Europe faces an unusual problem: ultra-cheap energy | Hacker News Reader

Europe faces an unusual problem: ultra-cheap energy

economist.com

31 points_tk_35 comments

Surplus energy? Seems like if it was really that cheap high energy use commerce and industry would eventually move in. Weird though, most Europeans I talk to complain about extremely high energy prices and actually go out of their way to shut their computers/etc off and buy low value high efficiency computers. I suppose the utilities are not passing on the low rates.

This could be an explanation: https://diem25.org/time-blow-electricity-markets/

I've read somewhere (but I can't find the source) that in Denmark and UK the prices do reflect the amount of wind (maybe also solar) energy.

> Weird though, most Europeans I talk to complain about extremely high energy prices and actually go out of their way to shut their computers/etc off and buy low value high efficiency computers. I suppose the utilities are not passing on the low rates

That's right, and that's exactly why the article is lobbyist bullsh*t.

There are flexible consumer energy tariffs based on the spot market + fee now. But although you even get negative prices, I was surprised that those tariffs are not economical for me. I have 2 heat pumps that are responsible for 75% of my energy consumption. I could optimize their working hours to low/negative hours by software and work with the thermal inertia of the house / water tank. At the moment it is not worth the effort, a monthly floating tariff is more or less the same. Especially because the net fees are not based on the spot market and are 50% of the energy bill. This is a political failure.

To be fair if consumers where to en masse react to spot prices then the grid would open itself to gamestop-style failures.

The mistake the big investors made with GameStop was assuming that retail investors would not coordinate, so when meme stocks started the big investors found themselves in unexpected waters.

If a sizable chunk of heat pump where to use the same algorithm to react to spot prices then the grid would have to adjust how spot prices are calculated.

It can be done, but I suspect the grid will want to retain some level of control (eg by providing you with the algorithm)

I am not going to allow the grid to control by heating and warm water.

When everybody cranks up their usage when prices fall and stop when prices rise then the whole system might be unstable wildly swinging between low and high usage. Added with natural changes from solar and wind it's a tough nut to crack.

In particular I suspect that even the most reactive energy sources (which I suspect are fossil fuels) takes minutes to scale up or down to follow demand.

This is not a problem, because in my market each day at 17:00 the fixed hourly prices for the next 00:00-24:00 period are published. Weather and therefore renewable energy yield is good predictable for 24 hours.

Higher network costs just reflect added expenses for redispatch and additional grid infrastructure required by variable energy production. The more decentralized and intermittent energy in the system, the higher the cost for infrastructure and keeping backup power plants running - in case of Germany, coal and gas

Flexible, localized net usage prices could smooth the intermittency and lower the demand on the net.

> Ultra-low—and indeed negative—prices suggest that it is not being put to good use at present, reflecting failures in both infrastructure and regulation.

The fundamental issue is that you can't control when and how much solar or wind energy to produce and it can't be stored at anywhere the scale needed.

A big part of the problem in the UK at least is we pay the same price for energy no matter where it is generated, but the grid doesn't have enough capacity to actually transport all the wind power from Scotland to the south.

They'll sort it out eventually.

Except in Hungary. Hungary is fucked. Solar was punished for years and just recently got promoted when Orban's friends and acquaintances got into the business. Wind turbines are still banned, while the technology gets better and better and nowadays pretty neat household setups could be installed. EU level regulations should be put in effect instead of state level ones to remove this kind of games.

Welcome home, my friend. Hungary always sucks, but at least now we are also last in consumption in the EU, time to catch up with Bulgaria.

They should incentivize homes to install batteries. That could absorve energy when price is low and relieve pressure when price is high.

I'm using Octopus mentioned in the article, I got paid £0.67 to use 12.62kWh over 4 hours due to spare energy in the UK on 8th June. So not really worth it financially, but the ability is there already to help even out the load.

You didn’t just get 67p, you also got the utility of that energy. For my EV, that’s a good 40 miles of range. That’s about £8 in equivalent petrol cost.

The message must not be getting through to the grid operators, then.

Grid operators are aware, transmission and storage take time to build, and will always be behind renewables deployments due to the deployment time delta.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40720682

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40720183 (thread)

Additional citations:

https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Europes-N... ("Europe’s Negative Power Prices Highlight the Need for Energy Storage Investment")

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/europes-solar-power-... ("Europe's solar power surge hits prices, exposing storage needs")

https://archive.today/XnsUO

As I understand it the negative prices in Germany are caused by stupid regulations that keeps the compensation to small scale solar power providers constant, regardless of the market price. I assume German tax payers are on the hook for the difference.

It certainly is the case in the Netherlands, which has the most or 2nd most Watt peak installed capacity per capita in the world. For households, there still is net metering. A law to abolish that was rejected in February or so. So, the energy companies came with a penalty for excess power returned, for power beyond the net metering. So it you use 3000 kWh in a year, but put 4000kWh on the grid in a year, you pay a fine for the 1000 kWh leftover.

Details vary per company and I'm not 100% up to speed on them as I have a dynamic tariff and thus those shenanigans don't apply to me.

The incentive is to self consume as much as possible, but the winter/summer difference makes that hard. IMO, the net metering is still very generous, maybe a better policy would be to just pay market crate for any power delivered to the grid.

The efficiencies of energy storage methods kinda suck but with enough input who cares?

Bullsh*t. Im not seeing that cheap energy anywhere here. The Economist has become an economic tabloid. Or maybe it always was, and we didn't notice.

The problem with this is that it removes the incentive to build more solar.

The good thing is that it increases the incentive to build storage.

Mired by decades ob lobby politics, we are stuck behind the solution to one of our biggest problems. The irony.

Fundamental issue is errors in subsidising. Renewables should not get subsidies when prices are negative.

Seems like a good time to invest in Spain’s solar..

Perhaps they can export stored sunlight to their neighbors up north..

Hydrogen electrolysis is the answer here.

They can then build out some unusual kinds of batteries.

See, https://nickgrossman.xyz/bitcoin-as-battery

Forget about the bitcoin side of it, I wouldn't agree with that, lol. The story about Iceland's aluminum smelters is a real eye opener.

The problem for aluminum or bitcoin is that the electricity from wind & solar, unlike geothermal, is variable. It will alter their economics to shutdown operations when it is cloudy and the wind stops blowing, etc. It really only works if they can have guaranteed access to power for some time frame and that will require a reversible form of energy storage (that's what a real battery is) or really good transmission. GPUs are hard to come by now so miners probably want power 24/7, but if power becomes the biggest constraint then it could make sense to have mining operations run idle for long stretches and use them as batteries.

Aluminum and bitcoin are not the only two products that are possible ...

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