Germany Has Too Many Solar Panels, and It's Pushed Energy Prices Negative (businessinsider.com) 305
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Markets Insider: Sunny days in Germany mean gray clouds for solar profitability as the nation's dive into renewables has left it with too much energy. According to a note from SEB Research, in the past 10 days, solar producers have had to take an 87% price cut during production hours. In fact, when production peaks, prices have slid well below zero. On average, the price received was 9.1 euros per megawatt-hour, significantly under the 70.6 euros paid during non-solar-power hours. "This is what happens to power prices when the volume of unregulated power becomes equally big or bigger than demand: Prices collapse when unregulated power produces the most," the Swedish bank wrote on Tuesday.
Last year's record wave of solar installations are what's driving Germany's price "destruction" as inventory outpaces consumption. While total solar capacity topped 81.7 gigawatts by 2023's end, demand load only reached 52.2 gigawatts, noted SEB chief commodities analyst Bjarne Schieldrop. The difference between the two actually widens even more in the summer, a season of peak production and lower demand. This also means that consumers are not necessarily benefiting from the low prices, as they typically consume more energy in non-solar hours. Unless new installations are spurred on by subsidies or power purchase agreements, oppressed profitability could eventually halt Germany's solar expansion, Schieldrop said.
Instead, focus is likely to move onto improvements that will make more use of the energy produced, such as investments in batteries and grid infrastructure. "This will over time exhaust the availability of 'free power' and drive solar-hour-power-prices back up," Schieldrop wrote. "This again will then eventually open for renewed growth in solar power capacity growth."
Last year's record wave of solar installations are what's driving Germany's price "destruction" as inventory outpaces consumption. While total solar capacity topped 81.7 gigawatts by 2023's end, demand load only reached 52.2 gigawatts, noted SEB chief commodities analyst Bjarne Schieldrop. The difference between the two actually widens even more in the summer, a season of peak production and lower demand. This also means that consumers are not necessarily benefiting from the low prices, as they typically consume more energy in non-solar hours. Unless new installations are spurred on by subsidies or power purchase agreements, oppressed profitability could eventually halt Germany's solar expansion, Schieldrop said.
Instead, focus is likely to move onto improvements that will make more use of the energy produced, such as investments in batteries and grid infrastructure. "This will over time exhaust the availability of 'free power' and drive solar-hour-power-prices back up," Schieldrop wrote. "This again will then eventually open for renewed growth in solar power capacity growth."
Same thing happening in Australia (Score:4, Interesting)
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Does the existence of decoupling laws in many US states prove that electricity is so overproduced that prices would easily go negative without said decoupling laws that allow bureaucrats to set rates, not supply and demand?
Re:Same thing happening in Australia (Score:4, Informative)
No, its a consequence of how the grid works. Too much energy is just as bad if not worse than too little energy. This creates highly volatile pricing in a free market because you can't just eat an extra GW as a loss and send the actual electrons to a ground (its just too much power to do that with). But consumers don't want this so the utility locks in long term supplies (and consumer prices) in most cases. Solar and wind are excluded from these things for various reasons including practical ones like not being able to control the sun and clouds. When you ignore the engineers and overbuild variable load supply (that you can't control) you end up with wildly swinging prices for these reasons which includes swings into negative prices as well as large price spikes.
The decoupling laws have to do with making people pay their fair share of the cost of maintaining the grid itself (not costs from power generation). If anything decoupling laws make this worse because they force more variable load onto the grid. But they prevent others from having to take an unfair share of the costs of maintaining the grid itself, at least that's the argument.
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you can't just eat an extra GW as a loss and send the actual electrons to a ground
Can't you just automatically disconnect panels until production matches demand? A PV panel that is not connected anywhere does not send electrons to the ground and does not produce any power.
Re:Same thing happening in Australia (Score:5, Informative)
Also, negative pricing makes grid storage a lot more profitable - get paid to charge up the battery, and get paid again to discharge it.
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you can't just eat an extra GW as a loss and send the actual electrons to a ground (its just too much power to do that with).
Not true, except for nuclear. Solar, wind, water, etc. can idle on short notice. Nuclear cannot.
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It's not so much that nuclear operates *best* at full load, so much as that you don't save signifidant money by reducing the the plant output. So as long as you get paid *something*, it makes more sense to sell power even if you can't make an econmic profit. As long as you're paid *something*, that's better than being paid *nothing*.
