It's Been So Windy in Europe That Electricity Prices Have Turned Negative (vice.com) 217
An anonymous reader writes: It's been very windy across Europe this week. So much so, in fact, that the high wind load on onshore and offshore wind turbines across much of the continent has helped set new wind power records. For starters, renewables generated more than half of Britain's energy demand on Wednesday -- for the first time ever. In fact, with offshore wind supplying 10 percent of the total demand, energy prices were knocked into the negative for the longest period on record. The UK is home to the world's biggest wind farm, and the largest wind turbines, so it's no surprise that this was an important factor in the country's energy mix. "Negative prices aren't frequently observed," Joel Meggelaars, who works at renewable energy trade body WindEurope, told Motherboard over the phone. "It means a high supply and low demand."
In Communist Europe... (Score:5, Funny)
Am I doing this right?
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Re:In Communist Europe... (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder if it would be cost effective for utility companies to get into the cryptocurrency mining business? Surely it would help avoid situations like this where they actually lose money (temporarily) by adding green power to the grid.
If they had 40 foot shipping containers filled with cryptocurrency mining computers that could be moved around by truck and plugged into the grid as needed, it might help offset costs. Obviously it would be smarter to use electric car fleets to absorb the extra capacity, but maybe this would help too?
Even if it only helped to make bitcoin mining less cost effective in coal powered regions of the grid, it might still be worth doing.
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I wonder if it would be cost effective for utility companies to get into the cryptocurrency mining business?
Wonder no more. This "record longest continuous negative power prices" lasted for a mind-boggling five hours. [argusmedia.com] How much cryptocurrency can be mined in five hours?
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How big is your server farm?
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According to the poster who floated this idea, it's the size of a 40 foot shipping container.
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5 hours now, but it's only going to get better as time goes on.
With renewables you want enough to cover you at all times, which means that much of the time you will have an excess.
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Skipping modding this just to point out how fucking retarded trying to get into mining now is.
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I wonder if it would be cost effective for utility companies to get into the cryptocurrency mining business? Surely it would help avoid situations like this where they actually lose money (temporarily) by adding green power to the grid.
If they had 40 foot shipping containers filled with cryptocurrency mining computers that could be moved around by truck and plugged into the grid as needed, it might help offset costs. Obviously it would be smarter to use electric car fleets to absorb the extra capacity, but maybe this would help too?
Even if it only helped to make bitcoin mining less cost effective in coal powered regions of the grid, it might still be worth doing.
There are electric "big rigs".
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"I wonder if it would be cost effective for utility companies to get into the cryptocurrency mining business?"
I like your thinking here but mining turns energy into money which is sort of contra to the ideals of employing renewables in the first place. That said it could be a useful additional sink for energy, given that the generating companies have shareholders and expensive boards to maintain.
Incidentally, I thought the whole idea of the grid was to not need to move things around - you *ahem* "simply"
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I like your thinking here but mining turns energy into money which is sort of contra to the ideals of employing renewables in the first place.
Whoever told you that? The goal of renewable energy (as a tech) is to have energy that won't run out (and green energy, energy that wont harm planet)
Also they were turning energy into a debt (negative prices). So for the power company it would be better to turn it into nothing, and better again to turn it into money (that could be used for further investment)
But for consumers it would have been great.
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And the greedy mother fucking suicidal fossil fuel shareholders who dump science and common sense in favour of asymptotic wealth over a period of nanoseconds.
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Hey look another article thats all like HEY AMERICA YOURE NOT DOING THIS AND WE ARE, and ignores the obvious things like the north american power grid designs, the scattered population centers over a large area, and so on.
