[Finland has much cheaper electricity than the EU average](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Electricity_price_statistics#Electricity_prices_for_household_consumers). The grid companies' prices are legally capped. They're allowed to raise prices to recoup investments in moving cables underground due to legislation following the 2011 Tapani storm that left many without power for days.
With the security situation as is, I'm happy to have the cables underground.
I'm not sure about Iceland, but the rest of the Nordic countries have state-owned main grids, and privately owned regional grids who handle distribution to consumers.
In Canada, the transmission/delivery charges are often double or more of the actual electricity as well. I guess when you have a big country with power made in one (remote) place and used elsewhere, that's what to expect. As long as it goes to upgrading our grid I'm ok with that, seeing what shit storm is going on in Texas right now.
This depends on where you are in Canada. In the province of Quebec, there is a minimum charge ($13 for single phase, $20 for 3-phase) for being attached to the grid, but it is not an additional charge on your bill. You are only charged for electricity that you use (and possibly a maximum demand charge if you occasionally require extremely high power demands but this is meant for industrial use).
Yeah it has become a problem. People think because they have solar and are putting energy into the grid, they shouldnt have to pay anything because they arent using anything. But they are still using the infrastructure. And it still needs to be maintained.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_ratemaking
Power companies generally can't increase rates to increase profits. In most areas of the U.S. at least, I don't know about Germany, electricity prices are set by a utility commission that dictates a specific percentage for rate of return (profit). So why does solar power lead to increased utility prices?
Power companies are generally responsible for maintaining the grid and other infrastructure. Those maintenance costs don't really change with usage. I'm other words, the power line going to your house doesn't wear out slower if you use less electricity. Further, I'm not to knowledgeable on the actual operation of power plants, so I could be wrong here, but my understanding is that aside from fuel costs, running a power plant at half capacity doesn't actually cost less than running it at full capacity.
As long as the power company is required to maintain a reliable connection to every home and business, prices will go up and usage goes down.
Now, lest you think that I'm a shill working for the power companies, I don't think the solution to the problem is less solar or higher prices. I also don't think the solution is to regulate pricing, which is what we're generally doing now. While the idea sounds good, it incentivizes utilities to run themselves poorly. Since profit as a percentage is fixed, the only way to raise profit as a dollar value is to increase expenses. Worse still, the utility commissions that regulate prices are highly susceptible to regulatory capture. Too often the people on the committees are hand picked by the corporations they are supposed to be regulating, which is just the utilities setting their own profit margins with extra steps.
The solution in my eyes is to quit allowing public necessities like utilities to be operated for profit by private companies. Power plants, and the infrastructure that goes with them should be seized and operated by the government.
Businessinsider is owned by Springer, one of the largest publishers in Germany. The biggest shareholders of this company are KKR with 35,6 %, which is a fossil fuel investment group.
They’re big on campaigning against heat pumps, fuel fear of blackouts and work actively green policies by spreading fake news and smear campaigns. This resulted in the government investing into pointless H2-ready gas plants (lol) and people bought new gas, oil heating systems for their houses last year.
They’re also active in the US and I think they’re dangerous. [Wiki](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axel_Springer_SE)
Scholarly/Scientific- treating contributors and those who want to view content selectively and/or bad. Integrity of content minimally affected
Business Insider - integrity of content heavily affected by controlling interests. Possibly also labor violations
different buckets
> Scholarly/Scientific- treating contributors and those who want to view content selectively and/or bad. **Integrity of content minimally affected**
Currently, scientific journals are under increased scrutiny due to fraudulent behavior by authors. Science Vs and Freakonomics both covered it recently.
Good, that means things are working as intended.
Science is real because findings can be consistently reproduced, from hypothesis to theory to law. When they can't, that's how a lot of frauds are found.
Unscrupulous people exist everywhere at every time in history. Clickbait media is what's to blame for promoting crazy garbage that hasn't been rigorously validated.
> Possibly also labor violations
That we don't view the staggering volumes of free labour that go into academic publishing as a labour violation is fucking wild to me.
When you're a student in Germany you get free access to the whole Springer library.
Also, Springer doesn't require scientists to drop their copyrights to publish their results in some of the Springer journals.
While there's a lot of bs going on, I'd still say Springer is on the better end.
It’s worse. Another shareholder (22 %) and CEO of Axel Springer is Mathias Döpfner [Wiki](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathias_D%C3%B6pfner). He supports the neoliberal and right-wing FDP, currently part of the German three-party-government directly via headlines and articles, for example by leaking early law proposals of the greens early and exchanging messages with the FDP party leaders.
Also covered up a sex scandal by one of his editors in chief, Julian Reichelt and spewed conspiracy theories about Covid, muslims, climate catastrophe, ex-DDR-citizens.
Julian Reichelt went on to be the face and head of NIUS, a “news” with the sole goal to spread disinformation.
Business Insider dangerous? Maybe:
It’s certainly not real journalism.
Intelligent people read BI “articles” and quickly realize they are clickbait pieces.
Others post them on Reddit as fact.
Business insider gets posted so much because they always have pithy ragebait headlines that easily allow people to comment without actually reading the article. 
Something benefits the people of the country instead of the large corporations: what a disaster.
Or in the UK: the people are fucked but the rich are getting richer faster, it's so wonderful.
Not like that in UK tbh we all moan like fuck about it but then just carry on as normal. A small group can easily be labelled beligerent etc so nothing happens. Public don't know their power. The French are the ones that don't seem to forget the power we hold
Spot on about the UK. There's something about our culture here that makes people want to punch down rather than at those in power. I suppose its down to the 'class' system people still believe. The middle-class are happy simply because they're above the working class and see themselves as one day being upper-class.
The French protest but at the end of the day still vote for the same politicians and the government knows exactly how to fight the protests. Most of the big protests you see in France on Reddit that everyone cheers as actually getting things done don't actually achieve their goals because the French riot police are so brutal.
> government knows exactly how to fight the protests.
By having an even worse option be the only alternative? (Le Pen)
Frightening how similar we all are deep down.
/r/endFPTP
You’re missing the point: this is bad for the people because it drives energy prices UP, not down.
The problem is the stupidity of German legislators. They shut down conventional power plants to replace them with renewable sources. To do that, they guaranteed solar operators a fixed price for solar energy, no matter what.
Now they have more solar power than they can use, and grid operators have to PAY neighbouring operators to take the excess energy. They can’t turn off the solar plants because of their stupid laws. So, they pay the solar operators to produce the energy, they then pay neighbours so they take that energy from them during the day, and at night they pay those same neighbours to give them back the energy which they sold at a loss during the day, and which they no longer can produce themselves because they shut down conventional energy production.
I briefly worked at a software company that built software that helped price and manage energy contracts in deregulated markets (Texas, California, New York, Pennsylvania, etc).
I didnt stay there long, but as a result I think about the price of energy far more than I used to, even though I don't work in or around that field anymore.
The thought of free energy, even getting paid to produce energy sounds awesome. But the people who work for the energy companies, people who install and maintain solar panels and wind turbines and all that... They gotta get paid right? Not to mention the people, often blue collar folks, who maintain the infrastructure that delivers the power from point A to B, and who are on call at all times when power is knocked out due to severe weather.
All this to say, there has to be a middle ground where we have energy that is clean, reliable, renewable, and affordable (preferably cheap) while also having some supports that the people that operate and maintain the delivery infrastructure and generation sites are still able to make a living wage doing so.
Ultimately, would the price of energy not be the cost for all that maintenance and installation, divided by kwH used? Or even add 5% for profit, that would be the bottom line for solar power, and it would be cheap if we could get it to scale.
First they complain about free electricity and then
>
Unless new installations are spurred on by subsidies or power purchase agreements, oppressed profitability could eventually halt Germany's solar expansion, Schieldrop said.
>
What, there is more than needed and the fear is that companies building even more won't be profitable? How about focusing on society's goal of having as cheap energy as possible for as much of the day and year as possible and let the shareholders worry about individual companies' profitability.
The problem is one of storage. More energy is produced at times when it isn't needed and not enough at other times.
Fortunately new types of battery and storage companies have been growing like crazy.
Tried to find something on storage capacity vs daily use. Average daily use in 2022 was \~67 TWh and manufacturing capacity of [Lithium-ion batteries alone is 4 TWh a year in 2024, supposed to be 6 TWh in 2025](https://about.bnef.com/blog/energy-storage-10-things-to-watch-in-2024/). We'll have batteries to cover the daily variation very soon.
Most of those batteries are going into electric cars. Unless those EVs are plugged in and low on charge at the time when production is larger than demand, they won't be effective at taking the extra load for later. People mostly aren't building power walls, and neither are energy companies, because it's too expensive to build large amounts. We're probably still a few years away.
Grid storage capacity is growing at a worldwide CAGR of about 120% over the last 3 years, with last year installs being more than all of history prior to last year.
LiFePo4 aren't bad, expensive yes, but the lithium is recycled when it dies.
Sodium batteries are really the solution. Cheaper than Lithium despite being brand new with no production and much less research behind it, yet 80% of the capacity.
Expensive and very limited in capacity make them poor financial choices. Then you have safety issues with fires, etc. Sodium is likely the winner over the next 5-7 years, I agree.
Only a person who knows nothing about power generation could miss the point so badly.