In that way nuclear power somewhat resembles renewables; when you have power the only thing you can do is sell it, even if it is at an economic loss [investopedia.com] (i.e. a less-than-normal p
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Re:Same thing happening in Australia (Score:5, Insightful)
None of that explains why volatile pricing is an issue.
I'll help. For some industries it can be a problem, because electricity is a big part of their costs and they want predictability. For them, they can buy contracts at a fixed rate, or they can improve their processes to match 48 hour advance pricing information.
For consumers, it means getting used to scheduling power consumption at different times. Most of it is automatic, e.g. your car charger makes sure you have X% in the morning, selecting the cheapest hours overnight to get there. Your AC drops the set point 1 degree when energy is cheap, so it can coast through the expensive periods.
Personally I love it. I even do stuff like schedule backups and disk checks to happen at cheap times now. The washing machine kicks in at 60C with the luxury steam mode when I'm being paid to consume energy.
Re:Same thing happening in Australia (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, *YOU* can use smart features on your new Tesla or set up cron jobs for disk scrubs, but is the guy down the street who constantly asks for help because his computer is slow again, going to take advantage of rate shifts? I don't even tell anyone what I do for a living anymore because too many think of it as an invitation for a free personal Geek Squad.
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What most of the people here fail to understand is that if you frequent Slashdot, you are on the right edge of the bell curve when it comes to tech.
What a lot of people here fail to understand is that their personal experience is not the same as other people's.
In the UK we have had time of use tarriffs, i.e. cheaper electricity at night since approximately forever. So long that the old gen kit is due to be discontinued soon, because it relies on Radio 4 Long Wave and that's due to be discontinued as well.
It
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Solar farms and some domestic users are being charged during peak hours to take their electricity rather than being paid
Fortunately, photovoltaic solar can be throttled back or off at electronic speeds. The panels just get a little warmer (but never more than as warm as they'd get if they were just mounted in the sun but not yet wired up, which they can stand just fine). Let their control know when the power rates are getting near zero or switching over to negative and they'll just shut down. So it's jus
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Too much power really does feel like a better problem to have then not enough. The trick is really to just figure out how to do something sensible with it.
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It is a bit more complicated. Solar farms can simply not deliver power, the farm does not get damaged by that. hence this is likely based on longer-term contractual obligations, not on technological reasons. The only power-generation tech that _must_ sell its power at all times is nuclear or the reactor gets shut down and likely damaged. And nukes take several hours to adjust power output when it is unplanned.
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The only power-generation tech that _must_ sell its power at all times is nuclear or the reactor gets shut down and likely damaged. And nukes take several hours to adjust power output when it is unplanned.
People are saying this all throughout this discussion (and similar about coal). I'm curious about it. I'm sure there's a ton of complications and nothing would have necessarily been built this way, but I would have imagined that it is possible to just not spin the turbines to stop power generation from these sorts of plants. eg. vent the steam, or use it do do some other "work" rather than spin the turbine (a flywheel or governor of some sort?). That way the reactor/coal furnace can keep working (maybe at
AI datacenters (Score:5, Insightful)
They just need a couple of AI datacenters and their excess power problems will be over.
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Right. Even throwing hashes at an altcoin is smarter than paying to send power to the grid.
But, seriously y'all, buy at least one $400 battery.
We do need smarter tech for integrating grid, battery, and charging. Mine is DYI and manual, which Isn't ready for normies. And my compute loads can run on 48VDC with minimal work which is not true of an average hair dryer.
Great systems are available in the $6K+ range but that means "not available" for 80% of households.
Precisely what we need (Score:5, Insightful)
On average, the price received was 9.1 euros per megawatt-hour, significantly under the 70.6 euros paid during non-solar-power hours.
The problem to date with solar (and wind) is that it doesn’t work all the time. This sort of timing based price differential is exactly what we need for the market to invest in developing and deploying the battery technology we need so that renewable energy sources can replace fossil fuels 24/7.
Re:Precisely what we need (Score:5, Interesting)
Alternatively, excess power can be used to produce synthetic alkanes.
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Alternatively, excess power can be used to produce synthetic alkanes.
First, produce hydrogen (which is also the first step in producing alkanes). However, electrolytic converters are expensive and it does not make economic sense to not run them 24/7 yet.
Re:Precisely what we need (Score:4, Interesting)
The single most surprising thing to me is how *slow* consumers and businesses are to respond to very strong price signals in relation to energy. Post-Ukraine, I was amazed by how few people and companies ran the maths and put up their own solar and battery, especially in the UK which was slow to blunt the price signal and didn't go as far as many EU countries.