If the population density is so low in some areas then they should have plenty of room to put up wind turbines locally
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i like to brag about the area where I live. I live in Ludington, Michigan which is in Mason County. Mason County has. 56 large windmills. It is also the home of a very large pumped storage plant. They are spending close to a billion dollars upgrading it. It is also very close to the deepest part of Lake Michigan. In a recent slashdot article someone was studying a proposal to put a sphere underwater to contain compressed air to generate power so maybe they could put one in Lake Michigan and put windm
Misleading Headlines Again... (Score:2, Informative)
Negative prices for energy are a pure fiction. If this were actually the case, the utility would pay you to use electricity. The reality here is that there are government subsidies or other government interference that is artificially distorting the market and that offset, minus the reduction in cost due to a glut in supply, may have netted a negative price for electricity temporarily. But all those wind turbines and other "green" systems are not free, thus if you have:
Some cost for green systems/total e
Re:Misleading Headlines Again... (Score:5, Informative)
No, this really is talking about negative energy prices. The suppliers are paying people to use electricity in order to keep the grid voltage stable, since production has to match demand.
Really this is a symptom of not having enough energy storage on the grid. They were generating so much energy that they could no longer store it, and needed to pay someone to burn the energy off.
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Sure. But then you need to pay a LOT more to turn the turbines back on when the wind eventually dies down.
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Actually, no, they can't, and that's the crux of the matter. Fossil fuel or nuclear turbines take a fairly long, involved process to spin up or down. And they feathering windmills can take a while depending on the windmill type and most place have laws that they have to turn off the "dirty" power first.
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Actually, no, they can't, and that's the crux of the matter. Fossil fuel or nuclear turbines take a fairly long, involved process to spin up or down. And they feathering windmills can take a while depending on the windmill type and most place have laws that they have to turn off the "dirty" power first.
Actually windmills are easy to turn off. They have a free-wheel position. This is needed during storms because they otherwise produce too much power and burn out their powerlines.
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Actually, no, they can't, and that's the crux of the matter. Fossil fuel or nuclear turbines take a fairly long, involved process to spin up or down. And they feathering windmills can take a while depending on the windmill type and most place have laws that they have to turn off the "dirty" power first.
Actually windmills are easy to turn off. They have a free-wheel position. This is needed during storms because they otherwise produce too much power and burn out their powerlines.
Correction: During storms they are locked to also avoid them tearing themselves apart. Still it is a switch all windmills need.
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It makes much more sense to get people to install batteries on their homes, with their home running of battery and mains and the grid supplier able to balance load by charging or drawing current from those batteries. The system would have to be designed to be able to run the house at normal maximum demand for say twenty four hours and then electrical companies can dump energy into those batteries. Dependent upon whether the consumer buys, leases or rents as part of the energy supply, affects how much they a
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Not quite true. The problem with Wind turbines is that if you run them unloaded, they tend to runaway and destroy themselves. You need to keep them loaded at all times. They could just dump the load into loadbanks or similar, but then they would have to invest in load banks (giant resistors) to make that practical. Solar, on the other hand, you can safely disconnect and leave open circuit if you don't need the power any more.
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Why can't you either shut some of them down entirely, or pitch the blades to regulate RPM?
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Every energy plant already has load banks, you can't just turn off coal or nuclear plants so they need it anyway. Wind turbines have brakes and can be fully locked out.
These prices are just cost on the futures market. It is indeed government subsidy that is being 'paid back' to speculators.
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But is it negative price for the end user, or some negative prices among the grid that only big power companies can use when exchanging electricity between themselves?
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Negative prices for 'users' that have either contracts coupled to the european energy exchange (EEX) or whomcan nuy directly at the EEX.
In other words: ordinary households still pay the house hold contract price.
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that's what I thought
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The suppliers should invest in Bitcoin mining rigs.
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As you so eloquently put it: No, they fucking shouldn't, that's fucking retarded.
There's a reason no-one uses enormous-scale lithium batteries. At the national-power-grid level, you go with something like pumped storage, as AC already pointed out.
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Or not enough demand response. [wikipedia.org]
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"The suppliers are paying people to use electricity in order to keep the grid voltage stable"
Your point is correct but I think you mean "generators". Generator's customers are "suppliers" (which can be the same group/organization) and the supplier's customers are "consumers" - which is you and me etc. Those are probably not industry terms but in essence the wholesale price from some power generators went negative for a while.
