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Germany Had So Much Renewable Energy That It Had To Pay People To Use Electricity (qz.com)
Quartz reports Germany produced so much renewable energy on Sunday, May 8, that commercial customers were being paid to consume electricity: "Thanks to a sunny and windy day, at one point around 1pm the country's solar, wind, hydro and biomass plants were supplying about 55 GW of the 63 GW being consumed, or 87%. Power prices actually went negative for several hours, meaning commercial customers were being paid to consume electricity." Many critics have argued that renewable energy will always have only a niche role in supplying power to consumers, given its daily peaks and troughs. With that said, Germany plans to hit 100% renewable energy by 2050. Denmark, for example, has already generated more electricity than the country consumes from its wind turbines. It now exports the surplus energy to Germany, Norway and Sweden.
Where else do you get that kind of service?
I'm sure the devil (misrepresentations) is in the details.
In the UK, since the power generation was split up, there have been occasions when generators have bid negative prices to supply electricity into the grid. These were companies operating fossil-fueled generators at times when demand was low (middle of the night).
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Outside of pumping water to heights or using conventtional battery storage, there are NEW IDEAS emerging all the time.
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Id be concerned if they didn't have spare capacity during what looks like the lowest demand scenario short of a zombie apocalypse. The real issue is, how to they cope on a very cold, overcast, windless day when industrial and domestic demand is at it's highest? Also, don't they have a means of distributing power throughout the entire EU, geographically large single countries do this.
But that was with dirty fossil fuel. I only use electrons from clean sources. I use a sieve to filter out the fossil fuel derived electrons.
This is how it's supposed to work. Renewables are often less predictable. So have a realtime bidding service, and when it's "negative" use as much as you can to charge batteries, then when the number is positive again, get paid to push electricity back into the grid. This will subsidize people buying batteries, which will smooth out the distribution of less predictable power sources. It's working as designed, just without batteries in place, yet. Charge your car at cheap times, and feed the grid at expensive times (from car or home). Win for all, and great for the environment.
Learn to love Alaska
It certainly is, if you look at the graph in the article you will easily see that there wasnt a particularly high amount of renewable energy being generated - this price
jump looks far more like someones pricing algorithm glitching than any actual market movement - there is little difference in the previous and subsequent pattern,
and the price certainly did not jump there. I would make an educated guess looking at the graphs that someone had a shutdown delay on a system and that may
have glitched the market a touch, causing a reaction in the algorithmic pricing models.
Yet another case of sensational headlines trying to sell a non-story.
The headline really should read 'German spot-price for energy collapses for no obvious reason, another algorithmic realtime pricing glitch?' or similar.
But you have to bait the clicks somehow apparently, so much for journalistic standards..
This is a problem, not a good thing. Wind and solar production should have been throttled to prevent dumping more power on the grid than demanded rather than paying companies to burn off the energy.
The only way renewables work is if the power is used locally to reduce/level demand or as preferred peaking generation (with sufficient idle nat-gas backups to cover the worst peak). The only time prices should go negative is in the rare occasion that the demand dips below the base (nuclear/hydro/coal) generation. And in that case, wind and solar shouldn't be putting any power into the grid.
Knowledge Brings Fear
This is just another illustration that the people who claim that renewable energy can never supply nearly all of our energy needs are wrong. It's mostly just a matter of building out the infrastructure which takes time. Our current power system wasn't built overnight either.
I'm waiting until there's so much oil being produced that they pay me to accept a barrel or two.
won't allow us to have negative power bills in this country.
it does come at a price to have that much renewable energy. We have among the highest prices in the world for electricity in Denmark. 75% of the price are taxes. Now they are talking about lowering the price by 10% by cutting some of those "green" taxes. But since the money has to come from somewhere, they are just putting that on income taxes instead.
Local businesses are happy because they don't get to pay anymore, consumers are happy because that are too stupid to have listened to the part that their income tax are going up, they just say "oh great lower price for electricity".
Having enough energy on a nice Sunday in the spring that was ideal for generation means nothing. What matters is on weekdays in the winter or during a heat wave in the summer. Throw in typical Northern European clouds and no wind and you're in a mess.
Electricity isn't something modern societies can do without.
You don't use electrons, you use an electric field. And electrons move very (very) slowly through a wire. I don't remember numbers, bu think it's on the order of cm/min. Not only that, but all the electrons you get, you give back again (if using alternating current).
Adding a generator to the grid keeps the field propped up (measured in volts).
I mean here it is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... It grew fast but now it's stuck at about 6%. I can't remember what they were saying would be the percentile but I don't think it was 6%.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
if they could just figure out how to harness and convert all those negative ions in washington, d.c.
