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Nuclear can demand a higher price because of its relaibility.
No they can't.

Energy is traded at the https://www.eex.com/en/ It is not traded by "reliability".

E.g. you want to buy "a band" of 2MW of electricity today, delivered tomorrow between 12:00 till 18:00 (hint: that are 6h * 2MW aka 12MWh)

Now you can make a wild guess from what plant the power will come if you have an idea about your counterpart. However in general you have no clue who is delivering the power.

And the more you are approaching peak hours or more precisely, hours were power demand is raising rapidly: the less a nuke can earn, because it is already running at max capacity, minus a few percent.

I'm so tired to repeat to idiots like you always the same truth abut electric power production.

If there is a power surge: nukes are maxed out. Coal or gas can increase but has costs. Solar and or wind might have a surplus and can deliver, at no cost. So: solar and wind win at the stock market. Always.

Keep in mind Germany is exporting nearly 30% of its production (we have overcapacity of 50%)

The only way to integrate a new nuke hypothetically into the german grid would be to make it as quickly load following as a modern coal plant. However some of the "new coal plants" build during the last 10 years, or planned to be build are already switched off again or construction is canceled: because wind and solar is cheaper.

In ten years all nukes will be replaced mainly by wind. And in 30 years the coal plants will be gone, too.

Then we can look back and see which country had the more sound approach.

It is actually called European Energy eXchange: https://www.eex.com/en#/en

Everybody who is interested in stuff like this and has the hardware (smartmeters?) knows that the price is negative: http://eex.com/
Companies interested are:
o other power companies, that buy it and distribute it over europe
o companies like aluminium mills
o or cooled storage houses
etc.

Ofc. unless you have a smartmeter normal households can not participate

If this were actually the case, the utility would pay you to use electricity.
That is actually what the "utilities" are doing.
http://www.eex.com/

It's designed by very very smart people, believe me. In reality, it's struggling to maintain frequency and voltage stability because control capacity is almost tapped out.

You are an idiot.

I suggest to check https://www.eex.com/en/ to see what primary reserves and secondary reserve power prices are.

Germanies grid has absolutely no problems to maintain frequency, WTF ... how dumb are you or who is paying you for spreading such bollocks?

Yes, they are hastily expanding.
No we aren't.

Do they share solar power across their borders?
Na, that is physicaly impossible.

We sell the (solar) power at the spot market in Leipzig. https://www.eex.com/en#/en

How the power reaches the consumer/buyer is a myracle, though. I believe we started that with some discoveries "J. K. Rowling" made. She is now a billionaire due to that.

Making every country solve this problem independently withing its own bordered seems like a poor approach.

Yeah, pretty sad! Isn't it? Luckily India is just one single country.

"What that means is that if most people had solar panels, from 10:00-2:00 they could generate as much power as they use the rest of the day. Their electric bill under net metering would be zero. However, the power company still has to provide power to them the other 20 hours per day - for free. See how that could be a problem for the utility, having to provide power for everyone, but nobody has to pay for it?"

well, your post was fairly good, except the part about 4 hours a day. from my link set the day to the 28th of September 2014, starting at 8:30 am decent thousands of megawatts, by 11:30am power is nearing it's peak for the day which levels off until about 2:30 pm and doesn't fall to the thousand megawatt until 5pm. and please realize this is solar generation in germany, a fairly far north country anything that works at germany's elevation is going to work even better in further south regions. so really you get 25% or better of power generation for six hours a day not four hours, and you get a trickle of power for 12-13 hours a day, if you call 100 megawatts 'trickle' 2.5% or better of peak capacity.

http://www.transparency.eex.com/en/Statutory%20Publication%20Requirements%20of%20the%20Transmission%20System%20Operators/Power%20generation/Actual%20solar%20power%20generation

There are 2 effects at work here: first, this is *aggregated* solar power output for the whole of Germany, meaning you start generating electricity when the sun comes up in Görlitz in the East (longitude 15 East) and you finish generating when sun sets in Aachen in the West (longitude 6 East). That's 9 of travel and with 15 / hour earth rotation speed that translates to (9 / 15) * 60 minutes = 36 minutes extra time due to the geographical extent of the entire country. Of course, you need to subtract this time for a single house, since it's essentially a single point on the earth compared to an entire country.

Secondly, since Germany is at a higher latitude, the variance of insolation over the course of the day will be lower than in equatorial latitudes, so your insolation curve will be flatter.

