
Power Prices Go Negative in Germany - kwindla
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/25/business/energy-environment/germany-electricity-negative-prices.html
======
rayiner
The article doesn’t actually answer the questions it purports to answer.
Better source: [https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/why-power-
prices-...](https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/why-power-prices-turn-
negative).

Energy markets are artificial markets designed to create various price signals
that result in certain incentives on both generation and demand, subject to
numerous constraints. One constraint is that demand and supply must balance.
The grid can’t store much energy. Oversupply can cause grid frequency to go
above 50/60 Hz, threatening grid stability:
[https://www.e-education.psu.edu/ebf483/node/705](https://www.e-education.psu.edu/ebf483/node/705).
Power prices go negative when there is too much generation capacity online at
a given instant, relative to demand. That creates incentives for generators
that can shut down (like natural gas) to do so.

Negative power prices are not a good thing for consumers. A negative price in
the wholesale electric markets does not mean the electricity is "less than
free." Obviously, even wind power or solar always costs positive money to
generate in real terms. Instead, it signals a mismatch between generation
capacity, storage capacity, and demand. In a grid with adequate storage
capacity, negative prices would be extremely rare.

~~~
adrusi
I think you're missing the critical piece of your explanation of why negative
prices aren't good for consumers:

The reason that negative power prices look like they would be good for
consumers is that it seems like they should lower their monthly bills. But in
practice their bill should stay the same, even if there were significant
periods during which energy prices were negative. Why? The negative prices
don't indicate that the cost of power production is negative for the power
company, so the power company is losing money. The power company has to recoup
those losses _somehow,_ and they do it by charging more when power prices are
positive.

In order to take advantage of negative power prices, a power consumer would
have to dynamically increase their power consumption in response to the
negative prices. If they have any significant power storage capacity, maybe
they could store power and sell it back to the grid when prices go positive,
or maybe turn on their mining rig while prices are negative, if they go
negative frequently.

~~~
rayiner
All energy costs a positive amount of dollars to produce. Thus, in the long
run, the price of electricity must be such that generators recoup their fixed
costs, recoup their variable costs, and make some profit that makes the whole
endeavor worthwhile.

In an ideal grid, the price of electricity would be a stable amount that
hovered around this long-run price.[1] If battery technology was up to par,
generators would place batteries between their plants and the grid, and
deliver electricity at a predictable rate, which would keep the price stable.
Negative rates that deviate dramatically from this price are the sign of a
grid in distress. Even though individual consumers might be able to take
advantage of these periods of negative rates, that doesn't mean its good news
for consumers as a class.

It's like when the power company pays electricity users to shut down during
demand spikes. Yes, consumers that can throttle demand during spikes can make
money from such events. But if you're seeing the price of electricity spike
frequently, that's a sign of something wrong with the grid, not a positive
thing for consumers.

[1] This is a simplification, because there's actually more than one energy
market involved that generators use to recoup their costs:
[https://www.bateswhite.com/media/publication/55_media.741.pd...](https://www.bateswhite.com/media/publication/55_media.741.pdf).
But it's easier to explain assuming one market and one price.

~~~
saosebastiao
> All energy costs a positive amount of dollars to produce. Thus, in the long
> run, the price of electricity must be such that generators recoup their
> fixed costs, recoup their variable costs, and make some profit that makes
> the whole endeavor worthwhile.

The only type of cost that strictly determines a price floor is the variable
cost. Recuperating fixed costs and profits are based on a revenue _prediction_
which may or may not come true, but once the investment is made it rationally
operates until prices descend past the variable cost barrier, regardless of
whether long term ROI is positive or not.

What I don’t understand is why prices must go negative. A price of zero should
be enough to turn off capacity, modulo switching costs (the cost to start or
stop a turbine?)

~~~
NickNameNick
It can take a long time to turn some capacity on or off, and not all
generators throttle cleanly to zero. Hydro plants can have rough running
ranges that cause excessive wear. or might have run-of river flow
requirements. Coal plants have huge parasitic loads in the crushers and
pulverisers and blowers, and/or poor ability to throttle below a minimum
limit.

For any of those reasons, it may make sense for a generator to pay someone
else to temporarily take their excess capacity, rather than shut the generator
down.

------
headmelted
Hopefully they'll introduce caps that take power costs to a minimum of zero.

I say this with some experience - here in Northern Ireland we're the world
leaders in terribly thought out (and utterly stupid) energy policies, and the
economic effects of them.