Hopefully that will change over time.
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Because that price hike was temporary. The prices are about the same as pre war nowadays.
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Could be. At the time, though, there was plenty of talk about energy price rises being permanent, and in the UK at least, the sharp spike has gone but prices remain materially above the long term norm.
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It's the UK, we are getting ripped off as usual.
You can get your bills down with a bit of effort. Switch to Octopus Agile that tracks the wholesale price of electricity, and then time shift your consumption a bit.
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Up-front costs are a big issue. In the UK a lot of people don't have the cash on hand. And then you need to find an installer, because there aren't enough to meet demand.
V2L might be a more practical method for many people, as they need a car anyway.
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I don't know the numbers right now, but I would estimate that only about 10% of Germany's homes have any type of AC to begin with. I for once, at an age of more than 50 years, have never lived in a home with AC, and I didn't miss one. Germany is much more to the North than the U.S., and Germany's southernmost point is still North of the U.S.-Canadian border. The highest t
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... Germany is much more to the North than the U.S., and Germany's southernmost point is still North of the U.S.-Canadian border...
You must be using a really weird atlas.
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Well, he's not that wrong. The southern German border fits nicely in that dip around the great lakes. The usual Canadian-US parallel (49th?) almost cuts Paris in half. Europe on average is a lot more northerly than the United States are.
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You'd love snobs from New York. They brag about not having AC all the time! Or at least they used to.
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Re: Precisely what we need (Score:5, Insightful)
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There's no rule of physics that if there is excess energy offering, the price must be negative, it just comes from the way the auctioning has been crafted, though like pointed out by the parent post, this is not a bug in the system, it is a feature.
That's true in the sense that there's no rule of physics saying that price must go down when supply goes up, but that's how markets generally work. What's the alternative you propose for determining who should stop supplying power to the grid when there's an excess of generation?
More gravity batteries are good investments (Score:2)
Exactly. The title is absolutely wrong, there is not too much renewable electricity generation, just not enough infrastructure around it.
We need more batteries and I don't think that's such a hard problem, but what do I know? A gravity battery [wikipedia.org] can be erected pretty anywhere. Look at the photo of the "Energy Vault 60 meter prototype in Castione-Arbedo".
What I see common near large urban areas as a real estate investment in my lifetime are large monthly rental storage unit buildings meant only to last a few decades. These large buildings are only meant as semi-profitable investment until the buildings are demolished and replaced with much more
Re: Precisely what we need (Score:4, Interesting)
The reason for negative prices is that when there is more energy than demand, it pushes up the frequency of the grid. The grid needs to maintain very close to 50Hz, so they pay people to consume the excess.
It's only a problem if you view negative prices as an issue. You could look at them as a huge opportunity and a massive win for consumers.
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Exactly. The title is absolutely wrong, there is not too much renewable electricity generation, just not enough infrastructure around it. Germany produces massive amounts of electricity with non-renewables, so they actually need more renewables (but mostly better grid and grid scale energy storage).
It's not wrong, you are merely choosing a different perspective. There actually is oversupply. You can stipulate if not for x then y but nonetheless given present day realities oversupply exists.
Present day ESS and grid infrastructure technology have similar issues with diminishing value and are not by themselves an economically feasible means of preventing the need for massive oversupply in the absence of a significant mix of dispatachable generation.
Also, what can be done to get rid of negative energy prices if that is desired? Well change the auctioning system. There's no rule of physics that if there is excess energy offering, the price must be negative, it just comes from the way the auctioning has been crafted, though like pointed out by the parent post, this is not a bug in the system, it is a feature.
There are real costs to oversupply. For markets of ph
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Not enough of an increase in temperature to matter.
For a product with a service life of decades a 10f delta matters.
The reason peoples' rooftop solar don't drop off the grid when the electricity is not wanted is just the fact that this is one more element to add to the circuitry, and unless it's important to the panel owner to implement this, the fact that it makes problems for the utility is not their problem.
Rooftop solar is in fact kicked off the grid when there is too much demand by utility altering the AC frequency. All of the grid tie inverters are explicitly designed to see this and shut down. It is no more or less circuitry because they are already required to sync with the grid and implement anti islanding.
Re:Precisely what we need (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem to date with solar (and wind) is that it doesn’t work all the time.
The actual problem isn't that. And it isn't one that we need some sort of new battery technology to solve. It's a lack of will to do things other countries are already doing.
