Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid
Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid
French day-ahead power fell to -€5.76 a megawatt-hour, the lowest in four years, in an auction on Epex Spot.
This is something that has been occasionally happening in Europe (at least in Germany, don't know about France) for well over 10 years now. Probably more like 15.
What's sorely needed at this point is much more storage to make this energy available when it is needed instead of when it isn't. Before that happens, you cannot really decommission any gas or coal power plants, because you still need them during times of much less renewable production.
this is why we still need nuclear, to replace the fossil fuel baseline.
France has plenty of nuclear power.
It doesn't help with renewable peaks in the slightest.What is needed are storage solutions and flexible usage that can utilize cheap power at peak times.
You can absolutely reduce coal and gas without batteries. Hydro is a thing, nuclear also exists. Maybe it's cheaper and more environmentally-friendly to disconnect some solar and some wind from the grid during excess peak production and keep the nuclear running, than having huge storage? Also you're forgetting about the possibility for instant demand response, imagine things like AC units in summer or heaters in winter, where they could be turned on automatically during peak production to keep your house comfier for no cost.
Happens in Norway occasionally. Even hits the headlines sometimes. Then you go into the price graph to see and the price is negative for an hour or so. Rest of the day it's more expensive than it was 2 years ago before we sold our power to central Europe.
Let's
Fucking
Go
Lol get rekt fossil fuel barons
The amount of subsidies they need just to mimic a fraction of our power!
I'm a Fiscally Responsible American Republican and this is EXACTLY why we SHOULDN'T transition away from Oil! Imagine all the RESEARCH into YACHTS and MANSIONS the CEOS can't do now that prices are NEGATIVE!
Though it won't show up as negative in the bill, not even a discount
If you have a dynamic pricing contract of course you get a discount... If you don't, you chose not to in return for price stability 🤷
Though yeah, last time prices went negative in Germany I was still paying 10ct/kWh in just taxes and fees. Would be pretty cool if they'd have paid me for using electricity during that time, but of course that's not how that works.
Negative prices aren't necessarily a good thing because they tend to curb investments. A Reddit comment explains it well: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1didv4q/comment/l938q2a/
Edit---I forgot the most important bit: Obviously that doesn't mean that we should invest less in renewables, but that we should invest in large-scale battery research like yesterday.
It does here
Thats because the majority of the cost is not in the direct cost of generation but in maintaining the grid. That's a fixed expense that does not fluctuate and there is no way generation costs will offset maintenance costs.
Yet whenever prices for something go negative we're never paid for taking it off their hands.
That's cuz it's not really negative in reality. That's not how services work.
Negative prices mean the companies are paying people to burn energy because too much energy in the grid is also a problem!
It's really meant for industry because a couple households turning on their hair dryers isn't going to cut it
Lemmy and the nuclear propaganda is so funny. France recently increased the electricity prices because nuclear energy is way more expensive than solar and they will have to increase them again because half of their plants are in severe need of repair.
It's a tricky thing, but renewables and nuclear fission plants are not two mutually exclusive things that can't coexist. The issue with renewables is that, right now, they are not consistent enough to be relied upon 24/7, and we don't have, right now, a good enough storage technology to solve the issue.
Without this, the only other option is to have renewables cover 30-50% of the production capacity, and another technology to provide a base capacity when renewables cannot be used. This can be hydro, if you have it, nuclear, gas or coal. Choose your poison.
There's some promising research in using heliostats (mirrors to direct sunlight) towards a central tower to create molten salt, allowing solar energy to be stored and released at night.
The nuclear bros are carrying so much heavy water for fossil fuel capital.
it's expensive because france is skill issuing with the EPR and EPR2 reactor which are incredibly complex and technically complicated PWR plants.
Nuclear energy while traditionally expensive, is incredibly rip for government subsidies considering most of the build cost is up front construction, which can also be eased with much simpler plants (non EPR plants) And also have a skilled manufacturing base capable of actually fucking making the thing lmao.
even if fuel is cheap it's still has an upfront cost per production and can be manipulated based on demand to ensure prices never drop and always go up.
or i mean, super, nuclear is obviously what society needs, because energy supply is a natural monopoly and nuclear uses fuel you can burn based on demand and guaranteed awesome profit as a private entity unlike infinite energy resources that produces surplus energy and only benefits society and not the shareholders and owners who are the only ones who obviously matter.
Article is paywalled, but love the headline. Imagine a future with energy as an essentially free resource. We have a LONG way to go, but just the fact that we are moving in the right direction gives me a glimmer of hope for the future.
