Comments on: Installing batteries is similar to high frequency trading (HFT)

By: Bomag

Bomag — Fri, 17 Feb 2023 18:58:00 +0000

What was the date when we were taken over by libertarian economists with stacks of equations purporting to model the world but lacking any room for a negative sign, and it all has to be forced on us by government diktat?

By: Jim

Jim — Fri, 17 Feb 2023 00:22:28 +0000

We should have so many nuclear reactors so fast and so hot that when people (read: autistic white nerds) can’t find a use for all the electricity even when it’s free we’re forced to dispose of the overflow with football fields of heat dissipators in a desperate last-ditch bid to stave off total nuclear meltdown, warm up the atmosphere and fight off Global Cooling, and keep the looming P3 Ice Age safely at bay. Heil Hitler.

By: Contaminated NEET

Contaminated NEET — Thu, 16 Feb 2023 00:11:55 +0000

HFT is fake. It’s not “exploit[ing] market inefficiencies to both improve the functioning of the market, provide liquidity, and generate revenue.” That’s a lie. There’s no super clever algorithm making razor-thin profits on thousands and thousands of smart trades faster than the human eye can follow. The algorithm is dumb: all it’s doing is watching for big orders, then sneaking little orders in ahead of them with its silicon speed and a geographical latency advantage. It’s pretty much front-running, except instead of robbing their customers, the HFTers rob everybody. In a decent society it would be illegal.

By: McChuck

McChuck — Wed, 15 Feb 2023 19:10:54 +0000

The globe doesn’t have enough known lithium deposits to make enough batteries for every car in California, much less the entire USA. And that’s not counting the energy grid backup.

By: Gavin Longmuir

Gavin Longmuir — Wed, 15 Feb 2023 18:00:02 +0000

“… the EROI on battery system is so short, and their revenue so high …”

Whatever happened to common sense? If that statement were true, then the world would be filled with traders with big battery stacks.

Obviously, the statement is arrant nonsense. Grid-scale batteries exist only in very unusual situations (eg Fairbanks, Alaska) or in places where mandates & subsidies force their use.

By: Freddo

Freddo — Wed, 15 Feb 2023 14:12:15 +0000

That comparison is full of sh*t, and that is putting it mildly. Might as well claim that supermarkets are HFT.

Battery storage is doing arbitration on a commodity where price fluctuations are well known and fairly predictable. The most crucial and obvious distinction is that the battery actually takes delivery of the product and discharges it at a later time.

More elegant are the bitcoin miners in Texas. They monitor the electricity spot prices and when the spot prices rise sufficiently they stop mining bitcoins and resell their electricity – presumable from fixed price long-term contracts – to the market.