(Our government recently collapsed, primarily due to a dispute over a
programme that saw farmers paid ~£1.12 for every £1 of biomass energy they
consumed, with no upper cap. Needless to say, there are empty barns in the
middle of nowhere at 30°C inside right now causing a lot of pollution and
"making" their owners a fortune. As a result of how much it has cost and is
projected to, a lot of spending has just been cancelled, including badly
needed hospitals).

So yeah, clean energy is great, when it's combined with sane policy.

~~~
runeks
Something having a positive price means it has value.

Something having a negative price means _getting rid of it_ has value.

A positive price signals that there’s a cost to consume something.

A negative price signals that there’s a cost to _not_ consume something.

~~~
headmelted
Is that the case here, though?

I didn't directly infer from the article that there was a cost to not
expending the energy being held in the grid (i.e. does the grid _need_ to
expel that excess?). If it needs to expel the excess to consumers, then
absolutely the negative pricing makes perfect sense, but I got the impression
that this was more a fortuitous set of variables than an intended outcome.

------
reacharavindh
It seems like a good first world problem to have, begging for engineers to
come up with an elegant solution!

What can a country do with occasional excess power like this?

* Communal/City water pumps run only during periods of excess power in a week

* City managed parking buildings that charge electric vehicles for free during these periods

* Heck city/country runs a data center that would "turn ON" servers only during periods of excess power in grids - to be used for public purpose data munging!

* Run an internet archiver that spins up crawlers only during periods of excessive power..

* Use the excess power to run air purifiers or CO2 absorbers or something else cool for the environment that we would not run otherwise..

What would YOU do if you had free power?

~~~
toomuchtodo
> What would YOU do if you had free power?

Build and run a factory that made more solar panels. Enough solar to power
civilization, any expected consumption growth, as well as power to capture
atmospheric CO2 and sink it underground.

~~~
SahAssar
If the limiting factor in manufacturing solar panels was power then it would
be an exponential industry (manufacture 1 solar panel, use it's power to
manufacture 2 and so on).

I'm pretty sure the limiting factor is the materials and the machinery
involved.

~~~
bufferoverflow
If you can automate all the steps, it's all just the energy and the time.
Though solar panels require quite a wide supply chain, it will take some time
to fully automate.

~~~
toomuchtodo
This was what I was targeting. A fully automated solar harvesting
manufacturing assembly. Energy and mass go in, out comes panels that are
shipped on autonomous semi trucks to a nearby facility for automated install
(automated utility scale install robotics already exist).

~~~
wnkrshm
Not everything hinges on power, there is a lot of chemical processing involved
in getting those raw materials and the raw materials to prices these materials
and so forth. Like the production of sulfuric acid that we need for virtually
everything.

------
kwindla
I'm curious here about what, if anything, these these negative electricity
prices might mean for cryptocurrency mining and transaction processing. How
feasible would it be to set up compute infrastructure that "soaks up" the
extra power in the German market, but is -- presumably -- idle a lot of the
time? For example, is this a good application for distributed networks that
piggy-back on top of other peoples' computers (with permission, of course).
See, for example, historical examples like SETI@home, Folding@home, and
Popular Power.

~~~
Maakuth
This is theoretically perfectly feasible. Currently, however, the capital
costs of mining equipment are so high that it doesn't make sense to keep them
offline.

~~~
kwindla
And if you don't have to pay any capital costs, because you are running a
massive, opt-in, decentralized pool of compute resources that other people own
... ? :-)

~~~
shagie
Most coin mining is not practical on home computing devices. Wasting the power
generation in this way isn't necessarily the best investment of the surplus
power.

Also... realize that this is power to the local utilities is negative cost -
not the power to someone's home. They're still paying retail rates. I would be
most disappointed to have the power utility turn on something that causes me
to consume more power (be it cryptocurrency or all the lights in my house)
when I'm still paying retail rates.

~~~
kwindla
Good point about retail rates being very different from wholesale rates.

------
jes5199
I see this as an important stage of going green:

Recently/Currently: Unpredictable spikes in wind+solar power make it less
profitable to run base-load power plants, since they can no longer guarantee
profit at 100% of their duty cycle. Cleaner natural gas peaker plants replace
the coal+oil baseload capacity.

Currently/Soon: solar+battery costs fall below natural gas costs, so battery-
storage systems replace peaker plants.

Near future: The transportation network converts from gasoline to electricity,
absorbing spikes in generation.

Further future: baseload is entirely wind+solar, small and moderate spikes go
into batteries that are distributed throughout the grid. But because baseload
capacity is scaled to typical demand during typical weather, there are
periodically very, very large power generation spikes when wind or sun is
strong, generating a lot of temporary energy at essentially 0 cost. I hope
this power is used to power negative-emission technologies.

