Yesterday the price of electricity in Finland was negative 1.5 cents / kWh
Yesterday the price of electricity in Finland was negative 1.5 cents / kWh
It's still not earning you money to spend electricity because you still have to pay the transfer fee which is around 6 cents / kWh but it's pretty damn cheap nevertheless, mostly because of the excess in wind energy.
Last winter because of a mistake it dropped down to negative 50 cents / kWh for few hours, averaging negative 20 cents for the entire day. People were literally earning money by spending electricity. Some were running electric heaters outside in the middle of the winter.
Renewables dipped below $0 for us in California too this year. Fortunately for the utilities, those savings don't get passed along to customers and I still paid $0.53 kW/h. /s
Lucky you.
Why /s there?
Also fuck PG&E. Fuck that company. Assholes.
A lot of that is the cost of transmission, which PG&E charges us out the ass for
Why does it feel like every Nordic country is much better then Sweden these days.
We each have our problems but I have to admit that I haven't heard many positive news coming from there recently.
The energy prices in Sweden were also mostly negative yesterday, and today as well. Although probably not quite as much as in Finland.
UK too.
Currently it's gone back up to 7p (about half to normal price), but the solar has kicked in and I'm supplying power to the grid anyway.
Because Sweden wants to be Nordic America these days.
And the current right wing government is looking closely at US republicans in particular
Eeh? The price dipped to -70 öre in southern sweden today.. And you should probably not use negative prices as a messurement of success anyways. :)
Because we have been riding high on believing that our infrastructure is the best in the world.
Try Norway. Our electric companies were sold to private investors who sold our electricity to the EU, and then they sold too much so they had to buy it back at exorbitant prices and the public is footing the bill for their dumbassery.
It's not as bad as it was a year ago but it's still about 15 times more expensive than it was just 4 years ago.
People were literally earning money by spending electricity. Some were running electric heaters outside in the middle of the winter.
Resistive load. Gotta dump excess energy somewhere.
My electric company here in the us mines bitcoin with it and charges us a "peak time incentive" pricing model.
Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to be born somewhere like Finland.
This is not a good thing. Any time generation has to pay to produce, solar and wind rollouts are slowed.
We need better demand shaping methods, to increase load on grids during periods of excess production, and decrease loads during shortages. We need to stabilize rates at profitable points to maintain growth of green energy projects.
We also need long-term grid storage methods, to reduce seasonal variation. A given solar project will produce more than twice as much power during a long summer day as it will during a short winter day. If we build enough solar to meet our needs during October and March, we will have shortages in November, January, February, and surpluses from April through September. We will need some sort of thermal production capability anyway; hydrogen electrolysis or Fischer-Tropsch synfuel production can soak up that surplus generation capacity and produce green, carbon-free or carbon-neutral, storable fuels for thermal generation and/or the transportation sector.
Negative pricing IS a demand shaping method, you need to have a certain % of the electricity produced that is consumed at the same time, otherwise you risk having an unstable electricity grid.
Or just export it - there must be nearby counties that don't have such a good renewable electric situation.
"just export it" sounds so simple, but the required infrastructure is actually incredibly expensive. Also most of Europe is already pretty tightly connected and trade does happen to a significant degree, but I have no idea what the actual percentage is or if it's used to balance oversupply and/or shortages. Kinda hard to find reliable sources for that.
Or water batteries for dams if your neighbors don't need your surplus, this way you don't need to extract lithium to produce regular batteries to store the surplus
https://www.science.org/content/article/how-giant-water-batteries-could-make-green-power-reliable
When I was growing up, my parents house had thermal storage electrical heating. Generally the heat was only “on” at night when electricity was cheap, then we’d control the temperature during the day with circulation fans. I remember it working really well while saving a ton of money.
Where is the thermal storage heating now? I specifically could use a mini-split heat pump, where the head unit is thermal storage, but I don’t see any such thing online
Generally the heat was only “on” at night when electricity was cheap
That is exactly why rates are going negative during the day now. Baseload generation benefits from artificial increases in the base, off-peak load. With solar and wind generation increasing, we now have a need to reduce that base, overnight load, and increase peak, daytime load.
thermal storage is kind of complicated and sucks a little bit, probably.
You can still do the heating thing, using your home as a thermal battery for example. You could also put a large thermal mass within your home, thousands of gallons of water (for example) directly integrating a thermal battery and optimally using it probably just isn't as viable as not worrying about it and doing something else.
Thermal storage needs to be quite large though, at least with the stone/brick like mass they used back then. And you need to isolate it, otherwise you have no control over the release of that stored heat. I wonder if new materials, maybe something that undergoes phase change in that temperature range, could be a lot more space efficient.
or you know, we could subsidize spending some of this excess power on something like "folding at home" except its actually in a government datacenter subsidizing power production peaking.
Although that's like, really boring.
