20 ms·

Power Prices Go Negative in Germany

485 points by kwindla 9y ago

kwindla 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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 9y ago
        Good point about retail rates being very different from wholesale rates.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    - zanny 9y ago
      If you aren't controlling the hardware doing the mining you also don't care about the electric costs to operate it.
      - kwindla 9y ago
        Well, you might if part of your arrangement with the people in your pool is that you'll mine only when it's profitable to do so.
- dennisdamenace 9y ago
  They mean nothing for crypto currencies. Study LMP day ahead and real time markets.
- revelation 9y ago
  For all we know the Chinese coin miners you are competing with already pay nothing for their energy, 24/7. And in the grand scheme of things, despite alarmist opeds in the NYT, computers or cryptocurrency miners are simply not big energy consumers where the opex for buying them only to have them sit idle for rare negative energy prices would somehow make you come out on top. You are looking to sink gigawatts here.
  - nugi 9y ago
    Got anything at all to back up that rather wild claim that chinese miners don't pay for power?
    - coding123 9y ago
      You gotta test them solar panels at the solar panel factory right?
    - shagie 9y ago
      Over on reddit, a lot of speculation in https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/43opxy/does_anyone_know_what_the_chinese_miners_are/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/43opxy/does_anyone... suggesting partnerships / kickbacks. That said, the entire thread is speculation without a single sourced link. For some actual numbers, http://www.theenergycollective.com/lindsay-wilson/279126/average-electricity-prices-around-world-kwh http://www.theenergycollective.com/lindsay-wilson/279126/ave... shows the cost of electricity around the world... though thats over the entire country (Pacific northwest is cheaper than other places). I would expect that the Three Gorges dam (22 MW capacity - for comparison the Grand Coulee Dam is 6.8 MW and is the largest hydroelectric power in the US (Hoover is 2 MW)- the run of the river dams on the Columbia are in the 2 MW to 1 MW range). Historically, Pacific Northwest power has been as low as $0.0308 and $0.0245 / kWh. Its a bit more now, but still lower than the national average. From http://www.isi.fraunhofer.de/isi-wAssets/docs/x/de/publs-mitarbeiterseiten/Electricity-Costs-of-Energy-Intensive-Industries.pdf http://www.isi.fraunhofer.de/isi-wAssets/docs/x/de/publs-mit... it appears that if you use enough, you're at wholesale rather than retail or commercial rates. If its not free (the implications of corruption in Chinese government are made here), the retail power cost is going to be low, commercial is lower, wholesale is going to be lower still. Its probably a bit cheaper than the historic Pacific Northwest rates.
melling 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Agreed, your comment is accurate. It will be quite a while I think before we get there (my guess is 20 years)
misterbowfinger 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
    - batmansmk 9y ago
      You are correct, I used to work with batteries for 3 years, people count capacity in Ah or Wh, but never in W. More often in Ah. Why Ah instead of Wh? Because V is constant, making Ah proportional to Wh. Wh = Ah * V; V is the rated voltage the battery is designed for (12V for instance). By definition the capacity is how much energy you can get out of your battery at the rated voltage under standard temperature at a standard discharge rate. Voltage will go down as the battery depletes. When the voltage output is too low and cannot power the circuit anymore we consider the battery empty. Therefore, as we stop using the battery when V is too different, we can consider V constant over the usage period. So Ah = k x Wh, k = 1/ V being almost constant. Ah is a easier unit to manipulate in charge rates, lifecyle etc. One important note: due to technology limitations, energy one can get out of a batter greatly depends on the discharge rate (+-50% energy) and environment temperature (+-50% energy). Capacity cannot be taken literally as how much energy you can store and restitute. Design a grid that can still operate with lower voltage, charge at a lower rate and operate in hot weather and you suddenly have way more capacity (x3).
ryanx435 9y ago
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?
- YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 9y ago
  The companies here (not Germany) can afford to pay for the right to put electricity in the grid because they are guaranteed a fixed compensation by the state for all the renewable electricity produced – at a rate that's several times the market price. Thus even at times when they have to pay, they still make more money than if they shut down the plants – which itself would just cost money.
- tedsanders 9y ago
  - The negative prices are always temporary, bounded in time and price by the cost to spin down a generator - Only the major industrial customers actually see the negative rates (residential customers are still paying retail) - In many regulatory environments the electric utility and power generators are different companies, so only the generators are at risk of losing money and shutting down plants
- kwindla 9y ago
  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.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