I can promise you my 'leccy bills did not go negative for a few hours this week 8
Re:Misleading Headlines Again... (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually nuclear has the same problem. It's a fairly expensive base load, but when demand drops prices still go negative, because you still need the grid to absorb the excess. You can't just ramp up and ramp down on a dime: that's why they call it base load. Your base load should always be less than total demand.
In fact what this news is pointing to is that the smarter we can be about using power when it's available, the more efficient we can be. Run your hot water heater and your home heater or air conditioner when prices go negative, turn it off when they go positive, keep the temperature under control but don't be stupid about it, and you need a lot less base load capacity.
Re:Misleading Headlines Again... (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually nuclear has the same problem. It's a fairly expensive base load, but when demand drops prices still go negative, because you still need the grid to absorb the excess. You can't just ramp up and ramp down on a dime: that's why they call it base load. Your base load should always be less than total demand.
Exactly this. During the California power crisis a decade or so ago, our public utility up in British Columbia made out like bandits. During the day time, power was at a huge premium in California. So, BC Hydro would run their hydro-electric power plants flat out, as hard as possible, unsustainably draining their reservoirs. At night, they'd turn the dams off, let the water build up behind the dams again, and buy dirt cheap nuclear power from California. The reason is that the older designs used in current Nuclear power plants can't reliably ramp up or down to meet real daytime/nighttime peaking.
Re:Misleading Headlines Again... (Score:4, Informative)
Your utility made out like bandits because Enron came up with a scheme to banksterize the power grid, not because there was an actual problem.
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Knee jerk much? No, it's not lies. If the grid had no renewables, nuclear would be a good solution. But that ship has sailed, and the reason it's sailed is that nuclear has high fixed costs and significant risk that's hard to quantify. So we're getting renewables; the question is whether nuclear is a good thing to have alongside the renewables. Given that Germany and France's nuclear plants can mostly operate in a load-following mode, if it were the case that that were true, we wouldn't be reading
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Cost is always a factor, but what do you call a renewable system that does better than "break even" which is what viable renewable energy does?
It's not net cost.
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Regardless, this headline makes it out to be a good thing. Wild market volatility and negative pricing are symptoms of underlying problems, not good things.
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If this were actually the case, the utility would pay you to use electricity.
That is actually what the "utilities" are doing.
http://www.eex.com/ [eex.com]
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NO, the utilities are being paid elsewhere and you are getting a fraction of that as a pass through...
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Maybe he's a hammer or a lockjaw.
useful dumpload needed (Score:5, Insightful)
My $0.02 anyway...
Re:useful dumpload needed (Score:4, Insightful)
Better yet, have "plants" brought online to do something useful, like pump that energy into batteries, pump water high up a hill, pump gas into high pressure chambers, pull trains up hills, etc, so that the energy can be used later when the pendulum swings the other way.
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This is /. doncha know. Stop making sensible suggestions.
Re:useful dumpload needed (Score:5, Interesting)
If one of the tenets of preventing global warming is to reduce use of CO2-producing fuels, then using excess wind capacity to generate stored power to use later instead of using CO2-producing fuels would seem useful.
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Re:useful dumpload needed (Score:4, Insightful)
Not when it can be done more efficiently, no. Storing electricity in pumped storage/batteries is ~90% efficient. Carbon sequestering systems, combined with carbon burning production is substantially less efficient than that.
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I was thinking that negative prices were a nice way to encourage people to invest in home batteries (Powerwall). With a big battery one can better exploit peak pricing (or in this case spot pricing). However, your idea is better/complimentary.
The real issue is what is a good way to deal with variable generated power. You either need to waste it, store it, or use it. Seems like a good business opportunity to come up with some clever ways to use it as it becomes available. Is this the kind of stuff E
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This isn't a new idea at all. I actually own several plants that are powered by renewable sources that turn atmospheric carbon dioxide into solid carbon and oxygen. They work great and are completely off-grid! The only downside is that every so often I have to collect the solid carbon and put it on the curb to be taken to the local sequestration area or the homeowner's association will complain about my bushes and trees needing trimming.