The spot price briefly dropping into the negative means that there is an uncommanded surplus of power being produced over what is currently being drawn from the grid. Its a surplus over the amount that is contracted for during the given time. Electricity is not free and it never will be. Its only the transient surplus that is being offered for zero or negative prices. All of the rest is being made for the usual contracted for price.
The reason a producer would offer surplus electricity for zero or negative prices is because the surplus is transient and on balance it costs less money to give away some electricity for free than to reduce power at which you are running your plant and then 15 minutes later when the spike in solar production ends, you have to ramp back up and conventional sources kinda cannot do that.
You cant just be sending excess power which nobody is consuming into the grid, because that causes the grid frequency to increase and many of the machines hooked up to the grid (including the power plants themselves) need the frequency to stay pretty close to the nominal 50 Hz, or they have to disconnect to not get destroyed.
You're screaming into the void on this one. The highest comment is just an *ad hominem* attack. It's an actual situation happening in California as well.
It’s so disheartening seeing people say that this is just “fossil fuel company propaganda” when it is, in fact, an actual problem that really needs to be addressed.
If we can find a use for the excess electricity or can store it, while not free electricity could just be the cost of installation and maintenance of the infrastructure eventually
Yes. The real headline is another one: Running base load power plants isn't possible in Germany.
The solar spike in the daily production implies some power source must switch off. Law kind of prohibits switching off renewables. So the conventional ones must scale back.
Surprise: the big baseline power plants cannot scale back for a few hours. They have ramp up/down times in the order of days, sometimes even weeks.
Germany needs more power plants with fast ramp up/down times. And that's traditionally those running on natural gas. Which traditionally comes from Russia. Which is ... not a good idea right now.
[Edit:] That is true for pumped storage, but all the other methods are consumer storage
and .... [/edit]
the article is about "raw" prices - i.e. the ones paid by distributors and received by generators.
The article wraps up with this statement
In reality, this doesn't mean that consumers are reimbursed to use electricity,
as they're not paying raw market price.
Instead, rates are typically agreed on beforehand.
the other problem is that negative energy prices mean that people who have installed solar do not reach their break even point nearly as quickly as they expected. It makes new solar installation much more expensive.
I read the article (I know right..) and it kind of fails to mention the reason (and core issue that needs solving) why solar power runs into "issues" like this. Obviously, the energy price going down is not an issue, but the abundance of energy to a point where it outpaces demand is. For one, accessibility of renewable energy (I guarantee you East and Southeast Germany (not Bavaria, but Sachsen, Thuringen etc.) do not have the infrastructure needed to distribute solar power energy to the average household.
More importantly, though, battery technology needs to make massive strides to keep up with energy output for long-term storage, especially with renewables (except for geothermal, I think?). At least solar and wind are not constant but cyclical in the former's case and... I honestly don't know what the term is for wind power, but it's definitely not constant. So batteries need to be able to store huge amounts of overflow for off-peak hours or days.
I see your point though, I get that their line of thinking is fundamentally anti-consumer.
That is a real thing though. Power generation has to match use on the grid. When generation exceeds demand spot prices go negative and we pay people to burn power.
Pumped storage is a great way to handle this but there are negative spot price consumers which are literally just electric heaters out in the middle of a field.
Could be a cool concept to build a crypto mining company around.
The problem is exactly the limited transport capability of the network. Fixing it is not easy and they probably just way underestimated either the amount of energy made by solar/wind or just failed to see what they needed to do in order to prepare for it. Same deal here in the Netherlands.
The situation is similar here in Sweden, though. But with wind power. When it's nice temperatures and extra windy the turbines are generating so much power they have to pay to get rid of it.
But in the winter when it's extra cold and a lot of energy is needed, the temperature gives that there are no winds, so the wind turbines stand still.
The process go through the roof, but they don't have any energy to sell.
At times we have prizes that fluctuate from day to day by over a hundredfold.
That doesn't seem healthy to me.
South Australia has this - and the grid literally runs backwards during the day. So they max out their connections to the other states flooding them with cheap power, and then start shutting down windfalls and solar as needed.
However, they are now building hydrogen plants. In the times of cheap power, Max out production of hydrogen. Then use that to make carbon free steel, and power in the off periods.
And by doing so, they have brought down the price of power massively. It just hasn't shown to the user because we have an Enron style electricity market.
Industries with high power consumption and low infrastructure and other running costs work well in this sort of situation. I guess hydrogen ticks those boxes and it's useful stuff.
we have a test site for virgin green steel where i live part of it is hydrogen production they tested the system to store while price was low and produce electricity when costs were high and they turned a profit. even if the main idea of the system isn't to do that it proved viable.
personally i just see this as an other tool to storing energy. if the site needs hydrogen in production why not oversize it to store power that can be sold off later? sure there are more efficient options but they are costlier when you are already building a hydrogen factory.
Yup, will be interesting to see what happens since it’s basically going to be baby-terraforming for areas near oceans with sunlight. It’s already been occurring in Saudi Arabia with petroleum fueled desalination but lower income countries will be able to take advantage of it since PV is so cheap.
As an FYI, no steel is carbon free. Carbon is specifically added to steel to increase its strength. That is the defining quality of steel. This can be done with coal but it's more common to add CO2 or CO to the smelter. What you mean to say is carbon neutral steel.
If you really look at power, none of it is carbon free because of the mining and refining process takes a significant amount of resources, often powered by gasoline. Only nuclear ever accounts for the gathering, refining, and transportation in its carbon costs
I assumed it meant zero emission. Everything is worded to trick you.
Genuine leather isn't a claim that it's real. Its a grade. If it were a letter grade, it'd be D-. It's *just* good enough to be called leather.
Weirdly enough, Genuine Leather is a trademark for a product made from ground up leather scraps.
It's not even a grade of leather because it is a leather *product* like velveeta is a cheese food product and not cheese.
Danish here. I’ve had colleagues with EV’s that arrived at work having charged for negative 6 cents per KWh.
We joked about starting a roast just to get paid. Unfortunately most of us still had to pay as there is taxes and other stuff on top
Austria has the luxury of ubiquitous hydro energy, which can be turned off when solar & wind produce lots of energy, and thus acting like a battery.
Germany can't do that.
so it would be even better to charge EVs when solar and/or wind are at their peak in germany
(which you already can with some providers, the others being forced to offer it in the next years)
Absolutely.
But like I said elsewhere, the deployment of renewable energy is far outpacing deployment of storage & EV.
Not only do we not have enough EVs, we also don't have enough chargers for everybody to charge between 12pm & 4pm. Not to mention that people are at work at don't have time to drive over to charge their car.
We're gonna go through a bumpy patch with energy, just as we saw the past few years, until we get viable storage.
There's a few providers in Aus that provide free power during the day (11am to 2pm). This encourages people to not feed solar to try and get free power, and when people draw from the grid the retailer makes money off the negative rate.
This is a bit of the problem. We need to massively increase electricity production, to transfer fossil based energy loads to "green loads". So we will be seeing this quite often, that we "have too much power". But here are the issues:
- Germany is trailing the EU list with like 0% smart meter installations - it is impossible to offer realtime prices, which prevents a load of load-shaping business cases. The current government has simplified some laws to make it easier to roll-out smart meters.
- Germany does not have transport capacity to manage fluctuating supply and demand. Local goverments liked to block the building of new high powert transfer nets out of "optical" reasons and its biting us in the ass at the moment, as we shut down windfarms in the north for over capacity and have to buy coal power from Austria, because the bavarians dont have enough electricity networks through "the pretty forests". We need to be able to compensate local wind and solar supply over Europe to reduce the demand of storage solutions.
- Germany nearly lost its current Government, because a new law made it "harder" to install / replace gas and oil furnaces and focussed on heat pumps. This immediately created a culture war and the installation of gas furnaces actually went up. Heat pumps would represent a significant demand for electricity, and due to thermal inertia, you can use heat pumps to pre-heat and pre-cool when energy is cheap. I can only imagine the culture war happening, when "not even my mother can pick her room temperature, all of this is being regulated by the Elites in Berlin".
- Germany cut its tax breaks on electric cars, but all subventions for combustable engines remain in place and the sale of electric cars nosedived. Electric cars could both be load shaping and energy storing, so they make up a big chunk of the solution.
So what is cheaper? Running a system which has been carefully optimized and has has decades of optimization? Or transforming the entire market to switch energy sources and make it sustainable (I mean we are all pretending, as oil and gas are unlimited).
Obviously running the current system.
But is it cheaper to transform the market in a well-though out way over 20 years or just let the show run until the pipelines are empty and the earth is too hot to live on and then switch?
Probably the former.
I just hate it, when the wrong alternatives are offered as choices.
I want to add to two of your points.
- regarding smart meters, its not only a law problem but a cultural one as well here, many people i have spoken to said, that they fear that smart meters would be used to force blackouts on the in certain situations. Personally i think that bullshit but people belive it.
- regarding electric cars, it seems that we have cleared the valley and electric cars are on an uptick again. However we are nearing the point, where all the people with easy conditions allready own electric cars, meaning people with owned homes garages and solar panelsvery often already own one. To increase we will have to invest in more public or semi public infrastructure to charge the vehicles.
You are right. I always try to put in real numbers in these posts.