throwaway7645 9y ago
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.
ChuckMcM 9y ago
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.
- briffle 9y ago
  Exactly, they can't remove base load power plants because they need them for times when solar and wind output are low, and 'peaker plants' are incredibly expensive. (which are activated in minutes, instead of hours/days) By adding battery (like the 100MW project in Australia) they can remove a few older base load plants, and handle spikes with batteries, instead of peaker plants.
- sliverstorm 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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!
raphinou 9y ago
Do consumers really get paid to consume? Never heard of anyone having a negative item on the electricity invoice.
- conistonwater 9y ago
  These are negative wholesale prices, it's in the internal electricity market, which consumers don't really interact with.
- tedsanders 9y ago
  No, residential customers still pay retail. I believe only major industrial customers ever see the negative wholesale rates.
rayiner 9y ago
The article doesn’t actually answer the questions it purports to answer. Better source: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/why-power-prices-turn-negative https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/why-power-prices-.... 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.
- sliverstorm 9y ago
  Negative power prices are not in and of themselves a good thing for consumers. Obviously, that power still costs money to generate. But, if the means of production (e.g. wind) is overall still a win and power only goes negative for short periods, if consumers can respond and sink that power more cheaply than the producer can dial back & protect the grid in the process, it might be the best solution for everyone.
  - rayiner 9y ago
    It's good to have a system where negative prices exist, so that demand can attempt to sink excess supply. But that doesn't mean that it's actually a good thing when prices go negative, as the article implies. That means that demand isn't adequately sinking the excess supply, and the grid is asking for a correction. Aside from the potential for grid stability, if it happens often, that means that you've wasted resources building too much generation capacity.
shagie 9y ago
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-stakes-math-behind-the-wests-greatest-river/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonbruner/2011/10/20/the-high-s... ) 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.
reacharavindh 9y ago
Ironically, the "related coverage" article was how Puerto Rico was still without power..
reacharavindh 9y ago
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?
- Polyisoprene 9y ago
  Bitcoin-mining
  - Robotbeat 9y ago
    I doubt it. Looking at bitcoin mining hardware, from what I can tell is that ASIC rigs cost about $2-5 per Watt of energy consumed, let's say $4/Watt. Since one might guess that the economic lifetime of ASIC hardware is approximately, say, 3 years (and that's being pretty gracious), then the capital cost of your bitcoin mining rig is about 15 cents per kWh IF YOU OPERATE IT CONSTANTLY. ...but if you only operate it the 25 percent of the time that electricity is free or negative or something, then the capital cost per Watt is like 60 cents per kWh. Residential electricity is about 11 cents per Watt. Industrial electricity is about 7 cents per Watt, and cheaper in places like the Northwest US with lots of hydro power. So it doesn't really make sense to buy ASIC hardware and idle it most of the time. You're better off paying even residential electricity rates and operating 100% of the time. If you have access to wholesale/industrial electricity rates, then it makes even less sense to idle your mining hardware most the time. It MAY make sense to idle the hardware if prices spike, but if you're not operating your hardware the vast majority of the time, then you're not operating cost-optimally. This point is generally true and applies to other proposed demand-response energy-sinks like hydrogen production: if your capital-cost-per-watt of demand is not very low, then it doesn't make sense to idle production. Capital cost of electrolysis should be the primary focus of any large-scale effort to leverage renewably produced hydrogen, or there's no way to compete IMHO.
jk2323 9y ago
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-laut-einer-verivox-analyse-zu-jahresbeginn-noch-weiter-a-1185047.html http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/service/strompreise-steigen... 3) produces more CO2 than France. So what's the news?
- wohlergehen 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    "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 9y ago
      Germany invested into Thorium in the second half of the last century. Turned out to be a bad investment.
      - jk2323 9y ago
hrasyid 9y ago
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.
- Dolores12 9y ago
  Electricity should be consumed to avoid overload on net. Shutting down generator then starting it up again could be more expensive.(labor, excess amortization due startup etc)
- marcosdumay 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    Ah. Can't you just press buttons to turn off generation on windmills or solar panels for example?
    - marcosdumay 9y ago
      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 9y ago
        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."
headmelted 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