In a region like Finland, sand batteries appear to be worthwhile for seasonal storage. Might be an avenue to pursue
Then there's always green hydrogen as well
Meanwhile in the USA the electric companies will mine BTC, and charge consumers more wherever they can. They will even sue people for going solar for "losing out on profits".
Luckily my energy company found a way around all of this to always charge more! We have "Basic Customer Charge", "Summary of Rider Adjustments", "Renewable Energy Rider", and then Sales Tax on all of it. My base charge is over 100$ before they start calculating your actually energy usage. Yay electrical monopolies!
Following the massive rate spikes during the Texas ice storms which were somehow legal, we get a couple hundred dollars added to our bill ever month for like a century. Even if you have solar and have net-negative electricity use you have to pay the fee for being connected to the grid.
And you have to be connected to the grid to have a certificate of occupancy. Otherwise we'd just have solar and a backup generator.
Such good freedom though
It might be cheap now, but I'm fearing the December - February i.e. the coldest part of the year when the price can get salty. Especially when/if the OL3 (or any other) plant trips offline, the price will bump up a lot.
The good part of having excess eletricity is that doing a "electric-kettle" district heating becomes feasible. So instead of reducing the (windmill) production, it makes sense to dump the excess generation capacity into district-heating. (which has large capacity to store the heat)
This will hopefully lead to storage methods, maybe exportable ones like hydrogen
Hydrogen is not good for energy storage. Round trip efficiency is abysmal and its incredibly difficult to store in the first place
Of course not, hydrogen is pathetic compared to batteries and similar stored mass energy solutions, but hydrogen does have its place, the future should be a mixture of different solutions because many methods have their advantages and disadvantages, but having a mixture means we can apply the best solution to the viable problems. Let's take transportation, you have a truck that earns money by travelling. If we want to transition away from fossil fuel, hydrogen makes sense over batteries that takes an hour to multiple hours to charge and the weight of the batteries reduce the overall payload of the truck.
You just sent me down a rabbit hole, I had heard of electrolysis but didn't realize that it was able to store energy on a large scale. Seems like a waste of water though.
Splitting water and keeping the H2 converts the energy into chemical energy. The oxygen is just dumped into the atmosphere, which is a loss of efficiency I think? What I know, H2 is the highest form of chemical energy there is.
Some processes require burning, or cannot be electrified otherwise. It's these where the hydrogen is needed directly. I think hydrogen is a source material that should be mostly be converted into other chemicals. Etc. methanol and ammonia are more easily storable, unlike diatomic hydrogen which can slowly diffuse through a metal wall, enbrittleling it. Clean ammonia production could replace a giant mass of fossil fuels.
Here is an another rabbit hole: most of your body's nitrogen is from ammonia and the fertilizers made from it.
Does it ever make you want to turn on every appliance in the house just for the hell of it? Lol
No, since we pay a flat transfer rate on top of that, about 2-6 cents per kWh depending on the area.
Of course, that doesn't stop idiots from turning on all their stoves during these times anyway.
It's pretty common in the UK to get proper negative prices so it actually pays me to charge my car and run my AC. Octopus Agile tariff for example.
If I had to guess, it's a temporary influx of "renewable" energy ( read solar nuclear energy as pretty much everything on earth including coal / water and so on ). You can't copy this into other countries. Both Scandinavian and alpine countries have abundance of water and wind energy
You can absolutely copy this. Just build solar where there's no wind.
You can’t copy this into other countries.
I'm currently paying $.20/kWh on a Texas grid that is heavily based on natural gas, despite being ripe for a solar/wind boom.
If you could cut my bill in half, particularly during the summer when my AC usage explodes, that would be much appreciated.
Yes, solar energy is tempting but the "advertised prices" and "cost savings" are mostly overstretched. Right now a lot of "renewable energy" sources are subsidized in Europe for only political reasons. Subsidies for solar installations are now gone but still you don't have to have costs of utilization. You will have them in 15 - 25 years for sure and then you will be able to make a proper assessment. Regarding Texas, I think solar energy could be profitable but for sure in Alaska it won't be. Still you need to do correct calculations and check what's the outcome of that installation would be. EU "green energy" savings analysis is just misleading. Germany, the main political proponent of the green deal is the best case for this. Energy prices are only going up and up after ditching atom energy. Russian "green" gas won't save them
It's simply supply exceeding demand. Finland has so much wind turbines that when it's summer time (no need for heating) and windy then the price drops to zero but then again in the winter time when it's cold and calm the opposite is true and we can see insane spikes in the price.
So only energy losses in theory
Welcome to the world of renewables. We have quite some negative hours in Germany in summer when sun and wind are active simultaneously. Unfortunately Finland relies on nuclear, does it?
What's wrong with nuclear?
People still buying into oil company FUD from the 70s
It's a poor solution for what people like to call "baseline power".
The argument goes: solar and wind don't provide consistent power, so there has to be some power generation that doesn't fluctuate so we always have X amount of power to make up for when solar/wind don't suffice. Nuclear is consistent and high-output, so it's perfect for this.
