UK retail electricity prices hit -19p/kWh today
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And it's not all that sunny. A Sunday of course so lower demand. I'm going to switch of my solar panels. We have a dynamic tarif, so I actually get these prices and will pay to deliver power.
Net metering in the Netherlands makes it not relevant for most people to curtail their solar panels. Apparently we have the most installed capacity per capita in the world, die to these incentives. They did their job, time for a next step: storage.
It's amazing to me there isn't some better way of using this energy in energy intensive industries e.g. electrolysis
Battery storage could earn you more if you discharge at the right moment, but energy prices aren’t negative often enough to warrant the expenses on a battery pack. You could also trade on intra-day pricing differences (buy low, sell high) but I doubt this will be an interesting business case for the average consumer.
Of course large scale battery parks work the same way, but they will have contracts with the grid provider to balance capacity, a more lucrative market.
Large scale electrolysis has the same problem as home batteries: big investment, so you won’t recoup the investment unless you can run the electrolyser often enough. Another issue is that electrolysers can’t scale up or down very quickly, so you can’t respond to capacity issues and get lucrative deals in that market.
The problem usually is that there's a physical cap on how much energy can be transmitted through a grid endpoint, and grids themselves charge a significant portion of the bill, meaning arbitrage only works if the actual price is eg. -14c (the case in my particular location)
No one gives away money for PV systems like Australia. Long may it continue.
[1] https://iea-pvps.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/PVPS_Annual_...
That's why the Dutch achievement is the more impressive one.
Still, great job to both countries!
I get the whole "free market" idea, but this conveniently ignores all externalities, as well as the cost of subsidies. For example, if subsidies were used to buy generating capacity (like solar panels), subsidies should be (partially) recovered.
We have too many "free markets" where we ignore the cost of externalities.
I don't know how much you know about energy grids, but there is a big reason why negative prices are needed. Energy can't float around on the network. It needs to be used (by direct usage, or storage). If there is too much energy on the grid it needs to be used. There's two ways to solve this, being stop energy from being pushed to the grid, or consume more energy. Both lead to negative pricing to create an incentive to achieve this.
If the goal were to consume excess production, power plants could just heat a pool of water on-site, or some similar industrial scale "pointless" electricity use.
Rather, negative prices are there because it's in the interest of energy producers to shift demand from the peak, as all their infrastructure needs to be scaled to meet that demand.
So don't think of it as free energy at the time you're using it, think of it as a fine for running your washer/dryer etc. during peak hours.
For example today we got to -5c/kWh in Finland and it will be negative most of the day. Currently hydro is scaled down by ~1500MW and nuclear ~600MW. Also a bunch of wind is probably turned off due to the negative prices (there is enough wind today to almost max the total wind production of 3200MW today but only ~600MW in use at the moment)
https://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market/power-system/
Though not all electricity is bought/sold on the spot market but instead a lot of consumers are on fixed rate contracts and the companies usually buy futures to cover most of the fixed price contracts they have.
This is also why there is now a lot of investment in storage and hydrogen. Basically as more and more renewables (mostly wind here in Finland) is being built they want to buy this negative (or 0) price electricity and make money by selling it later. Though even negative electricity costs to use due to taxes (0.063c/kWh for industrial usage) and transmission fees (between 4 to 10c/kWh depending on location)
They've got a bad rep because they're some proprietary computer with a cellular modem transferring who-knows-what back and forth to the mothership.
My power company (in .nl) wanted to install one, and I rejected it on that basis.
It would be trivial to implement what they're supposedly doing without relying on user-hostile technology and autonomous phone-home.
But what you're mentioning doesn't require smart meters at all, you could just e.g. poll prices online, and at the bottom of the curve turn on the power socket to your dishwasher with ZigBee. You'd just need a dishwasher that would start as soon as it got power.
Smart meters are there to phone home about your consumption in real time. They're mainly there to benefit the power company, any ability to inform your own consumption is incidental.
You could often profit in CA by just arcing electricity into the ground, at least until more storage capacity comes on grid
Coal seems to be shut off: https://grid.iamkate.com/
It's funny how far wind power has come- courtesy of the almost always windy North Sea.
Your bus can accommodate 40 passengers.
