Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

fortune.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 182 posts

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

#91

Post by hamandcheese »

jerf wrote: post #38
paulsutter wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 we…

You don't need negative prices for storage to be profitable, you just need to be able to sell your stored electricity for more than you paid for it.

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

#92

Post by remus »

manquer wrote: post #65
Neil44 wrote: post #29

This happens frequently in the UK too, if you have a compatible supplier you can set it up to charge your EV or some batteries during negative spikes. Ultimately if enough people were set up that way then prices would not get negative I suppose. * https://octopus.energy/smart/agile/

It is complex, wholesale prices generally do not reflect in retail directly. even when suppliers have flexible pricing and support V2G /buying from users solar etc, there is only only some correlation not 100% pass through of rates. There are also technical and economic reasons this may not work beyond just inelastic vendor pricing, there is cost to transmission(loss) and all the step down that has to happen before e…

> Projects like the one at Dinorwig (pumped hydro-storage) are more viable solution for excess capacity.

I think this is a little simplistic. Pumped hydro is very reliant on finding suitable geography which ultimately limits the potential capacity. I think it's more likely that grids of the future will rely on a variety of storage solutions (pumped hydro, consumer EVs, grid scale batteries etc.) and smarter load-shedding rather than any single solution being dominant.

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

#93

Post by jandrese »

jerf wrote: post #38
paulsutter wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 we…

The reason why the prices are negative is that renewables have become cheap to install, but don't come with an off switch.

There is good news though. With electric car sales slowing down (at least in the west) there is a surplus of batteries on the market, which makes grid storage projects more affordable. The incentives are currently pushing us towards decarbonizing our electric infrastructure faster and that is wonderful. As long as the politicians don't do anything dumb like slap huge tariffs on solar cells or something we should be making some real progress towards a green future.

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

#94

Post by netrus »

bastawhiz wrote: post #61
topper-123 wrote: post #9

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.

The prices being negative is literally the incentive to build storage.

Just to add to that: Any fluctuation in prices works to incentivise storage, negative prices are not so special in that regard.

Negative prices allow for some weird actions to become profitable - like starting an empty washing machine, turning in the light in an empty room or needlessly heating some water tank. Basically everything we are used to think of as waste. It sounds absurd, but it's not really a big deal.

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

#95

Post by nawitus »

Gare wrote: post #70
bryanlarsen wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And solar plants, unlike most other plants can be easily and quickly shut off so you don't even need to sell at negative prices.

Empirically this doesn't seem to happen.

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

#96

Post by olejorgenb »

gpm wrote: post #63
topper-123 wrote: post #9

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.

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

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

#97

Post by nawitus »

486sx33 wrote: post #36
Aeolun wrote: post #19

If 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

The explanation is lack of interconnect, not losses in transmission. If you have enough capacity to transfer electricity the prices will be equal in two neighboring electricity markets.

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

#98

Post by nawitus »

gruez wrote: post #58
jnsie wrote: post #28

Potentially ignorant question. How does this impact the consumer? Do they actually get paid/credited for electricity used?

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.

That depends on the consumer (and market I guess). In many countries in Europe that is an option. (Although there should be some extra fees on top).

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

#99

Post by ragebol »

guerby wrote: post #90
Neil44 wrote: post #29

This happens frequently in the UK too, if you have a compatible supplier you can set it up to charge your EV or some batteries during negative spikes. Ultimately if enough people were set up that way then prices would not get negative I suppose. * https://octopus.energy/smart/agile/

All the analysis I can find talk only about the spot price being negative. But what matters for economics is the volume exchanged at this negative price, that is if you are a buyer with infinite capacity to absorb kWh how much money you'll make yearly? Anyone with a good URL?

No URL, but if demand were there to take all that in, the demand would obviously go up. But there is not enough demand, so the capacity is far from infinite. The best fix for negative prices is negative prices, the demand will come.

I'm still curious about the actual MWh's traded for negative prices as well

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

#100

Post by jandrese »

Herz wrote: post #72
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Storage prices have been dropping precipitously for the past decade. Even more exciting is that the excitement over electric vehicles that has constrained battery supply for the past 2-3 years has started to slacken allowing battery prices to start falling again as EV manufacturers cut back on production. I'm excited to see what the next couple of years brings in the realm of grid and home storage.
Post reply on HN