~~~
Xixi
I'm not quite sure how to precisely calculate the need, however I'm afraid
that you are over-estimating battery capacities. Tesla's Giga Factory planned
annual battery production capacity is 35 gigawatt-hours (GWh). Assuming one
cycle per day, and a life expectancy of 1000 cycles, dedicating all this plant
production to replace peaker plants will give you a storage capacity of about
100 GWh.

While non-trivial, it's still dwarfed by US daily electricity consumption:
about 11,350 GWh [1]. Not sure how much would be needed for peaks, but 100 GWh
sounds small. And the Giga Factory production is not going towards trying to
absorb peaks in the US, but in cars used all around the world in non-optimal
patterns.

[1] Based on an annual consumption of 4,144.3 TWh in 2015:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_United_States)

~~~
freeflight
Tesla batteries might not solve the storage problem on their own, but there
are plenty of additional ways to store energy.

Imho up until recently, we didn't even have that much incentive to research
and innovate on large-scale energy storage (outside of storing it as fossil
fuels), as we would just generate it when we needed it, so no real need to
store it, no need to innovate on that front.

But with the abundance of energy created by renewables, we will need to
rethink our approach to energy production and consumption, putting more of a
focus on storage than was needed before.

~~~
Xixi
Indeed, I was specifically talking about batteries. But there are many other
ways to store energy. They don't even need to be as efficient as batteries, as
long as they are cheap/scalable.

Found an interesting study after some googling:
[https://www.lazard.com/media/438042/lazard-levelized-cost-
of...](https://www.lazard.com/media/438042/lazard-levelized-cost-of-
storage-v20.pdf)

------
ChuckMcM
Based on the results of the grid battery system in South Australia it looks
like this is the next step for Germany.

Add the batteries for peak smoothing and then you can start to take off the
more problematic (carbon foot print wise) base load sources.

~~~
sliverstorm
Not being a power engineer, I'm still wondering if/when somebody is going to
try to build a grid capacitor bank. Traditional advantages: long lifespan,
high charge/discharge rate, low complexity. Traditional disadvantages: large,
heavy.

Maybe the cost doesn't work out or something, but seriously, a fixed land
power station seems like the ideal use for caps.

They're fundamentally DC, but so are batteries. I wonder if you could make
yourself a massive LC tank, and bypass conversion losses...?

~~~
ChuckMcM
Wouldn't it be! There are some interesting issues though with capacitors (my
current favorite are graphene ones).

At the end of the day, we're talking about charge waiting to be used sitting
around in a capacitor. So looking at how much charge and what are the
ramifications of that charge 'at rest' as it were, are really interest.

For example, did you know that if you charged yourself negatively with a few
dozen Columbs of charge (in a vacuum) you would float off the ground? You
would find yourself repulsed from the earth (which has a huge store of
electrons holding negative charge). If you tried it in air however you would
find yourself the victim of an extremely vicious lightning attack as the
positive charge in the air helped itself to your electrons to balance itself
out!

Part of the issue of trying to hold so much charge is that as raw charge, it
actually exerts quite a bit of force. It can lift you off the ground, it can
pull capacitors toward each other, it can deform the very structure you have
created to contain it.

The other issue is keeping it from its mate, if nature abhors a vacuum she
really really hates two opposite charges separated by a small gap. You need a
really good dielectric separating your charge. You can't use air unless you
have a _lot_ of separation and the more separation the less charge your
capacitor can hold. So the ideal dielectric would be the evil twin of
graphene, one atom thick and impervious to any charge transfer at all[1]. The
compromise is you can't hold as much charge (which keeps the voltage potential
down below the dielectrics failure point) and you are back to using a lot of
space.

Batteries in this case work because they store the charge in small chemical
compounds that act as 'buckets.' The process of moving charge restructures
those compounds taking an electron or two and leaving behind a different
chemical structure or an empty bucket. This is a "win" because you never have
to hold so much charge in one place that it is either acting mechanically on
the mechanism (beyond the chemical bonds) or threatening to convert your
insulating dielectric into an unwilling conductor. The down side is that
assembling and disassembling the chemical compounds is an imperfect process at
best.

Ideally, a grid scale capacitor would have some sort of mechanical/physical
way of automatically organizing trillions of small individual capacitors which
could be processed through and drained or charged as the needs required. That
would make them not quite 'ideal' capacitors, capable of delivering all of
their charge in one go, but it would allow you to side step the mechanical and
dielectric challenges. You would also avoid the challenge of having a chemical
transition that was not be 100.0% reversible.