At 2-5 in the morning you get only 5 passengers, at peak hours you average might occasionally get 32.
If you could induce passengers to shift their habits such that you could be a small bus with a capacity for 30 people your infrastructure costs would go down.
So maybe you're charging $5 per trip on average, but $-5 off-peak, and $20 during the peak.
Other comments here point out that some power plants can't be easily scaled down, that's also true, but the system is also intended to shift overall demand over the long term.
So nobody's producing for negative prices, rather a peak hours consumer is directly subsidizing other customers, because the power company would like them to shift their consumption.
While abundance is a positive, it also makes all sort of absurd projects feasible.
In the short term we have a storage problem but I dont think this be an issue for much longer.
Energy usage is the hallmark of an advanced civilization. There's literally a SciFi (scientific?) scale for it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
On the other hand, as batteries advance, expect killer drone swarms to commit all sorts of atrocities and cars to become HUGE.
With abundant energy we get (in principle) global electrification, with that we get global digital interconnection and (again in principle) a uniform educational level. But with technology the positive scenario just never seems to be the one that actually materializes.
When oil prices rallied last year I saw an increase of gas-guzzlers on parking lots with a large FOR SALE sticker, but I'm not entirely sure the converse is true.
The number one driver of size in cars has been safety - either mandated or just perceived.
I suspect that, if anything, with abundant energy cars might become cheaper or made using more exotic materials like CFRP or anything borrowed from Formula 1.
Yeah, and what will change about this trend? Do you think all of a sudden people will want cars perceived as unsafe? If bigger is perceived as safer, bigger is what we'll get. People will just get bigger and bigger cars, up to the limit of lane widths, parking spot lengths, etc.
> I suspect that, if anything, with abundant energy cars might become cheaper or made using more exotic materials like CFRP or anything borrowed from Formula 1.
Ok, bigger and lighter up to a point. But guess what, car engineers will just use the weight budget to add seat heaters and coolers, 20 subwoofers, etc.
> When oil prices rallied last year I saw an increase of gas-guzzlers on parking lots with a large FOR SALE sticker, but I'm not entirely sure the converse is true.
We've seen this before with the 70s oil crisis. Car sizes went down, then as soon as times were perceived as good or prosperous, car sizes went up.
The VW Golf of 2023 (compact European hatchback) is bigger than the VW Passat of 1973 (mid-sized sedan).
But it will be practically free, or at least close to it. And that's the problem for all possible competition. How do you compete with something that is either free or close to it? You can't. So in long-run, anything that can be directly displaced by hydrogen will be driven out of the market.
So now my question is, consumers aren't looking at electricity price in real time[1], so making negative isn't going to get consumers to consume more. So what's the point of making it negative? It's not gonna help you achieve your goal of getting rid of it.
[1] Marje we're going negative!, get the extra kettles out of storage!
This does highlight the fact that we need smarter / more configurable home systems, since the decisions about what to do with solar / grid / battery / car can get fairly complex.
During times of crisis, it can be idled, but the reduction units aren’t designed to turn on and off subject to the whims of the market- capital equipment and labor to run it aren’t going to work at a 10 percent duty factor.
Consumers aren't looking at prices in real time, but industrial users are. Let's say that you run a large cold storage facility. You need to maintain temperatures within a safe range, but that gives you some responsiveness to real-time prices - you could push towards the low end of that range when prices are low, or drift up to the high end of that range when prices are high. In effect, you're using the temperature of your warehouse as an energy storage system. The same would apply to many industrial processes that involve heating, cooling or pressurised fluid.
As we transition towards 100% sustainable energy, we hope to exploit much more of these non-obvious sources of energy storage through dynamic pricing and smart appliances. If you charge your electric car overnight, you don't actually care when it draws energy from the grid as long as your battery is full in the morning. A smart charger could wait until prices are low in the dead of night, or even feed back some energy to the grid during the early evening. You probably won't notice if your air conditioner or your heating drifts beyond the set temperature by half a degree, but the grid most certainly will notice millions of smart thermostats that can reduce grid demand during brief peaks.
The headline says retail though.
I have a fairly extensive smart home setup so toggling devices off during peaks is easy, negotiating with the wife is going to be more challenging.