Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid

https://fortune.com/2024/06/16/electricity-prices-france-negative-renewable-energy-supply-solar-power-wind-turbines/

by Capstanlqc • 2 years ago

132 178 2 years ago

bell-cot• 2 years ago

French day-ahead power fell to -€5.76 a megawatt-hour, the lowest in four years, in an auction on Epex Spot. Germany’s equivalent contract dropped to €7.64.

If true - how fast could a new transmission line from France to Germany pay for itself?

toomuchtodo4• 2 years ago

https://montelnews.com/news/e15ef79e-2905-41ca-9124-165d7469...

https://montelnews.com/news/1525872/france-to-miss-2030-inte...

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL5N0KW3WE/

ganeshkrishnan2• 2 years ago

Germany already buys electricity from France. The cost mentioned above are the subsidized charges by the EDF to the french government.

Germans would get the full cost which is much higher than the quoted price here. Besides nuclear power is not flexible enough to amp it up and down according to demand (unlike coal or petrocarbon industries).

toomuchtodo4• 2 years ago

French reactors are built to load follow [1]. It is harder on the valves, but they do it ("maneuvering capabilities"). Regardless, it would be better if they could run flat out to push out fossil generation in adjacent grids (Germany, the UK, and Northern Italy) with sufficient interconnector capacity. France also still has a bit of coal and fossil gas generation to retire [2] [3].

TLDR More interconnector capacity, battery storage, and renewables needed (my analysis).

[1] https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...

[2] https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FR?wind=false&solar=fal...

[3] https://www.euractiv.com/section/coal/news/france-extends-li...

dmurray2• 2 years ago

Let's see:

The line can't just go a few metres across the border. Let's say it connects Dortmund, in the German industrial heartland on the French side of the country, with Chooz, the site of a nuclear plant near the German border. French nuclear plants are evenly distributed around the country [0], so that should be a reasonable choice. That's 250 km.

High voltage transmission costs around €2m/km to build [1] and carries around 2 GW of power [2].

So your line costs €500m to build and makes €13 x 2000 = €26,000 an hour and pays for itself after 20,000 hours or three years.

You might reasonably say you wouldn't expect to capture all of the €13 per MWh in arbitrage profits, and perhaps this disparity was a short-lived aberration. But actually it's not: electricity futures in France are priced €25 cheaper than their equivalent contracts in Germany [3], so you could reasonably expect to capture a good portion of that - if you split the surplus between you, the consumer and the producer you can still get €9.

Of course, one problem with this free money is that your competitors are already doing it. The gap is expected to narrow over time thanks to interconnectors like this, increased generation in Germany, and French nuclear plants going out of service [3]. Still, with increasing electrification of the energy market, this kind of power transmission seems like a good business to be in and a good investment for national governments and grid operators.

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Map-of-French-nuclear-po...

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358793859_Cost_of_e...

[2] https://web.ecs.baylor.edu/faculty/grady/_13_EE392J_2_Spring...

[3] https://montelnews.com/news/e15ef79e-2905-41ca-9124-165d7469...

jandrese4• 2 years ago

In general if the incentives are already aligned to solve a problem I don't worry about the problem. It is likely to solve itself without any intervention.

kseistrup2• 2 years ago

They ought to flood something towards Denmark. Right now, in this moment, I pay roughly 0.49€ (3.66 DKK) per kWh.

Y_Y• 2 years ago

Depends on where you are! Jutland and Fyn can share via the Central European grid whereas Sjaelland is on the Nordic grid with Sweden.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta...

(There are several HVDC links between those grids, but as I understand it that adds capacitance for the purpose of pricing.)

kseistrup2• 2 years ago

Indeed. I am on the island of Bornholm, just South of Sweden. There is only one cable connecting Bornholm, and it comes from Sweden (and once every couple of year a ship is sailing with its anchor out and tears the sea cable, so powercuts are longer and more frequent here than I'd prefer, but that's a story for another time).

leobg• 2 years ago

Let’s run a crowdfunding campaign for the cable. I’m midway and will want a piece of that as well.

ganeshkrishnan2• 2 years ago

This was very surprising and positive. I had expected pain for the electricity market in France since EDF "lost" the uranium mines in Niger and replaced it by shipping uranium from canada/australia.