China just recently brought up their first 10MWh sodium install [cnevpost.com]. Yes, fucking salt, which we have a lot of. US had a company that was developing this. [aquionenergy.com] Guess what happened? [seattletimes.com]
Most of the western nations lack conviction to actually make change. They are afraid to actually invest the money required to have a working renewables system. Not because, we lack the technology. It is that no democratically elected official wants to be the guy that puts millions of fossil fuel workers/voters out of a job.
That is the problem. It's not panels or batteries. It is the lack of determination, pure and simple. The US is so backwards, they're yelling about which bathroom someone does or doesn't go into, all the while tornadoes tear apart the nation to the point no one can afford insurance or some people just cannot find insurance full stop. You've got the UK so worried about "people coming into our nation" so bad, they literally shoot themselves in the economic foot. You got French people so far up their own goddamn ass, they want to actively piss off farmers, WHO FEED THEM. No one in western nations has the spine to do what is required, they're all too busy fighting fights that literally mean nothing. And they're too busy blaming everyone, for every problem, never wanting to actually just DO SOMETHING. China just continually shows how laughably behind the times all these "rich" nations are. The tech is there, there's just no willingness to put in the time and money. We don't have to strip mine Indian territory or rely on conflict minerals. We don't have to have arguments about nuclear reactors or what kind of EV pickup truck I'll drive. Or some fucking guy who can't keep his dick in his pants and wants to be President.
There is so much these Americans and British and French and Germans want to bitch about that's just bullshit. And worse, they don't anything about any of it. They just want to bitch. We can do it all with renewables starting right now and in fifteen to twenty-five years from now, be done.
But no elected official wants to rug pull the fossil fuel industry. They are too afraid and they're afraid to admit it, so how about a $128,718,290 Trillion dollar wall and some bombs in Israel to commit genocide instead? That's the problem. You think it's panels and batteries? No that's not the problem. That's not the problem by a long shot.
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We can do it all with renewables starting right now and in fifteen to twenty-five years from now, be done.
No, it won't be done in 25 years. It won't ever be done. That's because windmills and solar PV cells wear out and need replacement. We can debate how long they last but I'd rather not, it's something like 25 years but how long exactly they last is not all that important. I know that a solar PV system rarely goes out of commission all at once, it just fades away over time. This fading could be from solar damage, breakage here and there from hailstones, or whatever. They will eventually need replacement
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They will eventually need replacement, so the process will continue indefinitely
That is literally with ANY fucking infrastructure. Shock. Things don't last forever. Who fucking knew?!
A nation could afford a big push to deploy a bunch of solar panels for a short time, but can this be done indefinitely?
Yes. The US drop trillions on wars without blinking an eye. You can prop up a 1GWh solar for $860M. $100B is something like getting flipping close to a TWh of power. And that's not even a percentage of what the nation drops on bombs alone. Shit, the US has spent more bombing fucking schools in Gaza than is required to build a few 500MWh+ solar plants. Boy do you vastly underestimate cost of keepin
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Re:Precisely what we need (Score:5, Insightful)
Salt? We lack salt? Or carbon for the cathode? Iron and lead for anode? We lack these things? News to me. I live in Tennessee and out East there's shit ton of silicon metal but heaven forbid we mine that shit. Oh wait, that's exactly what they're doing in Tiptonville. Would you like to go back over that list of shit we don't have?
Take your meds.
I told previous guy that he needs to come off that shit he's smoking that makes him think we can run a nuke for 75 years.
Also, let's just say you're right about the dozen or so whatever the fuck we need. How much magic dust we need for a nuclear plant? Not only that, how much green cashy stuff we need? How much greasing the correct corrupt fuckers we need?
Y'all just angry that you can't blame some kids for fucking it up for your nuclear dreams. Y'all just angry that rich people run the place and they don't like risky investments. Y'all just hating on this system we got going on here in the United States but can bring yourself to say "we fucked up."
But sure it's the environmentalist. Wooo!! Boogyman environmentalist!!
We're never going to solve shit because none of y'all can be honest with yourselves. It's okay, rich people like it that way, makes the ass raping easier when there's no fight.
