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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.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Wednesday January 03 2018, @01:58PM
Now when they are at $200bn it is only $100bn to go until they've wasted enough money to instead have gotten an all nuclear grid (Barakah NPP (UAE, 4xAPR1400) cost 20bn and will give about 40TWh/yr, germany uses about 600TWh/yr).
But I guess having wind, solar and "going green" is more important than reducing CO2 emissions ;-)
And with a bit less schadenfreude - I'm actually worried about the german grid after 2022 since their nuclear power plants have started to specialize in frequency control / grid stabilization and in 2021 they plan to shut down 4GW and in 2022 another 4GW, since nuclear can (and in this case starts to) quite easily ramp 50% (2.1% per minute in the Konvoi-type that matters in this case) this means they'll have to come up with some 2GWe of frequency control per year in 2021 and 2022 (and due to the local terraforming a pumped hydro plant entails this means they'll need even more gas or coal))