  - raverbashing 9y ago
    Correct. Doesn't seem to apply for the biomass case though
  - headmelted 9y ago
    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.
- aoeusnth1 9y ago
  Why do you think negative prices would have bad side effects? Why would a cap improve efficiency?
- omarforgotpwd 9y ago
runeks 9y ago
> 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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
    - luispedrocoelho 9y ago
      Not as difficult, but consuming large amounts of energy on short notice is also not trivial. "connect a resistor to the end of a power cord" is supposed to make it sound trivial, but operating the resistors needed for absorbing the extra power on the grid is a large scale operation with non-trivial safety concerns. Also, you need to own and maintain all that equipment, &c &c.
    - marcosdumay 9y ago
      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 9y ago
ivanhoe 9y ago
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?
bitL 9y ago
So, is Germany going to pay me for mining BTC/ETH/XMR? :D
c3534l 9y ago
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.
- wlesieutre 9y ago
  Commercial buildings typically have a "demand charge" based on your peak energy usage, plus different electric rates for on/off peak hours. Some building systems have already tackled "load shifting" to move energy demand to off hours. One common method is "cold storage" where you run chillers overnight to store a bunch of coolant or ice in tanks and use that for your air conditioning during the day.
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  > "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 9y ago
    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.
jes5199 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...
  - greglindahl 9y ago
    Most cars are parked during the solar peak and during the overnight wind peak, so there's plenty of opportunity to use ordinary electric car charging as storage.
  - freeflight 9y ago
    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.
FriedPickles 9y ago
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.
ictoan 9y ago
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
kjrose 9y ago
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.
stesch 9y ago
And on German news sites: http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/service/strompreise-steigen-laut-einer-verivox-analyse-zu-jahresbeginn-noch-weiter-a-1185047.html http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/service/strompreise-steigen... 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.
exabrial 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
fingerlocks 9y ago
This happens nearly every spring in Washington state. The mountain snow pack melts in the spring causing a dramatic rise in river water levels. There are several hydro dams in the state, and the flooding rivers mean that more electricity is produced than the entire state could possibly consume. The surplus electricity is represented as a negative price on the energy market. This negative price simply means the power utilities will pay another utility in Oregon or California to take the power off the Washington grid. It's really just a curious phenomenon of energy markets, not exactly breaking news. edit: consumers don't see the benefits of the negative prices because it's short-lived: usually lasting a few weeks in March. The consumer's rates are often based on an averaged total power cost over the year.
hamandcheese 9y ago
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?
- bufferoverflow 9y ago
  Turbines have brakes, you can stop it. Usually it's done to prevent it from spinning too fast in strong winds.
- martinald 9y ago
  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.
- emiliobumachar 9y ago
  The energy does have to go somewhere. The natural solutions are speedup and friction heat, so, yes, I'd guess they do self-damage eventually.
sebleon 9y ago
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
jamanon 9y ago
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
zeristor 9y ago
If they remade The Graduate, I think the key industry would be: Batteries
Fuxy 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
siculars 9y ago
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.
lemoncucumber 9y ago
Now that we've seen negative interest rates and negative power prices, what's next?
stretchwithme 9y ago
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.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ocschwar 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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_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 https://www.iso-ne.com/isoexpress/web/charts/guest-hub?p_p_i...
yuhong 9y ago
The fun thing is that three-phase EV charging is common in Europe. Renault Zoe even support 40kW+ charging.
deleted 9y ago
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arditi 9y ago
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-albanian-hydropower-plants-on-people-and-the-environment/ http://www.ecoalbania.org/ebrd-confirms-negative-impacts-of-...
stesch 9y ago
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.
kumarski 9y ago
https://medium.com/@datarade/the-germans-and-their-renewables-c9263f10b33e https://medium.com/@datarade/the-germans-and-their-renewable...
grey-sunshine 9y ago
Time to mine coins in Germany...
oldpond 9y ago
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.
Ironprincess 9y ago
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?

