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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.
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.
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But at what price? Germany pays three times the price for power that the US does.
I don't really want a $1,200 power bill, thank you very much.
As others pointed out Germany doesn't pay 3 times what we pay in the USA but they do pay a bit more. But the real question here is how much is it going to cost you in 20 or 30 years when the effects of AGW really start kicking in and we're spending big money on trying to adapt. Are you really saving anything in the long run by hanging on to your cheap power now?
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?