You build me a nuke for $800 million we'll talk. Till then none of y'all have arguments for shit. Trust me I had a fucking boner for the micro-nukes. I totally wanted LFTR designs to fucking rocket to the moon. Shit, I'll take molten salt reactors to fucking Westinghouse AP1000 PWRs, I'm not picky. I think y'all got me wrong in that I hate nuclear. Nah, best nuclear is. But the fact of the matter is, I was wrong, I was on the wrong fucking team. I can see I was wrong. Because no rich person wants to buy a fucking nuclear reactor and that's all that matters. I thought knowledge and facts and energy production bullshit would win the day. But none of that fucking matters in this world. It's all about, will someone invest in it. And the answer is hell fucking no, nobody is dropping a goddamn penny into nuclear.
Don't care if it generate 6000 trillion fucking GWh. Don't care if it's CO2 whatever. Don't give a flying FUCK. The only thing they care about is can I turn a fucking profit off of it quickly? And you can never do that with nuclear, that is why it is dead. And there's nothing we can do to change that. It's how our entire society in the United States was created from day one, to be greedy ass bastards. That's why I was wrong, because I kept being idealistic, not acknowledging the 200+ fucking years of the opposite being true. And there are a LOT of people who will sell you a bunch of fucking bullshit, to make you believe it's some fucking hippie that's at fault here. You've got that sig and boy have you made some very rich person VERY HAPPY with that.
You know whatever. I'll take my fucking meds and fly high. At least I get to escape this bullshit. Shameful thing is I'll just have to be sober, because sure as shit can't afford the good shit these days.
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> I told previous guy that he needs to come off that shit he's smoking that makes him think we can run a nuke for 75 years.
That other guy has an overvalued idea [sciencedirect.com] in regards to nuclear power. Arguing with that previous guy is a waste of your time.
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All true, but don't forget the political aspect too. Many countries don't have nuclear and don't want it. Getting it would require setting up nuclear regulation agencies, getting the necessary talent, fostering a domestic nuclear industry and supply chain, and providing the mandatory unlimited free insurance that all nuclear plants need. Plus subsidies, of course.
And that's assuming their neighbours will let them have it. There was some alarm recently when Iran announced it wanted to export civilian nuclear
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Oh, and here's a great report that debunks your claims about solar panels needing a lot of energy to produce: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/... [fraunhofer.de]
Bottom of page 49. Energy payback term is between 1.3 and 2.1 years for solar panels in Germany.
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You got French people so far up their own goddamn ass, they want to actively piss off farmers, WHO FEED THEM.
I agree with your points in general, but I wouldn't exactly call the current EU agriculture subsidy system the pinnacle of a society having the conviction to do the right thing even when it's hard. It's closer to the example you provide of the American politician afraid of killing fossil fuel jobs: prioritizing the interests of a minority because making changes leads to highly-visible discontent from that noisy minority.
Re:Precisely what we need (Score:5, Informative)
China just recently brought up their first 10MWh sodium install [cnevpost.com]. Yes, fucking salt, which we have a lot of.
And if I scale this installation (picture in the link you provided) up 10-by-10 (kinda huge now, eh?), I will have 1 GWh capacity, or enough to store the output of ONE halfway recent NPP over ONE hour. The installation looks like it could fit on 50x50 meters, so we'd be talking 500*500 = 0.25 km^2 / 1 GWh.
Germany's electricity consumption (gross) is about 577 TWh/a (before moving to heat pumps for heating btw), and if we wanted to store 1% of that, we'd need 5770 GWh storage capacity, or 1440 km^2 / 0.4% of Germany's land (using the design shown).
Ofc our TOTAL energy consumption is about 3500 TWh/a. And maybe we'd have to find storage for more than 1% of our electrical consumption.
I'm not ruling that out, that sodium-based batteries are feasible, but probably not with this kind of land & resource use.
Re: Precisely what we need (Score:3)
Re: Precisely what we need (Score:2)
Even if you made 0.25 sq km a 0.25 cube km (and in the process made a giant brutalist skyscraper) that is still a stupid amount of land required if the current system is to 10m tall, you only scaled down by 25 times.
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Re:Precisely what we need (Score:4, Insightful)
Most of the western nations lack conviction to actually make change.
I don't think it's that. I think they lack the ability to even understand the issues. I trained as an EE just about the time that electricity markets in my country were 'liberalised'. Recently, I listened to an interview with a panel of industry consultants about the future of the energy market. My god. I mean, I can understand how a synchronous generator works, how to size the core iron in a substation transformer, the basics of a GW scale HVDC link, how your computer works or the universal motor in your vacuum cleaner. But the electricity market is pythonesque in its absurdity. One consultant was describing how perhaps we might have different outlets in the future linked to different suppliers for doing the various tasks we wanted (charge car, run fridge, vacuum etc). Why? Why would anyone do this? These people are paid around 3x what an EE actually earns to do EE work. This is the reason we are screwed.
