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Do I understand correctly from the article, that these negative prices are so that the suppliers can still claim their subsidy for supplying you. They are effec

Do I understand correctly from the article, that these negative prices are so that the suppliers can still claim their subsidy for supplying you. They are effectively giving you a cut of the subsidy?

jevgeni 7y ago
I think it's mostly due to the structure of the market: you can't sensibly reduce supply of power when demand drops like with commodities like oil. So the price is the only free variable left.
- onetimemanytime 7y ago
  get up get up...lets wash our clothes right now, free, and then some, electricity. I always wondered what happened if there was 100units of energy in the system and only 90 were used in that minute/hour. I imagined a place where they offloaded it to the ground, much like lightning.
  - martin_a 7y ago
    See... If politics hadn't fucked up for the last decades, and bowed down to the four large energy companies in Germany, we could have a wide variety of storage options to do something useful with all that excess energy...
    - jevgeni 7y ago
      A bit of off-topic, but I love the elegance of gravitational energy storage, like what the Swiss are doing: https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surprisingly-efficient-way-to-store-energy/ https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surpris...
      - martin_a 7y ago
        Anything is better than just wasting the energy or "selling" it for a negative price to somebody who dumps it somewhere.
turbinerneiter 7y ago
I believe it's rather about making sure the power gets drawn and it's more about the power from the slow plants, like coal. Basically: strong wind -> a lot of wind power -> coal plant can't lower its output -> excess energy -> pay somebody for allowing you to dump your power in their system But whether you see this as a problem of coal not being able to power down quick enough or wind not being a steady power source is dependent on whether you think CO2 emissions are bad or not.
- sputr 7y ago
  I love the slightly dishonest comments like this one. Wind power caused the instability but you fault the coal for not being able to compensate for it. What happens when you have 100 wind/solar and too much energy... Who do you fault then? Coal is bad, obviously. But don't use that fact to scapegoat it so you can ignore the glaring problem with renewables that all electro engineers in Europe are screaming about: critically increasing instability of the grid due to improper rollout of renewables.
  - turbinerneiter 7y ago
    Where have I been dishonest? I literally pointed out that the "who is at 'fault'" questions depends on how you frame the problem. > But whether you see this as a problem of coal not being able to power down quick enough or wind not being a steady power source is dependent on whether you think CO2 emissions are bad or not. What exactly is improper about the current rollout of renewables? The missing storage (batteris, gas)? True! But this would not be a problem if we had gas plants instead of coal, which can turn on and off much quicker. So again, you could frame this as improper rollout of renewables or as coal not being able to handle the new realities of the energy market. I actually agree with you about the issues we are facing and I see your comment as a very valuable addition to my comment, which simplified the issue too much, losing important detail. I was not trying to be dishonest.
    - sputr 7y ago
      Sorry, I was a bit too combatitive. Anyway, my critique is of the 'if we had gas plants'. But we don't. I see building a wind farm without storage as a similar thing to building a coal plant without a high chimney and filters. Sure, your making energy but your just making everyone deal with your shit while making everything worse. Renewables are, currently, incompatible with the current grid past a certain percentage of total production. Anything past that point requires a much more responsible approach. Aka storage is to wind what a damn is to hydro. Now gas can help. But gas isn't storage, it can only help smooth out the bigger disturbances. But since we're already having issues with storage and we're still just at the 'smooth out instabilities' part... I have no idea how we're going to deal with baseload since no one wants to touch nuclear and we can't build them anyway even if we wanted to.

Do I understand correctly from the article, that these negative prices are so that the suppliers can still claim their subsidy for supplying you. They are effectively giving you a cut of the subsidy?

jevgeni 7y ago

I think it's mostly due to the structure of the market: you can't sensibly reduce supply of power when demand drops like with commodities like oil. So the price is the only free variable left.

onetimemanytime 7y ago
get up get up...lets wash our clothes right now, free, and then some, electricity. I always wondered what happened if there was 100units of energy in the system and only 90 were used in that minute/hour. I imagined a place where they offloaded it to the ground, much like lightning.
- martin_a 7y ago
  See... If politics hadn't fucked up for the last decades, and bowed down to the four large energy companies in Germany, we could have a wide variety of storage options to do something useful with all that excess energy...
  - jevgeni 7y ago
    A bit of off-topic, but I love the elegance of gravitational energy storage, like what the Swiss are doing: https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surprisingly-efficient-way-to-store-energy/ https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surpris...
    - martin_a 7y ago
      Anything is better than just wasting the energy or "selling" it for a negative price to somebody who dumps it somewhere.

turbinerneiter 7y ago

I believe it's rather about making sure the power gets drawn and it's more about the power from the slow plants, like coal. Basically: strong wind -> a lot of wind power -> coal plant can't lower its output -> excess energy -> pay somebody for allowing you to dump your power in their system But whether you see this as a problem of coal not being able to power down quick enough or wind not being a steady power source is dependent on whether you think CO2 emissions are bad or not.

sputr 7y ago
I love the slightly dishonest comments like this one. Wind power caused the instability but you fault the coal for not being able to compensate for it. What happens when you have 100 wind/solar and too much energy... Who do you fault then? Coal is bad, obviously. But don't use that fact to scapegoat it so you can ignore the glaring problem with renewables that all electro engineers in Europe are screaming about: critically increasing instability of the grid due to improper rollout of renewables.
- turbinerneiter 7y ago
  Where have I been dishonest? I literally pointed out that the "who is at 'fault'" questions depends on how you frame the problem. > But whether you see this as a problem of coal not being able to power down quick enough or wind not being a steady power source is dependent on whether you think CO2 emissions are bad or not. What exactly is improper about the current rollout of renewables? The missing storage (batteris, gas)? True! But this would not be a problem if we had gas plants instead of coal, which can turn on and off much quicker. So again, you could frame this as improper rollout of renewables or as coal not being able to handle the new realities of the energy market. I actually agree with you about the issues we are facing and I see your comment as a very valuable addition to my comment, which simplified the issue too much, losing important detail. I was not trying to be dishonest.
  - sputr 7y ago
    Sorry, I was a bit too combatitive. Anyway, my critique is of the 'if we had gas plants'. But we don't. I see building a wind farm without storage as a similar thing to building a coal plant without a high chimney and filters. Sure, your making energy but your just making everyone deal with your shit while making everything worse. Renewables are, currently, incompatible with the current grid past a certain percentage of total production. Anything past that point requires a much more responsible approach. Aka storage is to wind what a damn is to hydro. Now gas can help. But gas isn't storage, it can only help smooth out the bigger disturbances. But since we're already having issues with storage and we're still just at the 'smooth out instabilities' part... I have no idea how we're going to deal with baseload since no one wants to touch nuclear and we can't build them anyway even if we wanted to.