I am always interested in reading papers on interesting research in this area.
There are a couple of labs doing work on 'liquid' batteries where the
electrolyte can be charged externally through one chemical process and
discharged in the battery through another. Graphene capacitors are also pretty
cool but they still need a better dielectric and a way of creating them cost
effectively. Patterning a few billion connected in parallel seems to be a
research target to try and avoid some of the high K issues. But there are many
graphene labs and not many are focused on any one thing so it is harder to
find.

[1] Even with that you'll get tunneling as the electrons find their
probability function landing on the other side of the dielectric, nothing is
ever perfect!

------
shagie
A bit dated (2011) though touching on the economies of power generation, "The
High-Stakes Math Behind the West's Greatest River" (
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonbruner/2011/10/20/the-
high-s...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonbruner/2011/10/20/the-high-stakes-
math-behind-the-wests-greatest-river/) ) is an interesting read.

From the NYT article about Germany:

> At the same time, other mainstays of the country’s electricity supply,
> especially some coal and nuclear power plants, are unable to dial back
> quickly enough, leading to negative prices on electricity trading markets.

From the Forbes article about the Columbia river (Oregon / Washington):

> issue is what happens when too much electricity is on offer. The enormous
> supply of hydroelectricity during spring runoff can push electricity prices
> to zero—the BPA gives away electricity to local utilities for free when it’s
> forced to produce more than it wants to. Since wind producers enjoy
> production subsidies, they can push rates below zero, effectively paying
> other utilities to switch off their generators. Last winter, the BPA told
> wind producers under its balancing authority that it wouldn’t pay negative
> rates to them during high-water events.

This gets more complicated when you also take into account the non-power
constraints on hydro generation. Environmental concerns limit how much water
can go over the spillway (which hyper-aerates the water and increases
turbidity... which is bad for the fish.
[http://www.oregon.gov/deq/FilterDocs/Coltmdlwqmp.pdf](http://www.oregon.gov/deq/FilterDocs/Coltmdlwqmp.pdf)
gets into this including the water standards act.

> The concentration of total dissolved gas relative to atmospheric pressure at
> the point of sample collection shall not exceed 110 percent of saturation,
> except when stream flow exceeds the ten-year, seven-day average flood.
> However, for Hatchery receiving waters and waters of less than two feet in
> depth, the concentration of total dissolved gas relative to atmospheric
> pressure at the point of sample collection shall not exceed 105 percent of
> saturation;

The interconnectivity of all of these factors is quite interesting to me and
one of those things that is much deeper than a simple management of the power
market.

------
hamandcheese
I’ve always wondered: is it not possible to simply “unplug” some of the
turbines from the grid? Would an “unplugged” turbine that was still spinning
result in damage to its self?

~~~
martinald
The problem is that green energy subsidies are paid usually per kWh regardless
of the need. They are often way more than the energy price.

So even if your energy price is negative 2cents/kWh, and your subsidy is
10c/kWh then it makes sense to still run despite it causing near carnage on
the grid.

And all these contracts are very long terms (20-25 years), so no easy way to
change terms.

------
ocschwar
So, I work in this field, and I have to find it really annoying to see the
NYTimes miss the big picture.

The price for electricity tomorrow from 12 to 1 was set in the Day Ahead
Market already, by all the participants (generator owners, utilities, big
consumers.) At that market (making up numbers for the sake of explanation),
let's say the utilities together bought 22000 KWH for that one hour. The
amount of money changing hands is quanitity times price, let's say at $30 per
KWH.

12 o'clock comes around, and for whatever reason, consumers are just not
flipping enough switches and consumption is 20000. Now at the Real Time
Market, money changes hands to get enough generators to dial back production,
and enough big time consumers to dial theirs up.

Some times utilities don't buy 100% of their power on Day Ahead, taking the
risk that they can get a decent deal at Real Time for the small amount of top-
up they will need. SOmetimes they overbuy because of bad forecasts. That's
when negative pricing kicks in.

Back to our example: Consumers only need 20000KWH for that hour. So 2000KWH's
worth of dials need to turn. The people turning the dials get paid for it, at
that negative price.

But the amount of money changing hands is small compared to what happend the
day before when forecasted power was scheduled.

TLDR:This is not a big deal.

~~~
heisenbit
I'm a bit shocked your first hand explanation was down-voted. Facts should be
appreciated even if they do not fit what one would prefer to be the case.

Another fact bit: Germany electricity retail prices were forecasted to go up
next year. There is a fair amount of subsidizing of the build-out of renewable
energy still going on. Also the network is not geared towards the new energy
source distribution and requires investments for which consumers are billed in
part up-front before seeing the benefits.

