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

Re:During a mild Sunday, I'd hope so.

[KGIII]

I was watching a documentary about that not too long ago. Well, tangentially related. See, the Australians don't want it back. They've got it, they mine it, and no you can't send it back when you're through with it. They had a politician who wanted to take it back ("We've got the bloody bush. Nobody goes there." - Not Verbatim) but no, nobody really liked that idea. The politician tried the bit about how they were kind of responsible for it but nobody was buying that either. He even tried the whole bit about how they could make money on it. Nope. That didn't go anywhere either.

So, that's where they mine most of the uranium that you're talking about and they play the no-givesies-backsies-game. Maybe stuff it in some other mine?