We certainly wouldn't have that here, if they were producing more power than what was being used they would put the price up because we weren't using enough of it.
Paying people to use power I'm sure a few fat rich bastards will have chocked when they read that.
biomass plants Those plants are 'dispatch able' just like any other conventional plants.
Power prices actually went negative for several hours, meaning commercial customers were being paid to consume electricity.
That means basically only other power companies and not "random commercial customers". Considering that that happened on a sunday it is not as spectacularly as it seems.
On a sunday you have e.g. only a little bit more than 50% load of e.g. a mid week day peak load.
If prices go negative usually another power company is "buying" the power to fill up pumped storages. During weekdays however also steel or aluminium recycling plants are on standby to wait for such opportunities.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Oh whew. Thanks for explaining it.
It doesn't often go negative, but it regularly drops to low rates at peak solar times. So long as someone can buy low and sell high, there's a profit to be made. If that's enough to cover costs, including capital, there's a business opportunity.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
So, with a capacity factor of ~20% that means that the wind farms are a feel good effort to green wash the natural gas peaker plants and the 45% coal base production spewing carbon and radioactive waste into the atmosphere that actually provides the vast majority of the energy.
Two decades of aggressive government programs to install solar and wind and the carbon reductions are hardly noticeable. I suspect if the idiots screaming renewables woke up and realized that their solution isn't solving anything and supported nukes as well as renewable, we could actually solve the global climate change problem before it destroys us.
But you know. They pay other provinces and countries to take our power. And jack the customers prices to the highest in north america all in the name of GREEN RENEWABLE power.
We use less power and they cry they arent making enough so they jack our rates. We use more power and they jack our rates to make us use less. I and the rest of the province have some choice words for Green energy bullshit right now.
I don't understand it going negative. Why can't they just vent it? Why can't they shut it down or just disconnect the line? Hydro is easy to turn off but even solar and wind has ways to turn them off for maintenance. Barring that, just throwing a tarp over the solar would block out the sun. Heck, even running it to a nearby tank and boiling water would make more sense than paying someone to consume it. What exactly is gained by paying someone to take it versus venting it somehow?
Call me when you can generate a real supply 24 hours straight for a year. I can produce Germany's peak power output in my garage, but only for a fraction of a second or the neighbors get rumbly.
If you are shown a demand curve sloping downward and you call it witchcraft, you may not be a capitalist.
NOBODY gets paid for the extra energy. The extra energy becomes a CREDIT for energy used during the nights or a rainy day. If there is actually a surplus at the end of the year, it is the company the one that gets paid, not the user/customer.
...and for residential customers, Germany has some of the most expensive electricity in the world. Residential customers and small businesses pay a "renewable energy tax" (EEG) of 6.354 cents / kWh as of 2016. I have a large family, so this works out to be about 440€ additional tax burden per year, not counting the 19% VAT added on top of the EEG tax. So I am paying for all this "free electricity". This tax is highly regressive and hits poorer residents much harder because they cannot afford to invest in energy-saving appliances.
The article sounds as if it is a good thing that Germany has to pay people to use electricity. Actually it is exactly this problem that sets the upper limit to how much renewable energy can be used in a modern economy with current technology. The market correctly valued that the power produced by renewable sources had negative value, yet the producers of renewable energy were paid exactly the same feed-in tariff as they get on a cold windless evening. Doubling renewable energy production will not result in doubling the amount of electricity usefully used by Germany over the course of a year. It will be dumped somewhere in the system. Germany must solve the engineering problems required to efficiently store and recover vast amounts of energy as well as building more renewable energy generating systems to reach its goals.
I'm totally surprised that this is not a major topic of discourse in a country with such a large body of technical talent.
It happens rarely, but is nothing extraordinary - almost every year for few hours around Christmas, but also spontaniously. I've even hear about a startup that earns money burning energy with negative prices, but unfortunately I cannot find it now
Sources:
https://www.eex.com/en/market-data/power/spot-market/auction#!/2012/12/25 (big negative)
https://www.eex.com/en/market-data/power/spot-market/auction#!/2014/12/25
https://www.eex.com/en/market-data/power/spot-market/auction#!/2015/12/26
http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=5110
Now imagine you had an electric car parked up outside, with some big ass batteries in it, plugged in and storing that surplus energy.
As if surplus power is a problem?
It isn't, we just haven't moved forward quickly enough and away from fossil fuels.
Denmark sells excess power to Germany, Germany has to pay its users to use excess energy. Shut up and take my money!!!!
