Sure. But the marginal cost of renewables is often genuinely zero, because they're producing power for which there is no market demand at that moment.
I already mentioned capital costs.
Discussion
Marginal cost can be zero from time to time and producers will run if they can get other incentives like RECs.
However they won’t give the power for free and have wear and tear on equipment. Better to shut down than to sell at zero or negative prices if no RECs can be captured
BTW I work in renewable energy
Which specific type of renewable energy?
There's essentially zero wear and tear on photovoltaic solar. Other than maybe a few fans it's entirely solid state.
Wind turbines are turning out to have widespread gearbox lifetime issues, with many gearboxes lasting significantly less than their 20-30 design lifetimes. But that's probably going to improve. And direct drive turbines are becoming more common.
Depends. While PV solar panels are rated up to 30 years useful life and there is indeed no mechanical action going on in their operation, the semiconductors inside them doesn't like high heat, so it tends to need some form of cooling. Not sure how the PV parks they're putting up in New Mexico and various tropic locations will fare. I guess we'll see.
PV solar panels run _cooler_ with a load. Think about it: a fixed amount of energy hits them. If that energy doesn't go somewhere else, it just heats up the panel. Specifically, the solar energy causes electrons to be excited. With a load, those electrons dissipate their energy in the load. Without a load, that energy is eventually dissipated as heat within the panel.
Solar panel operators actually use this to find broken panels, by using infrared cameras to look for panels that are unusually hot.
So yes, using the electricity panels generate will (ideally) increase their lifespan a bit.
Solar wind and hydro
Solar panels that tilt to follow the angle of the sun do have a motor that will have wear and tear for example.
Wind you covered. It’s better not to run than run at negative prices.
Hydro has other complexities, especially with pondage capacity. Lots of moving pieces.
Renewable is far more complex than what we hear on many podcasts to be frank.
A very tiny % of solar panels are mechanized. That whole idea has mostly been obsoleted by increasingly cheap solar panels.
Hydro obviously isn't worth running at exceptionally low prices in most cases as most hydro involves water storage –not run of the river – so it's better to use the water later. But hydro is usually dispatchable, so I didn't even mention it as it's really not in the same category as solar or wind.
That said, even with hydro sometimes they'll run hydro plants for long periods at negatives prices. IIRC an example of this maybe a decade or so ago was a Quebec dam where so much rain had fallen they they needed to dump it through the turbines even though they'd pushed electricity prices negative, as it was cheaper to pay that price than have to use (and then repair) the emergency spillways (mechanically, the turbines had to have an electrical load on them or they'd overspeed).
There are always exceptions for small periods of time in a year, in a day, etc. for free power.
However, the miners I talk with want high availability (95%+) to deploy their ASICs, not intermittent free power. Building the mine is too costly to run at 5%-10% of the time (negative prices or prices lower than transmission, etc.) is a very low frequency for our fleet at least.
To be clear, in the thread you are replying to I was clear that renewables _may_ be used for hashing significantly during low cost periods, _in the future _. I'm not claiming that's a significant thing yet.
Right now the #1 renewable used for Bitcoin mining is probably still stranded hydro.
I was not referring to any of your other treads
I was just answering this specific tread.
Renewable Energy is my daily reality. I agree that stranded hydro is the best use case but it’s not as common as miners would want and more than generators like…