"What that means is that if most people had solar panels, from 10:00-2:00 they could generate as much power as they use the rest of the day. Their electric bill under net metering would be zero. However, the power company still has to provide power to them the other 20 hours per day - for free. See how that could be a problem for the utility, having to provide power for everyone, but nobody has to pay for it?"

well, your post was fairly good, except the part about 4 hours a day. from my link set the day to the 28th of September 2014, starting at 8:30 am decent thousands of megawatts, by 11:30am power is nearing it's peak for the day which levels off until about 2:30 pm and doesn't fall to the thousand megawatt until 5pm. and please realize this is solar generation in germany, a fairly far north country anything that works at germany's elevation is going to work even better in further south regions. so really you get 25% or better of power generation for six hours a day not four hours, and you get a trickle of power for 12-13 hours a day, if you call 100 megawatts 'trickle' 2.5% or better of peak capacity.

http://www.transparency.eex.com/en/Statutory%20Publication%20Requirements%20of%20the%20Transmission%20System%20Operators/Power%20generation/Actual%20solar%20power%20generation

So this Fox News story was idiotic. Solar only works in Germany because it is heavily subsidized. German consumers pay a great deal more for electricity than they would without the solar subsidies. Solar will always be expensive until you figure out a way to create a much less expensive solar infrastructure, such as nano-tech based solar that you paint on a road or a roof. You have to maintain solar arrays and the low power density means large areas are needed for solar capture, and the sun does not shine at night, so you have to solve the energy storage problem too.

Solar used to only work in Germany because of the subsidies. At this point, solar is Germany is much cheaper than retail electricity. As far as German's paying much more for electricity because of solar, that's not really so clear either. If you look here:

http://www.transparency.eex.com/en/

    you can see where Germany's power is coming from at any given time. Solar is doing an incredible job of peak shaving, which lowers the cost of electricity. The accounting problem then becomes that people know how much the solar subsidy costs, but don't know how much lower the cost of all the other power is because of solar.

    You mention solving the storage problem, and the Germans are working on that as well:

http://bosch-solar-storage.com/

    Best estimate I've seen is that solar+storage for an average retail German customer will be cheaper than grid power sometime next year.

    Even if none of this is cheap enough for you, just wait a bit. Solar is getting around 7-8% cheaper every year. Best estimate I've seen for the USA is that between 1/3's and 2/3's of American's will be able to save money by 2020 with unsubsidized solar power. A great tool to play around with and see this is here:

http://www.ilsr.org/projects/solarparitymap/

By the way did you notice that the efficiency of the two existing compressed air plants are 42 and 54%. That would mean that the daytime rate would have to be about twice the night time rate to break even.

Yesterday, one MWh of electricity at the European Energy Exchange (EEX) cost 25€ at 5am, but 53€ at 8pm. That's even more than a factor of two.

There's a lot of talk about wind energy in Germany, but in truth most of our energy stems from coal and natural gas plants. And that's not going to change in the foreseeable future. Check out the up-to-date statistics on power production in Germany that eex provides.

Actually, you are mostly wrong:

- it does replace power sources (have a look at -> http://www.transparency.eex.com/en/ - seems atm not to be working for actual production)
in that case wind is replaced by solar, as wind replaces, solar the other time of the year,
(when the sun is not shining in summer you mostly have higher wind speeds)

- peak demand occurs while daytime
peak production occurs while daytime

- your "mostly" and mine "mostly" because, yes to match situations which out of the unpredicted range (plant goes dark or else)
you need stored energy to "replace"

- "hydrogen is not an energy source"
hydrogen today is an energy source because +95% is cracked out of natural gas, but it is the target to use hydrogen as a storage media.

There is still a lot of desert we could place photovoltaics in. The main reason this is not done big time yet is that fossil energy is so cheap. Looking at the EEX (http://www.eex.com/de/) right now, the average price is around 5 Euro-cents per kWh.

Renewables have a long way to go before they can compete with that. But compared to the prices the end user pays (typically 20-25 cents/kWh in Germany), photovoltaics are getting close and wind power is already cheaper. So I think our civilisation could survive on that, if we develop less wasteful habits in using energy and raw materials.

Do you have a handy chart of wind-by-month in the UK? In Denmark, which is quite close, the wind turbines produce a quite a bit more power in winter than in summer.

Of course right now anyone who can produce energy in Northern Europe can make a good deal of money. The hydro reservoirs in Scandinavia ran almost empty this spring, Swedish nuclear power is still not at full output, Germany has shut down a lot of nuclear capacity, power lines are straining to deal with the demand... At least the spring flood came early and seems to be very generous this year, we just need bigger lines to Norway and Sweden.

See Nordpoolspot for the Scandinavian view. There is also EEX for the view a bit further south, sadly without the pretty maps. For extra prettiness there is the Danish grid which unfortunately eats 100% CPU with flash.