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Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid

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Re: Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but don't come with an off switch But they do. Often literally. Negative prices usually happen because of laws requiring minimum utilization, or subsides, or because they are so small and rare that it is not worth having someone on place to turn the switch.

If you want to be pedantic yes. But its not like grid operators back in the control rooms are disconnecting solar farms because the grid is oversaturated. They instead tell the fossil fuel plants to reduce their burn rate. They have to work around the instability from the renewables. That's why grid scale storage is such a key component of the future energy economy.

> But its not like grid operators back in the control rooms are disconnecting solar farms because the grid is oversaturated. They instead tell the fossil fuel plants to reduce their burn rate.

Since we're being pedantic, as I understand it, the grid operators don't usually tell plants what to do (outside of system stress response, curtailment, etc), the grid operator shares the forecast, and when the price forecast is low, fossil fuel plants are likely tell the grid operator they'd rather shutdown than produce power at low/negative prices. For solar plants, there's no fuel cost, and there might be subsidies, so producing at a negative market price might still be positive for the generator and there's no reason to turn it off. For nuclear, fueling schedules don't really change based on use, so there's no reason to not provide optimum power outage other than for grid stability.

Grid scale storage should reduce price swings, since storage plants will tend to show up on the demand side when prices are low and the supply side when prices are high; although perhaps price swings will become bigger when prediction fails --- if storage fills up by noon you'll have a lot of excess supply until sunset; if storage empties by midnight, you may have a lot of excess demand until sunrise.

Re: Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid

#132
post #106
post #83

I had a friend recently tell me about how his excess power is put back into the grid and how he hopes our area sees negative rates eventually like this. My cynical side was quick to point out that I would fire up my crypto miners if electricity was free for a few hours a day. After talking to him more I realized we both had different take aways from the story of "the tragedy of the commons" I lightened the conversati…

> I would fire up my crypto miners if electricity was free for a few hours a day I dunno, if electricity was free only for a few hours, I would use it to charge batteries, and then use that stored electricity later in the day when it's not free. If electricity was free most or all of the time, and/or if I could store more than I could use, then sure, I'd probably use it for unnecessary things that some might consider…

If the price swings were frequent and steep enough, you could probably have your batteries send power back to the grid when the price gets high.

I doubt the economics work, but I'd love to live in a world where a lot of the grid's battery storage is based on backup batteries people have at their houses with the added bonus of reducing their billing costs.

Re: Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but don't come with an off switch But they do. Often literally. Negative prices usually happen because of laws requiring minimum utilization, or subsides, or because they are so small and rare that it is not worth having someone on place to turn the switch.

If you want to be pedantic yes. But its not like grid operators back in the control rooms are disconnecting solar farms because the grid is oversaturated. They instead tell the fossil fuel plants to reduce their burn rate. They have to work around the instability from the renewables. That's why grid scale storage is such a key component of the future energy economy.

In the UK there are grid operators in the control rooms disconnecting wind farms. It's called curtailment and it's expensive: https://www.energylivenews.com/2024/04/08/grid-constraints-l...

Re: Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid

#134
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

French reactors are built to load follow [1]. It is harder on the valves, but they do it ("maneuvering capabilities"). Regardless, it would be better if they could run flat out to push out fossil generation in adjacent grids (Germany, the UK, and Northern Italy) with sufficient interconnector capacity. France also still has a bit of coal and fossil gas generation to retire [2] [3]. TLDR More interconnector capacity,…

It is likely that the times where French renewables flood the market roughly coincide with the times where German renewables flood the market, which where 60% of the supply even in the winter. The few remaining times where that isn't the case are probably not relevant. I mean every bit helps of equalizing over a larger area can help, but we likely need interconnects with places that are a bit farther away than France…

Spain is adjacent to France, just like Germany; not sure it's farther away :P

But the way these networks work, you can often build up the interconnects where there's a pricing/availability disparity, and pretty soon you have a vast interconnect. Because if Germany's grid pricing benefits from relatively unconstrained interconnection with France, there's going to be a pricing disparity at Germany's other borders. Of course, grid borders don't necessarily reflect national borders, and national interconnection projects have to happen too.

That said, the top 5 countries by peak load in wikipedia are France, Germany, UK, Italy, and Spain, which are all either France or neighbors of France.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta...

