The real time market, meanwhile, covers who it is who has to adjust his production or consumption to cover the difference between what everyone thought would happen 24 hours ago and what happens now.
The real time price hits negative, but it's only the delta between real time volume and day-ahead volume that's traded at the negative price.
And it's the people who are turning knobs, being paid by those who are sticking to what they planned to do at the Day Ahead market.
There are no negative prices.
Here's how it works: Generators put out bids for how much they can produce and the price. Consumers pull in the bids ordered by price until they have enough power.
After that they pay everyone the highest price for the power.
So making your power negative just means you want to be first on the list.
You don't actually get paid negative money. It's just a tactic.
When prices are negative Generators have to pay for the power they produced, for the privilege of not shutting down their process be it nuclear, coal etc. presumably hydro and natural gas would shut down in response to negative prices.
For example the article talks about wind. Wind generators have no problem shutting down.
No, it's not about the privilege of not shutting down, it's what I said: it's simply the bottom of the order book, not the actual flow of money.
It also happens in Ontario, and maybe elsewhere but I don't know as much about how other markets deal with oversupply.
Wind generators generally have fixed price contracts for as much as they can produce so they carry on generating even if the price is negative and they get the same positive price. Or if they do have to shut down for system reliability they will get paid even though they didn't generate any power. That is called being constrained off.
If the price is negative it is because generators would rather pay than go offline. The nuclear plants in Ontario will bid negative because they have real costs if they have to alter their output.
I maintain that the price is negative because the highest selected bid was negative, and any generators producing during those 5 hours had to pay $25 for every MWH they produced.
are you in the power business in the UK?
I used to work on software that implemented the market settlement rules in Ontario in order to calculate a distribution utility's cost of power every day, and I've also spoken at length with an economist who wrote market rules, and examined the behavior of the market participants for compliance with the rules, but it is possible that the uk and Ontario markets differ in this regard, although the article indicates the price was negative.
It's distributed by nature. Centralizing control is pretty much the exact opposite of what you want in an electrical grid.