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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.
In the UK, since the power generation was split up, there have been occasions when generators have bid negative prices to supply electricity into the grid. These were companies operating fossil-fueled generators at times when demand was low (middle of the night).
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Id be concerned if they didn't have spare capacity during what looks like the lowest demand scenario short of a zombie apocalypse. The real issue is, how to they cope on a very cold, overcast, windless day when industrial and domestic demand is at it's highest? Also, don't they have a means of distributing power throughout the entire EU, geographically large single countries do this.
It is not always sunny and windy across the entire continent
This would be an option in the US if we had a modern electrical grid
Just ask Congress where funding for the superconducting electrical grid upgrade is at...
They run fans. Really BIG fans. To generate more power for each other!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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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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..
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.
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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.
it does come at a price to have that much renewable energy. We have among the highest prices in the world for electricity in Denmark. 75% of the price are taxes. Now they are talking about lowering the price by 10% by cutting some of those "green" taxes. But since the money has to come from somewhere, they are just putting that on income taxes instead.
Local businesses are happy because they don't get to pay anymore, consumers are happy because that are too stupid to have listened to the part that their income tax are going up, they just say "oh great lower price for electricity".
You don't use electrons, you use an electric field. And electrons move very (very) slowly through a wire. I don't remember numbers, bu think it's on the order of cm/min. Not only that, but all the electrons you get, you give back again (if using alternating current).
Adding a generator to the grid keeps the field propped up (measured in volts).
The details are that it was about the lowest demand point of the entire year, and coincidentally a very good solar and wind day overall. It lasted for a brief moment, and just a few hours later, renewables were back down to less than 50%. You won't see the headline when renewables are at the low point.
This is from the most recent historical generation data in Germany (Fraunhofer Institute)
(Total Production = Production from Solar, Wind, and Conventional)
Max Solar Day = 212 GWh (65 GWh wind). Total = 1211 GWh (June 6)
Max Wind Day = 562 GWh (20 GWh solar). Total = 1517 GWh (Dec 12)
Min Wind + Solar Day = 5.5GWh Solar, 31.2 GWh Wind. Total = 1407 GWh (Dec 3)
You can see how great the differences are between highs and lows. And despite how much Germany has invested, at times they still get very little from Renewables. These numbers are full day numbers, its even worse if you look for the low for a short duration as the one celebrated in the headline.
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.
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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.
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.
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...but they won't.. Why because you'll never hear the phrase, "paying people to use electricity" in the U.S.
Oh whew. Thanks for explaining it.
Yield grew 6.5% last year; somewhat less than the year before, but don't you think a single year of lower growth is a little too soon to declare it "stuck"?
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
The private sector paid for brand new transmission lines from West Texas, where the wind and sun is, to Dallas/Ft Worth.
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In Europe the electrical grid is connected between the countries. It's also on a day to day basis so one day it flows in one direction and another day in the other.
Only thing you can be sure of is that in Denmark the wind almost always blows, and if it doesn't then it's probably sunny.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
...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.
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.
They're not doing it all at once. And besides power generation is going to be a blend of technologies and any spikes will smooth out as the system scales. And if it came to it and there was an excess or the excess was used during different parts of the day, it could be stored by various means - pumping water to the top of towers, flywheels, molten sodium, compressed air, hydrogen creation etc.
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.
That graph is the averaged over a long period. One of the issues with solar and wind power is that they tend to be very bursty, wind in particular. The power output from a wind turbine is proportional to the third power of the wind speed. If you have an hour of wind that's double the normal speed, then you're generating eight times as much power from the wind generators as normal for that hour. Most other power plants can't reduce capacity instantly to compensate so for short bursts there is a lot more power being generated than is being consumed. In some cases, it's cheaper to produce the waste power than to start decoupling things from the grid and spilling the power somewhere (ideally into storage, sometimes just as waste heat), so you end up paying people to consume the power, because it costs more to stop producing it.
Most consumers don't see this, because we buy power indirectly but some big industrial consumers have contracts that allow them to get direct access to the spot price and consume power when it's very cheap. The idea behind a smart grid is to allow everyone to benefit from this kind of thing. For example, having your fridge run its compressor when the cost of power drops very close to zero.
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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?
I was skeptical so I checked.
Apparently the US has about 250 tons of nuclear waste. That should indeed fit in a not very large room - you could fit in barrels in a 20x20 meter room.
I do suspect that putting that much nuclear material in one room is a bad idea.. ;)
Problem is that it only happens on a few days a year when the sun is high in the sky, the days are long, and the wind is also blowing. Moreover, the reason that the price of electricity goes to zero (or below) is that no one really wants it at any price. In short, generation capacity is overbuilt. Why is it overbuilt? Because subsidies for renewable energy in Germany are poorly structured and do not go to zero when the wholesale price for electricity goes to zero. Who pays for the subsidies? Why the ratepayers of course.