For a long time nuclear power was going to make electricity so cheap it wasn't worth billing. Turns out they were right, the reactor is just 92 million miles away
is this end consumer prices? This sounds more like we're totalling in french energy exports, (france exports a LOT of nuclear energy, as well presumably, renewable)
I'm not French nut usually the price of transmission is omitted, netting in a positive cost for end consumers. If it was really negative, there would be businesses just burning energy to make money.
Battery business should be good in the future though.
yeah, the only case where power companies would pay people to consume power would be the event that they are over producing, and have nowhere for it to go, which would be actively harmful, nuclear plants will lose money if you aren't selling energy, but it doesn't make sense to buy that energy yourself, you would just let it burn. Or maybe the government would subsidize burning it, i don't know. Generally this kind of thing happens in a really unstable electricity market. It's not that ideal.
Energy storage is going to be a huge business though, i think batteries are probably going to be common than people think, compared to things like thermal storage, though i guess it all depends on how expensive batteries are in comparison more than anything.
French government make electricity price scale on the most expansive one. So with the war in Ukraine, the price of gas plumed up, and so do every electricity bill that was never so expansive, by far.
The "liberalization of energy market" force everyone to buy electricity from courrier that don't do anything; they do not produce or invest, they just buy and sell electricity. This firms take all the money between the price and the cost. This severely threat the electricity production, that is still made by the former public firm (ex « Électricité de France » ); even if it's electricity is the cheapest, and it's the firm that invest the more in renewable energy.
yeah that sounds about right, we have a similar structure here in the US with power co-ops, and generation sellers, and then end consumers. In our local case we have generators, running through a co-op. Which is running through another co-op which is then being sold to end consumers.
Gotta love modern economics.
I wonder if people will soon realize that that rage they have for scalpers is just directed at the amateurs and that the upper class is full of people doing pretty much the same thing just in less obvious ways.
Your employer (if you work for a private for-profit company) pays you x for your labour and then takes the proceeds of the labour and sells it for y where y is (generally) much higher than x. A business is profitable when the sum of all y is higher than the sum of all x.
If it's a non-profit, then the difference between y and x must be put back into the business in some way, which could be an investment into an expansion of its scope or it could be a raise for some or all of the workers (payroll is not profit, it's an expense). And that could mean just the CEO gets a raise, because some of the leeching is via different pay levels for different people that isn't based on just the difference they are directly making to the income.
Public services can vary. If the service is profitable, then the profit goes into the budget of the government entity(s) that run it, as determined by legislature. So everyone is acting as the middleman there. If it's not profitable, then it's covered by taxes, at cost. There's still varying salaries but it's subject to government oversight, so things shouldn't get as unbalanced as they would in the private sector, at least in theory. Though even in the public sector, there's this assumption that promotions should come with big raises, regardless of how the workload changes, so you can still have people at the top making orders of magnitude more than people at the bottom.
Negative? Sounds like music to the crypto-miners. Heck, can I get paid for shorting two wires together?
Usually in addition to electricity itself you pay for using the power grid per kWh. IIRC here in Finland it's around 0.07€/kWh. At one point due to some error the price of electricity went down to like -0.20€ and we were indeed paid to use electricity. Though we paid back with more expensive electricity a while after.
^oh ^no!
Paywalled article
Short way of saying "I use the wrong browser"
You don't like Floorp?
Am I the only one that doesn't understand how something could fall into a negative price range? Like does that mean the power companies have to pay the people using power? And how is power being that cheap a problem in any way? Isn't cheap accessible power what we've been striving to achieve??
Just a note to say that this is the electricity market breaking down - don't celebrate it! France has had low-carbon energy since the 70s when they built a load of nuclear power. The have started building renewable plants rather than updating the nuclear plants. Electricity cannot be stored in the amounts that we use it. So many statistics about wind/solar quote power act like we can use it all... but an installation battery that could store a country like France's worth of energy for 12 hours (solar never works at night) would be the biggest megastructure humans have built*. During a period of high pressure a whole country might get little wind for a week. Also, check out this map if you visit regularly the low carbon energy solutions are nuclear or hydro... the only countries that reliably don't burn fossil fuels use these. [edit: clarity, *edit: Not quite-about 100mx100mx50m, approximately the same size as the Great Pyramid of Giza, but made of flammable material - I got confused with something that could provide a week or two for windless anticyclones]