Unfortunately, reality is a little different. First problem is that solar/wind at scale don't fluctuate as much. The sun always shines somewhere, and the wind always blows somewhere. You have to aggregate a large area together, but that already exists with the European energy market.
Second issue is that solar/wind at scale regularly (or will regularly) produce more than 100% of the demand. This gives you two options: either spend the excess energy, or stop generating so much of it. Spending the excess requires negative energy prices so people will use it, causing profitability issues for large power plants. As nuclear is one of the most expensive sources of energy, this requires hefty subsidies which need to be paid for by taxpayers. The alternative is shutting the power plant down, but nuclear plants in particular aren't able to quickly shut off and on on demand. And as long as they're not turned on they're losing money, again requiring hefty subsidies. You could try turning off renewable power generation, but that just causes energy prices to rise due to a forced market intervention. Basically, unless your baseline power generator is able to switch off and on easily and can economically survive a bit of downtime, it's not very viable.
Nuclear is safe. It produces a lot of power, the waste problem is perfectly manageable and the tech has that cool-factor. But with the rapid rise of solar and wind, which are becoming cheaper every day, it's economic viability is under strong pressure. It just costs too much, and all that money could have been spent investing into clean and above all cheap energy instead. I used to be pro-nuclear, but after seeing the actual cost calculations for these things I think it's not worth doing at the moment.
As for what I think a good baseline power source would be: I think we have to settle for (bio-)gas. It's super quick to turn off and on and still fairly cheap. And certainly not as polluting as coal. We keep the gas generators open until we have enough solar/wind/battery/hydrogen going, as backup. If nuclear gets some kind of breakthrough that allows them to be cheaper then great! Until then we should use the better solutions we have available right now (and no, SMRs are not the breakthrough you might think it is. They're still massively more expensive than the alternatives and so far have not really managed to reduce either costs or buils times by any significant margin).
Maybe fusion in the future manages to be economically viable. Fingers crossed!
Unfortunately Finland relies on nuclear, does it?
Yeah we though relying on Russian natural gas might pose some issues in the future so we went with nuclear instead. I hope we build more of it.
I know nuclear isn't ideal but to rule it out completely while the alternative for stable baseline power is still coal and gas seems problematic to me
Shutting down their nuclear power plants is probably the worst thing the Germans have done.
Well maybe the second worst thing
Might want to think about this for a bit longer.
And when the sun and wind aren't active?
People will point to a few hours of negative energy prices as if it's a triumph, but it just proves that there's still nowhere near enough storage for renewables to provide baseline power.
They are not the only forms of electricity generation.
And when the sun and wind aren't active?
That is a serious issue. Under the hood the power grid is being reengineered to solve it. Lot of battery storages, pump lakes, and may be hydrogen conversion. Still this is an open issue. I love to follow the discussion in blogs and podcasts.
for renewables to provide baseline power.
I think what people always forget is, that water energy exists. It is a form of renewable energy that has the potential to provide baseline power, since it isn't that dependent on short term weather. I think in Spain they have a water power plant that produces as much energy as several nuclear power plants together.
A negative price is absurd and has no physical reality, it is the result of speculation and abstract rules not grounded on reality. It always costs to build and operate whatever power source and networks were involved, you don't have to pay electricity to f*ck off if you produce too much of it.
The issue is baseload generation like nuclear: we can't switch it on and off quickly; we can't ramp it up or down fast enough to match actual demand. There are times where we have to keep it online during a surplus, when we know that surplus will drop off and leave us with a shortage.
Combine that with variations between forecasted and actual weather conditions affecting solar and wind production, and yes, we will occasionally have surplus power to deal with.
The long-term solution is better demand shaping methods, to make use of any amount of power in excess of normal consumption. But until we have the ability to switch on loads and suck up such excesses, we are going to have this problem from time to time.
No, it does have a reality. The problem is that an electricity grid can collapse, due to too much electricity. However some power plants can not be easily shut down. Nuclear for example can be throttled to about 50%, but shutting it down requires a restart, which takes a day. So loosing a little money for a few hours can be cheaper then a full shut down. There are other effects, like district heating power plants, which are needed to provide heat, hydro power, which has too much water in the reservoir and waste power plants, which have to burn the waste at some point.
Then you got to keep in mind that Finland is fairly is a country with a small population, which is rather isolated. They cut the power lines to Russia and Sweden and the Baltic countries are also low population and especially Sweden also has a lot of low carbon electricity. So export is not an easy option.
Sure, but if there is too much electricity on the net, things will start to break. That electricity has to go somewhere. No one wants to buy electricity because everyone is trying to get rid of their surplus.
About the negative, I don't know.
you don't have to pay electricity to f*ck off if you produce too much of it.
It's not any different than most physical goods. Whatever you can't sell before it goes bad, you have to pay someone to take off your hands using real resources (dumpsters, trucks, human labor).
Too much electricity in the system is harmful, and if nobody wants to buy it, then you have to pay someone to take it out of the system.