I consider news like this trés cool. Albeit percentages being usually low the Green Party has a solid standing in Germany and especially with my generation, and for good reasons too. However, that it came about for a majority holding conservative politician and party such as Merkel and the great coalition of CDU & SPD to make the call on moving out of nuclear fission was the missing piece in the puzzle. Sentiment towards fission was getting less enthusiastic throughout the decades and Fukushima Daiichi + Merkel was all it needed to finally do the u-turn in Germany.
I'm glad for once Germany is leading the pack without to much of an internal debate. The speed at which the u-turn was put in to practice is astonishing by German standards.
Nuclear Fission is on the way out, and I consider that a good thing. Nobody can take on resposibility for their garbage for a 200 000 year time period - that's a simple fact. Add to that the costs and multiple-century long consequences of disasters such as Chernobyl and Fukushima, and you got yourself a big fat no-go for this type of energy source.
You should see to it that your country decomissions nuclear fission aswell, wherever you live. It's too dangerous.
My 0.02 Euros.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Here is a graph of electricity prices where I live for the current day: http://www.aemo.com.au/Electricity/Data/Price-and-Demand/Price-and-Demand-Graphs/Current-Dispatch-Interval-Price-and-Demand-Graph-QLD. Note the red line (whole sale price) drops off the bottom graph in the small hours of the morning. It's negative.
At least were I live it has nothing to do with renewables (the sun ain't shining at that time after all). Oddly it is because coal plants suffer the same problem renewables - they can't control the power quickly. No one is using power at the coal plants are producing at 3 AM so there is an oversupply, and it's costs more to shut the plant down for the hour or so than it does to pay people to find ways to use it.
This happens just about every fucking day! How is this news?
If you're using it just for the sake of using it, it's neither renewable nor sustainable.
Renewables do have negative effects on the environment, some of them severe. For example, many endangered birds have become more endangered due to being killed by windmills. And, we still do not understand the long term effects of taking energy out of the wind on a large scale. Let's not even get started on the pollution caused by the manufacture of silicon wafers.
The proper thing to do when there is no demand for your product is to stop producing it, especially if producing it harms the environment as much as wind and solar do.
I just have to say it. In our supposedly superior United States we can't do that. We are full of chowder heads that insist that natural energy simply can not work. You see we known certain things here. Solar and wind energy are no good. Socialized medicine is no good. Free college is no good. They all are no good becasue we are so superior that we are a pile of worthless dingbats.
I was skeptical so I checked.
Apparently the US has about 250 tons of nuclear waste. That should indeed fit in a not very large room - you could fit in barrels in a 20x20 meter room.
I do suspect that putting that much nuclear material in one room is a bad idea.. ;)
And the worst part is that you can't even grow bananas in most of the U.S.
Naturally our terraforming project will eventually resolve that problem.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
RIGHT...because Solar has 0 'toxic waste' to deal with or the fact that it is hazardous forever (https://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2014/10/08/dark-side-solar-waste-concerns-abound)...'no one can take on the responsibility for their garbage forever so we must stop the production & use of solar panels now!'
Note that I don't buy such arguments at ALL. The fact that use of radioactive materials can be a 'closed loop' recycling and waste management process makes it just as 'green' as Solar, wind or any other of your 'favourite green energy sources'.
I have nothing specifically against Solar, wind or other power generation techniques but unlike 'greenies', 'nimbys' and others who don't actually want to 'save the planet' rather than just 'control society' I think nuclear is not just 'fine' but the should be the PRIMARY power source being promoted. If this truly was about 'saving the planet', greenies would be backing nuclear 'en masse' (as opposed to only a few 'high profile' ones that have switched their thinking)...until I see that happen I'll know this is just a big 'game' being played to try to control people/society rather than a real belief that we're doing all we can to 'save the planet'.
An "electric field" is simply a mathematical description of how electrons are moving.
There is no such thing as an "electric field", in and of itself. Only electrons. Which, if they move, may have that motion described in terms of a field, though that description will always be generalized and imprecise.
Electrons = Physical Reality
Fields = Mathematical Abstraction Used To Describe Motion of Particle Groups.
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An "electron" is simply a mathematical description of how electric fields are behaving.
There is no such thing as an "electron", in and of itself. Only electric fields.
I can see bits of paper being picked up by the field of a charged object. I can't see electrons, they are merely a description of how fields behave.
Your entire argument boils down to "nuclear energy could be as clean as solar currently is, but it isn't". That's not great. Sporadic capitalised words don't make up for shoddy reasoning, regardless of how angry at greens you were when you wrote that.
Not only that, but all the electrons you get, you give back again (if using alternating current).
AC? Even if you use DC, what comes in must go out. Unless you want to make lightning.