German power prices dropped below zero on the first trading day of the year, an increasingly frequent phenomenon in Europe as renewables expand.
Intraday prices in Germany, the region’s biggest market, turned negative during four hours overnight as wind-energy output reached as much as 40 gigawatts, far outstripping demand."
Meaning, energy storage farms could be a business?
Only if Germany changes existing legislation on power taxation. And do check out for how much a TWh of grid scale storage goes for. Hydrogen is the only borderline cost effective solution at the scale required.
Decentralized 1-8 WH “Trade at Home” Packs would be able to buffer the civil need, even with a low adoption rate… but come on, these things would generate money by trading AND you have a nice power backup solution for your flat.
But that’s just a stupid idea… why would anyone want this. It’s not like we literally throw away LiPo Batteries after a single use (Vape).
And there are 180GW battery storages planned to store this energy for the next day. But guess who has to confirm the plans? The 4 almighty German power companies. And guess why it‘s just in planning phase? And who is loosing money if energy prices don’t fluctuate that intense? And who tried to slow down the renewables last decade? Same shit as the petrol and gas heads did. Change can’t be stopped, so they play for time.
180 GW is power.
If you’re talking about energy I suppose you mean 180 GWh.Changed it. Thx
They’ll only block it until they can be the ones to own the battery plants. There is a hell of a market incentive to be able to purchase literally free electricity ans resell it later.
Right now it has a ROI of around 4-5 years. However, this playground isn’t for standard people.
Oh of course, grid scale energy is never for the “normal person”. The point I am making is established fossil-fuel based energy majors do not want any pip-squeak independent startups to start siphoning profit off from their system or possibly making it more efficient or cheaper for the consumer. Vertical integration of monopolies is the name of the game.
Domestic scale storage ROIs a lot longer than that, despite 1 kWh going for over 0.3 EUR.
Good thing then that Bundeskartellamt and Bundesnetzagentur are looking more closely at this now
Article is behind pay/account wall. Cannot read.
Is that why their heavy industry collapsed? Cheap power?
https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-energy-bills-germany-brussels-pipeline-prices/
Still 40 cents per Kwh?
The article says declining, not collapsed. The EU says it has to move quickly but with a potential shift (due to right-wing and conservative parties regaining power) from renewables to nuclear that could fail.
I mean the reason for why this happened is clear, Europe always relied on cheap Russian gas which is, at least for people who have just a sliver of humanity, a no go and there is no cheap replacement except for renewables. I guess if the Germans would have invested in renewables earlier on this whole issue would not exist.
It also happened in the UK and I suspect other European countries with significant wind generation. Is this still a rare event in Germany? 2-3 times a month isn’t uncommon here. Especially in the winter.
It’s rare in Germany since we have a quite large population and heavy industry compared to the renewables production. We had days with 100% renewable coverage in the past, but negative energy prices are still a rarity.
We never have been 100% renewable in the UK. It’s more that we go into surplus and shutting generators down is more expensive than the price going negative. Hence we won’t get huge negative prices. Connectors to other countries can only export so much.
It also only happens when:
- long term weather forecast underestimated weather based generation.
- demand is low. (E.g. weekend and public holidays)
The population of Germany is only 25% bigger than the UK, so I think the two are comparable. A larger manufacturing base will make the demand-side curve more predictable though. Still, we’re largely talking about the effect of supply unpredictability.
