This is a clear social good.
If it threatens economic hardship on solar power producers then it’d be extremely rational for the government to subsidize those companies.
If the problem is that energy is too cheap, then the power grid should be entirely nationalized. We don’t need to prop up their profits.
I’m all for nationalization[1] but Germany hasn’t indicated that’s a direction they’d like to go in - it’d be absolutely terrible if this clear good ended up collapsing the green energy market and forcing a nove back to fossil fuels though.
- Actually, specifically in Germany’s case, I’m not in favor of nationalization since something is seriously fucked up w.r.t. their energy policy. I don’t trust the people who just shuttered all the nuclear reactors.
It’s just a question of shifting load. As electric cars become more common you could program the residential and parking chargers to only charge when electricity is free and stuff like that.
Always interesting https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/price_spot_market/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE
In reality, this doesn’t mean that consumers are reimbursed to use electricity, as they’re not paying raw market price.
So this is literally just pure profit for the producers, and they’re still complaining
No, it’s pure profit for energy intensive industrial/commercial consumers as they get paid for using energy. The producers have to decide to either lose money by paying someone to use the energy or lose money by idling their power plants as upkeep still costs money.
No it’s not, it’s a clear loss situation for producers. The companies that sell to end users may make a bit extra, but even when they have fixed price agreements, this is calculated in to some degree.
Here (Denmark) we have variable price agreements by the hour, and most companies stopped offering fixed prices at all, after the price hikes when Russia invaded Ukraine. That was a situation where many electricity traders (middlemen) made huge profits, and the bill was handed down to consumers. Some companies expected prices to increase more than they did, so the fixed price agreements were awfully expensive, Often more than double what they should have been. They were also generally payed in advance, which caused huge bills even if you cut consumption hard.
The electricity market is an awful market, because it’s treated as if it’s a free and open market, but in reality it isn’t, because it’s tied to a lot of infra structure, and it’s also tied to a lot of long term agreements, because that’s the only way to plan infra structure properly.
More from the same author:
Starvation and malnutrition plummet as crop yields increase. Unfortunately a new industry of storing food must be created to ensure the excess is preserved for times of need.
Free time skyrockets as menial labor is offloaded onto AI and machines. Unfortunately a new self-actualization industry must be created for people to learn intellectual and creative skills they didn’t have time or money for.
Higher education rates increase as governments help fund students and enact laws to keep for-profit-education from price gouging. Unfortunately untold new industries are created as unnoticed talent is given the opportunity to cultivate it.
Germany pays Denmark money to stop creating wind energy when the prices get too low
Imagine having so much energy that you’d rather spend money not to harvest it, instead of maybe using it to make hydrogen or storing it on other ways
Hydrogen generators don’t pay for themselves if they only run now and then, that’s why nobody has built one just to use the excess energy only.
Are you sure? Maybe they dont pay for themselves as fast as investors would want? Maybe its because the market for them is not ripe yet?
A manufacturing company around here is currently building their own energy solution involving solar panels and three wind generators, iirc. They do set up a hydrogen generator because they need the hydrogen for some processes but they are not building it bigger than necessary for that, citing that using it for energy storage as well would be less cost efficient than some short term energy storage using battery buffers on site and relying on the grid for the rest.
Interesting!
I only think that this proves that its can be though. Just because batteries and the grid are cheaper for their exact needs, doesn’t prove that it’s useless. Still, it the idea of stopping the harvest of energy when it is too cheap to make money on, that is wrong. There are other methods to store electricity, like pumped storage (gravity storage), heat, compressed air, flywheel energy storage etc.
People here are getting rid of their hydrogen cars, because there are no places to refuel them. (Danish articled)
Germany has been building some really big battery installations already with a lot more to come. These things take time.
Usually investors want a business case first. Note they have free every they can sell later. Battery installations will appear.
Sounds like its time to invest in some energy storage. Batteries are one thing but at that kind of scale it’s probably better to go with momentum storage or something
Oh no! What about the executives yachts? Are they safe?
Buy more batteries?
This is why the US is working so hard to stop renewables. Rich people don’t make any money when power is free.
Sure they do all they need to do is a bit a regulatory capture and free electricity for them means more profits while you continue to pay the same or higher prices.
It sounds like some enterprising capitalist should be building out energy storage to be paid to take the surplus and sell it back when the sun’s not out.
Cheap renewable energy? This is devastating! How will we ever recover from this?
Scarcity is a requirement for capitalism.
Oh for Darwin sake! This is a distribution problem, and relates to optimising efficiency.
Sounds like Germany can start exporting said energy and make even more money. How is this a bad thing?
It’s bad because the owning class has less control.
Oh no!
Anyway…
It must be a lot of work to see everything through this lens, all the time.
If you look at the states surrounding Germany, and the inter connectors they have, you’ll understand better why this isn’t just a simple thing to do and why it doesn’t relate to income level differences.
The only region that has managed to build a perfectly integrated spot market for electricity is Scandinavia. Every time you want to enable something like this, you’re in difficult negotiation territory; politics, unions, local government, NIMBYism, technical difficulties etc play a huge part.
