German power prices dropped below zero on the first trading day of the year, an increasingly frequent phenomenon in Europe as renewables expand.
Intraday prices in Germany, the region’s biggest market, turned negative during four hours overnight as wind-energy output reached as much as 40 gigawatts, far outstripping demand."
And there are 180GWh battery storages planned to store this energy for the next day. But guess who has to confirm the plans? The 4 almighty German power companies. And guess why it‘s just in planning phase? And who is loosing money if energy prices don’t fluctuate that intense? And who tried to slow down the renewables last decade? Same shit as the petrol and gas heads did. Change can’t be stopped, so they play for time.
Edit: Some figures of public power production were published. Power was 62% out of renewables. Mainly wind power. Solar as second.
And the Carbon emissions for electricity is reduced and 50% as of 2014 (152 million tons CO2). Lot of dirty coal burning for power in the past.
Now, heating and mobility as to be transformed to electricity. Making it cheaper as well.
180 GW is power.
If you’re talking about energy I suppose you mean 180 GWh.Changed it. Thx
They’ll only block it until they can be the ones to own the battery plants. There is a hell of a market incentive to be able to purchase literally free electricity ans resell it later.
Right now it has a ROI of around 4-5 years. However, this playground isn’t for standard people.
Domestic scale storage ROIs a lot longer than that, despite 1 kWh going for over 0.3 EUR.
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Oh of course, grid scale energy is never for the “normal person”. The point I am making is established fossil-fuel based energy majors do not want any pip-squeak independent startups to start siphoning profit off from their system or possibly making it more efficient or cheaper for the consumer. Vertical integration of regional monopolies is the name of the game.
They introduced some kind of caps (don’t remember the details) on negative pricing quite early on, from what I understand it would have been very lucrative in the last decade or two to get into grid-scale battery storage without those caps.
One thing I remember is Flensburg building, pretty much on a whim, a water storage tank with immersion heater, an investment that amortised within a month or two as they were literally getting paid to fuel their district heating.
There’s got to be some rules as to what you can do with electricity you by at negative prices, e.g. not just put an immersion heater in the ocean, maybe some prioritisation as to who gets the energy first just as there is on the production side (fossils have to shut down and pay if they don’t do that fast enough while renewables get to produce energy), but overall I don’t see why there should be a limit on negative prices.
Good thing then that Bundeskartellamt and Bundesnetzagentur are looking more closely at this now
Neat. Now watch everyone collectively forget about it the very second nuclear power is brought up.
I don’t get why it is relevant. Energy is cheap and abundant today almkst everywhere that isn’t sanctioned or a warzone.
But, but, AI!
Meaning, energy storage farms could be a business?
Only if Germany changes existing legislation on power taxation. And do check out for how much a TWh of grid scale storage goes for. Hydrogen is the only borderline cost effective solution at the scale required.
Decentralized 1-8 WH “Trade at Home” Packs would be able to buffer the civil need, even with a low adoption rate… but come on, these things would generate money by trading AND you have a nice power backup solution for your flat.
But that’s just a stupid idea… why would anyone want this. It’s not like we literally throw away LiPo Batteries after a single use (Vape).
It also happened in the UK and I suspect other European countries with significant wind generation. Is this still a rare event in Germany? 2-3 times a month isn’t uncommon here. Especially in the winter.
Oh no, communism. 🙃
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