So it looks like solar and wind have more than compensated for the nuclear power shortages.

The olympic games will put this news to test and I guess we will find out soon if this news is indeed true.

realusername• 2 years ago

There's two years of uranium ready to use in reserve plus five years more in reserve to enrich plus all the other producers. There's never been any issue with uranium, not even remotely. I'm not even sure the Niger coup will last that long.

cyberax2• 2 years ago

This is NOT positive. Not at all. This means that the grid is filled with useless generating capacity.

As a result, nuclear power becomes less competitive. However, renewables work poorly during the winter time. In Europe, they can go down for multiple _weeks_ at a time, far beyond any storage capabilities. And the only power plants that can fill the gap are fossil fuels.

End result: more fossil generation.

yodelshady• 2 years ago

"..the grid operator to request that Electricite de France SA take several nuclear plants offline."

Could you read the article please?

The lumbering beasts, which actually do hate changing output at all, turned off before the renewables.

Secondly, another below comment already explains that no, there's not a shortage.

Thirdly, please for f*ks sake, engage your brain and think what the impact of 700 euros a month (high in 2022) to negative prices now has on industry. What the everloving ** do I charge my customers?

Maybe this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40679507

topper-1232• 2 years ago

Isolated this is a zero sum game in favor of buyers (someone has ti take the electricity), but longer term, this shows there needs to be better greater electricity storage solutions available, i.e batteries or similar.

paulsutter• 2 years ago

Negative prices make storage very practical

andrewxdiamond• 2 years ago

And de-incentivizes supply. A real solution need to be available to balance the supply and demand of power such that the rates on both ends are predictable.

A market where a good fluctuates between profitable and not is not one very attractive to investment.

Playing the video game Victoria 3 has taught me a lot about healthy markets. You have to play both sides of supply and demand to get to the prices you need

jerf• 2 years ago

Unfortunately you've got a massive term mismatch. You have negative prices today, but a lot of reason to believe that by the time you could bring your storage online the problem will already have resolved itself.

Oil briefly went negative a few years ago. If you decided to build a storage business dependent on negative oil prices for profit, you might just be coming online around now, and very much poorer than you were before. (Of course you would in fact have stopped a long time ago.)

bastawhiz2• 2 years ago

The prices being negative is literally the incentive to build storage.

netrus• 2 years ago

Just to add to that: Any fluctuation in prices works to incentivise storage, negative prices are not so special in that regard.

Negative prices allow for some weird actions to become profitable - like starting an empty washing machine, turning in the light in an empty room or needlessly heating some water tank. Basically everything we are used to think of as waste. It sounds absurd, but it's not really a big deal.

rurban• 2 years ago

And even better, the incentive to expand the grid. The market is easy to control, because the money flows via the internet. But how to transport the energy?

Without a proper grid not possible. The various countries block the expansion for political reasons. They would loose their power.

gpm2• 2 years ago

Alternatively this is an economic opportunity for any industry that can usefully make use of intermittent free* energy.

* Long term I have to imagine this is just "cheap" because there's got to be tons of industries that can use intermittent free energy.

olejorgenb• 2 years ago

Such industries need to be have low enough capital cost as well

stoperaticless2• 2 years ago

I argue that the number of such industries is and will be low.

Usually clients want consistency in the output. (they depend on the product/service)

Business owner usually wants consistency in employee/machinery output. (They cost money)

To me it seems that only low priority computation (incl. con-coins) is such industry. (Investment kind of reused, and relatively few employees)

There will be some shift to adjust to intermitency (e.g. Worker hours might be shifted to the time when solar generates the most energy to take advantage of the price)

hackerlight• 2 years ago

  "French electricity prices turned negative as a drop in demand and surging renewables output prompted some nuclear reactors to power down."

This is an issue with nuclear in a net zero scenario. Nuclear starts out at 90%+ capacity factor, like in California today. But as fossil fuels become a low percentage of the grid, you inevitably get a low capacity factor which increases LCOE. Even if you don't want any renewables and you only build nuclear, the problem is demand isn't static so you have to overbuild nuclear by a lot and run at a low capacity factor, or you build storage, either of these increases LCOE.

The sensible thing will be to use renewables on top of nuclear rather than overbuild nuclear, like what France is doing. But that will also eat into capacity factor when it's more windy and sunny like what France experiences.

