Submitted 3 days ago by ArtikBanana@lemmy.dbzer0.com to technology@lemmy.world
German power prices dropped below zero on the first trading day of the year, an increasingly frequent phenomenon in Europe as renewables expand.
Intraday prices in Germany, the region’s biggest market, turned negative during four hours overnight as wind-energy output reached as much as 40 gigawatts, far outstripping demand."
Oh no, communism. 🙃
Neat. Now watch everyone collectively forget about it the very second nuclear power is brought up.
The whole point of bringing up nuclear power is that that its output is constant.
The whole point of this article is that renewable electricity production sometimes grows so much that there’s not enough storage.
Yes, you can’t just count integrated production, because without necessary storage it’s just wasted. At best.
I don’t get why it is relevant. Energy is cheap and abundant today almkst everywhere that isn’t sanctioned or a warzone.
But, but, AI!
Meaning, energy storage farms could be a business?
Only if Germany changes existing legislation on power taxation. And do check out for how much a TWh of grid scale storage goes for. Hydrogen is the only borderline cost effective solution at the scale required.
Decentralized 1-8 WH “Trade at Home” Packs would be able to buffer the civil need, even with a low adoption rate… but come on, these things would generate money by trading AND you have a nice power backup solution for your flat.
But that’s just a stupid idea… why would anyone want this. It’s not like we literally throw away LiPo Batteries after a single use (Vape).
It also happened in the UK and I suspect other European countries with significant wind generation. Is this still a rare event in Germany? 2-3 times a month isn’t uncommon here. Especially in the winter.
It’s rare in Germany since we have a quite large population and heavy industry compared to the renewables production. We had days with 100% renewable coverage in the past, but negative energy prices are still a rarity.
Article is behind pay/account wall. Cannot read.
Is that why their heavy industry collapsed? Cheap power?
The article says declining, not collapsed. The EU says it has to move quickly but with a potential shift (due to right-wing and conservative parties regaining power) from renewables to nuclear that could fail.
I mean the reason for why this happened is clear, Europe always relied on cheap Russian gas which is, at least for people who have just a sliver of humanity, a no go and there is no cheap replacement except for renewables. I guess if the Germans would have invested in renewables earlier on this whole issue would not exist.
but the BILD owned magazine so nicely spread the propaganda
DrunkenPirate@feddit.org 3 days ago
And there are 180GW battery storages planned to store this energy for the next. But guess who has to confirm the plans? The 4 almighty German power companies. And guess why it‘s just in planning phase? And who is loosing money if energy prices don’t fluctuate that intense? And who tried to slow down the renewables last decade? Same shit as petrol and gas heads did.
empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
They’ll only block it until they can be the ones to own the battery plants. There is a hell of a market incentive to be able to purchase literally free electricity ans resell it later.
zergtoshi@lemmy.world 2 days ago
180 GW is power.
If you’re talking about energy I suppose you mean 180 GWh.
DrunkenPirate@feddit.org 2 days ago
Changed it. Thx
barsoap@lemm.ee 3 days ago
They introduced some kind of caps (don’t remember the details) on negative pricing quite early on, from what I understand it would have been very lucrative in the last decade or two to get into grid-scale battery storage without those caps.
One thing I remember is Flensburg building, pretty much on a whim, a water storage tank with immersion heater, an investment that amortised within a month or two as they were literally getting money to put surplus electricity into their district heating.
There’s got to be some rules as to what you can do with electricity you by at negative prices, e.g. not just put an immersion heater in the ocean, maybe some prioritisation as to who gets the energy first just as there is on the production side (fossils have to shut down and pay if they don’t do that fast enough while renewables get to produce energy), but overall I don’t see why there should be a limit on negative prices.
leisesprecher@feddit.org 2 days ago
The thermos approach is unfortunately almost the best we currently have, because every storage solution would have to pay taxes twice, once for buying, once for selling. Not VAT, but Stromsteuer.
Also, these dips don’t occur that often, are usually not very long and it’s kind of a reverse game of chicken. The more storage we have, the less profitable each one gets. All that makes it rather unattractive to install grid scale plants.
tja@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Good thing then that Bundeskartellamt and Bundesnetzagentur are looking more closely at this now