Another fun fact: The subsidies have angered the liberal party (which has
become the bearer holder of liberal markets ideology and is anything but
left). To stop the build-out they have started putting up significant building
permit regulations in NRW, a state where they have recently risen to power.
Explaining how the restrictions on land owners fit with their platform
requires a few mental twists.

~~~
ocschwar
I'll admit it was not my best written comment I was rushing to catch a plane.

BTW, here's a live picture of the New England power market, both real time and
day ahead. Older nuclear plants require a day's notice to change their power
output, so day-ahead is the norm, but some markets also arrange purchases n
hours ahead where n < 24 as well.

[https://www.iso-ne.com/isoexpress/web/charts/guest-
hub?p_p_i...](https://www.iso-ne.com/isoexpress/web/charts/guest-
hub?p_p_id=lmpmapportlet_WAR_isonelmpmapportlet_INSTANCE_6n3S&p_p_lifecycle=0&p_p_state=pop_up&p_p_mode=view&p_p_col_id=column-5&p_p_col_count=3)

------
throwaway7645
Negative prices occur all the time in the US. Not every day, but often enough
when load is low and the wind is blowing. As more and more renewable are
built, this will occur in increasing amounts. We still have to have non-green
generation online as wind and solar can massively fluctuate. For the time
being, the state commissions help out the utilities via legislation and
increasing rates. This isn't some conspiracy, but what you do if you want
available power 24x7.

------
c3534l
Perhaps its time we started to design power-consuming devices to take
advantage of fluctuating electricity costs. That would be one application of
"the internet of things" that I don't immediately find creepy and pointless.
Alternatively, it could simply spur the private investment of increasing
battery technology as consumers would have an incentive to simply charge up
their own energy supplies to get a reduction in their overall utilities bill.

~~~
ZenoArrow
> "Perhaps its time we started to design power-consuming devices to take
> advantage of fluctuating electricity costs."

If your goal is to make money, then sure. If your goal is to reduce the damage
caused by burning fossil fuels, I'd suggest reconsidering.

A better use of these negative prices is reducing the number of actively used
power stations based on fossil fuels. We would need to keep them until further
load balancing capacity could be introduced (i.e. until we no longer had the
need to turn the polluting power stations back on). The ultimate goal is a
flexible power grid that kept environmental pollution to an absolute minimum.

~~~
aembleton
If my IOT freezer could reduce the temperature of the freezer by a further 5c
when power is negative and let it rise a couple of c when price rises above 1
standard deviation from the median price then the price signals could be used
to modulate demand.

This would save me money, and reduce demand on the grid when there is no
renewable energy. My freezer would effectively become a battery, storing
energy as a reduced temperature. Multiply this across all households and add
in other devices like tumble driers and you could have a real impact.

~~~
ZenoArrow
> "you could have a real impact"

You could have a real impact on what? Your wallet?

My point is, we ultimately want to reduce demand on non-renewable sources of
energy. With that in mind, running additional devices to soak up the excess
demand of the current grid is a mistake, as it hides the fact that not all the
electricity was truly needed, and therefore gives no incentive for the
electricity producers to reduce supply, which means they'll keep running all
the non-renewable power plants they currently do.

You may think that the actions of an individual don't add up to much, but
collectively they do, so small acts of reducing electricity usage can have a
real impact, both on your wallet and the environment.

------
siculars
Crypto mining (bitcoin et al.)/incentivized node hosting will figure this
whole thing out.

But seriously, civil power generation/storage via solar will allow folks to
escape the patchwork rules, regulations, laws, etc. that are already here and
coming to a jurisdiction near you. Power utilities may not buy your power but
your mining rig will make you crypto that will allow you to escape that
control.

------
melling
We need ways to store the excess power. Otherwise, wind and solar use will
have their limits. Fossil fuels will need to power half the grid.

“Battery storage capacity, meanwhile, is not yet advanced enough to take in
all of the excess generation.”

~~~
throwaway7645
Agreed, your comment is accurate. It will be quite a while I think before we
get there (my guess is 20 years)

------
Ironprincess
This is a process systems issue more so than a market one. The inflexibility
of traditional energy sources and unpredictability of renewable energy sources
coupled with the inability to store energy conspire against the balance of
supply and demand. When there’s too much energy suppliers can’t simply shut it
off on a daily basis nor can they store is for excess use and so to deal with
market forces they allow prices to go below zero which helps no one,
especially not the consumer. What if we created more flexible energy
distribution channels from energy stored and not generated daily? Is this
possible?

------
kjrose
Just as a curiousity. Is this negative power often enough to make a business
model of battery supply to the power system feasible?

I mean having a company with a massive bank of batteries. When power goes
negative they try to take as much as they possibly can from the network and
when it goes positive they try to sell it back at the higher rate. Essentially
win-win. You only power up on negative days and you sell when you make money,
otherwise you just sit on it. And since you were paid to take the energy in
the first place losing it over time when you don’t sell isn’t a loss because
you didn’t pay for it at all.

------
exabrial
I've also heard that negative power prices are an indicator that excessive
subsidies are present in the market. Is this true? I think I saw it here on HN
in the comments a year or two ago when it happened in Texas.

