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.

Comments

If it becomes a regular thing

[rmdingler]

There are several ways to store excess electrical generation if it becomes a common enough occurrence.

Outside of pumping water to heights or using conventtional battery storage, there are NEW IDEAS emerging all the time.

As it should be, false headline.

[thesupraman]

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..

Re:As it should be, false headline.

[sjames]

Look again, they were producing above consumption already, then renewable energy jumped to what looks like the point that they couldn't drop conventional generation any lower without shutting down base load (expensive and takes a good while to recover from).

They very likely hit a discontinuity in the pricing algorithm at that point, but it appears quite reasonable that they were in an overproduction situation and needed to dump supply.

Re:As it should be, false headline.

[Beezlebub33]

This is a common misconception. You would think that you should be able to just have the generators running and producing power and just have it go nowhere. The end consumer just plugs in their computer and starts up, so it _looks_ like it is a infinitely scalable source of power, and it doesn't really matter if you are running it or not. In practice, there has to be a careful balance between the amount of energy produced and the energy consumed. Too little power being generated and you get brownouts / the voltage drops. Too much power and you have too high voltage / exploding transformers.

The time scale for balancing is on the order of seconds. They do this by having a variety of different sources of power, including base load (coal, nuclear for example) and quick response (some hydro, gas turbine) and pushing / pulling power from other locations that either have too much or too little, or having pumped hydro storage, or having some consumers that have power needs that you can control. Renewable power is one part of the power equation, and in some ways it is good (since it peaks approximately during peak power needed) and in some ways it is bad (you can't control it or demand more when you want more).

Re:My B.S. meter is in the red

[guruevi]

You do have to consider that Germany's power prices are about two to three times as high as in the U.S and have risen 30% in the last decade (20c/kWh to 30c/kWh). Tesla harnessed some really cheap renewable energy in the early 1900's and it's still going, stable regardless of the weather. I pay 8c/kWh for primarily 'renewable' energy from (Niagara Falls) and it's relatively cheap to maintain as well.

Please also note the graph in the article. That looks more like a trading issue/glitch (energy gets traded much like stock on a stock market) because the actual power generation was higher later on without a massive dip.

Re:Thats really cheap

[ShanghaiBill]

How does Denmark push its electricity to its neighbours Germany, Norway or Sweden, when they are doing the same?

Because the wind doesn't always blow everywhere at once, but it is always blowing somewhere. Wind energy is more reliable when it is geographically dispersed, so one region's peaks can fill another region's troughs.

I live in Germany...

[bkmoore]

...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.

Re:Renewable energy can work.

[hvdh]

You cannot get a $0.15/kWh power plan in Germany for private homes, only for large industrial plants.
The cheapest price (by kWh) I can get for my German home is 0.23€ ($0.26) / kWh plus 60€ ($69) per year, so it's 0.25€ ($0.28) / kWh in total.

Latest statistics say the average price for private customers is 0.28€ / kWh:
http://de.statista.com/statist...