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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.
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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..
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.
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?
...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.
You cannot get a $0.15/kWh power plan in Germany for private homes, only for large industrial plants.
The cheapest price (by kWh) I can get for my German home is 0.23€ ($0.26) / kWh plus 60€ ($69) per year, so it's 0.25€ ($0.28) / kWh in total.
Latest statistics say the average price for private customers is 0.28€ / kWh:
http://de.statista.com/statist...
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?
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.. ;)