Spain has become one of Europe’s cheapest power markets • Hacker News Board

Re: Spain has become one of Europe’s cheapest power markets

#151

Post by ZeroGravitas » Mon, May 11, 2026, 8:37 AM UTC

zejn wrote: post #149

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Batteries are sweeping stability markets wherever they are set up. They're simply cheaper and better at it.

No, these are two different things. One is stability market, where batteries are now king, the other is physics of fault ride-through, where actual physical inertia is a real neccessity, at least for the time being. That is why synchronous condensers are installed. Every major renewable grid has installed additional intertia to avoid blackouts.

No, batteries do that better too.

Variously called "synthetic inertia", "virtual inertia" or "grid-forming inverters".

Some people treat the spinning metal like vinyl records and think you can't get that "warmth" with the new tech but on objective measures, including cost, they win.

People install them because they were the old tech for this, and there's lead times and caution, it's just slowly changing legacy not something batteries can't physically do better.

Re: Spain has become one of Europe’s cheapest power markets

#152

Post by zejn » Mon, May 11, 2026, 8:47 AM UTC

AndrewDucker wrote: post #143

mbid wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar panel production is extremely energy intensive. Germany has one of the highest energy costs in the world. So there was no way for Germany to maintain a competitive solar panel industry.

If only they'd been able to build enough solar power to bring down the energy costs to the point where they could build solar.

They could also just split the Germany into multiple bidding zones, then north parts of Germany would have a lot of cheap wind power, similar as in Sweden.

Re: Spain has become one of Europe’s cheapest power markets

#153

Post by ZeroGravitas » Mon, May 11, 2026, 9:08 AM UTC

XorNot wrote: post #106

victorbjorklund wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many times negative spot prices.

Which is bad, it's a market and infrastructure failure. Negative prices are to get generators to turn off. A new feature on solar inverters is curtailment mode so they can be remote shutdown when the grid goes negative, since if you're on wholesale energy pricing you'll be charged if you keep driving the grid.

It's a good thing and you explain why in your second paragraph.

What gives people the right incentives to increase or reduce curtailment? The market price being negative or positive.

Re: Spain has become one of Europe’s cheapest power markets

#154

Post by ZeroGravitas » Mon, May 11, 2026, 9:13 AM UTC

mhh__ wrote: post #102

tialaramex wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when was the last time you heard someone talking about how cheap renewables are and discuss the CfD schemes All the time? Every single HN discussion about this ends mentioning CfD, often as if it's some secret nobody knows about even though the CfD strike prices are often headline news when they're agreed.

I've basically only just seen this stuff started to be discussed critically in the media in fairly recent years. not including $work discussions with energy traders.

Why are you hearing it discussed critically? It's a great British innovation that has demostrably made the world a better place and provided the UK (and others who have copied it) with big investments in cheaper and cleaner energy.

Re: Spain has become one of Europe’s cheapest power markets

#155

Post by XorNot » Mon, May 11, 2026, 9:31 AM UTC

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #153

XorNot wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is bad, it's a market and infrastructure failure. Negative prices are to get generators to turn off. A new feature on solar inverters is curtailment mode so they can be remote shutdown when the grid goes negative, since if you're on wholesale energy pricing you'll be charged if you keep driving the grid.

It's a good thing and you explain why in your second paragraph. What gives people the right incentives to increase or reduce curtailment? The market price being negative or positive.

If the market is being driven negative then it means there's an oversupply. Which means overall the price of electricity is higher then it should be - negative prices have to be compensated by higher positive prices at other times, and reduce the return on capital to build new power infrastructure of all sorts.

Turning off productive solar panels is wasting power.

Re: Spain has become one of Europe’s cheapest power markets

#156

Post by zejn » Mon, May 11, 2026, 9:47 AM UTC

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #151

zejn wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, these are two different things. One is stability market, where batteries are now king, the other is physics of fault ride-through, where actual physical inertia is a real neccessity, at least for the time being. That is why synchronous condensers are installed. Every major renewable grid has installed additional intertia to avoid blackouts.

