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South Australia is a fascinating case study of this in action - average prices in the middle of the day are actually negative.

• ajross 5y ago
  As battery/storage deployment improves, this will balance out. Imagine a bunch of plugged-in EVs and home batteries ready to charge on demand in the middle of the day, etc...
  • rasz 5y ago
    In the middle of the day EVs are usually being used, or sit in company parking lot, not plugged into your home solar installation.
    • wumpus 5y ago
      Some employers have plugs at work. Facebook has several hundred L2 charging stations at HQ, for example.
    • ajross 5y ago
      Right, but we're talking about evolution of infrastructure. Putting plugs at parking spots is extremely cheap, and in fact is happening already basically everywhere.
  • ehnto 5y ago
    South Australia has been trialing that exact idea with smart wall sockets and grid connected devices. One such device is a grid aware hot water heater. If you will need the hot water at night or in the morning it doesn't matter when you heat it initially.
• kragen 5y ago
  If this is due to solar, though, this is some kind of perverse market malfunction—somebody's getting paid to keep their solar farms turned on and pumping power into the grid even when the grid operator is having to pay someone else to burn it up. Negative LMPs can be real with coal or nuclear generation, because their ramp times are measured in hours or even days, so you can't just turn them off at night when you don't need them. But the ramp time of a PV panel is about 100 nanoseconds. Short the panel out with a MOSFET (or, more dangerously, open-circuit it) and it stops producing power in under a microsecond. There's no fundamental reason for PV to drive prices negative.