~~~
martinald
Yes, of course. The German energy grid is one of the most incredibly (over)
subsidized grid in the world. Incredibly low wholesale costs, incredibly high
retail costs. The difference is the enormous amount of subsidies paid to green
energy producers.

If there weren't subsides in play everyone would be going bankrupt.

~~~
exabrial
That's a damn shame. I'm "pro whatever is cheapest" energy, and theoretically,
that should be renewables like solar and wind. In my opinion, subsidies hurt
more than help after the R&D phase of deployment. It makes an investment into
the technologies complicated and dependent on regulatory climate.

------
stesch
And on German news sites:
[http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/service/strompreise-
steigen...](http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/service/strompreise-steigen-laut-
einer-verivox-analyse-zu-jahresbeginn-noch-weiter-a-1185047.html)

Strom wird zu Jahresbeginn noch teurer

Die Strompreise sind hoch wie nie - und es geht noch weiter: Das
Verbraucherportal Verivox rechnet für das kommende Jahr mit einem Preissprung.
Obwohl die Versorger Nachlass geben könnten.

------
hrasyid
Why did they go negative instead of zero or just very low? Why did the power
company encourage people to needlessly waste electricity? Do excess generated
electricity cause problems for the companies? If yes, won't shutting down some
generators get rid of the excess?

This is my first questions to the headline. The answer is not obvious for me,
but I can't find an answer in the article.

~~~
marcosdumay
All the electricity produced must be consumed, roughly at the same time. It
has nowhere else to go.

Shutting down generators is a process that may take hours (or days if it's
nuclear) and may be expensive.

~~~
hrasyid
Ah. Can't you just press buttons to turn off generation on windmills or solar
panels for example?

~~~
marcosdumay
You can disconnect solar panels, yes. You can disconnect a windmill turbine
from its generator too (what carries a small cost).

You can't just disconnect thermal solar generators, but shutting them down is
relatively fast and cheap.

When the price goes negative, it's usually because consumption is smaller than
the coal + nuclear supply.

~~~
shagie
Or hydro can't put that much over the spillway because of regulations
(environment, down stream flooding, etc...) - it has to go through the
powerhouse.

Or (for hydro again), there was a release of water upstream in anticipation of
demand (it takes a few hours to go from the Grand Coulee to the bottom dam)
and that demand didn't appear (or other sources produced more - such as a
sunny and windy day).

Hawaii and its island power issues also has the "well, you can turn off the
centralized solar power systems, but the distributed residential ones are
difficult to curtail."

------
oldpond
Creating the electricity market was one of the biggest mistakes humans have
ever made because it created the potential for Enron. And now we don't even
question the existence of the market. There's a lot of good history to
discover here. The merchants of power by John Wasik is a good place to start.

------
raphinou
Do consumers really get paid to consume? Never heard of anyone having a
negative item on the electricity invoice.

~~~
conistonwater
These are negative wholesale prices, it's in the internal electricity market,
which consumers don't really interact with.

------
reacharavindh
Ironically, the "related coverage" article was how Puerto Rico was still
without power..

------
FriedPickles
Article says price was $60/megawatt-hour, and that the inversion lasted "for
much of Sunday and the early hours of Christmas Day".

How much current can a typical industrial user draw from their connection?

Maybe there's a market for large internet connected resistors.

------
misterbowfinger
Isn't this supposed to be solved by better batteries? I'm confused why the
supply of energy matters, unless there's a limited amount of time to use it.

I'm not an electrical engineer, so if anyone understands this better, please
correct me :-)

~~~
throwaway7645
Batteries simply don't really exist to store grid level amounts of energy. You
have to stack lots and lots of batteries which costs lots and lots of money
and still only stores something like ~10 MW when we have 1500 MW coal plants.
Electricity is used immediately, so we really can't economically store it in
the levels we need. In the future (this is just starting to occur), large
batteries will charge (as a load) when the price is low and discharge (as a
generator)when it is high which allows the owner to make money and helps the
grid as these resources can provide power nearly instantaneously. Right now
they're small and few in number, but they will get bigger and more prevalent
assuming battery technology continues to get better.

-Source electrical engineer in this industry

~~~
njarboe
Isn't 10 MW a unit of power and storing energy would be in MWhs or Joules? I
understand that the grid needs to balance the power it is using, but to
provide that power over time you need to store energy. Surprised an
"electrical engineer in this industry" would use these terms, but maybe I just
don't quite grok the lingo. An explanation would be great.

~~~
throwaway7645
You're correct, but in the industry we really just talk in terms of Power at
the transmission grid level and usually in millions of watts or MW. So if a
coal plant is currently generating 2000 MW and you have a battery that can
only consume 5 MW or 0.25%, then that isn't very much storage. Put another
way, let's say the load in your region is 60 GW and you have 200 MW of energy
storage. That is only a tiny fraction of storage relative to what the demand
is.