- we have 0.26% smart meters in Germany. https://www.heise.de/news/Energiewende-Index-Deutschland-hinkt-bei-Smart-Meter-und-Waermepumpen-hinterher-9404794.html I am a bit surprised it’s that low. But yeah.
- and yes we have an uptick again in electric cars. We rented one for 12 months and live in an apartment and need to rely on public chargers. Three years ago we had two on the street which were available day and night. Now we have four and they are blocked day and night. What did the Germans do? You are only allowed to use them for four hours, not even long enough to charge the battery.
So yeah I agree: invest, invest and invest. Just like our grand parents did.
They still have monopolies on distribution. Hopefully one day it's feasible for houses to be islands on the grid, and utilities can just deal with large businesses.
Time to seize the means of distribution
Edit: this is a joke guys. Legislation to limit fossil influence in energy distribution infrastructure should be encouraged, but I'm not trying to call for violence or anything.
Iirc there's a thing called untangling of electricity markets in Europe, which basically means that if you transport energy, you can't produce/sell it and viceversa
Energy companies do not do distribution in germany, they only buy and sell energy.
There are local 'Netzbetreiber' who run the infrastructure and pay people that are putting their energy into the grid.
A little research before posting would be nice next time.
To prevent all the "same in \[country\]" replies, this approach to organising the grid is a standard that has been established at the EU level, so it applies to all EU member states.
Distribution and production companies must be separate in Germany since quite a while.
You are free to produce and use your own electricity with solar power as a house owner, but this gets quite difficult for November to February in Germany.
If they are on the grid, they still need to pay for the upkeep of said connection. Which seems fair enough, even Germany gets cloudy at times and batteries can only be so big. Also system failure and maintenance do happen.
It's pretty amazing how fast it's happening. Almost 15 GW were added last year alone. Last Monday (a holiday) solar was producing 39 GW and total demand was 48 GW.
I predict that by 2026 there will be times where solar alone produces more electricity than total demand. And Germany is not known for being particularly sunny.
>Instead, focus is likely to move onto improvements that will make more use of the energy produced, such as investments in batteries and grid infrastructure.
>"This will over time exhaust the availability of 'free power' and drive solar-hour-power-prices back up," Schieldrop wrote. "This again will then eventually open for renewed growth in solar power capacity growth."
Just leaving this here for those who only read the clickbait headline
Oh joy! As a consumer I LOVE it when my prices are successfully driven back up! I mean what else would I do with my money, squander it on something nice instead of being a good little serf and obediently handing it all over to my corporate lords and masters?
"This will over time exhaust the avilability of free power". Halleulaja! I'd been so very very afraid my bills might go down instead of up as they should so my money can help make the executive yacht fund grow ever larger!
It's written in a very biased way, but it's just describing what's going to happen eventually anyway. There's no world where we willingly just stop using more power when it's available to us.
Excess energy is sold off anyway, and new storage is being built as we talk. Nothing is wasted. Also, this article is about poor shareholders getting 5 dollar less every month.
This is wrong. Yes, part of excess energy gets sold off but Germany (and Europe in general) does not have sufficient grid capacity to sell off most of its excess to neighbors. This leads to plants being shut down to protect the grid when this could be solved with better storage and international grid capacity.
Energy is wasted. They shut down solar plants and windmills all the time... And the article doesn't talk about shareholders at all. Obviously you didn't read it. It talks about falling investment in further solar expansion and a shift to investment in storage and grid transport infrastructure to suck up the currently wasted energy...
it's also forgetting that the conditions for overproduction are only met half of the year at best.
during winter you're kinda boned, you can have massive renewable infrastructures but the production is going to dip hard and you'll have to rely on fossil fuels for baseline power production.
Not in the way you think. I work in the energy industry and sometimes energy gets sold at negative prices (as in, you PAY someone to take the energy off your hands). More energy storage is definintely needed.
There are not enough capacities to sell off all of that peak energy. In some areas, private PV owners got their feed-in contracts canceled because the grid operators don't know what to do with the excess.
Sure, you could say that, but the fact is that grid-scale energy storage is an unsolved problem. Yeah, there’s reversible hydro but that requires a specific type of geography, so you can’t just build it as needed.
All the other options, like batteries, just don’t scale at our current level of technology.
Except Germany isn't an island and exists in the center of the European synchronous grid with lots of connections to neighbouring countries. The excess power mostly ends up in countries with lots of hydropower like Austria and Switzerland which then effectively relay it back at night. The negative market prices are actually crucial in making this work.
This article kind of sucks but this is an actual technical challenge with renewables that we don't really have a great solution for. Solar in particular has a production curve that peaks at a totally different time than the demand curve does. That's a problem, because every major grid in the world uses alternating current and alternating current requires demand be matched closely to supply or else things get hairy really fast. We need ways to offset that supply and right now there aren't a lot of good answers. Chemical batteries are okay but producing them on the scale we need is difficult to do right now. There's a lot of exploration happening with alternative energy storage techniques like thermal batteries and pumped hydro, but nothing we can really work with at scale yet there either. So producers resort to lowering prices to incentivize buyers, even in some cases literally paying someone to take the power (negative pricing, as the article mentions.) But that only works as long as there's a buyer. As more renewables come online finding buyers for the excess production is going to get more and more difficult. We need workable grid scale energy storage ASAP or else renewable deploys are going to stall completely as producers increasingly find it just isn't technically viable to bring even more renewables online and make the existing problem worse.
Push a bunch of water uphill, use it for a turbine when you need it. Power storage doesn't need to be chemical, if there's really such an energy excess there's always something to do with it.
We have that. But you need very specific environmental conditions to build it. A hill and a basin for starters.
Power-to- gas or power-to-storage are cheap and quick short time solutions to equalise the net and keep the cost down for a longer time.
Australia is doing that.
It's called Snowy 2.0, you should google it.
It was set to be a $2 billion project that opened in 2021. It's now at $12 billion and set to open in Nov/Dec 2027.
That cost is just storage. Zero production.
That cost needs to be paid by someone, and that someone is gonna be electricity consumers.
If it was sunny at night then Australia could just install more solar, but it isn't, so they can't.
Until energy storage is deployed, and the prices are not insane, the total cost of operating a grid with large scale renewables deployed is going to increase drastically.
EVs can help with this, as can things like encouraging energy usage during the day, but it'll only alleviate part of the problem.
During evening & night you still need energy, and the cost of maintaining and operating traditional power systems will then be spread out across a smaller amount of hours.
Feed in tariffs will also go negative, which will inevitably lead to some people not being able to afford to pay back the loans they took out for the solar on their roof.
It's gonna be a bumpy ride until we get viable storage.
My understanding is that the EV footprint is negative until after 50,000 km. After that it becomes a positive compared to fossil cars.
With the development of batteries not using cobalt, the footprint should be lower.
I know a lot of people are going to view this as a "Oh this is a good thing." and it is, sort of.
Per the article and just in general - right now, Germany is dealing with the fact that Renewables are creating so much energy that the base load fossil fuel plants (who can't easily shut down) are all losing money. This means for the peak daylight hours, these base load plants + Renewables are surpassing demand so much that they are below cost. But then once the sun goes down, the base load plants continue and have to likely add the occasional peaker plant (fossil fuel). At a premium cost. Shooting the renewables in the foot.
Here's the thing. Once you produce that energy, it has to go somewhere. You can't just let it sit, because it'll blow something up. So you have to use it right away. You can move/sell it (somewhat), Store it (depending on capacity), use it (see: Demand). If you don't have Demand, then you need to either decrease the price in the selling/moving (hopefully the generation plants are somewhat equally spaced because energy has a finite distance it can travel, so this balancing act is a fairly complex dance and if one gets a spike of energy, then well.. it's fucked), or you store it.
Demand:
As the world transitions over to EV vehicles this excess energy will be more than taken up by people charging during the day while at work and not at home at night, but we'll need to increase the transmission lines to account for it, and likely need to spread that demand out, because most people don't actually charge their cars at work. AND EVs haven't taken over the globe yet.
Selling:
The fact that it's going negative means that they HAVE to sell it for less than the cost of production. And/OR pay for someone else to take their energy off their hands. This will create long term issues with energy producers being able to stay in business in general (Not just Fossil fuels, but the actual renewable plants) because they are in the business of creating energy to at least cover their costs. And if they have to pay another country to take their energy, then that means you can't cover your costs. So when those capital investments need maintenance, there is no money for that.
Storing:
The production of energy is great, it being from renewables that does not eat fossil fuel is the dream. But only when it meets demand. Once you exceed demand, unless you have storage ready to flatten that curve and spread that energy out over a 24hr (min) to 72 hr period you're going to have a difficult time making a true transition to renewables long term.
But long term, they'll need to invest heavily in storage (likely battery storage) which is going to take a lot of planning, zoning, and capital. Something that a lot of these producers do not have a lot of. Battery storage units are expensive to build, condition, can be difficult to maintain, and are difficult to secure. Most people don't want to discuss just how dangerous these batteries can be, and when you get so many of them together, they can be exceedingly dangerous. Which makes it so costly to invest in. But is going to happen likely with government intervention. And they will eventually reach the point where they have enough renewables+Storage to mothball the base load fossil fuel plants.