They are literally delusional. The electricity market simply needs to optimise for cost per kwh delivered to the home while keeping supply rates above a certain reliability level. It is not rocket sciences. Even better, demand is extremely predictable in the short term (and even in the long term it's not absurdly hard to estimate), and technology does not change that quickly. If you left it to EEs it would probably take an office of about 50 people per country to maintain a long term investment schedule and basically keep the lights on. If you wanted to drive some kind of CO2 reduction target, we could do that too - no problem.
But no, rather than just having a bunch of engineers coordinating with city planners to determine where and when new capacity is required, we have to leave it to this rube-goldberg style market system, where the people who speculate about the market make an order of magnitude more than the people who physically keep the lights on.
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The actual problem isn't that. And it isn't one that we need some sort of new battery technology to solve. It's a lack of will to do things other countries are already doing.
China just recently brought up their first 10MWh sodium install [cnevpost.com]. Yes, fucking salt, which we have a lot of.
Wow! With a capacity of 10MWh, it would easily store more energy than than the smallest pumped-storage hydroelectric power station in Germany (6MWh). (Never mind that the other 30 stations have a total capacity of 40,000MWh.) It could even store the nominal solar power (peak capacity) of Germany for nearly half a second.
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Re: Precisely what we need (Score:2)
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Financial incentive for storage (Score:3)
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Re:Financial incentive for storage (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure if you're sarcastic or actually think you're correct. Sodium and Lithium are part of the same periodic group. Sodium is actually right below lithium. They have very similar chemical properties. The big difference for battery technology between these two is the way the ions are stored in the battery medium when charged (Anode). With Lithium, the ions can neatly fit in between the layers of graphite, quite many of them. However, due to this, the graphite deforms a little and this limits the number of charging cycles due to deformities over time.
Sodium ions are too big to use graphite efficiently as a storage medium. But they are still absorbed by amorphous (irregularly structured) hard carbon. Only not closely to the density Lithium is stored in graphite. This means energy storage density is lower, so the volume (and weight) of the battery goes up significantly. However, the anode also deforms a lot less, which gives Sodium ion batteries a larger number of charging cycles than Lithium ion batteries.
Applications where weight/volume isn't a top priority but the longevity of the storage medium is (like in grid storage), Sodium-ion batteries are superior. Also, Sodium hydroxide is several magnitudes cheaper than Lithium hydroxide, which should factor in costs when you start producing at scale.
Restate the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Are they still burning coal and/or natural gas for electricity? If so, then they still don't have too many solar panels.
Instead, it sounds like they don't have enough storage.
Re:Restate the problem (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, this is basically a great problem to have, and there's lots of ways to tackle it:
1. Time of use demand shifting for energy-intensive activities
2. Better interconnectors to shift the power from places with too much to places with not enough
3. Storage (short, medium, long)
Charging EVs is both 1 and 3 at the same time.
The single most exciting thought is what we might be able to do with spare power once we've got 2 and 3 in place to satisfy all our demands including from electrifying transport and power. When energy is genuinely too cheap to meter, i think we could see some truly interesting innovations for humanity
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Can you imagine a scenario where electricity is already too cheap to meter but retail prices are administratively propped up by state decoupling laws?
"Decoupling is a regulatory mechanism that separates a utility's revenue from the volume of electricity or gas it sells."
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Yes. The US is broken in so many ways, and so many of these are things that are hostile to consumers in a way that other developed countries just would not allow. The British energy market is shonky too, but not on anything like the same scale
How is this a problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't a problem at all. Another BS propaganda by the fossil fuel zombified dinosaur lobby.
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Or worse, in this case commodities traders (SEB Inc) . The /. headline is terrible, but parallels the trader report.
Slashdotters aren't the only ones to think of the possibilities that inexpensive electricity can be used for. Maybe it's not hyper efficient to generate green hydrogen via electrolysis but at literally $0 wholesale it is economically feasible. Same thing on those days hours of curtailment, where literally they disable the solar generators from sending to the grid so it won't overwhelm.
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Correct.
Electricity has always been overproduced at times, well before renewables came along. That happened because coal plants can't change output fast enough to follow the rapid drop after peak usage. The solution for decades now has been Alumina plants that chew the excess production. Nuclear is worse at flowing load changes that coal. That has lead to the country with the largest proportion of it's electri
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https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/... [fraunhofer.de]
17.3, page 49.