Just something to keep in mind when you hear people talk about nuclear costs. Multiply it by at least 1/0.7 if they haven't taken this into account.

mjevans• 2 years ago

High level planning is important for efficiency. It'd be great to have some resources which either store power in bulk cheaply (even if not efficiently) and/or inexpensive to idle operations that can achieve public benefit for spare power.

bytesandbots• 2 years ago

The levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) is the rate of the total energy output of the energy system to build and operate it over its lifetime to the average total cost of the system over that lifetime.

cft• 2 years ago

In related news: Macron calls for new elections

D-Coder• 2 years ago

New _electrons_? Oh wait.

Aeolun• 2 years ago

If the price is -5$ in France, but still $7 in Germany, why not dump all that excess energy to Germany?

jasoncartwright• 2 years ago

Not enough interconnect capacity https://montelnews.com/news/1525872/france-to-miss-2030-inte...

philipkglass• 2 years ago

There isn't enough transmission line capacity to transfer all of it.

486sx33• 2 years ago

Not enough interconnect High loses in transmission No one needs the energy in the times it goes negative, unless you’re a 1/4 planet away Unfortunately electric cars only make the peaks and valleys more pronounced. What we need is electric cars to be required to charge the grid during high demand and only charge during very low demand. The chargers need to be smart and integrated with the grid operator

nawitus3• 2 years ago

The explanation is lack of interconnect, not losses in transmission. If you have enough capacity to transfer electricity the prices will be equal in two neighboring electricity markets.

EcommerceFlow2• 2 years ago

What I never understood was how France gets 70-75% of their electricity from Nuclear, yet their energy prices aren't "too cheap to meter", and while cheaper than their neighbors, don't really raise any eyebrows. Wouldn't this be a major example of why Nuclear is NOT the future?

robertlagrant6• 2 years ago

I'm confused. The way you've phrased this certainly doesn't sound like it couldn't be the future.

EcommerceFlow2• 2 years ago

I've heard for years that if we just had "tons" of Nuclear plants, our energy costs would essentially be too cheap to meter. Yet France is not experiencing this even at 75% Nuclear.

henearkr• 2 years ago

The determinant factor in this article is the renewable electricity sudden flow.

Nuclear fission reactors have problems in other domains like being a huge liability during a military conflict, and dependance on uranium supply from the Sahel.

gumby• 2 years ago

Indeed. The op ex of nuclear is surprisingly high (esp when compared to wind solar), then on top of that is the cost of financing the very long build.

Also, nuclear plants in France are starting to suffer from water shortages; since an overheating plant is a problem it means that they take water at the expense of other uses, which is an externality they currently don't pay for because the economics of these plants is so terrible already.

I really want to like niclear but I have never been able to see the math work (and I've been paying intermittent attention for 40 years).

givemeethekeys• 2 years ago

There's a cost associated with construction and maintenance - labor and materials aren't free.

Then, there's everything else - you'd have to look at their budget to see if the proceeds from electricity are funding other programs.

johnzim• 2 years ago

I mean.. They literally just became too cheap to meter by application of 33% more generation?

Functionally they could get there by just building a few more reactors.

more_corn• 2 years ago

The “just” word is doing a lot of work here and masking multiple billion euro investments, decades long planning and build projects, risk and opportunity cost. How about instead we “just” invest in grid scale and distributed battery storage and double down on wind and solar?

digdugdirk2• 2 years ago

Their grid was still constructed on a capitalistic model. Investment in electricity generation stations in return for payments from electricity consuming users over time. Build too much nuclear (or any other power generation) and you lower the returns of the previous investors.

The easy answer is that financiers don't want it, so it won't happen.

hn_throwaway_994• 2 years ago

Wouldn't this be a major example of why Nuclear is NOT the future?

Not at all. Nobody has really put forth "too cheap to meter" as a rationale for nuclear for 50 years or more.

The issue is that nuclear is currently the only reliable base load generation technology that doesn't produce carbon (except perhaps hydro for reasonable definitions of "reliable"). The other top technologies either produce carbon (natural gas and coal) or are unreliable (solar and wind).

