nytimes.com
www.nytimes.com

The article doesn’t detail it fully, but a lot of electricity wholesale markets are structured like this:

  • For each time block, the utility solicits bids to supply electricity
  • The lowest bidders win, and every bidder gets paid the price that the highest winning bidder bid
  • This “clearing price” then determines what the utility charges retail customers

So until you get rid of gas generation completely for some time slots, the clearing price that everybody pays is set based on how much it costs to burn fossil gas to generate electricity, even if, say, 90% of generation happens using wind and solar. As a result, all the benefit of wind and solar goes to the people owning the generation capacity, rather than retail utility customers.

  • sparkyshocks@lemmy.zip
    2·
    6 hours ago

    As a result, all the benefit of wind and solar goes to the people owning the generation capacity, rather than retail utility customers.

    Building out solar/wind still helps the consumer, because reducing the number of days or the number of hours per day the price is set by the marginal fossil fuel kWh will still bring down monthly averages.

    And even for the hours where the price is set by a fossil fuel producer, it’s still generally better for the consumer when that particular hour needs to bid for the cheapest 100 MWh versus 500 MWh that may include even more expensive sources.