Does the production of PV modules use more energy than they can deliver
during operation?
No.
The Energy Payback Time (EPBT) indicates the period of time that a power plant has to be operated in order to replace the primary energy invested. The harvest factor (Energy Returned on Energy Invested, ERoEI or EROI) describes the ratio of the energy provided by a power plant and the energy expended for its life cycle. The energy return time and harvest factor of PV plan
It's almost as if (Score:5, Insightful)
Hoarding power when it's plentiful and selling it when it's scarce could be profitable. Something like a big-ass battery - gravity [wikipedia.org] or chemical - could be a worthwhile investment.
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You're literally describing energy storage, pal. And it has the advantage of not being radio-fucking-active, too, which turns out to matter to enough of us to irritate the living piss out of you.
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so is this a good thing? (Score:2)
At least on the surface it SOUNDS like they have a money-making system that's generating a surplus for their citizens? I know, a positively SHOCKING thing for a government to do in 2024, actually turn a profit on something! But is it so?
Not enough batteries (Score:2)
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who wrote this headline, a piece of coal (Score:2)
We have negative power prices in Australia all the time because of the same reason: "too much" solar.
This can be a problem because it can lead to grid instability - to the point where some users are forcibly disconnected from the grid. This has led to some dissatisfaction from some people as they were used to getting the feed in tariff to help compensate for the cost of their solar.
However, the market is slowly catching up to the opportunity created by this. Anyone that has adaptable loads is able to take a
It's called the duck curve (Score:2)
We see it in every place that has lots of solar capacity: Spain, Australia, California, etc. It would be incredibly fierce in the Levant and Gulf, which is why Morocco is attempting to build DC interconnectors to Europe as it would be a potentially huge profit source for them.
It's such a great problem to have: so much power that we don't know what to do with it. Because it stimulates demand for new energy-intensive activities that can be ramped up and down quickly and provide benefit to humanity, more inter
Stop this idiotic attempt to slow down the future (Score:3)
Germany has less than a quarter of the solar panels it needs to be carbon-neutral. As the world moves away from burning stuff to move around and to create heat, demand for electricity will replace demand for fossil fuels, which still make up the majority of energy use by far. Moving the electricity use from fossil generation to renewables is only a small part of the task, and that's not even close to done. The world, not just Germany, needs MORE solar panels. AS MANY AS YOU CAN INSTALL.
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Indeed. The negative energy prices only come from energy generation methods that need to have their power consumed NOW or really bad things happen. That is basically only nuclear. If the power a nuclear plant generates is not consumed immediately, it needs to do an immediate sast emergency shutdown (SCRAM) that will likely damage the plant and then may take weeks or months to go up again. You have a few minutes to decide, but not half an hour for something like that. And to reduce power output of a nuke in
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Fossil fuel shills decompose naturally. They're full of shit.
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Wrong title (Score:3)
Sigh. (Score:3)
"Oh, no, we have free electricity!"
First world problems.
There's no such thing.... (Score:2)
....as having too much electricity.
Use it in electrolysis plants to make pollution free hydrogen. Hydrogen has any number of uses - steel making, powering vehicles, I'm not a chemist but possibly making synthetic petrol and other liquid fuels that are far easier to store than hydrogen.
Clickbait article (Score:2)
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Indeed. This "story" is pure bullshit. Obviously, when you transition to renewables, you want ample supply and the means at times, oversupply. This is completely expected and not a problem in any way. In time, storage and supply-adapted-consumption will nicely deal with this. Oh, and since this is solar, it can also simply be not consumed. Unlike nuclear where you either consume or the plant needs to SCRAM (and is then down for a few months while continuing to _consume_ power) and it takes hours to make unp
Intermittency (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is, there is no solution to intermittency. Intermittency means that you cannot match supply and demand. So take northern Europe. There will be weeks in the summer when there are strong winds and long sunny days. At that point you will have way excess production. But, and its a big but, the wind generation will fluctuate wildly. You can see all this happening in real time here:
www.gridwatch.co.uk.
Then winter comes. A blocking high leads to total calm across most of northern Europe. Wind production in the UK, for instance, from about 28GW of faceplate, falls to under 0.5GW for days on end. Peak demand is after 5pm, so there is no solar. In fact, in winter there is negligible solar during December and January even during the day.
