Potentially ignorant question. How does this impact the consumer? Do they actually get paid/credited for electricity used?
transmission charges still apply
Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid
31–40 of 182 posts
Re: Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid
#32"French electricity prices turned negative as a drop in demand and surging renewables output prompted some nuclear reactors to power down." This is an issue with nuclear in a net zero scenario. Nuclear starts out at 90%+ capacity factor, like in California today. But as fossil fuels become a low percentage of the grid, you inevitably get a low capacity factor which increases LCOE. Even if you don't want any renewable…
High level planning is important for efficiency. It'd be great to have some resources which either store power in bulk cheaply (even if not efficiently) and/or inexpensive to idle operations that can achieve public benefit for spare power.
Re: Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid
#33What 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?
The determinant factor in this article is the renewable electricity sudden flow.
Nuclear fission reactors have problems in other domains like being a huge liability during a military conflict, and dependance on uranium supply from the Sahel.
Re: Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid
#34What 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?
Indeed. The op ex of nuclear is surprisingly high (esp when compared to wind solar), then on top of that is the cost of financing the very long build.
Also, nuclear plants in France are starting to suffer from water shortages; since an overheating plant is a problem it means that they take water at the expense of other uses, which is an externality they currently don't pay for because the economics of these plants is so terrible already.
I really want to like niclear but I have never been able to see the math work (and I've been paying intermittent attention for 40 years).
Re: Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid
#35AFAIK this happens fairly regularly in some northern european countries (NL and DE come to mind) due to wind over-production. The sooner we get cheap grid storage, the better.
Re: Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid
#36If the price is -5$ in France, but still $7 in Germany, why not dump all that excess energy to Germany?
Not enough interconnect
High loses in transmission
No one needs the energy in the times it goes negative, unless you’re a 1/4 planet away
Unfortunately electric cars only make the peaks and valleys more pronounced. What we need is electric cars to be required to charge the grid during high demand and only charge during very low demand. The chargers need to be smart and integrated with the grid operator
Re: Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid
#37What 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?
There's a cost associated with construction and maintenance - labor and materials aren't free.
Then, there's everything else - you'd have to look at their budget to see if the proceeds from electricity are funding other programs.
Re: Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid
#38Isolated 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.
Negative prices make storage very practical
Unfortunately you've got a massive term mismatch. You have negative prices today, but a lot of reason to believe that by the time you could bring your storage online the problem will already have resolved itself.
Oil briefly went negative a few years ago. If you decided to build a storage business dependent on negative oil prices for profit, you might just be coming online around now, and very much poorer than you were before. (Of course you would in fact have stopped a long time ago.)
Re: Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid
#39What 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?
I mean.. They literally just became too cheap to meter by application of 33% more generation?
Functionally they could get there by just building a few more reactors.
Re: Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Negative prices make storage very practical
And de-incentivizes supply. A real solution need to be available to balance the supply and demand of power such that the rates on both ends are predictable. A market where a good fluctuates between profitable and not is not one very attractive to investment. Playing the video game Victoria 3 has taught me a lot about healthy markets. You have to play both sides of supply and demand to get to the prices you need
Why? If you make a sufficient amount of money in the 5-8pm peak period it can make you strongly profitable despite losing money at noon.