constraints much much easier and more fruitful.
[1] That said, my intuition is that current outages are probably not due to supply insufficiency, but due to transmission system failures.
by Certhas - The article's main complaint is that generating capacity has been overbuilt by maybe 10%. That's not a bad thing. There are worse things than extra generating capacity.by Animats
- .. at a cost of about $12bn.by pjc50
- I’ve made a large mistake that ended up being a positive for the company I was working for (profit wise) and I took it as seriously as if it had gone in the opposite direction. It was a simple thing but boy did the anxiety of worry destroy me. Can’t imagine what the worry would have been like if it was in the opposite directionby Aboutplants