Re: Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid

#135

What I never understood was how France gets 70-75% of their electricity from Nuclear, yet their energy prices aren't "too cheap to meter", and while cheaper than their neighbors, don't really raise any eyebrows. Wouldn't this be a major example of why Nuclear is NOT the future?

> Wouldn't this be a major example of why Nuclear is NOT the future? Not at all. Nobody has really put forth "too cheap to meter" as a rationale for nuclear for 50 years or more. The issue is that nuclear is currently the only reliable base load generation technology that doesn't produce carbon (except perhaps hydro for reasonable definitions of "reliable"). The other top technologies either produce carbon (natural g…

> (except perhaps hydro for reasonable definitions of "reliable").

And geothermal, as you mention below. But, like hydro, it only works in certain geographic areas

Re: Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid

#136
post #63

Isolated this is a zero sum game in favor of buyers (someone has ti take the electricity), but longer term, this shows there needs to be better greater electricity storage solutions available, i.e batteries or similar.

Alternatively this is an economic opportunity for any industry that can usefully make use of intermittent free* energy. * Long term I have to imagine this is just "cheap" because there's got to be tons of industries that can use intermittent free energy.

I argue that the number of such industries is and will be low.

Usually clients want consistency in the output. (they depend on the product/service)

Business owner usually wants consistency in employee/machinery output. (They cost money)

To me it seems that only low priority computation (incl. con-coins) is such industry. (Investment kind of reused, and relatively few employees)

There will be some shift to adjust to intermitency (e.g. Worker hours might be shifted to the time when solar generates the most energy to take advantage of the price)

Re: Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid

#137
post #109
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it a bit whishful thinking to think that storage will come down in price and nuclear won't? Beyond that, leaving out storage costs, what are the technologies that can cover the world's storage? And in what quantities? Because if I think of lithium, wouldn't it be an environmental disaster to extract and recycle all the materials involved? In general, I don't understand why basically nuclear is to be replaced.

> Isn't it a bit whishful thinking to think that storage will come down in price and nuclear won't? My understanding is that the costs around nuclear aren't due to the technology being expensive (something that yes, we would expect to get cheaper over time), but because of the -- IMO necessary -- regulatory and safety regime surrounding nuclear power. Costs that I wouldn't expect to change all that much (and maybe ev…

I believe you are mostly right.

However, I don't think the decline in battery prices is primarily due to the technologies used. Instead, it's more about economies of scale and demand, which help optimize prices.

From my perspective, nuclear energy is on a similar path but with significantly less investment. A major portion of nuclear costs stems from the lack of economies of scale.

In my opinion, the arguments against nuclear energy contribute to the perception of its economic inefficiency. If people don't believe in it or don't want it, there will never be an opportunity to achieve economies of scale.

Here its quite well documented: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power...

Re: Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid

#138
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's see: The line can't just go a few metres across the border. Let's say it connects Dortmund, in the German industrial heartland on the French side of the country, with Chooz, the site of a nuclear plant near the German border. French nuclear plants are evenly distributed around the country [0], so that should be a reasonable choice. That's 250 km. High voltage transmission costs around €2m/km to build [1] and ca…

In general if the incentives are already aligned to solve a problem I don't worry about the problem. It is likely to solve itself without any intervention.

Yes, I don't worry about hundred-dollar bills on the sidewalk either.

Re: Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid

#139
post #79
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consumers don't pay the market rate, because that'd expose them to price shocks (see: the griddy fiasco in texas a few years ago). They get a fixed rate from their utility.

In France consumers with below 36kVA grid connection can choose to pay state fixed prices, or they can choose various market offers, here is the official list of electricity providers: https://www.enedis.fr/liste-des-fournisseurs-delectricite

State-fixed prices are rarely interesting though, as the price is calculated to be above-market.

Re: Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid

#140

Econ 101: with a marginal cost equal to zero, a competitive electricity market (with a price driven to marginal cost because of competition) cannot be sustainable because electricity price it cannot pay for the fixed costs. Solution: we must stop electricity pricing based on energy produced (which made sense when using fossil fuel) and switch to a pricing mechanism where you pay for available power because that's whe…

That's the goal of the capacity market.

https://energy.ec.europa.eu/topics/markets-and-consumers/cap...

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