No, batteries do that better too. Variously called "synthetic inertia", "virtual inertia" or "grid-forming inverters". Some people treat the spinning metal like vinyl records and think you can't get that "warmth" with the new tech but on objective measures, including cost, they win. People install them because they were the old tech for this, and there's lead times and caution, it's just slowly changing legacy not so…

Ah, that's nice to hear. This also means we won't have to have another type of hardware on grid, since the batteries can make this work.

Re: Spain has become one of Europe’s cheapest power markets

#157

Post by ahartmetz » Mon, May 11, 2026, 9:53 AM UTC

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #116

maartenscholl wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an interesting point about energy market balancing but it has causality backwards. Spain simply has a better energy mix than Germany, no matter how big the spread between the countries is as a function of interconnectedness.

Spain also has pretty sensible legislation that is somewhat green. For large public areas the lowest allowed AC setting is 27°C / 81°F. Where-as in America you'll go to a mall and it'll be 65°F. https://www.catalannews.com/politics/item/spain-limits-air-c... Probably doesn't make a ton of difference. But I found that very respectable. It made me hopeful they have other basic green sensibilities.

That is very sensible of Spain. I find that 27°C + the dehumidifying effect of AC is exactly the comfort temperature when wearing hot weather appropriate clothes. American polar breeze AC settings seem completely insane to me.

Re: Spain has become one of Europe’s cheapest power markets

#158

Post by ZeroGravitas » Mon, May 11, 2026, 9:56 AM UTC

XorNot wrote: post #155

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a good thing and you explain why in your second paragraph. What gives people the right incentives to increase or reduce curtailment? The market price being negative or positive.

If the market is being driven negative then it means there's an oversupply. Which means overall the price of electricity is higher then it should be - negative prices have to be compensated by higher positive prices at other times, and reduce the return on capital to build new power infrastructure of all sorts. Turning off productive solar panels is wasting power.

The negative price can also be thought of as paying people to use the productive solar panels rather than turn them off, it's a two sided market that drives demand to times of clean and cheap energy, which lowers costs for everyone.

Re: Spain has become one of Europe’s cheapest power markets

#159

Post by tpm » Mon, May 11, 2026, 9:57 AM UTC

BonitaPersona wrote: post #140

throwaway_2626 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spain's energy policy could easily be improved, but saying that Spain's economy isn't doing well is disingenuous. In terms of GDP, it's one of the countries with the fastest growth in the EU [1]. Also, our economy is becoming more diversified, precisely thanks to lower energy prices that attract industries that previously gravitated towards Germany and Eastern Europe. [2] I'm curious about how politics have hurt tour…

The GDP is growing simply because the population is growing massively. This is such a low-quality measurement driven by government propaganda. Quality of life, GDP per capita, and plenty of other measurements are needed to actually evaluate how an economy is going. And Spain's economy is far, very far away from "going like a rocket", like your misinformation echo-chamber tries to parrot.

> The GDP is growing simply because the population is growing massively.

Per capita GDP is growing too, so this is simply wrong.

Re: Spain has become one of Europe’s cheapest power markets

#160

Post by ahartmetz » Mon, May 11, 2026, 10:01 AM UTC

leonidasrup wrote: post #146

verzali wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is actually very easy to move electrons. I only need to get on an aeroplane to move a lot of electrons around.

It's very easy to move electrons, it's just expensive to move lot of electrons. Just to illustrate the scale costs of energy moved in the form of natural gas: Nord Stream 1 + Nord Stream 2 with combined capacity of the four pipes is 110 billion cubic metres per annum (3.9 trillion cubic feet per annum) of natural gas. Calorific Value of Natural Gas from 34 to 52 MJ/m3 https://met.com/en/media/energy-insight/calorific…

I think the joke was that all matter is full of electrons.

What you really want is electric potential differences that push electrons. It's the difference between having oil and having hydraulic energy (pressure and flow rate).