Fuck that title. No such thing as too many solar panels. The only thing that is bad is how the energy is used or if it’s wasted. Free energy should mean algae production which would mean carbon negativity. Negative energy price should mean negative carbon emissions, get on it.
The grid needs the supply and demand to be balanced for the power to be stable. Otherwise you get fluctuations in voltage and frequency which are both bad for anything connected to the grid.
There can absolutely be an oversupply of energy. We need to either find ways to store that surplus energy, or use it for something positive like desalination or carbon capture.
There’s been more solar and battery storage capacity installed this year+last year in USA than all prior years combined. And those investments are happening because the return of investment is huge. Those batteries are there to smooth out the supply and helps keep the grid stable.
Germany actually spends money to stop Denmark producing power on windy days when prices get too low. Instead we could be making hydrogen and storing it in so many creative ways
Its ‘free’ anyway so there should be no concern about how much of it is lost in conversion
Nothing is free. Equipment costs money and time to build, operate, maintain, and repair.
The equipment to harvest energy, is built already and is practically being held inactive, because companies can’t make money off it. If we could invest in ways to convert even some part of that excess energy into energy that could be sold later, I can’t see why this should not be feasible.
The way I see it, companies are interested in making money on energy and not supplying affordable energy
Maybe we’ll get to the point. This news just shows us, that solar power can really be very impactful, even in not-so-sunny Germany. And that we’ve reached a turning point, where we can no longer ‘just’ put up more solar panels, but also start developping systems to store this excess energy in an economically feasible manner.
But actually, that’s nothing very new either. At least for home owners, who just put solar panels on their roofs, also investing in battery storage to use most of the produced energy themselves has been the economic strategy for a few years, since the price gap between what you got for putting energy into the grid, and what you had to pay for taking energy out of the grid was the only thing left that (economically) incentivized people to install solar power ever since the so called “Einspeisevergütung” subsidies have been dropped.
I imagine solar panels and wind turbines will become a lot more expensive when batteries (and other energy storage options) become available, as they will be a lot more useful. It only makes sense to build as many as possible before the storage option become available
Free energy should mean algae production
This is a jump I’m not understanding. Do you mean that energy having no cost would mean that the electricity generated can be used to make algae? Or that it’s a byproduct of?
Do you mean that energy having no cost would mean that the electricity generated can be used to make algae?
Yes. Make algae with energy that produces no carbon dioxide = carbon sink.
There’s just no economic incentive to do so. (yet?)
The economic advantage is that our grandchildren might be able to have an economy if we don’t crash and burn this place before we die.
I agree. Unfortunately that is too abstract a factor for most peoples present investment decisions.
Exactly! Put a real price of carbon and this will start to chance.
Could you elaborate how to grow algae with electricity?
Turn excess electricity back into heat and light.
Input heat, light, water, air, and nutrients.
Output oxygen and carbon (algae biomass).
You are right, this is BS.
I recently researched this and Germany’s grid is quite “smart” (the oldest technologies involved, such as DECABIT or VERSACOM over PLC, very much predate the term “smart grid” but whatever) and power plants and households are connected for production and load control. Power plants are required to participate but households can use a load management system for water tank heating (the basic premise is that specific frequency impulses are sent over the power grid for primitive (originally relay-based!) logic in DECABIT meters to switch depending on the assigned device group, and meters count in lower-price mode while the load is activated for a guaranteed number of hours each day; you can manually override the switch for expensive on-demand water heating) and/or HVAC (here, a smart thermostat is usually used that gets real-time energy prices and decides based on its temperature range settings if it saves money to run heating/cooling).
People in Texas apparently hate this (muh freedom), and look how reliable their grid is!
Anyway, solar, unlike coal or nuclear, is absolutely capable of going off-grid if necessary. There is an MPPT system in their inverters that usually works to operate the panels at the optimal voltage & current so that it can suck the most power out of them but it can be overridden to work at below 100% efficiency, or even 0%. This will cause the panels to run with no current draw and get about 20% hotter but they are designed to withstand this. Similarly, wind turbines can be braked, water can be passed outside turbine shafts and so can pressurized steam if you really need to cut production quickly. Still, this is an emergency condition, it is preferred to use pumped hydro (responds in 1 minute, limited capacity) or batteries (respond in seconds, very limited capacity) or lower coal/gas-based production (responds in 3-20 minutes for as long as you wish) or load-side management to regulate the grid, as it wastes no power.
The system is very complex and robust, the frequency (the variable most dependent on production/load balance) only dips below 49.8 Hz about once per a few years (the emergency value that was reached in February 2021 in Texas and can only be sustained for minutes before total blackout is -1% from nominal (49.5 or 59.4, respectively) and has never been touched in Europe’s modern history).
(You’d think it would be voltage what falls in case of too little power but it can be readjusted quite easily with switched transformer taps and, oddly enough, reactive power management (connecting a few capacitor/inductor banks to mains) when necessary, however frequency control is the difficult part.)
Does that mean Germany will have the exotic negative energy that makes constructing a wormhole possible?
It’s more the negative energy of a reluctant teenager.