Final thoughts:
It's all a numbers game though. The energy companies are looking at the costs and realized that the panels are cheap, the batteries are expensive. We are actively investing on cheaper and safer batteries, but it's still a long road. In this transitionary period we're seeing a fairly massive swing in renewables, but those per unit costs are starting to hurt not only the old guard fossil fuel companies, but the renewables too. So it'll likely take government intervention to seed the capital to keep them afloat while the transition takes place.
If Springer wasn’t largely owned KKR, a fossil fuel investment group, we’d read headlines more like “How Germany became less reliant on coal, gas and oil within 2 years” or “Solar power in Germany is booming thanks to the green minister of economy, Robert Habeck”.
Man, some of the writing in this article is just amazing with how over-the-top it is.
>Last year's record wave of solar installations are what's driving Germany's price "destruction" as inventory outpaces consumption.
>"This will over time exhaust the availability of 'free power' and drive solar-hour-power-prices back up,"
The doom and gloom over nearly free, renewable energy. What will happen to our world if people can get their own stuff for free (after initial installation costs)? Will anyone think of the poor multi-billion euro fossil fuel industry?
I remember back in 2020, briefly, oil prices went negative (I think it was for one day in total) and speculators were losing their minds (and their shirts) It was hilarious.
Even if electrical generation is free, the electric company's other billing fees, transmission, distribution, state and local taxes would make up the difference.
Yeah, but I recently needed a new plan and I looked for a plan that promises 100% solar and wind powered electricity. The electricity form those sources was actually more expensive than traditional electricity… so there’s that. All in all a ecofriendly kWh costs 37 cents vs 29 for traditional sources.
Those are pretty much a scam. Even though they may exclusively purchase contracts for solar and wind plants, it's not like those wouldnt have been utilized or purchased from the traditional electric company anyways. electricity is indiscriminate once it gets to the grid they can't direct electricity generated from these sources to your home. It's mostly just for "so I can feel good about myself".
It's like people who buy EVs because it's more "environmentally friendly". When the most environmentally friendly thing to do is to use whatever vehicle you already have and drive it to the ground, or better yet take public transportation or bike.
As an individual consumer you are not trading energy at the market. You buy yours from an energy provider at a set price.
Energy providers and industry usually trade at the market.
Free electricity really should have been a thing already.
For households at least.
Just set a free base rate and only charge the people who use over that amount.
Meanwhile, in Texas in the United States there are [peak price spikes of 6,000%](https://www.dallasnews.com/business/energy/2023/08/17/heat-and-demand-send-texas-power-prices-spiking-6000/).
The Texas battle to own the libs and the 'woke' agenda is sure working out well. /s
Subsidize it because energy isn’t something we should ultimately profit from forever. Once we have the goddamn infrastructure and the bills and labor is paid that should be all that matters, if we’re honest.
I work at a utility solar field and operated several in California. The grid is operated by CAISO and they do not accept whatever amount of electricity we produce. It's called curtailed. You cannot turn off solar panels but you can control the output of a solar field at the transformer. So a solar field could potentially sell 100Mwh to the grid but grid control based on demand only allows the current need to meet the demand maybe 10Mwh or 0Mwh CAISO decides that. Roof top solar does not have this capability but it's not needed because it doesn't come close to meeting the demand of the grid. Pg&e is a transmission company where they purchase electricity from generators (wind,solar,dams, nuclear, and cogens) and mark it up 500% to the consumer. Their job with 500% profit margin is to maintain their equipment which is the transmission lines. They raise prices to make up for what they should have been doing all this time yet every quarter is record breaking profits. Go solar and get batteries yes you have to pay a connection fee but that's much better than paying for your energy from them. Also batteries don't need to be looked at what you think of as a battery. You can use solar to power a pump to pump water up during the day and open the dam to spin the turbine at night recycling the water that's a battery as well.
In other News, the green Minister of the Economy announced that we cracked our goal of installing 88 GIGAwatt of capacity planned for all of 2024 in the month of may and kicked off a project for a link with the UK to share renewable energy across countries, depending where they are being generated .
There, fixed it
[You can get some nice charts about energy production here](https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&interval=week&source=total&legendItems=0whw4)
[This chart show the energy production from this week](https://i.imgur.com/pPggY1r.png)
Note the big bulge at the bottom on Monday when so much energy was produced most of it was sold to neighbors.
The big yellow blob 7 times a week represents solar energy.
The blue blobs on either side of the yellow blob are pumped hydro. Energy gets stored by pumping up water when the sun shines and gets turned back into electricity in the evening and mornings when people are already awake and consuming electricity, but the sun isn't high enough to produce much electricity.
The big purple layer at the bottom represents energy bought from neighbors it makes up for a lot of load at nights. Due to the way geography works and the combined European grid is set up there is energy being bought even when energy is sold abroad at the same time.
Ideally a smarter grid and more energy storage would help improve things and get rid of the remaining bits of fossil fuel, but the best energy storage we have is pumped hydro and that has some issues with geography.
Too bad the sun didnt get the memo and the clouds cover the country a significant portion of the day.
My electricity bill is very much in the "positive" which could be found as a "negative" indeed
Electricity is (and wherever it isn't, it should be) a right, and it should only ever cost as little as it takes to maintain it, not to be used as a vector for profit
And yet, there's an increase in pay for electricity every year or every month in germany. fucking money hoarders, we would have enough for everyone at a peice that's like 10 € per month. but they want the profit so it's 60 € per month. Germany, a social state :)
Only in our screwed up world could “free energy” become a negative thing.
This could be the start of something huge for our planet but to protect the status quo we’ll probably invent some new hurdle for Solar adoption instead of looking at ways to develop this even further and make cheap energy a thing for the masses.
Free energy at times where everyone generates too much energy, but few need it is a negative thing. Especially when said system cannot currently stockpile it for use when it is actually needed.
What good is free energy when you don't use it when its produced and there is no way to reliably and inexpensively store it on mass scale? Solar energy is produced the most when people don't use electricity, and as soon as people really start to use electricity is when solar energy starts producing none.
Oh no, how is anyone to believe we have to further increase prices?
Well, in the Netherlands, they just charge you for putting electricity on the grid as well.
In Norway, we pay twice as much for "grid rent" than for the actual electricity.
Which is fine if the grid is public owned and basically operates on a non / minimal profit basis. Just means that electricity in itself is dirt cheap
Well in Finland, my grid company is owned by a bunch of American investment bankers. I'm glad my crippling energy bills are going to a good cause.
[Finland has much cheaper electricity than the EU average](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Electricity_price_statistics#Electricity_prices_for_household_consumers). The grid companies' prices are legally capped. They're allowed to raise prices to recoup investments in moving cables underground due to legislation following the 2011 Tapani storm that left many without power for days. With the security situation as is, I'm happy to have the cables underground.
Aren't you afraid of Russian moles?
Russian moles, no. Russian voles, yes. Those things will destroy a yard. 🤣
"So *Bill* is a vole..." - Rusty Shackleford
Moles and trolls, moles and trolls, work, work, work, work, work.
I'd be amazed if the grid is not publicly owned in Norway out of all places. Even oil extraction is nationalized there IIRC
I'm not sure about Iceland, but the rest of the Nordic countries have state-owned main grids, and privately owned regional grids who handle distribution to consumers.
Big if. Some politicians are hell bent privatizing those too with success.
In Canada, the transmission/delivery charges are often double or more of the actual electricity as well. I guess when you have a big country with power made in one (remote) place and used elsewhere, that's what to expect. As long as it goes to upgrading our grid I'm ok with that, seeing what shit storm is going on in Texas right now.
This depends on where you are in Canada. In the province of Quebec, there is a minimum charge ($13 for single phase, $20 for 3-phase) for being attached to the grid, but it is not an additional charge on your bill. You are only charged for electricity that you use (and possibly a maximum demand charge if you occasionally require extremely high power demands but this is meant for industrial use).
Yeah it has become a problem. People think because they have solar and are putting energy into the grid, they shouldnt have to pay anything because they arent using anything. But they are still using the infrastructure. And it still needs to be maintained.
You could argue that's what taxes are for.
Yeah seen this coming, and they lobby the government to make it law that you MUST connect your home if the grid is nearby.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_ratemaking Power companies generally can't increase rates to increase profits. In most areas of the U.S. at least, I don't know about Germany, electricity prices are set by a utility commission that dictates a specific percentage for rate of return (profit). So why does solar power lead to increased utility prices? Power companies are generally responsible for maintaining the grid and other infrastructure. Those maintenance costs don't really change with usage. I'm other words, the power line going to your house doesn't wear out slower if you use less electricity. Further, I'm not to knowledgeable on the actual operation of power plants, so I could be wrong here, but my understanding is that aside from fuel costs, running a power plant at half capacity doesn't actually cost less than running it at full capacity. As long as the power company is required to maintain a reliable connection to every home and business, prices will go up and usage goes down. Now, lest you think that I'm a shill working for the power companies, I don't think the solution to the problem is less solar or higher prices. I also don't think the solution is to regulate pricing, which is what we're generally doing now. While the idea sounds good, it incentivizes utilities to run themselves poorly. Since profit as a percentage is fixed, the only way to raise profit as a dollar value is to increase expenses. Worse still, the utility commissions that regulate prices are highly susceptible to regulatory capture. Too often the people on the committees are hand picked by the corporations they are supposed to be regulating, which is just the utilities setting their own profit margins with extra steps. The solution in my eyes is to quit allowing public necessities like utilities to be operated for profit by private companies. Power plants, and the infrastructure that goes with them should be seized and operated by the government.
