German power prices dropped below zero on the first trading day of the year, an increasingly frequent phenomenon in Europe as renewables expand.
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."
And there are 180GWh battery storages planned to store this energy for the next day. 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 the petrol and gas heads did. Change can’t be stopped, so they play for time.
Edit: Some figures of public power production were published. Power was 62% out of renewables. Mainly wind power. Solar as second.
And the Carbon emissions for electricity is reduced and 50% as of 2014 (152 million tons CO2). Lot of dirty coal burning for power in the past.
Now, heating and mobility as to be transformed to electricity. Making it cheaper as well.
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.
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 paid to fuel 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.
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.
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.
We never have been 100% renewable in the UK. It's more that we go into surplus and shutting generators down is more expensive than the price going negative. Hence we won't get huge negative prices. Connectors to other countries can only export so much.
It also only happens when:
long term weather forecast underestimated weather based generation.
demand is low. (E.g. weekend and public holidays)
The population of Germany is only 25% bigger than the UK, so I think the two are comparable. A larger manufacturing base will make the demand-side curve more predictable though. Still, we're largely talking about the effect of supply unpredictability.
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.