485 points by kwindla 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      Good point about retail rates being very different from wholesale rates.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - zanny 9y ago
    If you aren't controlling the hardware doing the mining you also don't care about the electric costs to operate it.
    - kwindla 9y ago
      Well, you might if part of your arrangement with the people in your pool is that you'll mine only when it's profitable to do so.
dennisdamenace 9y ago
They mean nothing for crypto currencies. Study LMP day ahead and real time markets.
revelation 9y ago
For all we know the Chinese coin miners you are competing with already pay nothing for their energy, 24/7. And in the grand scheme of things, despite alarmist opeds in the NYT, computers or cryptocurrency miners are simply not big energy consumers where the opex for buying them only to have them sit idle for rare negative energy prices would somehow make you come out on top. You are looking to sink gigawatts here.
- nugi 9y ago
  Got anything at all to back up that rather wild claim that chinese miners don't pay for power?
  - coding123 9y ago
    You gotta test them solar panels at the solar panel factory right?
  - shagie 9y ago
    Over on reddit, a lot of speculation in https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/43opxy/does_anyone_know_what_the_chinese_miners_are/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/43opxy/does_anyone... suggesting partnerships / kickbacks. That said, the entire thread is speculation without a single sourced link. For some actual numbers, http://www.theenergycollective.com/lindsay-wilson/279126/average-electricity-prices-around-world-kwh http://www.theenergycollective.com/lindsay-wilson/279126/ave... shows the cost of electricity around the world... though thats over the entire country (Pacific northwest is cheaper than other places). I would expect that the Three Gorges dam (22 MW capacity - for comparison the Grand Coulee Dam is 6.8 MW and is the largest hydroelectric power in the US (Hoover is 2 MW)- the run of the river dams on the Columbia are in the 2 MW to 1 MW range). Historically, Pacific Northwest power has been as low as $0.0308 and $0.0245 / kWh. Its a bit more now, but still lower than the national average. From http://www.isi.fraunhofer.de/isi-wAssets/docs/x/de/publs-mitarbeiterseiten/Electricity-Costs-of-Energy-Intensive-Industries.pdf http://www.isi.fraunhofer.de/isi-wAssets/docs/x/de/publs-mit... it appears that if you use enough, you're at wholesale rather than retail or commercial rates. If its not free (the implications of corruption in Chinese government are made here), the retail power cost is going to be low, commercial is lower, wholesale is going to be lower still. Its probably a bit cheaper than the historic Pacific Northwest rates.

