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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

#151

Post by cyberax »

kypro wrote: post #129
Damogran6 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My aging mind can't remember the actual facts but it was determined that when someone has significantly more power than they had a need for (say, full batteries and a whole lot of solar) that it opened up interesting behaviors. We try hard to be as efficient as possible, but when you don't have to, it leads to interesting stuff. (like leave the lights on, leave the windows open with a space heater next to you, etc.)

I was told that in Russia nat gas is so cheap that they keep the heating on 24/7 and will often just open windows to regulate temperature. No idea how true this is and whether it just applies to offices / apartment complexes but this is what I was told.

It's true! Old apartment buildings and offices were designed with district heating in mind.

The heating is provided via hot water radiators that are not at all adjustable, there are no thermostats in individual apartments! So if the weather is not very cold, your apartment can become too hot. While it's still sub-freezing outside.

Newer apartment buildings have adjustable radiators with thermostatic valves, but it's far from common.

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

#152

Post by Krssst »

EcommerceFlow wrote: post #26

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?

In countries using only intermittent renewable, we get news articles in the exceptional event that the grid did not need much fossil fuel generation for a day.

In France, we get those in the exceptional event that we need more than a little fossil generation for a day.

It's expensive, but seems to actually work at removing fossil generation from the grid almost completely.

Negative prices meant the grid is inefficient to me; that's not a good thing. When you build a factory you want it operating as much as possible, otherwise ROI falls. That's worth more than a few plants.

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

#153

Post by dfex »

jandrese wrote: post #111
marcosdumay wrote: post #107

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.

In Australia, this has been happening for some time - plants are literally having their output dialled back (or even being disconnected entirely) during peak times by the market operator.

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-23/solar-farm-overload-h... [2] https://reneweconomy.com.au/aemo-slashes-output-of-five-big-...

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

#154

Post by gpm »

olejorgenb wrote: post #96
gpm wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Such industries need to be have low enough capital cost as well

Sure, or more precisely they need to be able to draw a box around the power intensive step where they can cheaply store a buffer of the inputs and outputs, and have excess capacity for that step.

Like I'm not an expert on fertilizer production, but it seems pretty likely to me that you could draw that box around ammonia production and build out capacity that relatively cheaply, while leaving what I imagine to be the more operationally complex and capital intensive steps of extracting phosphates (via sulphiric and phosphoric acid) and potassium (which has nitric and sulphiric acid as biproducts), and combining that nitric acid with the ammonia (into ammonium nitrate) alone.

In some cases if you have excess production capacity (because you have unpredictable or seasonal load and you aren't currently at a peak) you don't necessarily even need more production capacity at all, just the ability to store a bit more of the inputs and outputs in a buffer.

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

#155

Post by purew »

jimbobthrowawy wrote: post #132
kelnos wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This is reality, att least in Sweden. You can invest in battery storage att your house and give control of it to the power company. They will then use the locally available power storage to either feed back to the grid or store excess of capacity and needed.

It can be quite profitable from what i heard, in relation to installing solar cells.

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

#156

Post by bryanlarsen »

Herz wrote: post #149
bryanlarsen wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are enough innovations in the pipeline that it's very safe to predict continuing battery price drops for the next decade, another 80% reduction or so. It's possible it stops after a decade. At that point nuclear would need a 100x price reduction to compete.

https://assets.bbhub.io/professional/sites/24/fig1battery.pn... Sorry but where do you see this 80% drop? When the price of storage seems close to reaching a plateau (which by the way is also what I assumed in previous comments). I understand being optimistic, but you claim to know the future while also denying the present... It's ironic.

Easy prediction with a 50% drop since last summer.

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/03/07/battery-prices-collap...

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

#157

Post by Retric »

Herz wrote: post #143
Retric wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well it's one thing though to use the storage for a cell phones and some cars, another to keep all the industries and homes going on. Not really. If all vehicles on the road where 100% PEV’s your looking at ~250 TWh in batteries. 1/5 of that would be ~50TWh. Global electricity demand is about 70 TWh per day. You don’t need 70 TWh worth of storage if daily production is > daily demand. It all comes down to which is…

I quite believe in it with the fact that it is feasible in the coming decades a way to redistirbute peak energy through daily storage. The problems in my opinion is assuming too much that everything will go as planned according to current trends (cheaper renewable, cheaper battery, enough production, 100+% penetration, etc). Because we're talking about several independent variables, and there's a chance (in my opinio…

People predict falling prices because that’s what fits the trends not because it’s necessary for a ‘green’ future.

We don’t need the price of solar or batteries to keep falling, or for large exponential growth to occur. Simply maintaining the current rate of solar energy installs over the next 25 years would result in a renewable heavy grid.

China is currently on pace to install ~300 GW of solar power in 2024 assuming they continue that for 25 years and give a minimal 15% capacity factor that’s already at 100% of their current electricity consumption before those panels hit end of life. Granted, demand would increase over that time period but keeping up with demand doesn’t require crazy exponential growth here.

Grid batteries are in a similar situation, companies aren’t installing them at scale because they don’t need to but there’s plenty of excess battery manufacturing capacity right now to fill the need as it shows up. Basically at current rate of renewable installs there becomes an economic incentive to slowly ramp up grid batteries.

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

#158

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

Herz wrote: post #114
Damogran6 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are other storage technologies being fielded...they haven't been popular because their energy densities are low...but if you have a 2000 lb hunk of Iron Aire battery next to your house, who cares? ( https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a42532492/ir... )

Do you have any idea how long it takes for a technology at a research stage to enter scale production and be commercially viable?

If there is a good enough economic impetus, it will enter commercial use quickly. Also, things like iron air batteries are relatively extremely simple - it's not like there is complicated chemistry to figure out.

When it comes to grid scale storage, I think there will be rapid advancements because the constraints for what what makes a good grid battery is so different from what makes a good laptop or EV battery, and we've really only recently been investigated batteries with those constraints. I.e. for decades battery tech has been concerned about things like weight-to-capacity ratios, recharge times, etc. Most of that hardly even matters for fixed, installed batteries at power plants.

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

#159

Post by stkdump »

toast0 wrote: post #134
stkdump wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Please re-read my comment. France's relatively small renewable fleet flooding their home market is a solution in search of a problem. If the goal is to decarbonize Germany in times of low renewable production inside Germany then we need interconnects between Germany and places high in renewables as well that are farther away from Germany than France. This is why Norway and Spain are good candidates.

France will have enough trouble rebuilding its declining nuclear fleet in the coming decades for their own energy needs, so any infrastructure that bets on France being able to supply neighbors as well will have a quick expiration. France is actually importing a lot of renewables in winter, because they heat homes with old electric heating (i.e. no heat pumps) and bad insulation that looses much more heat than homes in other countries and their nuclear supply can't cope with that.

In all likelyhood what will do the electricity decarbonization trick in Germany is threefold: more electricity transmission inside the country and with other renewable-heavy countries, continued quick buildout of renewables in Germany and a bit of battery storage, outlawing of coal and lignite in We already have a non-negligable amount of battery storage in German homes, but currently the incentives are laid out so that they will power these homes at night only. I believe we are loosing out on a bit of efficiency by not using it yet to feed back into the grid when needed. This could be enabled by smart meters and dynamic pricing in the future. It would also allow better to move household electricity demand into the times when renewables are most abundant.

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