~~~
dmurray
So the main constraint on the battery is throughput, not storage capacity?

~~~
throwaway7645
Nope, the main issue is indeed the fact that it can't store a whole lot of
energy (also important that they can't maintain a high output for too long),
but we still talk in MW as that is what we're primarily concerned with (MW
flow on a line going over the line's rating...not having enough generation
(MW) to meet load (MW)...etc). Saying a battery can't store enough MW isn't
scientifically accurate, but it is the slang of the industry if you will. If
you worked in the water industry they're probably very concerned with water
flow rates. In high voltage transmission we're concerned with the flow of
power (MW (real power) & MVAR (reactive power))

------
Fuxy
It would be cool if there were some home automation devices that monitored
power prices and they would atomatically turn on the washing machine and such
when the prices went negatice + there was stuff to wash in the machine for
example.

~~~
perl4ever
I don't want that when I'm not there to put wet clothes in the dryer. And
although I once had a combination washer/dryer it didn't work well.

------
runeks
> What causes negative prices?

> Basically, when the supply of power outstrips demand for it.

What does this even mean? Why would demand for _being paid_ to use power be
finite?

It doesn’t make sense to view demand as separate from the price of
consumption.

~~~
rayiner
I'll ship you 100 tons of refined uranium, _and_ I'll pay you $50 for it. But
you've gotta be able to take delivery in the next 20 minutes.

~~~
runeks
Are you trying to make the point that consuming electricity is as difficult as
storing uranium?

I’m not making a general statement about negative prices. I’m making a
statement about being paid to connect a resistor to the end of a power cord.

~~~
marcosdumay
Of course it's much easier. If it was as difficult there would be big
companies living just on properly getting rid of electricity.

But it being easier does not make it free. The price is negative exactly
because it costs the generating company something to put a resistor at their
side. If you have a resistor around that is cheaper, you can get some nice
payment out of using it.

~~~
runeks
Why doesn’t the power producer just disconnect the generator from the grid? A
turbine spinning isn’t a problem in and of itself.

I don’t disagree with you in theory, but in practice I don’t believe that it’s
cheaper to send out power over the grid, and pay people to consume it, than it
is to just not produce it in the first place.

~~~
marcosdumay
The spinning energy MUST be consumed. Otherwise the turbine will accelerate
until it breaks, what may take a block away from some city.

Powering down generators take some time, and powering them back up costs quite
a bit (both vary widely from one tech to another). For short durations it is
just cheaper to pay somebody to take the energy.

------
kumarski
[https://medium.com/@datarade/the-germans-and-their-
renewable...](https://medium.com/@datarade/the-germans-and-their-
renewables-c9263f10b33e)

------
arditi
and other countries still suffer from clean energy resources. Only because of
economic interests for energy sales. In some countries the environment is
being destroyed only for some hydropower plants, here is an example:
[http://www.ecoalbania.org/ebrd-confirms-negative-impacts-
of-...](http://www.ecoalbania.org/ebrd-confirms-negative-impacts-of-albanian-
hydropower-plants-on-people-and-the-environment/)

------
stesch
Yes, I think it's negative for me that the energy prices are rising.

I'm in Germany and the local news here is different from the Utopia I have to
read on Hacker News and Reddit.

------
stretchwithme
If you have to pay for the grid to take the electricity you generate, the
sensible thing to do is stop generating it, even if your costs are all fixed.

------
ivanhoe
The real question is would the bill in the end be lower like this or with a
positive energy price, but no green-power taxes?

------
lemoncucumber
Now that we've seen negative interest rates and negative power prices, what's
next?

------
bitL
So, is Germany going to pay me for mining BTC/ETH/XMR? :D

------
sebleon
What kind of energy consumer adjusts their electricity usage based on price?

Seems like this doesn't apply to households - people will just switch stuff on
when they need something, they probably don't even monitor prices. I'm
guessing this is good for energy-intensive industries that have large battery
storage capacity?

*didn't read, paywall

------
zeristor
If they remade The Graduate, I think the key industry would be: Batteries

------
yuhong
The fun thing is that three-phase EV charging is common in Europe. Renault Zoe
even support 40kW+ charging.

------
grey-sunshine
Time to mine coins in Germany...

------
ryanx435
how is this sustainable in the long term?

if the energy companies are paying their customers, won't the companies run
out of money eventually?

and if they run out of money, then won't they have to be subsidized by the
government? and if that happens, isn't that basically people paying taxes,
which go to the electric company, which go back to the people?