Then you also have the occasional, once every couple of decades, whole season that are relatively calm with very low wind output.
People here propose storage for the shortfalls. Well, the Royal Society investigated the question and decided that battery storage to meet the shortfalls was impossible. They also went back enough years to discover the existence of calm seasons. They proposed excavating hundreds of caverns, sealing them, then pumping them full of hydrogen, which would have to be stored for decades to finally deliver when there is one of these seasonal calms. Read the report here:
https://royalsociety.org/news-... [royalsociety.org]
People here also suppose you can use peak over production to make hydrogen. No, you can't. No large scale industrial process can manage on power that shows the daily peaked profile solar does, or the complete irregularity wind does. Don't believe me for how intermittent all this is, go look at Gridwatch and see for yourselves.
The idea that countries can transition from gas and coal to wind and solar may be emotionally alluring for many, but its a fantasy. Its not going to happen. There are many problems, but the killer is that there is no solution to intermittency. Any country which persists to the bitter end with trying to do it will either blink, or will inflict economy destroying blackouts on its population.
The craziest aspect of the idea is that at the same time the countries that have embarked on the net zero project propose to at least double demand. You have data centers, EVs, conversion of home heating to electricity. All this makes the problem worse, all these absolutely require reliable power. To double or more demand while closing down conventional when there is no solution to intermittency is crazy.
The above cites the UK and northern Europe. You want something closer to home, look at what New York is planning. The net zero plans they have come up with involves using something called Dispatchable Emissions-Free Resource to solve the intermittency problem. What is that? Its what it says, its something that does not exist anywhere in the world, nor is it under development, its reliable dispatchable power generated from a source that does not emit CO2. Well, maybe nuclear would qualify, but New York is of course not planning on using that to get to net zero in power generation. But whatever it is, its going to have to come into existence fairly smartly, or New York will find itself confronted, like everyone else, with a choice between having reliable power and dropping net zero.
Again, don't believe me about DEFR, look up the presentations:
https://documents.dps.ny.gov/p... [ny.gov]
Need to get realistic. There is not going to be any energy transition, in the sense of life carrying on as now but with different technologies supplying power, heat, transport energy. Or perhaps one should say, there may be at some point, but that point is not now, and those currently advocating doing it right away are driven to inventing wholly imaginary
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So interconnect northern Europe to the rest of Europe, and to Asia, and across the Strait of Gibraltar to Africa.
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You seem to have misunderstood what "net zero" means. It doesn't mean we never emit any CO2 ever, it means that the total we emit and the total we capture is zero.
So the plan is very much to still have some gas plants for occasional use, which will be offset by capture elsewhere.
At no time in human history has e.g. wind in the North Sea been so low that it would only produce 2% of name plate capacity from a distributed set of wind turbines. Give us the date when you claim this happened for "days on end", al
I'm confused (Score:2)
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Not really (Score:2)
What Germany has is that it is in transition to fully renewable. Hence storage, transition and supply-adapted consumption is still in the process of being established. This is an intermediate state and meaningless. Everybody runs into that effect sooner or later. It is expected.
Unless new installations are spurred ??? (Score:2)
It isn't too much power (Score:3)
Data point (Score:3)
This price imbalance is not, as far as I can tell, being passed on to consumers that still pay the highest prices during the day and the lowest prices at night.
Return industry (Score:3)
If industry would return, you can easily dump cheap energy into such processes such as glass and metal foundries.
Re:Why don't they mine Bitcoin or other crypto.. (Score:5, Insightful)
or pump water back to higher dams or compress air mines, flywheels, lift weights in mine shafts or in industrial energy storage buildings
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or pump water back to higher dams or compress air mines, flywheels, lift weights in mine shafts or in industrial energy storage buildings
Maybe because doing that would take considerable investment of raw material, labor, and in some cases a considerable demands for land area. They already invested a lot of material in land, labor, and material for solar power so piling on the demands for more with storage will cause problems with finding enough resources to go around.
I find it a bit "cute" that they blame this energy glut in part on expansion of expansion on nuclear power capacity. First problem I see is, what "expansion" of nuclear power
Re:Why don't they mine Bitcoin or other crypto.. (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe because doing that would take considerable investment
Oh no. Not investment in infrastructure. Can't do that!!!! What is the world coming to suggesting we need to invest in our utilities.
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Since the goal (if you're not running a coal, gas, or nuke plant) is to get us off coal, gas, and nukes... the title should be "Germany has insufficient short term power storage capacity".