melling 9y ago

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 9y ago
Agreed, your comment is accurate. It will be quite a while I think before we get there (my guess is 20 years)

misterbowfinger 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
  - batmansmk 9y ago
    You are correct, I used to work with batteries for 3 years, people count capacity in Ah or Wh, but never in W. More often in Ah. Why Ah instead of Wh? Because V is constant, making Ah proportional to Wh. Wh = Ah * V; V is the rated voltage the battery is designed for (12V for instance). By definition the capacity is how much energy you can get out of your battery at the rated voltage under standard temperature at a standard discharge rate. Voltage will go down as the battery depletes. When the voltage output is too low and cannot power the circuit anymore we consider the battery empty. Therefore, as we stop using the battery when V is too different, we can consider V constant over the usage period. So Ah = k x Wh, k = 1/ V being almost constant. Ah is a easier unit to manipulate in charge rates, lifecyle etc. One important note: due to technology limitations, energy one can get out of a batter greatly depends on the discharge rate (+-50% energy) and environment temperature (+-50% energy). Capacity cannot be taken literally as how much energy you can store and restitute. Design a grid that can still operate with lower voltage, charge at a lower rate and operate in hot weather and you suddenly have way more capacity (x3).

ryanx435 9y ago

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?

YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 9y ago
The companies here (not Germany) can afford to pay for the right to put electricity in the grid because they are guaranteed a fixed compensation by the state for all the renewable electricity produced – at a rate that's several times the market price. Thus even at times when they have to pay, they still make more money than if they shut down the plants – which itself would just cost money.
tedsanders 9y ago
- The negative prices are always temporary, bounded in time and price by the cost to spin down a generator - Only the major industrial customers actually see the negative rates (residential customers are still paying retail) - In many regulatory environments the electric utility and power generators are different companies, so only the generators are at risk of losing money and shutting down plants
kwindla 9y ago
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.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

throwaway7645 9y ago

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.

ChuckMcM 9y ago

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.

briffle 9y ago
Exactly, they can't remove base load power plants because they need them for times when solar and wind output are low, and 'peaker plants' are incredibly expensive. (which are activated in minutes, instead of hours/days) By adding battery (like the 100MW project in Australia) they can remove a few older base load plants, and handle spikes with batteries, instead of peaker plants.
sliverstorm 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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!

raphinou 9y ago

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

conistonwater 9y ago
These are negative wholesale prices, it's in the internal electricity market, which consumers don't really interact with.
tedsanders 9y ago
No, residential customers still pay retail. I believe only major industrial customers ever see the negative wholesale rates.

rayiner 9y ago

The article doesn’t actually answer the questions it purports to answer. Better source: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/why-power-prices-turn-negative https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/why-power-prices-.... 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.

sliverstorm 9y ago
Negative power prices are not in and of themselves a good thing for consumers. Obviously, that power still costs money to generate. But, if the means of production (e.g. wind) is overall still a win and power only goes negative for short periods, if consumers can respond and sink that power more cheaply than the producer can dial back & protect the grid in the process, it might be the best solution for everyone.
- rayiner 9y ago
  It's good to have a system where negative prices exist, so that demand can attempt to sink excess supply. But that doesn't mean that it's actually a good thing when prices go negative, as the article implies. That means that demand isn't adequately sinking the excess supply, and the grid is asking for a correction. Aside from the potential for grid stability, if it happens often, that means that you've wasted resources building too much generation capacity.

shagie 9y ago

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-stakes-math-behind-the-wests-greatest-river/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonbruner/2011/10/20/the-high-s... ) 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.

reacharavindh 9y ago

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

reacharavindh 9y ago

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?

Polyisoprene 9y ago
Bitcoin-mining
- Robotbeat 9y ago
  I doubt it. Looking at bitcoin mining hardware, from what I can tell is that ASIC rigs cost about $2-5 per Watt of energy consumed, let's say $4/Watt. Since one might guess that the economic lifetime of ASIC hardware is approximately, say, 3 years (and that's being pretty gracious), then the capital cost of your bitcoin mining rig is about 15 cents per kWh IF YOU OPERATE IT CONSTANTLY. ...but if you only operate it the 25 percent of the time that electricity is free or negative or something, then the capital cost per Watt is like 60 cents per kWh. Residential electricity is about 11 cents per Watt. Industrial electricity is about 7 cents per Watt, and cheaper in places like the Northwest US with lots of hydro power. So it doesn't really make sense to buy ASIC hardware and idle it most of the time. You're better off paying even residential electricity rates and operating 100% of the time. If you have access to wholesale/industrial electricity rates, then it makes even less sense to idle your mining hardware most the time. It MAY make sense to idle the hardware if prices spike, but if you're not operating your hardware the vast majority of the time, then you're not operating cost-optimally. This point is generally true and applies to other proposed demand-response energy-sinks like hydrogen production: if your capital-cost-per-watt of demand is not very low, then it doesn't make sense to idle production. Capital cost of electrolysis should be the primary focus of any large-scale effort to leverage renewably produced hydrogen, or there's no way to compete IMHO.

jk2323 9y ago

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-laut-einer-verivox-analyse-zu-jahresbeginn-noch-weiter-a-1185047.html http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/service/strompreise-steigen... 3) produces more CO2 than France. So what's the news?

wohlergehen 9y ago
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 9y ago
  "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 9y ago
    Germany invested into Thorium in the second half of the last century. Turned out to be a bad investment.
    - jk2323 9y ago

hrasyid 9y ago

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.