Negative pricing? (Score:5, Funny)
This reminds me of the time I went to buy cinder blocks at Home Depot. The guy told me the more I bought, the cheaper they are. So I told him to load them up on my trailer until they're free.
Cute solution to a similar problem (Score:5, Interesting)
Then there are days, usually in winter, when the island has the opposite problem: it creates more energy than it can use or store. Just as Eigg Electric has to manage its deficiencies itself, it has to manage its surpluses. Fortunately, it has a system for that too: when there is a surplus of power, electric heaters in the community hall, pier lobby and two churches automatically turn on. This keeps these shared spaces warm all through the winter and requires “virtually no central heating in the system at all,” says Booth. “We don’t charge for it because the whole community benefits.”
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I wouldn't be surprised that if the share of unreliable renewable energy, smart meters and electric vehicles goes up you can "donate" storage capacity to the power company in exchange for free charging. Say you charge your Tesla to say 50% minimum for your short daily commute, but if and only if it's free it'll go up to 90% automatically. Or on request, of course. Even if it's only a few kWh each multiplied by thousands of cars it's many megawatts. You might also see a slight increase in demand as people ta
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Person 1: Wow, it must be really windy.
Person 2: How can you tell?
Person 1: Well I just burned my ass on the heated toilet seat.
Explanation (Score:5, Informative)
Before too many people jump in blaming this on subsidies, they should read this:
https://www.cleanenergywire.or... [cleanenergywire.org]
My understanding is that basically if you have energy sources which can't be quickly or cheaply shut down, and supply exceeds demand, the price can turn negative so that the grid can dump the excess power.
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And just how much time does it take to feather a wind mill? Surely that should be nearly instantaneous, like an airplane propeller? Or do they have to send out a technician to climb up and turn a big wheel to feather the vanes?
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Depending on make and model it takes seconds to minutes. Modern wind plants can be turned off or down to a set percentage or to a set ceiling almost instantaneously.
The energy price turning negative "enough" causes this to be set in motion, albeit not completely automatically (somebody usually decides looking at day-ahead market prices for which quarter-hours a specific turbine should be turned off or throttled). It could be automated, but right now there is really no need to and it might make the system mo
Re:Explanation (Score:4, Funny)
And just how much time does it take to feather a wind mill? Surely that should be nearly instantaneous, like an airplane propeller? Or do they have to send out a technician to climb up and turn a big wheel to feather the vanes?
They have to send a guy in a red shirt up an access tube so that he can reverse the polarity. There are usually plenty of sparks involved.
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Everybody who is interested in stuff like this and has the hardware (smartmeters?) knows that the price is negative: http://eex.com/ [eex.com]
Companies interested are:
o other power companies, that buy it and distribute it over europe
o companies like aluminium mills
o or cooled storage houses
etc.
Ofc. unless you have a smartmeter normal households can not participate
Minor nit (Score:5, Informative)
The real question is... (Score:2, Interesting)
We Need to Add Capacitance to the Grid (Score:3)
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It would not affect the price at the slightest. :)
It only would change 'buys' the power for a negative price
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We don't know, because the cats, foxes and sharks ate their corpses.
But it was certainly less than those who die to air pollution and other man made poisons.
Thanx for your concerns, though.
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Using California tariffs as an example, you have 85 days per year of "on-peak" energy in the summer, with a $0.06/kWh price differential between on-peak and off-peak rates. At these tariffs, your break-even point is energy storage at $77/kWh/10,000 cycles with 6% MARR (loosely subsidized), or $323/kWh at 1% MARR (subsidized).
In the UK, it seems like TOU rates are a new concept, but they have a very low rate year-round at night an
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If your battery is good for 10,000 cycles, that is n, if you use the battery 85 times per year that is np, your initial cost is $400, so that is PV, and your savings is (say) -$0.15 per cycle, and that is PMT. We can assume for discussion that the salvage value is equal to t
time to mine bitcoin freepower makesti it good for (Score:2)
time to mine bitcoin free power makes it good for profit
Downside to wind, solar (Score:2)
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Obligatory Calvin and Hobbes quote (Score:2)
Negative? (Score:2)
Electricity prices have gone negative?
