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

Anybody want to point out solar has stalled?

[NotSoHeavyD3]

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%.

biomass plants

[angel'o'sphere]

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.

Re:If it becomes a regular thing

[AaronW]

This would require that the utility companies partner with companies like Tesla and the makers of various chargers to control the charging rate. I agree that this is a great idea but I wouldn't get my hopes up yet. With my car, a Tesla model S, the local utility (PG&E) could partner with Tesla and by knowing where all of the cars are they could control the time and rate each car charges at to balance the load. It would require a new setting in the car which is basically charge my car by a certain time. They could incentivize this with lower rates. Right now I charge from 11pm - 7am when the EV rate hits its lowest point, though at full power (20KW) my car is typically charged in an hour. I usually charge at half the rate (10KW) so there's a lot less loss in the wiring.

For utilities, the base load power stations are typically far more efficient than the peaker plants but they typically can't vary their output much. By doing things like staggering when cars charge and/or controlling the rate they charge it can shift more power to baseload generation by having a steady load. This requires either connected cars (like Tesla) or connected chargers.

And its still a failure...

[bored]

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.

Re:As it should be, false headline.

[lorinc]

I don't think it's a glitch. It looks rather typical of this kind of dynamical systems.

When the gap between the red curve and the green area goes below a certain threshold, that means that you have an excess of power that has to be dissipated otherwise the generator breaks. The optimal price is fairly easy to compute in that case : it's minus the total cost of the repair in case of not seeling the electricity. That means you are willing to pay somebody to take your electricity as much as it would cost you to repair your system in case nobody buys, but no more.

I think this is also a feature of the decentralized nature of renewables. Not all producers are able to dissipate all their energy because it depends on local (local climate, local network, local consumption, etc) and global variables (global production, global network, global consumption, etc), which makes everything barely predictable.