Slashdot Mirror
It's Been So Windy in Europe That Electricity Prices Have Turned Negative (vice.com)
An anonymous reader writes: It's been very windy across Europe this week. So much so, in fact, that the high wind load on onshore and offshore wind turbines across much of the continent has helped set new wind power records. For starters, renewables generated more than half of Britain's energy demand on Wednesday -- for the first time ever. In fact, with offshore wind supplying 10 percent of the total demand, energy prices were knocked into the negative for the longest period on record. The UK is home to the world's biggest wind farm, and the largest wind turbines, so it's no surprise that this was an important factor in the country's energy mix. "Negative prices aren't frequently observed," Joel Meggelaars, who works at renewable energy trade body WindEurope, told Motherboard over the phone. "It means a high supply and low demand."
Then there are days, usually in winter, when the island has the opposite problem: it creates more energy than it can use or store. Just as Eigg Electric has to manage its deficiencies itself, it has to manage its surpluses. Fortunately, it has a system for that too: when there is a surplus of power, electric heaters in the community hall, pier lobby and two churches automatically turn on. This keeps these shared spaces warm all through the winter and requires “virtually no central heating in the system at all,” says Booth. “We don’t charge for it because the whole community benefits.”
Actually nuclear has the same problem. It's a fairly expensive base load, but when demand drops prices still go negative, because you still need the grid to absorb the excess. You can't just ramp up and ramp down on a dime: that's why they call it base load. Your base load should always be less than total demand.
In fact what this news is pointing to is that the smarter we can be about using power when it's available, the more efficient we can be. Run your hot water heater and your home heater or air conditioner when prices go negative, turn it off when they go positive, keep the temperature under control but don't be stupid about it, and you need a lot less base load capacity.
How many birds were harmed in the making of this energy and did the producers of this clean energy face the same kinds of fines an oil or coal company would have for killing the same amount of wildlife? That would certainly offset any negative energy prices.
Sure. But then you need to pay a LOT more to turn the turbines back on when the wind eventually dies down.
I wonder if it would be cost effective for utility companies to get into the cryptocurrency mining business? Surely it would help avoid situations like this where they actually lose money (temporarily) by adding green power to the grid.
If they had 40 foot shipping containers filled with cryptocurrency mining computers that could be moved around by truck and plugged into the grid as needed, it might help offset costs. Obviously it would be smarter to use electric car fleets to absorb the extra capacity, but maybe this would help too?
Even if it only helped to make bitcoin mining less cost effective in coal powered regions of the grid, it might still be worth doing.
If one of the tenets of preventing global warming is to reduce use of CO2-producing fuels, then using excess wind capacity to generate stored power to use later instead of using CO2-producing fuels would seem useful.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
"Traditional base load" does not match supply with demand.
It constantly produces around 95% of its max capacity. Hence the name: base load.
That is the minimum amount of power your grid will always consume. So you build plants that can be run close to 100% 24/7 all years long. Hence the name: base load.
But now we have so much renewables, that they produce more power than the base load plants.
You are mixing up 'base laod' with either 'load following', 'balancing power' or 'reserve power' or with all three of them.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Not the actual electricity itself. The Electricity has been rock bottom cheap here in Sweden for YEARS now.
But the EL-companys lobbyists have successfully lobbied away the roof on network/electricity transportation fee's, so there is no longer any roof on that.
This means the EL-Companies are working together to charge SKY high prices for transportation of the electricity, it's technically a fee they take to repair and maintain the network, but it's also an obligatory fee to be connected to them, it's insanely high, and they just yet again warned us of much higher prices.
In fact, our network prices are so crazy high that we pay roughly 40 cents per KWH just for transportation AND taxes on transportation. Yes, that's nearly half a dollar per KWH!
So all the sensationalist BS about negative EL-prices is just headline clickbait, it has no real life implication for any citizen.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Actually nuclear has the same problem. It's a fairly expensive base load, but when demand drops prices still go negative, because you still need the grid to absorb the excess. You can't just ramp up and ramp down on a dime: that's why they call it base load. Your base load should always be less than total demand.
Exactly this. During the California power crisis a decade or so ago, our public utility up in British Columbia made out like bandits. During the day time, power was at a huge premium in California. So, BC Hydro would run their hydro-electric power plants flat out, as hard as possible, unsustainably draining their reservoirs. At night, they'd turn the dams off, let the water build up behind the dams again, and buy dirt cheap nuclear power from California. The reason is that the older designs used in current Nuclear power plants can't reliably ramp up or down to meet real daytime/nighttime peaking.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...