~~~
kwindla
Yes, very large government subsidies created the current market situation in
Germany. But, note that "very large" is only relative to typical subsidies of
wind and solar in other countries. Also, all electricity markets in developed
countries are pretty much completely regulated and the economics of
electricity are determined much more by a combination of regulation and
indirect subsidies than they are by anything remotely resembling a simple
definition of market forces.

In the United States, for example, we have an extremely complicated mixture of
local and state-level economic, infrastructure, and supply regulations,
environmental regulations that are mostly federal (though also state), zoning,
eminent domain, and other kinds of permitting. Then, alongside all those, we
have massive subsidies of electricity distribution infrastructure, extraction
of coal and oil, transportation, and "homeland security." Finally, we also
have relatively small subsidies for wind and solar.

Germany made a policy decision some years ago that public subsidies of
renewables would create large positive social externalities. So, yes, the
money goes around in a circle, but -- to over-simplify -- in theory creates
more money (technology development, improved resistance to economic shocks,
jobs, public health) and better outcomes of various other kinds (public
health, reduction of climate change risks of various kinds, reduction of risk
from nuclear plants, perceived electoral advantages by the political parties
in power) as it goes around.

------
jk2323
Germany has

1) one of the highest prices per kWh for the normal consumer

2) prices are still increasing
[http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/service/strompreise-
steigen...](http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/service/strompreise-steigen-laut-
einer-verivox-analyse-zu-jahresbeginn-noch-weiter-a-1185047.html)

3) produces more CO2 than France.

So what's the news?

~~~
wohlergehen
1) Related to how the EEG is more a subsidy of energy-intense industry rather
than regenerative energy, at the expense of the consumer.

2) "Die meisten Stromanbieter halten an ihren aktuellen Preisen fest, und 78
Versorger senken ihre Preise sogar im Schnitt um 2,2 Prozent. Zugleich aber
heben 64 Versorger ihre Grundtarife im Schnitt um knapp drei Prozent an" \-->
Most utilities keep their prices fixed, 78 reduce prices by ~2.2%, 64 increase
by ~3%.

3) More than France (nuclear), Spain (nuclear, wind), Sweden (nuclear, hydro)
and Norway (hydro). It is unsurprising that countries heavily invested in
nuclear and hydro produce less CO2.

Germany's energy policy is far from perfect, but probably one of the most
future-proof in Europe (which costs money). France will have huge issues with
decommissioning in the next decade; nuclear is not a silver bullet.

~~~
jk2323
"Germany's energy policy is far from perfect, but probably one of the most
future-proof in Europe (which costs money)."

Really? Germany has one of the LEAST future proof energy politics. I would
like to see a country that actually has more than a 2 years energy plan and
would invest in something meaningful, like Thorium reactors.

~~~
morsch
Germany invested into Thorium in the second half of the last century. Turned
out to be a bad investment.

~~~
jk2323
Because it was not developed to the final stage?

Worst investment yet, was solar Energy.

PS: Fixed this for you. Sorry, did not know you are a bullshitter!

It started generating electricity on April 9, 1985, but did not receive
permission from the atomic legal authorizing agency to feed electricity to the
grid until November 16, 1985. It operated at full power in February 1987 and
was shut down September 1, 1989.[1]

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300)

------
ictoan
Of course, when Capitalists read this article, it is bad news for them because
they can no longer make money off people. Better stick to oil and coal for
maximum profit! #MAGA

/s

------
jamanon
Germany actually needs to pay other nation states around it to take the energy
they can't use (they don't want it). Using the energy intelligently (demand
managment) only lowers smoothes the energy spikes of renewable energy only by
11% (when you do it monthly, on a daily base its nearly nothing.) Pump
stations are a good idea but the amount of pumpstation we would need only for
the current German electricity demand exceeds already what you could build in
all of Europe.

Currently when there is a lot of wind we stop coal burning power plants and
the government pays its owner for what they could have been produced in that
time. Because stopping the plant makes it more inefficient, there are some fix
costs around it to operate it.

See this interesting video about the topic (its in German sorry):
[https://youtu.be/ZzwCpRdhsXk](https://youtu.be/ZzwCpRdhsXk)