Dolores12 9y ago
Electricity should be consumed to avoid overload on net. Shutting down generator then starting it up again could be more expensive.(labor, excess amortization due startup etc)
marcosdumay 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Ah. Can't you just press buttons to turn off generation on windmills or solar panels for example?
  - marcosdumay 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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."

headmelted 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.
- raverbashing 9y ago
  Correct. Doesn't seem to apply for the biomass case though
- headmelted 9y ago
  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.
aoeusnth1 9y ago
Why do you think negative prices would have bad side effects? Why would a cap improve efficiency?
omarforgotpwd 9y ago

runeks 9y ago

> 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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
  - luispedrocoelho 9y ago
    Not as difficult, but consuming large amounts of energy on short notice is also not trivial. "connect a resistor to the end of a power cord" is supposed to make it sound trivial, but operating the resistors needed for absorbing the extra power on the grid is a large scale operation with non-trivial safety concerns. Also, you need to own and maintain all that equipment, &c &c.
  - marcosdumay 9y ago
    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 9y ago

ivanhoe 9y ago

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?

bitL 9y ago

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

c3534l 9y ago

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.

wlesieutre 9y ago
Commercial buildings typically have a "demand charge" based on your peak energy usage, plus different electric rates for on/off peak hours. Some building systems have already tackled "load shifting" to move energy demand to off hours. One common method is "cold storage" where you run chillers overnight to store a bunch of coolant or ice in tanks and use that for your air conditioning during the day.
ZenoArrow 9y ago
> "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 9y ago
  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.

jes5199 9y ago

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 9y ago
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_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...
- greglindahl 9y ago
  Most cars are parked during the solar peak and during the overnight wind peak, so there's plenty of opportunity to use ordinary electric car charging as storage.
- freeflight 9y ago
  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.

FriedPickles 9y ago

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.

ictoan 9y ago

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

kjrose 9y ago

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.

stesch 9y ago

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

exabrial 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.

fingerlocks 9y ago

This happens nearly every spring in Washington state. The mountain snow pack melts in the spring causing a dramatic rise in river water levels. There are several hydro dams in the state, and the flooding rivers mean that more electricity is produced than the entire state could possibly consume. The surplus electricity is represented as a negative price on the energy market. This negative price simply means the power utilities will pay another utility in Oregon or California to take the power off the Washington grid. It's really just a curious phenomenon of energy markets, not exactly breaking news. edit: consumers don't see the benefits of the negative prices because it's short-lived: usually lasting a few weeks in March. The consumer's rates are often based on an averaged total power cost over the year.

hamandcheese 9y ago

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?

bufferoverflow 9y ago
Turbines have brakes, you can stop it. Usually it's done to prevent it from spinning too fast in strong winds.
martinald 9y ago
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.
emiliobumachar 9y ago
The energy does have to go somewhere. The natural solutions are speedup and friction heat, so, yes, I'd guess they do self-damage eventually.

sebleon 9y ago

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

jamanon 9y ago

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

zeristor 9y ago

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

Fuxy 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.

siculars 9y ago

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.

lemoncucumber 9y ago

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

stretchwithme 9y ago

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.

deleted 9y ago

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ocschwar 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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_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 https://www.iso-ne.com/isoexpress/web/charts/guest-hub?p_p_i...

yuhong 9y ago

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

deleted 9y ago

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arditi 9y ago

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-albanian-hydropower-plants-on-people-and-the-environment/ http://www.ecoalbania.org/ebrd-confirms-negative-impacts-of-...

stesch 9y ago

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.

kumarski 9y ago

https://medium.com/@datarade/the-germans-and-their-renewables-c9263f10b33e https://medium.com/@datarade/the-germans-and-their-renewable...

grey-sunshine 9y ago

Time to mine coins in Germany...

oldpond 9y ago

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.

Ironprincess 9y ago

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?