I actually don't believe nuclear is "the future" because I think renewables + battery storage will be more economical going forward and less politically dicey. But France is currently the envy of the world for their energy generation save for some countries with unique environments that allow for a lot of carbon-free generation (e.g. Norway with hydro and Iceland with geothermal).

briandear• 2 years ago

Why isn’t wind and solar politically dicey? Nuclear is only politically dicey due to ignorance. I’d rather one nuclear plant than having the landscape covered with huge windmills — windmills made out of materials that aren’t recyclable. Solar is even worse. Nuclear doesn’t affect wildlife like wind and solar.

Herz7• 2 years ago

Isn't it a bit whishful thinking to think that storage will come down in price and nuclear won't?

Beyond that, leaving out storage costs, what are the technologies that can cover the world's storage? And in what quantities?

Because if I think of lithium, wouldn't it be an environmental disaster to extract and recycle all the materials involved?

In general, I don't understand why basically nuclear is to be replaced.

guerby4• 2 years ago

Note: nuclear near rivers is prone to the same "reliability" issues as hydro.

throw0101c3• 2 years ago

Not at all. Nobody has really put forth "too cheap to meter" as a rationale for nuclear for 50 years or more.

A history of the phrase, which was originally said in 1954 (seventy years ago):

Only a few days later, Strauss was a guest on Meet the Press. When the reporters asked him about the quotation and the viability of "commercial power from atomic piles," Strauss replied that he expected his children and grandchildren would have power "too cheap to be metered, just as we have water today that's too cheap to be metered."[4]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_cheap_to_meter

It was never meant to be taken as $0:

For a long time water was paid for in a flat rate, and one could certainly envisage where electricity was the same: the power company would pick some kind of median/average to charge folks.. Of course most folks have metered water/sewage nowadays, and so metered electricity is less strange.

Georgelemental• 2 years ago

(except perhaps hydro for reasonable definitions of "reliable").

And geothermal, as you mention below. But, like hydro, it only works in certain geographic areas

yongjik• 2 years ago

The nice thing about nuclear is that you can plan how much electricity you're going to generate. (Well, not counting project delays and stuff...)

Ergo, if you're using nuclear and energy became "too cheap to meter" then someone was not doing their job properly. If Tesla overestimated market demand and has to give away cars for free, would you say it means Tesla is the car of the future?

helsinkiandrew3• 2 years ago

yet their energy prices aren't "too cheap to meter"

French nuclear power is run by EDF, which although 85% owned by the French government has “a mandate to make a profit for its shareholders”

guerby4• 2 years ago

EDF is 100% owned by the french government since 20230608:

https://presse.economie.gouv.fr/08062023-letat-redevient-lac...

Retric3• 2 years ago

France is its own unique thing because of how the government paid for so many things out of pocket they ended up losing money selling at wholesale rates. Safe Nuclear ended up being a lot more expensive than earlier predictions.

It’s not some design issue that you can fix with small modular reactors or whatever. Every time anything significant goes wrong people kept adding systems to prevent it happening again. Sometimes that’s something physical like a wall or redundant system, and other times it’s longer procedures and more paperwork. This has been great for avoiding another SL-1, 3 mile island etc, but mitigating every possible risks isn’t cheap. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1

For example there was once an expensive issue where foreign material fell into the spent fuel pool where fixing it significantly extended an outage at a single reactor so now everyone working on anything at any reactor takes significant steps to mitigate that risk. Great things working as intended except now something that might have cost 100k now costs significantly more because of that mitigation effort.

Extend that to any significant issue across hundreds of reactors and 50+ years and suddenly triple checking to avoid every fuck up means doing anything is really expensive. Worse very little of it is wasted effort, there’s just far more ways to fuck up in practice than in theory.

PS: I do believe it’s possible to have safe and cheap nuclear power, it’s just going to look very different than what we’re doing today.

photochemsyn• 2 years ago

Operating costs for a coal-fired power plant, a nuclear reactor power plant, and a solar-battery power plant (requirement: steady power output 24-7) are all pretty comparable these days. Upfront constuction costs on nuclear are higher than others, so nuclear comes out near the top of the cost envelope. A lot also depends on variable costs of uranium ore and the fuel rod production process.