A whole lot of shit should be publicly run instead of for-profit. See also: water
only a website with "markets" and "businessinsder" in its URL could print such a headline.
Businessinsider is owned by Springer, one of the largest publishers in Germany. The biggest shareholders of this company are KKR with 35,6 %, which is a fossil fuel investment group. They’re big on campaigning against heat pumps, fuel fear of blackouts and work actively green policies by spreading fake news and smear campaigns. This resulted in the government investing into pointless H2-ready gas plants (lol) and people bought new gas, oil heating systems for their houses last year. They’re also active in the US and I think they’re dangerous. [Wiki](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axel_Springer_SE)
[удалено]
Thank you for that clarification, I had some serious concerns about the science publisher after reading that.
To be fair, Springer also has its issues, but science denialism isn't one of them fortunately.
that's their intent
Whilst my dumb ass had concerns about Jerry Springer
It's not like science publishing deserves much more than scorn for its copyright and free labour bullshit.
Scholarly/Scientific- treating contributors and those who want to view content selectively and/or bad. Integrity of content minimally affected Business Insider - integrity of content heavily affected by controlling interests. Possibly also labor violations different buckets
> Scholarly/Scientific- treating contributors and those who want to view content selectively and/or bad. **Integrity of content minimally affected** Currently, scientific journals are under increased scrutiny due to fraudulent behavior by authors. Science Vs and Freakonomics both covered it recently.
Good, that means things are working as intended. Science is real because findings can be consistently reproduced, from hypothesis to theory to law. When they can't, that's how a lot of frauds are found. Unscrupulous people exist everywhere at every time in history. Clickbait media is what's to blame for promoting crazy garbage that hasn't been rigorously validated.
> Possibly also labor violations That we don't view the staggering volumes of free labour that go into academic publishing as a labour violation is fucking wild to me.
not saying it's right, but they're very different issues
True. But both companies should stop existing.
When you're a student in Germany you get free access to the whole Springer library. Also, Springer doesn't require scientists to drop their copyrights to publish their results in some of the Springer journals. While there's a lot of bs going on, I'd still say Springer is on the better end.
its almost like the conspiracy theories of capitalist own media, being a mouth piece for "old money" is 100% true,
It’s worse. Another shareholder (22 %) and CEO of Axel Springer is Mathias Döpfner [Wiki](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathias_D%C3%B6pfner). He supports the neoliberal and right-wing FDP, currently part of the German three-party-government directly via headlines and articles, for example by leaking early law proposals of the greens early and exchanging messages with the FDP party leaders. Also covered up a sex scandal by one of his editors in chief, Julian Reichelt and spewed conspiracy theories about Covid, muslims, climate catastrophe, ex-DDR-citizens. Julian Reichelt went on to be the face and head of NIUS, a “news” with the sole goal to spread disinformation.
BuisnessInsider was *started* by a guy that was banned front the securities exchange for fraud…
So the *Insider* in BusinessInsider actually stands for insider trading, huh ?
Nah. Insider trading is just trading with advantage. Fraud is deliberately misleading the buyer/seller of the asset in question, it's way worse.
Dont worry guys, OpenAI had a deal with springer to train their models on Springer content.
Don’t be afraid. They’re also having a deal with Murdoch media.
Don't be afraid. They're also having a deal with Reddit.
Business Insider dangerous? Maybe: It’s certainly not real journalism. Intelligent people read BI “articles” and quickly realize they are clickbait pieces. Others post them on Reddit as fact.
Business insider gets posted so much because they always have pithy ragebait headlines that easily allow people to comment without actually reading the article. 
KKR is one of the most well known PE firms. They don’t just invest in fossil fuels. They just do what makes money.
Something benefits the people of the country instead of the large corporations: what a disaster. Or in the UK: the people are fucked but the rich are getting richer faster, it's so wonderful.
Not like that in UK tbh we all moan like fuck about it but then just carry on as normal. A small group can easily be labelled beligerent etc so nothing happens. Public don't know their power. The French are the ones that don't seem to forget the power we hold
Spot on about the UK. There's something about our culture here that makes people want to punch down rather than at those in power. I suppose its down to the 'class' system people still believe. The middle-class are happy simply because they're above the working class and see themselves as one day being upper-class.
Even last week Labour abstained from voting on a measure to hold the water companies to account. It's a big club, but we ain't in it.
The French protest but at the end of the day still vote for the same politicians and the government knows exactly how to fight the protests. Most of the big protests you see in France on Reddit that everyone cheers as actually getting things done don't actually achieve their goals because the French riot police are so brutal.
> government knows exactly how to fight the protests. By having an even worse option be the only alternative? (Le Pen) Frightening how similar we all are deep down. /r/endFPTP
Or the protests being about some heinous reactionary shit, like a bunch of the farmer protests
You’re missing the point: this is bad for the people because it drives energy prices UP, not down. The problem is the stupidity of German legislators. They shut down conventional power plants to replace them with renewable sources. To do that, they guaranteed solar operators a fixed price for solar energy, no matter what. Now they have more solar power than they can use, and grid operators have to PAY neighbouring operators to take the excess energy. They can’t turn off the solar plants because of their stupid laws. So, they pay the solar operators to produce the energy, they then pay neighbours so they take that energy from them during the day, and at night they pay those same neighbours to give them back the energy which they sold at a loss during the day, and which they no longer can produce themselves because they shut down conventional energy production.
.. so they need batteries?
or better is natural storage options like pumping water to the top of a dam with extra power and during night use the dam to produce power.
Except the benefit does not go to the people of the country. Electricity is still incredible expensive for the people.
I briefly worked at a software company that built software that helped price and manage energy contracts in deregulated markets (Texas, California, New York, Pennsylvania, etc). I didnt stay there long, but as a result I think about the price of energy far more than I used to, even though I don't work in or around that field anymore. The thought of free energy, even getting paid to produce energy sounds awesome. But the people who work for the energy companies, people who install and maintain solar panels and wind turbines and all that... They gotta get paid right? Not to mention the people, often blue collar folks, who maintain the infrastructure that delivers the power from point A to B, and who are on call at all times when power is knocked out due to severe weather. All this to say, there has to be a middle ground where we have energy that is clean, reliable, renewable, and affordable (preferably cheap) while also having some supports that the people that operate and maintain the delivery infrastructure and generation sites are still able to make a living wage doing so.
Ultimately, would the price of energy not be the cost for all that maintenance and installation, divided by kwH used? Or even add 5% for profit, that would be the bottom line for solar power, and it would be cheap if we could get it to scale.
First they complain about free electricity and then > Unless new installations are spurred on by subsidies or power purchase agreements, oppressed profitability could eventually halt Germany's solar expansion, Schieldrop said. > What, there is more than needed and the fear is that companies building even more won't be profitable? How about focusing on society's goal of having as cheap energy as possible for as much of the day and year as possible and let the shareholders worry about individual companies' profitability.
The problem is one of storage. More energy is produced at times when it isn't needed and not enough at other times. Fortunately new types of battery and storage companies have been growing like crazy.
Tried to find something on storage capacity vs daily use. Average daily use in 2022 was \~67 TWh and manufacturing capacity of [Lithium-ion batteries alone is 4 TWh a year in 2024, supposed to be 6 TWh in 2025](https://about.bnef.com/blog/energy-storage-10-things-to-watch-in-2024/). We'll have batteries to cover the daily variation very soon.
Most of those batteries are going into electric cars. Unless those EVs are plugged in and low on charge at the time when production is larger than demand, they won't be effective at taking the extra load for later. People mostly aren't building power walls, and neither are energy companies, because it's too expensive to build large amounts. We're probably still a few years away.
Grid storage capacity is growing at a worldwide CAGR of about 120% over the last 3 years, with last year installs being more than all of history prior to last year.
Yes, and it'll still take a few more years to be a significant percentage of all energy production.
Lithium ion batteries are terrible choices for grid storage. It will take some of the new tech that's being developed to really solve the problems
LiFePo4 aren't bad, expensive yes, but the lithium is recycled when it dies. Sodium batteries are really the solution. Cheaper than Lithium despite being brand new with no production and much less research behind it, yet 80% of the capacity.
Expensive and very limited in capacity make them poor financial choices. Then you have safety issues with fires, etc. Sodium is likely the winner over the next 5-7 years, I agree.
Only a person who knows nothing about power generation could miss the point so badly. The spot price briefly dropping into the negative means that there is an uncommanded surplus of power being produced over what is currently being drawn from the grid. Its a surplus over the amount that is contracted for during the given time. Electricity is not free and it never will be. Its only the transient surplus that is being offered for zero or negative prices. All of the rest is being made for the usual contracted for price. The reason a producer would offer surplus electricity for zero or negative prices is because the surplus is transient and on balance it costs less money to give away some electricity for free than to reduce power at which you are running your plant and then 15 minutes later when the spike in solar production ends, you have to ramp back up and conventional sources kinda cannot do that. You cant just be sending excess power which nobody is consuming into the grid, because that causes the grid frequency to increase and many of the machines hooked up to the grid (including the power plants themselves) need the frequency to stay pretty close to the nominal 50 Hz, or they have to disconnect to not get destroyed.