Not to worry, once they switch to "clean coal" that'll all be fixed.
In fact, maybe they could just run the wind turbines on coal and then there will be plenty of jobs for every coal miner in Europe!
discourse (Score:3)
Only on Slashdot will you find people who will tell you that renewable energy is a far-fetched fantasy, but ubiquitous driverless cars are just around the corner. Oh, and we're totally going to Mars.
We pay for the electricity network and taxes! (Score:5, Interesting)
Not the actual electricity itself. The Electricity has been rock bottom cheap here in Sweden for YEARS now.
But the EL-companys lobbyists have successfully lobbied away the roof on network/electricity transportation fee's, so there is no longer any roof on that.
This means the EL-Companies are working together to charge SKY high prices for transportation of the electricity, it's technically a fee they take to repair and maintain the network, but it's also an obligatory fee to be connected to them, it's insanely high, and they just yet again warned us of much higher prices.
In fact, our network prices are so crazy high that we pay roughly 40 cents per KWH just for transportation AND taxes on transportation. Yes, that's nearly half a dollar per KWH!
So all the sensationalist BS about negative EL-prices is just headline clickbait, it has no real life implication for any citizen.
Store Energy by Splitting Water for Hydrogen (Score:2)
This is why power companies just need to start using excess energy to split water and either store the hydrogen for use in a HFC power plant as needed or sell it for use in HFC vehicles.
It's so easy, Cal State LA is d
Thanks global warming! (Score:2)
Thanks for making it so windy so we can run our cheap wind turbines.
negative prices? (Score:2)
not on my monthly bill...
Re:subsidy (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not about subsidy, it's about keeping the grid voltage constant.
You're paying people for the service of using up energy, and keeping the grid stable. Negative electricity prices are really a symptom of not having enough storage capacity on the grid.
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Actually it is not the voltage but the frequency (which are coupled ofc.).
Re:subsidy (Score:5, Informative)
Negative energy prices are a symptom of having too many power plants with no incentive to reduce output in an oversupply condition.
There are many reasons why a plant may not wish to reduce power:
- a thermal plant may already be operating at close to its minimum rated power, and may require the operator to waste steam to reduce electricity output, because the plant cannot sustain a lower steam production (in such a condition, there is a loss of revenue, but no reduction in fuel costs, so is undesirable - unless prices turn negative at which point steam waste may be judged appropriate).
- Renewable and nuclear generators which have zero, or near zero, marginal operating costs are reluctant to reduce output as it reduces revenue, without a saving in fuel costs
- Subsidised power generators (which in the UK model sell the power to the govt at a fixed price, and the govt then sells it on the open market) do not have to respond to market forces, so have no incentive to reduce power output, even in the event of negative prices.
- Some plants, such as the old UK nuclear plants, are limited by fatigue life, and therefore must avoid temperature and load changes, except for plant operational reasons, and therefore are reluctant to reduce load, even in the event of negative prices.
- Renewable electricity is legally required to hold a "privileged" position in the energy market, such that it must not be curtailed if any other source can be curtailed first. In the event that for technical reasons, renewable energy must be curtailed (e.g. very high local wind conditions resulting in local grid overload), the compensation that must be paid to the wind generators is very high (up to 10x the value of the subsidies curtailed).
run the wind mills backward (Score:2)
Make more wind!
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But think of the 200% profits once the wind mills start turning in the opposite direction!
Re:subsidy (Score:5, Funny)
Either direction is fine.
Those big windmills are there to combat global warming.
They are cooling fans.
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Re:subsidy (Score:4, Informative)
But if prices are negative, why don't they just feather the wind mills? No point in producing energy and paying for it, might as well shut them down if there's too much supply and too little demand.
EU and German law requires wind and solar to take priority over all other sources, so that last thing you are allowed to curtail is wind. Wind is only 15% total annual generation in Germany, if they want much higher penetration, they will need to curtail wind a lot more, which will make the cost of wind rise.
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They could build a wind wall and make Mexico pay for it ...
