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."

Comments

Cute solution to a similar problem

[by (1706743)]

Small Scottish isle with its own power grid, which often has the same problem of excess generation:

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.”

Re:useful dumpload needed

[martinX]

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.

We pay for the electricity network and taxes!

[MindPrison]

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.