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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.
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
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.
Show me one plant where the fuel has been cleanly disposed of completely. We have vast amounts of fuel piling up with no way to make the stuff benign. It will be hanging around indefinitely. You can quote all you want of ways to recycle and reuse the fuel until it is benign, but so far that is all just talk and has not moved beyond the vaporware stage. I throw it in the same camp as Clean Coal technology.
...but they won't.. Why because you'll never hear the phrase, "paying people to use electricity" in the U.S.
Use the excess to split water for hydrogen. Use the hydrogen in fuel cells on large trucks and other large vehicles where straight battery power is currently impossible.
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.
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.
To understand Germany's energy use, just look at this graph. 75% of it is fossil fuel based. The idea that it had so much renewable it had to pay people to use it is ridiculous and simply a function of the bureaucracy, not the reality.
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?