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

Opportunity

[AK Marc]

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.

As it should be, false headline.

[thesupraman]

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..

Re:As it should be, false headline.

[sjames]

Look again, they were producing above consumption already, then renewable energy jumped to what looks like the point that they couldn't drop conventional generation any lower without shutting down base load (expensive and takes a good while to recover from).

They very likely hit a discontinuity in the pricing algorithm at that point, but it appears quite reasonable that they were in an overproduction situation and needed to dump supply.

Re:As it should be, false headline.

[Beezlebub33]

This is a common misconception. You would think that you should be able to just have the generators running and producing power and just have it go nowhere. The end consumer just plugs in their computer and starts up, so it _looks_ like it is a infinitely scalable source of power, and it doesn't really matter if you are running it or not. In practice, there has to be a careful balance between the amount of energy produced and the energy consumed. Too little power being generated and you get brownouts / the voltage drops. Too much power and you have too high voltage / exploding transformers.

The time scale for balancing is on the order of seconds. They do this by having a variety of different sources of power, including base load (coal, nuclear for example) and quick response (some hydro, gas turbine) and pushing / pulling power from other locations that either have too much or too little, or having pumped hydro storage, or having some consumers that have power needs that you can control. Renewable power is one part of the power equation, and in some ways it is good (since it peaks approximately during peak power needed) and in some ways it is bad (you can't control it or demand more when you want more).

Re:My B.S. meter is in the red

[guruevi]

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.

Re:Renewable energy can work.

[riverat1]

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?

Volume of nuclear waste

[shani]

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.. ;)