While a 1 GW coal plant might burn as much as 4 million tons of coal a year, a comparable nuclear power plant only consumes some 30 tons of fuels rods per year - but depending on ore quality and U-235 enrichment level, that might translate to 300,000 tons of uranium ore that needs to be mined and converted into fuel rods through an expensive multi-step process. Coal is much dirtier in terms of average daily emissions (though there's always the catastrophic failure risk with nuclear).

Solar / wind / storage operating costs are limited to maintenance and battery replacement, which can still be considerable.

gwervc• 2 years ago

Because the price of electricity is (unfairly) based on gas price by EU regulations, imposed by Germany. One of the propositions of one party running for the next election is to renegotiate this so we can use our cheap electricity as the competitive advantage it is.

jillesvangurp• 2 years ago

That's because it's a state run system and it really isn't that cheap. The nuclear operators are shielded from market rates by the government. The way that works is that they get a guaranteed price per kwh in long multi year deals, regardless of what the market does. That's actually true in most countries that operate nuclear plants. Without those guarantees, it's to risky of a thing to do financially for investors.

What they charge customers in France is also controlled by the government (and not the same thing). The difference is simply made up by tax payer money. Of course being connected to the rest of the European market and also having a lot of their own renewables, this just means that bill is getting larger and larger for the French government whenever there is a surplus of wind and solar. Which is probably happening quite often now.

Here are some details on a deal the French government struck with nuclear operator EDF recently: https://www.clearygottlieb.com/news-and-insights/publication...

It's indeed a great example why commercial nuclear plants without extensive state support is not really a thing. Most places that have nuclear plants, also feature heavy government involvement and state funding. That plant that Bill Gates is involved with that recently started construction work, only still exists because of extensive state involvement.

HarHarVeryFunny• 2 years ago

Why would any commercial energy producer, of any variety (nuclear, coal, solar, wind, etc), put money into building excess capacity to the point that the marginal profit of extra production is zero?

Krssst• 2 years ago

In countries using only intermittent renewable, we get news articles in the exceptional event that the grid did not need much fossil fuel generation for a day.

In France, we get those in the exceptional event that we need more than a little fossil generation for a day.

It's expensive, but seems to actually work at removing fossil generation from the grid almost completely.

Negative prices meant the grid is inefficient to me; that's not a good thing. When you build a factory you want it operating as much as possible, otherwise ROI falls. That's worth more than a few plants.

gwbas1c• 2 years ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20240617071413/https://fortune.co...

jnsie• 2 years ago

Potentially ignorant question. How does this impact the consumer? Do they actually get paid/credited for electricity used?

NullPrefix• 2 years ago

transmission charges still apply

gruez• 2 years ago

Consumers don't pay the market rate, because that'd expose them to price shocks (see: the griddy fiasco in texas a few years ago). They get a fixed rate from their utility.

guerby4• 2 years ago

In France consumers with below 36kVA grid connection can choose to pay state fixed prices, or they can choose various market offers, here is the official list of electricity providers:

https://www.enedis.fr/liste-des-fournisseurs-delectricite

nawitus3• 2 years ago

That depends on the consumer (and market I guess). In many countries in Europe that is an option. (Although there should be some extra fees on top).

Neil442• 2 years ago

This happens frequently in the UK too, if you have a compatible supplier you can set it up to charge your EV or some batteries during negative spikes. Ultimately if enough people were set up that way then prices would not get negative I suppose.

* https://octopus.energy/smart/agile/

risyachka• 2 years ago

I wonder how many people need to do that in order for it to become not negative.

Neil442• 2 years ago

Interesting question! Maybe someone cleverer than me can work it out :)

hn_throwaway_994• 2 years ago

That's pretty much the whole dilemma now with decarbonization. We know how to generate electricity very cheaply with solar and wind. We just don't know how to do it at the right time.

It will take a lot of investment in storage tech (beyond lots of people using their EV car batteries as time-shifting storage, though that's certainly a good use!) in order to get prices smoothed out so that electricity generated at 1PM can be used at 11PM.

manquer2• 2 years ago

It is complex, wholesale prices generally do not reflect in retail directly. even when suppliers have flexible pricing and support V2G /buying from users solar etc, there is only only some correlation not 100% pass through of rates.

There are also technical and economic reasons this may not work beyond just inelastic vendor pricing, there is cost to transmission(loss) and all the step down that has to happen before electricity is at your door, that cost will be always positive so it may not actually be net positive.

