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Power Prices Go Negative in Germany, a Positive for Energy Users

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday January 03 2018, @07:01AM   Printer-friendly
from the making-money-from-home dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Germany has spent $200 billion over the past two decades to promote cleaner sources of electricity. That enormous investment is now having an unexpected impact — consumers are now actually paid to use power on occasion, as was the case over the weekend.

Power prices plunged below zero for much of Sunday and the early hours of Christmas Day on the EPEX Spot, a large European power trading exchange, the result of low demand, unseasonably warm weather and strong breezes that provided an abundance of wind power on the grid.

Such "negative prices" are not the norm in Germany, but they are far from rare, thanks to the country's effort to encourage investment in greener forms of power generation. Prices for electricity in Germany have dipped below zero — meaning customers are being paid to consume power — more than 100 times this year alone, according to EPEX Spot.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/25/business/energy-environment/germany-electricity-negative-prices.html

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  • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Wednesday January 03 2018, @12:57PM (4 children)

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 03 2018, @12:57PM (#617137) Journal

    customers are being paid to consume power

    Perhaps I don't understand the nuances, but... That's just stupid. Power glut, wind overage, whatever, there are still costs (labor, infrastructure) ensuring that the cost of the energy is not zero.

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by zocalo on Wednesday January 03 2018, @01:22PM (1 child)

    by zocalo (302) on Wednesday January 03 2018, @01:22PM (#617140)
    In the long term, sure. In the short term it's possible to get into situations where your combined power generation can exceed consumption by more than the power grid can handle, so unless you have infrastructure-scale Tesla powerwalls or something like the UK's Electric Mountain [electricmountain.co.uk] to dump the excess into you need to either reduce the generation or increase load to avoid damage to the grid. That's where it gets tricky as depending on the type, spinning a powerplant up or down can be time consuming and expensive process, and if you're coming up on a period where high load is expected then it may be preferable to just get someone to temporarily generate some additional load instead. Since there's no easy way to co-ordinate the general population to consume enough extra power and then stop doing so in the kind of capacities that are required to keep the grid in its sweet spot, that's also why it's generally large industry or infrastructure users that get to take the most advantage of the cheap (or negative cost, in this case) power.
    --
    UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 03 2018, @02:07PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 03 2018, @02:07PM (#617151)

      It's not hard to take a wind turbine off line electrically and brake it to a stop if the power isn't needed. But it may be harder to take a wind farm off line politically if it's owned by someone who is personally powerful (connected to or "owns" politicians, etc)?

  • (Score: 2) by Nuke on Wednesday January 03 2018, @02:37PM

    by Nuke (3162) on Wednesday January 03 2018, @02:37PM (#617164)

    That's just stupid. Power glut, wind overage, whatever, there are still costs (labor, infrastructure) ensuring that the cost of the energy is not zero.

    It isn't. The price goes negative because of the peculiar contracts, which involve arcane formulae, between the generators and their customers (who are the retail distributors, not the end users). The generators are still incuring real costs (their staff wages for a start) even if they are having to pay their customers. This has nothing to do with being "green", and the Second Law of Thermodynamics has not been fooled.

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 03 2018, @11:55PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 03 2018, @11:55PM (#617428) Journal
    There's two situations where this matters. The first is "someone needs to sink this power now or my grid will melt" in which the grid is at risk because there's too much power produced. The second is "I'll pay someone to use this power in order for me to scoop up highly profitable feed-in tariffs." In other words, there's some profitable shenanigan and they're splitting part of the profits with the consumer of electricity.