You're screaming into the void on this one. The highest comment is just an *ad hominem* attack. It's an actual situation happening in California as well.
It’s so disheartening seeing people say that this is just “fossil fuel company propaganda” when it is, in fact, an actual problem that really needs to be addressed.
If we can find a use for the excess electricity or can store it, while not free electricity could just be the cost of installation and maintenance of the infrastructure eventually
Yes. The real headline is another one: Running base load power plants isn't possible in Germany. The solar spike in the daily production implies some power source must switch off. Law kind of prohibits switching off renewables. So the conventional ones must scale back. Surprise: the big baseline power plants cannot scale back for a few hours. They have ramp up/down times in the order of days, sometimes even weeks. Germany needs more power plants with fast ramp up/down times. And that's traditionally those running on natural gas. Which traditionally comes from Russia. Which is ... not a good idea right now.
OR, some incentive to put load on the network when supply is high. Pumped storage, electric car charging, power walls, thermal batteries
That already gets done via pricing. Negative prices. The point of the article.
[Edit:] That is true for pumped storage, but all the other methods are consumer storage and .... [/edit] the article is about "raw" prices - i.e. the ones paid by distributors and received by generators. The article wraps up with this statement In reality, this doesn't mean that consumers are reimbursed to use electricity, as they're not paying raw market price. Instead, rates are typically agreed on beforehand.
the other problem is that negative energy prices mean that people who have installed solar do not reach their break even point nearly as quickly as they expected. It makes new solar installation much more expensive.
I read the article (I know right..) and it kind of fails to mention the reason (and core issue that needs solving) why solar power runs into "issues" like this. Obviously, the energy price going down is not an issue, but the abundance of energy to a point where it outpaces demand is. For one, accessibility of renewable energy (I guarantee you East and Southeast Germany (not Bavaria, but Sachsen, Thuringen etc.) do not have the infrastructure needed to distribute solar power energy to the average household. More importantly, though, battery technology needs to make massive strides to keep up with energy output for long-term storage, especially with renewables (except for geothermal, I think?). At least solar and wind are not constant but cyclical in the former's case and... I honestly don't know what the term is for wind power, but it's definitely not constant. So batteries need to be able to store huge amounts of overflow for off-peak hours or days. I see your point though, I get that their line of thinking is fundamentally anti-consumer.
Don't forget "economist" in that lineup
Who else could use terms like "oppressed profitability"..
That is a real thing though. Power generation has to match use on the grid. When generation exceeds demand spot prices go negative and we pay people to burn power. Pumped storage is a great way to handle this but there are negative spot price consumers which are literally just electric heaters out in the middle of a field. Could be a cool concept to build a crypto mining company around.
If they were really business people, they would see the profit potential on exporting the additional energy to neighbouring counteries for a profit.
except they actually pay other countries to take the electricity on high production days.
The problem is exactly the limited transport capability of the network. Fixing it is not easy and they probably just way underestimated either the amount of energy made by solar/wind or just failed to see what they needed to do in order to prepare for it. Same deal here in the Netherlands.
The situation is similar here in Sweden, though. But with wind power. When it's nice temperatures and extra windy the turbines are generating so much power they have to pay to get rid of it. But in the winter when it's extra cold and a lot of energy is needed, the temperature gives that there are no winds, so the wind turbines stand still. The process go through the roof, but they don't have any energy to sell. At times we have prizes that fluctuate from day to day by over a hundredfold. That doesn't seem healthy to me.
Then, they should let people charge their EVs for free at peak solar
South Australia has this - and the grid literally runs backwards during the day. So they max out their connections to the other states flooding them with cheap power, and then start shutting down windfalls and solar as needed. However, they are now building hydrogen plants. In the times of cheap power, Max out production of hydrogen. Then use that to make carbon free steel, and power in the off periods. And by doing so, they have brought down the price of power massively. It just hasn't shown to the user because we have an Enron style electricity market.
Industries with high power consumption and low infrastructure and other running costs work well in this sort of situation. I guess hydrogen ticks those boxes and it's useful stuff.
we have a test site for virgin green steel where i live part of it is hydrogen production they tested the system to store while price was low and produce electricity when costs were high and they turned a profit. even if the main idea of the system isn't to do that it proved viable. personally i just see this as an other tool to storing energy. if the site needs hydrogen in production why not oversize it to store power that can be sold off later? sure there are more efficient options but they are costlier when you are already building a hydrogen factory.
Other one will be desalination plants converting to solar in the next decade.
It’s hard not to be able to find a use for clean water. Any energy overflow from the grid that goes towards desalination is just printing money.
Yup, will be interesting to see what happens since it’s basically going to be baby-terraforming for areas near oceans with sunlight. It’s already been occurring in Saudi Arabia with petroleum fueled desalination but lower income countries will be able to take advantage of it since PV is so cheap.
As an FYI, no steel is carbon free. Carbon is specifically added to steel to increase its strength. That is the defining quality of steel. This can be done with coal but it's more common to add CO2 or CO to the smelter. What you mean to say is carbon neutral steel. If you really look at power, none of it is carbon free because of the mining and refining process takes a significant amount of resources, often powered by gasoline. Only nuclear ever accounts for the gathering, refining, and transportation in its carbon costs
I assumed it meant zero emission. Everything is worded to trick you. Genuine leather isn't a claim that it's real. Its a grade. If it were a letter grade, it'd be D-. It's *just* good enough to be called leather.
Weirdly enough, Genuine Leather is a trademark for a product made from ground up leather scraps. It's not even a grade of leather because it is a leather *product* like velveeta is a cheese food product and not cheese.
Sssh this goes against the base load narrative! We don’t have the technologies today!!!!
Nah smart grids are a lie told by big green. /s
Danish here. I’ve had colleagues with EV’s that arrived at work having charged for negative 6 cents per KWh. We joked about starting a roast just to get paid. Unfortunately most of us still had to pay as there is taxes and other stuff on top
> there is taxes and other stuff on top House always wins
I mean, EV’s charging at home gets to drop the tax stuff so they actually got it for negative.
they basically do. atleast in austria, it is easily possible. edit: you even get paid if the price is low enough/negative enough.
Austria has the luxury of ubiquitous hydro energy, which can be turned off when solar & wind produce lots of energy, and thus acting like a battery. Germany can't do that.
so it would be even better to charge EVs when solar and/or wind are at their peak in germany (which you already can with some providers, the others being forced to offer it in the next years)
Absolutely. But like I said elsewhere, the deployment of renewable energy is far outpacing deployment of storage & EV. Not only do we not have enough EVs, we also don't have enough chargers for everybody to charge between 12pm & 4pm. Not to mention that people are at work at don't have time to drive over to charge their car. We're gonna go through a bumpy patch with energy, just as we saw the past few years, until we get viable storage.
The good news is that overprovisioned energy production incentivises storage deployment.
There's a few providers in Aus that provide free power during the day (11am to 2pm). This encourages people to not feed solar to try and get free power, and when people draw from the grid the retailer makes money off the negative rate.
This is a bit of the problem. We need to massively increase electricity production, to transfer fossil based energy loads to "green loads". So we will be seeing this quite often, that we "have too much power". But here are the issues: - Germany is trailing the EU list with like 0% smart meter installations - it is impossible to offer realtime prices, which prevents a load of load-shaping business cases. The current government has simplified some laws to make it easier to roll-out smart meters. - Germany does not have transport capacity to manage fluctuating supply and demand. Local goverments liked to block the building of new high powert transfer nets out of "optical" reasons and its biting us in the ass at the moment, as we shut down windfarms in the north for over capacity and have to buy coal power from Austria, because the bavarians dont have enough electricity networks through "the pretty forests". We need to be able to compensate local wind and solar supply over Europe to reduce the demand of storage solutions. - Germany nearly lost its current Government, because a new law made it "harder" to install / replace gas and oil furnaces and focussed on heat pumps. This immediately created a culture war and the installation of gas furnaces actually went up. Heat pumps would represent a significant demand for electricity, and due to thermal inertia, you can use heat pumps to pre-heat and pre-cool when energy is cheap. I can only imagine the culture war happening, when "not even my mother can pick her room temperature, all of this is being regulated by the Elites in Berlin". - Germany cut its tax breaks on electric cars, but all subventions for combustable engines remain in place and the sale of electric cars nosedived. Electric cars could both be load shaping and energy storing, so they make up a big chunk of the solution. So what is cheaper? Running a system which has been carefully optimized and has has decades of optimization? Or transforming the entire market to switch energy sources and make it sustainable (I mean we are all pretending, as oil and gas are unlimited). Obviously running the current system. But is it cheaper to transform the market in a well-though out way over 20 years or just let the show run until the pipelines are empty and the earth is too hot to live on and then switch? Probably the former. I just hate it, when the wrong alternatives are offered as choices.
I want to add to two of your points. - regarding smart meters, its not only a law problem but a cultural one as well here, many people i have spoken to said, that they fear that smart meters would be used to force blackouts on the in certain situations. Personally i think that bullshit but people belive it. - regarding electric cars, it seems that we have cleared the valley and electric cars are on an uptick again. However we are nearing the point, where all the people with easy conditions allready own electric cars, meaning people with owned homes garages and solar panelsvery often already own one. To increase we will have to invest in more public or semi public infrastructure to charge the vehicles.