Re:subsidy (Score:4, Insightful)
Doesn't quite work that way. There is no such thing as an oversupply on an electric grid. Just because you have a wall wart that can supply 2000mA doesn't mean it will blow up your cell phone that only needs 500mA.
These are point prices on the energy market and works much like stock and futures markets. It's not like they go knocking at people's door to beg them to use energy, the end user still pays an exorbitant amount ($1+) per kWh at the end of the month. This is just a temporary swing in the futures of "supply cost" which is a very small chunk of the final cost, usage taxes, green buildout taxes, regulatory cost, network maintenance and energy transport costs make up the majority of the bill.
The reason for this is indeed subsidies, which you pay for in taxes. So the state subsidizes "green" power, but you can't just turn off your nuclear and other plants, that would be both dangerous and take days to recover. So you keep supplying power and as always, the only option is to turn off flexible generators (solar and wind), the problem is that you now have a bunch of money the government gives you per kWh the green energy plant "generates" but there is no demand and you can't legally keep/collect the money, so now the people that have paid for the futures of the green energy plant get paid back based on how much the plant would've generated if it were running.
So the end users are paying speculators through taxes levied on their energy bills for the energy that doesn't end up being generated.
Re: subsidy (Score:2)
$1/kWh?! That's seven times typical midwest US rates. Shudder to think of summer A/C bills...
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Air con is hardly ever used in this part of the world in homes. I'm at 51deg North and I'm S.W. of London. We just don't get the sort of temperatures that many parts of the USA get in summer.
51Deg North is farther north than Toronto btw.
My Electricity bill for the past 3 months was £40.00 and £3.00 for Gas.
If I want to cool the house, I just open a few windows. The cross draught keeps it cool.
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$1/kWh?! That's seven times typical midwest US rates. Shudder to think of summer A/C bills...
There are probably about 3 people in the whole of the UK who have summer A/C bills. A/C here is about as useful as a raincoat in the Sahara.
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the end user still pays an exorbitant amount ($1+) per kWh at the end of the month.
I know the dollar isn't worth much these days, but are these actual prices for energy in the US or maybe anywhere in Europe? I pay € 0,18 per kWh for my electricity and I was under the impression it is not more than € 0,25 over large parts of Europe.
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the end user still pays an exorbitant amount ($1+) per kWh at the end of the month.
I know the dollar isn't worth much these days, but are these actual prices for energy in the US or maybe anywhere in Europe? I pay € 0,18 per kWh for my electricity and I was under the impression it is not more than € 0,25 over large parts of Europe.
Yes, "$1+ per kWh" seems fake. I'm paying €0.25 per kWh (in Germany) and that's with a supplier that delivers 100% renewable (wind, water, solar) power. All in all I pay about €30 a month for electricity.
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Because the electricity providers typically have deals with large users of electricity (like aluminium smelters for example) that give them preferential rates, but require them to use electricity exactly when the generators want them to.
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Is storage not an option?
No. It's crazy expensive whichever method you advocate, and there are many. This is why traditional base load power systems match supply with demand. There has always been an incentive to store because it would greatly simplify many difficult problems. If it were feasible it would have been done long ago.
Re:Storage (Score:4, Interesting)
"Traditional base load" does not match supply with demand.
It constantly produces around 95% of its max capacity. Hence the name: base load.
That is the minimum amount of power your grid will always consume. So you build plants that can be run close to 100% 24/7 all years long. Hence the name: base load.
But now we have so much renewables, that they produce more power than the base load plants.
You are mixing up 'base laod' with either 'load following', 'balancing power' or 'reserve power' or with all three of them.
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It might be nice for future smart grid appliances (dare I say IoT...) to be able to take cues from power generation to burn a little extra juice (run the water heater, cool the fridge/freezer, turn off
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I think it's only economical if you have the right geography.
Well, when you have surplus power, you spend it on bulldozers to make a really tall hill. Eventually, you have a mountain to lift water up to.
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I am legitimately curious, though, as to the effective cost-per-joule/subsidy-per-joule of various energy sources over the lifetime of the source.