At steep enough negative pricing this could be profitable, however at that point power plants with the highest costs and easiest scale down/ shut down procedures will start acting.

Projects like the one at Dinorwig (pumped hydro-storage) are more viable solution for excess capacity.

remus• 2 years ago

Projects like the one at Dinorwig (pumped hydro-storage) are more viable solution for excess capacity.

I think this is a little simplistic. Pumped hydro is very reliant on finding suitable geography which ultimately limits the potential capacity. I think it's more likely that grids of the future will rely on a variety of storage solutions (pumped hydro, consumer EVs, grid scale batteries etc.) and smarter load-shedding rather than any single solution being dominant.

kieranmaine• 2 years ago

Octopus and OVO also offer EV tariffs where you get a cheaper kWh price if you let them control when your EV is charged. You can always override the smart charging but you pay the standard rate.

* https://octopus.energy/smart/intelligent-octopus-go/ - 7.5p per kWh

* https://www.ovoenergy.com/electric-cars/charge-anytime - 7p per kWh

guerby4• 2 years ago

All the analysis I can find talk only about the spot price being negative.

But what matters for economics is the volume exchanged at this negative price, that is if you are a buyer with infinite capacity to absorb kWh how much money you'll make yearly?

Anyone with a good URL?

ragebol2• 2 years ago

No URL, but if demand were there to take all that in, the demand would obviously go up. But there is not enough demand, so the capacity is far from infinite. The best fix for negative prices is negative prices, the demand will come.

I'm still curious about the actual MWh's traded for negative prices as well

pyrale5• 2 years ago

Afaik most of the energy is traded otc, spot markets are a tiny fraction of what gets delivered.

But that fraction is still interesting: since p=c must be respected, and there is always some small delta that is hard to predict and has to be covered. The spot price is not relevant to consumer prices, but it is relevant to the cost for energy providers to fine-tune their supply.

riffraff• 2 years ago

AFAIK this happens fairly regularly in some northern european countries (NL and DE come to mind) due to wind over-production. The sooner we get cheap grid storage, the better.

ragebol2• 2 years ago

Fairly regularly indeed. The bare EPEX spot price, before taxes etc, is on track to be at least 500 hours this year in NL. (About 300h in 2923 iirc)

MartienVisser on twitter has some great graphs about the energy market, but I'm on my phone and banned twitter from that.

jtwaleson• 2 years ago

I'm in NL and often use this website to check for day-ahead pricing: https://energie.anwb.nl/actuele-tarieven

It's very frequent indeed. I noticed that it's mostly during sunny days in late spring / summer / early fall (solar). Much more rare is randomly at night (stormy days).

Solar is still pretty small in national grid charts, but I suspect that residential solar just reduces demand from the grid and doesn't show up as production.

littlestymaar2• 2 years ago

Econ 101: with a marginal cost equal to zero, a competitive electricity market (with a price driven to marginal cost because of competition) cannot be sustainable because electricity price it cannot pay for the fixed costs.

Solution: we must stop electricity pricing based on energy produced (which made sense when using fossil fuel) and switch to a pricing mechanism where you pay for available power because that's where the marginal cost is increasing.

bryanlarsen13• 2 years ago

Many markets already do this: for example California pays generators a mixed rate per kWh and kW.

But just pricing per kWh can work. If the limit is available capacity at 6PM, then those kWh are the most profitable and capacity will be built to meet demand at 6PM.

digdugdirk2• 2 years ago

I'm intrigued. But with an electrical grid that requires a constant match between electricity generation and consumption, how would you ensure the stability of a thing when its controlling mechanism (pricing) is its own derivative?

littlestymaar2• 2 years ago

I don't understand your question. But let me clarify something the grid requires constant match between generation and consumption power to match.

pyrale5• 2 years ago

That's the goal of the capacity market.

https://energy.ec.europa.eu/topics/markets-and-consumers/cap...

helsinkiandrew3• 2 years ago

It’s only been negative for a few hours in the past year though.

https://data.nordpoolgroup.com/auction/day-ahead/prices?deli...

rig666• 2 years ago

I had a friend recently tell me about how his excess power is put back into the grid and how he hopes our area sees negative rates eventually like this.