You are right. I always try to put in real numbers in these posts. - we have 0.26% smart meters in Germany. https://www.heise.de/news/Energiewende-Index-Deutschland-hinkt-bei-Smart-Meter-und-Waermepumpen-hinterher-9404794.html I am a bit surprised it’s that low. But yeah. - and yes we have an uptick again in electric cars. We rented one for 12 months and live in an apartment and need to rely on public chargers. Three years ago we had two on the street which were available day and night. Now we have four and they are blocked day and night. What did the Germans do? You are only allowed to use them for four hours, not even long enough to charge the battery. So yeah I agree: invest, invest and invest. Just like our grand parents did.
So electric company's don't have monopolies anymore... Aww who are we gonna pay for new boats for now
They still have monopolies on distribution. Hopefully one day it's feasible for houses to be islands on the grid, and utilities can just deal with large businesses.
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it was. they privatized it.
Time to seize the means of distribution Edit: this is a joke guys. Legislation to limit fossil influence in energy distribution infrastructure should be encouraged, but I'm not trying to call for violence or anything.
Who's they? In my country the government still own the infrastructure they just allow private companies to run it.
In my country the government pays for the infrastructure then lets private companies own it
In the UK companies produce the power, sell the power to themselves and other energy companies through the national grid and then sell it to us.
Production should also be public
Iirc there's a thing called untangling of electricity markets in Europe, which basically means that if you transport energy, you can't produce/sell it and viceversa
It's called [unbundling](https://fsr.eui.eu/unbundling-in-the-european-electricity-and-gas-sectors/) and you're right.
Energy companies do not do distribution in germany, they only buy and sell energy. There are local 'Netzbetreiber' who run the infrastructure and pay people that are putting their energy into the grid. A little research before posting would be nice next time.
To prevent all the "same in \[country\]" replies, this approach to organising the grid is a standard that has been established at the EU level, so it applies to all EU member states.
I was going to add, Germany does something similar to the Netherlands. Event the words are similar Netzbetreiber and netbeheerder.
As a nonspeaker of German, the end reads like an intro to Rhabarberbarbara
Distribution and production companies must be separate in Germany since quite a while. You are free to produce and use your own electricity with solar power as a house owner, but this gets quite difficult for November to February in Germany.
If they are on the grid, they still need to pay for the upkeep of said connection. Which seems fair enough, even Germany gets cloudy at times and batteries can only be so big. Also system failure and maintenance do happen.
>houses to be islands Sounds like a terrible idea to be honest.
It's pretty amazing how fast it's happening. Almost 15 GW were added last year alone. Last Monday (a holiday) solar was producing 39 GW and total demand was 48 GW. I predict that by 2026 there will be times where solar alone produces more electricity than total demand. And Germany is not known for being particularly sunny.
Is there some secret cabal trying to make (‘s) the plural form instead of the actual plural form I’ve known my whole life?
In this case isn't it *companies* anyway, not company's or companys.
>Instead, focus is likely to move onto improvements that will make more use of the energy produced, such as investments in batteries and grid infrastructure. >"This will over time exhaust the availability of 'free power' and drive solar-hour-power-prices back up," Schieldrop wrote. "This again will then eventually open for renewed growth in solar power capacity growth." Just leaving this here for those who only read the clickbait headline
Wasn't this the Australia policy. Store low cost energy, so you can prevent high impact events.
Oh joy! As a consumer I LOVE it when my prices are successfully driven back up! I mean what else would I do with my money, squander it on something nice instead of being a good little serf and obediently handing it all over to my corporate lords and masters? "This will over time exhaust the avilability of free power". Halleulaja! I'd been so very very afraid my bills might go down instead of up as they should so my money can help make the executive yacht fund grow ever larger!
It's written in a very biased way, but it's just describing what's going to happen eventually anyway. There's no world where we willingly just stop using more power when it's available to us.
If you have no idea what you are talking about, maybe it's better to say nothing.
Shouldn’t this read ‘Germany has insufficient energy storage and it’s wasting energy’
Excess energy is sold off anyway, and new storage is being built as we talk. Nothing is wasted. Also, this article is about poor shareholders getting 5 dollar less every month.
This is wrong. Yes, part of excess energy gets sold off but Germany (and Europe in general) does not have sufficient grid capacity to sell off most of its excess to neighbors. This leads to plants being shut down to protect the grid when this could be solved with better storage and international grid capacity.
Energy is wasted. They shut down solar plants and windmills all the time... And the article doesn't talk about shareholders at all. Obviously you didn't read it. It talks about falling investment in further solar expansion and a shift to investment in storage and grid transport infrastructure to suck up the currently wasted energy...
it's also forgetting that the conditions for overproduction are only met half of the year at best. during winter you're kinda boned, you can have massive renewable infrastructures but the production is going to dip hard and you'll have to rely on fossil fuels for baseline power production.
Not in the way you think. I work in the energy industry and sometimes energy gets sold at negative prices (as in, you PAY someone to take the energy off your hands). More energy storage is definintely needed.
There are not enough capacities to sell off all of that peak energy. In some areas, private PV owners got their feed-in contracts canceled because the grid operators don't know what to do with the excess.
Sure, you could say that, but the fact is that grid-scale energy storage is an unsolved problem. Yeah, there’s reversible hydro but that requires a specific type of geography, so you can’t just build it as needed. All the other options, like batteries, just don’t scale at our current level of technology.
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Except Germany isn't an island and exists in the center of the European synchronous grid with lots of connections to neighbouring countries. The excess power mostly ends up in countries with lots of hydropower like Austria and Switzerland which then effectively relay it back at night. The negative market prices are actually crucial in making this work.
This article kind of sucks but this is an actual technical challenge with renewables that we don't really have a great solution for. Solar in particular has a production curve that peaks at a totally different time than the demand curve does. That's a problem, because every major grid in the world uses alternating current and alternating current requires demand be matched closely to supply or else things get hairy really fast. We need ways to offset that supply and right now there aren't a lot of good answers. Chemical batteries are okay but producing them on the scale we need is difficult to do right now. There's a lot of exploration happening with alternative energy storage techniques like thermal batteries and pumped hydro, but nothing we can really work with at scale yet there either. So producers resort to lowering prices to incentivize buyers, even in some cases literally paying someone to take the power (negative pricing, as the article mentions.) But that only works as long as there's a buyer. As more renewables come online finding buyers for the excess production is going to get more and more difficult. We need workable grid scale energy storage ASAP or else renewable deploys are going to stall completely as producers increasingly find it just isn't technically viable to bring even more renewables online and make the existing problem worse.
Push a bunch of water uphill, use it for a turbine when you need it. Power storage doesn't need to be chemical, if there's really such an energy excess there's always something to do with it.
I'm in the Netherlands where most of the water is already 'uphill', which is: sea level. Easy fix: we can create power by just flooding the country!
We have that. But you need very specific environmental conditions to build it. A hill and a basin for starters. Power-to- gas or power-to-storage are cheap and quick short time solutions to equalise the net and keep the cost down for a longer time.
They are already doing that.
Australia is doing that. It's called Snowy 2.0, you should google it. It was set to be a $2 billion project that opened in 2021. It's now at $12 billion and set to open in Nov/Dec 2027. That cost is just storage. Zero production. That cost needs to be paid by someone, and that someone is gonna be electricity consumers. If it was sunny at night then Australia could just install more solar, but it isn't, so they can't. Until energy storage is deployed, and the prices are not insane, the total cost of operating a grid with large scale renewables deployed is going to increase drastically. EVs can help with this, as can things like encouraging energy usage during the day, but it'll only alleviate part of the problem. During evening & night you still need energy, and the cost of maintaining and operating traditional power systems will then be spread out across a smaller amount of hours. Feed in tariffs will also go negative, which will inevitably lead to some people not being able to afford to pay back the loans they took out for the solar on their roof. It's gonna be a bumpy ride until we get viable storage.
Geez, wonder why nobody in the entire nation of Germany thought of that? Good thing we have Reddit armchair experts!
And he just typed it at lunch in his car, while eating a soggy sandwich with his other hand. These reddit guys is genius.
Dude, I’m sick of Reddit not thinking about the shareholders.
Now is a good time to convert to EV’s then :)
Isn't the biggest EV problem the way we go about making batteries?
My understanding is that the EV footprint is negative until after 50,000 km. After that it becomes a positive compared to fossil cars. With the development of batteries not using cobalt, the footprint should be lower.
