Australia

I’m really hoping this is a temporary problem.

There are a lot of very large batteries in the process of being built that will start to meaningfully address this issue in the next couple of years.

This sounds like a great opportunity to advertise times of cheap excess energy. Encourage more grid scale batteries, desalination, AI compute, crypto mining. Anything that uses a large amount of energy and can be automated to happen ad-hoc.

Thought the goal should be to capture and reuse all the excess energy, and drop fossils to zero permanently, once and for all.

Aussie in Finland here. We have an electricity system here with "spot price". I get charged a price per kWh depending on the forecasted supply (from producers) and demand (from history and other math) and it changes every hour. At the time of writing this it is 0.60 c/kWh (+margin+transmission+taxes for a total of 7.87c/kWh).

When demand is higher, like winter, and supply is lower (maintenance or faults or no wind), the price can go up to 30-50c, but when there is plenty of power about the energy price can go into negatives.

This makes an effect on usage and stabilises the system. But probably too hard to set up.

Fuckers should have enabled islanding.

Summary of cause: It's unusually low forecasted load demand, 13-35% normal, paired with transmission lines that route excess to other geographics being down for maintenance.