Is there a lesson here for the US and other countries? You bet there is. But it isn't that renewable energy is dirt cheap. It's that one better be careful how one structures renewable energy subsidies (if any) because if one does not, one's electric bill is going to to include a surcharge to pay the Warren Buffetts, Koch brothers, T Boone Pickens et.al. for generating electricity that no want needs or wants.
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First US usage of power is about 4 times higher per household than Germany, possibly due to Germans mostly not having or using AC in the warmer months. This makes summer the power usage low in Germany. In the US the summer months are the usage high.
http://shrinkthatfootprint.com...
https://www.eia.gov/electricit...
The government (ie taxpayers) subsidize the tune of 20 billion Euros per year and rising (hiding the actual cost)
http://www.bloomberg.com/view/...
http://www.greentechmedia.com/...
http://www.seia.org/research-r...
German prices per kwh are higher (~.34 per kwh) vs US (~.15) mostly due to tax/tariff on energy, and regulatory procedures related to the infrastructure payments of solar and other renewables. The prices are rising so fast the government has had to begin a more restrictive path on new solar.
https://www.eia.gov/electricit...
https://www.cleanenergywire.or...
Based solely on price per kwh and predictable capacity, solar is awful. More specifically awful for germany, because of geography and weather trends.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/qu...
This unpredictability is causing massive new production plants using coal. This is a reult of shutting down nuclear and building solar which only generates an average of >10% of potential capacity. Altogether the solar plan's end result is not bringing them closer to meeting their climate pollution goals.
https://carboncounter.wordpres...
"when the wind suddenly stops blowing, and in particular during the cold season, supply becomes scarce. That's when heavy oil and coal power plants have to be fired up to close the gap, which is why Germany's energy producers in 2012 actually released more climate-damaging carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than in 2011. If there is still an electricity shortfall, energy-hungry plants like the ArcelorMittal steel mill in Hamburg are sometimes asked to shut down production to protect the grid. Of course, ordinary electricity customers are then expected to pay for the compensation these businesses are entitled to for lost profits."
http://www.spiegel.de/internat...
Not sure where you got the "Classic sovietstyle central planning at work" from.
It's classic central planning. Top down decision-making based on dubious ideological goals with little to no regard for the consequences.
The consumer pays through higher taxation. Nuclear is heavily subsidised in France isn't it. In fact the sector is almost wholly owned by the government.
Nuclear is indeed subsidized in France, just like renewable energy is in Germany through artificially high costs for residential consumers (added tax). The German city where I lived for 10 years until last month has 99.99% of its energy supply (and the supply of its county) coming from dams that have been operating for decades and had been paid through a mix of city taxes and citizen investments. Yet, we were also paying the extra tax to encourage the switch to renewable energy, which was then used to put solar panels and windmills that didn't even register as a blip in the energy mix of the city. Probably because the now privatized operator wasn't using those to supply the city, but selling the energy somewhere else. In France, I'm getting my electricity through a local supplier using biomass... I'm paying less than half of German prices at peak time, but slightly more than half of German prices off peak time.
For taxation, it depends in which tax bracket you are... for a single person:
German tax rates:
French tax rates:
Germany taxes are lower if you earn between 26 791 and 52 153 a year, it is unfortunate for most of my ex neighborhood that they were mostly in the bracket where Germany is more expensive, below 26791 a year. Most of my new neighborhood is in the same bracket and pay less taxes. In my tax bracket, there is a less than 1% difference in the effective tax rate (in favor of Germany) but that is still below what I save through utilities, services, price of real estate and interest rates on the house credit. It's also a theoretical saving as I am paying my income tax in Luxembourg where my effective tax rate is a whole 11% lower than what it would theoretically be in Germany (theoretically, because my gross salary would also be lower in Germany).
Another big difference in taxation between the two country is property taxes, I'm paying roughly the same amount of property taxes in France as I was paying in Germany. My property in France is way bigger than the one I had in Germany. In France, the property tax includes things like garbage disposal, water treatment and TV tax. Garbage disposal and water treatment have been privatized in Germany, so you have to pay extra money on top of the property tax. As I lived in the suburbs of the city in Germany, I wasn't actually getting any of the services I was supposed to receive through my property taxes (library, maintained roads, ...).
I was paying a pet tax in Germany, which doesn't exist in France, and gets very expensive if you have more than 1 dog. I'm getting far better network connectivity options in France even tho I moved to the middle of the sticks and I lived in the suburbs of a decent sized city in Germany. Road tax in Germany is to be paid every year, it is a once-off in France when you register the vehicle. As a trade-off, in France, I would have to pay to use toll roads (highways I use maybe once or twice a year). The car road-worthiness check in France is half the price of the same check in Germany.
All in all, France is a cheaper option for me.