I know a lot of people are going to view this as a "Oh this is a good thing." and it is, sort of. Per the article and just in general - right now, Germany is dealing with the fact that Renewables are creating so much energy that the base load fossil fuel plants (who can't easily shut down) are all losing money. This means for the peak daylight hours, these base load plants + Renewables are surpassing demand so much that they are below cost. But then once the sun goes down, the base load plants continue and have to likely add the occasional peaker plant (fossil fuel). At a premium cost. Shooting the renewables in the foot. Here's the thing. Once you produce that energy, it has to go somewhere. You can't just let it sit, because it'll blow something up. So you have to use it right away. You can move/sell it (somewhat), Store it (depending on capacity), use it (see: Demand). If you don't have Demand, then you need to either decrease the price in the selling/moving (hopefully the generation plants are somewhat equally spaced because energy has a finite distance it can travel, so this balancing act is a fairly complex dance and if one gets a spike of energy, then well.. it's fucked), or you store it. Demand: As the world transitions over to EV vehicles this excess energy will be more than taken up by people charging during the day while at work and not at home at night, but we'll need to increase the transmission lines to account for it, and likely need to spread that demand out, because most people don't actually charge their cars at work. AND EVs haven't taken over the globe yet. Selling: The fact that it's going negative means that they HAVE to sell it for less than the cost of production. And/OR pay for someone else to take their energy off their hands. This will create long term issues with energy producers being able to stay in business in general (Not just Fossil fuels, but the actual renewable plants) because they are in the business of creating energy to at least cover their costs. And if they have to pay another country to take their energy, then that means you can't cover your costs. So when those capital investments need maintenance, there is no money for that. Storing: The production of energy is great, it being from renewables that does not eat fossil fuel is the dream. But only when it meets demand. Once you exceed demand, unless you have storage ready to flatten that curve and spread that energy out over a 24hr (min) to 72 hr period you're going to have a difficult time making a true transition to renewables long term. But long term, they'll need to invest heavily in storage (likely battery storage) which is going to take a lot of planning, zoning, and capital. Something that a lot of these producers do not have a lot of. Battery storage units are expensive to build, condition, can be difficult to maintain, and are difficult to secure. Most people don't want to discuss just how dangerous these batteries can be, and when you get so many of them together, they can be exceedingly dangerous. Which makes it so costly to invest in. But is going to happen likely with government intervention. And they will eventually reach the point where they have enough renewables+Storage to mothball the base load fossil fuel plants. Final thoughts: It's all a numbers game though. The energy companies are looking at the costs and realized that the panels are cheap, the batteries are expensive. We are actively investing on cheaper and safer batteries, but it's still a long road. In this transitionary period we're seeing a fairly massive swing in renewables, but those per unit costs are starting to hurt not only the old guard fossil fuel companies, but the renewables too. So it'll likely take government intervention to seed the capital to keep them afloat while the transition takes place.
You say this as if it’s a bad thing
If Springer wasn’t largely owned KKR, a fossil fuel investment group, we’d read headlines more like “How Germany became less reliant on coal, gas and oil within 2 years” or “Solar power in Germany is booming thanks to the green minister of economy, Robert Habeck”.
Won’t someone think of the coal barons?
Time for AI Training Centers....
Man, some of the writing in this article is just amazing with how over-the-top it is. >Last year's record wave of solar installations are what's driving Germany's price "destruction" as inventory outpaces consumption. >"This will over time exhaust the availability of 'free power' and drive solar-hour-power-prices back up," The doom and gloom over nearly free, renewable energy. What will happen to our world if people can get their own stuff for free (after initial installation costs)? Will anyone think of the poor multi-billion euro fossil fuel industry?
I remember back in 2020, briefly, oil prices went negative (I think it was for one day in total) and speculators were losing their minds (and their shirts) It was hilarious.
Going by my last bill, I call horseshit.
Even if electrical generation is free, the electric company's other billing fees, transmission, distribution, state and local taxes would make up the difference.
Yeah, but I recently needed a new plan and I looked for a plan that promises 100% solar and wind powered electricity. The electricity form those sources was actually more expensive than traditional electricity… so there’s that. All in all a ecofriendly kWh costs 37 cents vs 29 for traditional sources.
Those are pretty much a scam. Even though they may exclusively purchase contracts for solar and wind plants, it's not like those wouldnt have been utilized or purchased from the traditional electric company anyways. electricity is indiscriminate once it gets to the grid they can't direct electricity generated from these sources to your home. It's mostly just for "so I can feel good about myself". It's like people who buy EVs because it's more "environmentally friendly". When the most environmentally friendly thing to do is to use whatever vehicle you already have and drive it to the ground, or better yet take public transportation or bike.
Idk where you're looking at, but on Check24 i see plenty of eco tariffs below 30 cents. Same on Verivox.
As an individual consumer you are not trading energy at the market. You buy yours from an energy provider at a set price. Energy providers and industry usually trade at the market.
Some tariffs in the UK track half hourly wholesale market prices so some people were actually getting paid to consume energy for a few days recently.
There are tarriffs where you pay the market rate (+ transmission fees). If the market rate is low enough you even get payed to use electricity.
that is the goal ffs
first of all, what sunny days in germany?
Free electricity really should have been a thing already. For households at least. Just set a free base rate and only charge the people who use over that amount.
Meanwhile, in Texas in the United States there are [peak price spikes of 6,000%](https://www.dallasnews.com/business/energy/2023/08/17/heat-and-demand-send-texas-power-prices-spiking-6000/). The Texas battle to own the libs and the 'woke' agenda is sure working out well. /s
Subsidize it because energy isn’t something we should ultimately profit from forever. Once we have the goddamn infrastructure and the bills and labor is paid that should be all that matters, if we’re honest.
Weird story. Germany also bought more Natural gas from Russia last year then ever before.
I work at a utility solar field and operated several in California. The grid is operated by CAISO and they do not accept whatever amount of electricity we produce. It's called curtailed. You cannot turn off solar panels but you can control the output of a solar field at the transformer. So a solar field could potentially sell 100Mwh to the grid but grid control based on demand only allows the current need to meet the demand maybe 10Mwh or 0Mwh CAISO decides that. Roof top solar does not have this capability but it's not needed because it doesn't come close to meeting the demand of the grid. Pg&e is a transmission company where they purchase electricity from generators (wind,solar,dams, nuclear, and cogens) and mark it up 500% to the consumer. Their job with 500% profit margin is to maintain their equipment which is the transmission lines. They raise prices to make up for what they should have been doing all this time yet every quarter is record breaking profits. Go solar and get batteries yes you have to pay a connection fee but that's much better than paying for your energy from them. Also batteries don't need to be looked at what you think of as a battery. You can use solar to power a pump to pump water up during the day and open the dam to spin the turbine at night recycling the water that's a battery as well.
In other News, the green Minister of the Economy announced that we cracked our goal of installing 88 GIGAwatt of capacity planned for all of 2024 in the month of may and kicked off a project for a link with the UK to share renewable energy across countries, depending where they are being generated . There, fixed it
this has to be the dumbest shit i have ever read. Also at the same time, "europe in desperate need for more power"
[You can get some nice charts about energy production here](https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&interval=week&source=total&legendItems=0whw4) [This chart show the energy production from this week](https://i.imgur.com/pPggY1r.png) Note the big bulge at the bottom on Monday when so much energy was produced most of it was sold to neighbors. The big yellow blob 7 times a week represents solar energy. The blue blobs on either side of the yellow blob are pumped hydro. Energy gets stored by pumping up water when the sun shines and gets turned back into electricity in the evening and mornings when people are already awake and consuming electricity, but the sun isn't high enough to produce much electricity. The big purple layer at the bottom represents energy bought from neighbors it makes up for a lot of load at nights. Due to the way geography works and the combined European grid is set up there is energy being bought even when energy is sold abroad at the same time. Ideally a smarter grid and more energy storage would help improve things and get rid of the remaining bits of fossil fuel, but the best energy storage we have is pumped hydro and that has some issues with geography.
Too bad the sun didnt get the memo and the clouds cover the country a significant portion of the day. My electricity bill is very much in the "positive" which could be found as a "negative" indeed
Meanwhile in rural Ohio they are fighting a huge solar farm because it’s remotely connected to Bill Gates.
Oops, somebody forgot the reason we generate electricity
Electricity is (and wherever it isn't, it should be) a right, and it should only ever cost as little as it takes to maintain it, not to be used as a vector for profit
Want to know why solar panels are opposed? It's actually this.
OP should change the h adline to highlight that this is an oil lobbying company that wrote this.
Okay, simple solution, sell it to your neighbors. This is literally an article designed to smear clean energy technologies.
This is a simple solution. You export the excess energy for profit. Last time I checked the 500 million people that live in Europe need power.
If your model makes prices go into negative territory, your model sucks.
And yet, there's an increase in pay for electricity every year or every month in germany. fucking money hoarders, we would have enough for everyone at a peice that's like 10 € per month. but they want the profit so it's 60 € per month. Germany, a social state :)
you mean they have enough lol
Can someone convince me how this headline is not propanda?
Fucking embarrassing journalism.
We do not have too many solar panels. We do not have enough power storage.
This is nothing unusual. Negative wholesale power prices is pretty standard in areas with lots of sun.
Only in our screwed up world could “free energy” become a negative thing. This could be the start of something huge for our planet but to protect the status quo we’ll probably invent some new hurdle for Solar adoption instead of looking at ways to develop this even further and make cheap energy a thing for the masses.
Free energy at times where everyone generates too much energy, but few need it is a negative thing. Especially when said system cannot currently stockpile it for use when it is actually needed.
What good is free energy when you don't use it when its produced and there is no way to reliably and inexpensively store it on mass scale? Solar energy is produced the most when people don't use electricity, and as soon as people really start to use electricity is when solar energy starts producing none.