
Germany hit a new high in renewable energy, briefly making prices negative - Osiris30
http://qz.com/680661/germany-had-so-much-renewable-energy-on-sunday-that-it-had-to-pay-people-to-use-electricity/
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MikeTV
Isn't Sunday family day, culturally? At least when I visited last year,
businesses were closed and there were many more families outside
walking/biking/etc than on Saturday.

You'd have to pay me to use the power, too, if I would rather be outside in
this perfect weather.

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Mithaldu
We're also having a RIDICULOUSLY hot may, with 27°C being my apartment's
temperature for the past 4 or 5 days straight, with windows open and no
heating on.

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kleiba
It's only been 11 days into May, the cold change is about to happen. And just
two weeks ago, it was snowing.

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jweir
Real time prices go negative in U.S. energy markets as well. Usually during
off peak hours with a high percentage of wind generation in the zone.

Look at the North Zone of New York, it spent a good chunk of Sunday negative:
[http://mis.nyiso.com/public/csv/realtime/20160508realtime_zo...](http://mis.nyiso.com/public/csv/realtime/20160508realtime_zone.csv)

Use the LMP column(Locational Marginal Price)

It should be noted that most energy is purchased in the day ahead market,
which I can't recall seeing negative - although maybe in Texas (ERCOT).

The provider will need to buy back the energy in at the realtime price if they
are not generating. But I am not sure about the market rules for negative
prices.

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alexsherrick
You can get negative day-ahead prices quite frequently due to congestion
depending on what lines, generators, transformers, etc are out.

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Arnt
So many of these articles (and HN comments too) seem to regard negative prices
as a terrible no-no.

I don't see why paying electricity users to timeshift is worse than paying for
storage facilities.

I bet most of the German metal industry has already tweaked its production
facilities to be able to ramp higher and lower on short order, while keeping
weekly production stable. Good thing too IMO.

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ascendingPig
Is Agora Energiewende still counting ethanol as "renewable"? Any article about
German energy that doesn't mention the country is following the same
disastrous path (of fulfilling new energy demands, caused by the loss of
nuclear, by moving the energy sector inefficiently to agriculture) that the US
took in the Bush years is negligent.

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Overtonwindow
Question: Why do they have to pay to put energy into the grid? If there's too
much energy being generated, is there not a way to release that energy? Who
gets paid, the consumer, or the local utilities? This sounds more like good
energy conservation, than what will actually happen when Germany's nuclear
plants go offline.

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szczys
That should be the goal of these "po public utilities". The public pays the
upfront cost and assumes the risk of I stalling and maintaining these new
systems. The should be able to relish in the benefits when those costs are
overcome.

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rjdevereux
If customers are getting paid to use electricity, is it legal for them to just
send it to a ground wire the whole time rates are negative to get paid as much
as possible?

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_ph_
At the powers involved you might melt quite a bit of the ground :). But some
heating plants for centralized house heating do have electric water heaters,
which are used, as soon as the electricity spot price goes below a certain
number - the rest of the time they heat with gas.

These spikes would go mostly away, if more coal plants get replaced by gas
plants which can be switched off very quickly. I guess, as soon as there are
more of those days, this shift is getting financially attractive.

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lunchTime42
The problem is storage.. what to do.. what do do with all this .. freeze the
pumped water storage to horizontal glaciers?

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chillydawg
Melt very large vats of aluminium and then use that molten aluminium to boil
water later on to drive some turbines.

Pump water uphill into a reservoir or series or reservoirs.

Produce hydrogen gas by electrolysis and sell it to fuel cell people.

Charge very large arrays of batteries.

I dunno.

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thescriptkiddie
Pumping water uphill is already in common use. Here are a couple of other
ideas:

Use electric cargo trains to carry many loads of gravel from the bottom of a
mountain to the top. Dump the gravel out into a huge pile. Later, load the
gravel back in the trains and regenerative brake all the way back down the
mountain.

Cut a large-diameter shaft into bedrock. Using the rubble from the excavation
of the shaft as aggregate, pour a very heavy concrete piston that fits in the
shaft. Pump water into the bottom to lift the piston, discharge pressurized
water through turbines later.

Compress air and put it in old natural gas wells. Discharge pressurized air
through turbines later.

Use a large heat pump to warm depleted uranium or similarly dense material in
a large vacuum flask. Run the heat pump backwards (like a steam engine) later.

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tantalor
"on Sunday" please.

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JoeAltmaier
Marginal return. Include infrastructure investments required to build it all,
and they're all probably still deep in the red?

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JoeAltmaier
Let me illustrate: an Uber driver may make money on a given day, if the cost
of ownership of the car is not included. Payback period is a term used to
describe the time needed at a profitable level to pay for the
purchase/installation of a system. While its a good thing to see money coming
in for your energy system, that means little in terms of the purchase
decision.

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madmulita
Oh, wait, some engineer was cheating with the reporting software... :D

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bcatanzaro
This is a disaster for renewable energy and should be reported as such. The
costs of such unreliable power are enormous. Such naive reporting does the
world no favors.

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trhway
Actually it is good for renewables industry as a whole as it provides business
case for storage technologies which is lagging a bit behind.