My cynical side was quick to point out that I would fire up my crypto miners if electricity was free for a few hours a day. After talking to him more I realized we both had different take aways from the story of "the tragedy of the commons" I lightened the conversation up by informing him he could do folding from home for a few hours to make sure his excess power went to a noble cause & thwart my zero sum approach.

Damogran64• 2 years ago

My aging mind can't remember the actual facts but it was determined that when someone has significantly more power than they had a need for (say, full batteries and a whole lot of solar) that it opened up interesting behaviors. We try hard to be as efficient as possible, but when you don't have to, it leads to interesting stuff. (like leave the lights on, leave the windows open with a space heater next to you, etc.)

SoftTalker• 2 years ago

Yes, mine is when I'm at a hotel I set the AC much cooler than I would at home, and I take really long showers.

stoperaticless2• 2 years ago

Name for it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

kypro• 2 years ago

I was told that in Russia nat gas is so cheap that they keep the heating on 24/7 and will often just open windows to regulate temperature. No idea how true this is and whether it just applies to offices / apartment complexes but this is what I was told.

djmips• 2 years ago

Is Folding a good use of computing resources and power? Do they have any wins?

kelnos3• 2 years ago

I would fire up my crypto miners if electricity was free for a few hours a day

I dunno, if electricity was free only for a few hours, I would use it to charge batteries, and then use that stored electricity later in the day when it's not free.

If electricity was free most or all of the time, and/or if I could store more than I could use, then sure, I'd probably use it for unnecessary things that some might consider wasteful (not crypto mining; I'm allergic).

jimbobthrowawy• 2 years ago

If the price swings were frequent and steep enough, you could probably have your batteries send power back to the grid when the price gets high.

I doubt the economics work, but I'd love to live in a world where a lot of the grid's battery storage is based on backup batteries people have at their houses with the added bonus of reducing their billing costs.

countvonbalzac• 2 years ago

Is folding at home still relevant after alpha fold?

gfarah• 2 years ago

Is excess renewable energy being used anywhere for direct air capture of carbon? My hope is that as more countries produce surplus energy, we will massively scale up direct air capture to help address our climate emergency.

chickenbig2• 2 years ago

Day ahead prices turning negative does not mean the wind and solar generators make a loss for every kWh they sell; they still receive country specific subsidies (production tax credits, feed-in-tariffs, contract for difference, renewables obligations ... and let's not forget about investment subsidies which helped to get the plant built) which make it worth their while to keep the blades spinning and the solar inverters humming. Otherwise what is the argument for subject your equipment to wear-and-tear and then paying for someone to take your product?

In addition there are more general system costs (the need for capacity payments to ensure electricity can be generated at peak times, as well as maintaining plants in reserve in case the weather isn't what was forecast the day ahead).

By this line of argument, negative prices on sunny/windy days increase the price of electricity to the consumer, since all of these subsidies need to be recouped (either by the tax or energy systems).

flakeoil• 2 years ago

It's hard to draw a link between negative prices and increased subsidies in most cases. The subsidies can be recouped during the no-negative periods. In addition, subsidies are not needed anymore to make wind and solar cost competitive. And with increased use of electric cars (and battery storage in general) we will see increased usage of this negative pricing to charge them so the negative price will diminish or go away.

Don't forget that we still produce most of our energy from coal, oil and gas. Most of that needs and will be replaced by electricity so there is a huge need for more electricity.

chickenbig2• 2 years ago

subsidies are not needed anymore to make wind and solar cost competitive

See https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/api/files/docume... where the European Commission approved the plan for the French state to give aid to push renewable deployment in France.

I google translated section 2.2 (paragraph 9) of the ruling document

... As such, the French authorities consider that there are “positive external effects” linked to the development of renewable electrical energies, in particular the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector and the benefits in terms of robustness of the electricity sector. electricity supply linked to a more diversified electricity mix. These external effects are positive for the community but cannot be “monetized” by the investor. The French authorities consider that public support is necessary to have an investment in renewable energies that meets the expected collective benefits.

I would have expected inflation and interest rate changes to have negatively affected the viability of renewables. That is certainly the case for offshore wind in the UK (AR5 failed to produce any bids, AR6 has 66% higher maximum bid).

rsynnott2• 2 years ago

Finally, energy too cheap to meter.

Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid

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