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Germany has too many solar panels, pushed energy prices into negative territory

23 points by tmalsburg2 2y ago

dotcoma 2y ago
I don’t understand: one day you read that Germany made a mistake closing their nuclear plants (they were old and at the end of their life cycle, by the way) and is relying on carbon plants, and the next day you read that they have too much solar power ??
- undersuit 2y ago
  You can't shutdown the coal plants quickly when their energy is no longer needed, like on a bright sunny day. It's still a problem that Germany wants to use coal for their base load generators.
  - KingOfCoders 2y ago
    Germany needs to use coal, the government fears being replaced by a far right movement, which has strong roots in the coal areas of East Germany - politicians feels that closing coal production would be the tipping point for a far right and far left coalition to get into government. It's always about the jobs. The challenge on top is the replacement of coal after the exit from nuclear power. The anti-nuclear stance of many people and politicians in (West-)Germany is from the 1970s and the 1980s, especially when PershingII missles were installed in Germany. People of many other countries had no contact with nuclear weapons, stored somewhere in the wilderness. In Germany a nuclear missle facility was near to many people (I grew up next to a PershingII depot). Chernobyl didn't start the anti-nuclear stance but later accelerated it. So decades later Germany got out of nuclear energy. Which now poses the problem of getting out of coal.
    - reducesuffering 2y ago
      > The challenge on top is the replacement of coal after the exit from nuclear power. Solar when the sun is shining, windmills when the wind is blowing, batteries, hydro, and maybe 1 backup nat. gas plant when somehow all of that is out and you need to ramp up. Looks like some more wind and a lot of batteries is what's left.
  - Delmololo 2y ago
    Of course you can.
    - TheLoafOfBread 2y ago
      Sure, once. Then you can switch it off for good, because it will get damaged - the combustion chamber inside needs to be heated up or cooled down slowly, otherwise it will crack. When you are "not using" coal power plant, you still need to keep the combustion chamber hot.
      - Delmololo 2y ago
        The question is not if you can, you can, it's about speed and how fast. And solar is predictable per day good enough that you can compensate the short intervals with gas and batteries.
- Ekaros 2y ago
  Both can be true at same time. You need power also during night. And that will not come from solar. You really want to support at least that demand from non-carbon sources...
- hcfman 2y ago
  The cost of a nuclear power plant is enormous. Surely they can buy a hell of a lot of batteries for the cost of one of those things and the maintenance costs thereof? The current leaders in the Netherlands also want to start projects for new nuclear power plants. The Netherlands is also over producing apparently. Surely, they also should be investing in massive battery plants instead of new nuclear reactors. Imagine the maintenance costs of protecting the nuclear reactors when the global warming flooding starts in these low lands.
  - realusername 2y ago
    Unfortunately no they can't. China themselves, the biggest producer in the world, only has the equivalent of a few days of winter consumption of Germany. Batteries to smooth out the production yearly is still sci-fi. There's no replacement for a nuclear plant yet for this purpose until a very large breakthrough is made. The only realistic large scale storage at this level is a dam and since the tech is old, most places in the developed world where one can be built has one already.
    - chomskyole 2y ago
      There has been plenty of replacement for nuclear. It's something that really never made it big due to costs. I would also highlight risks, given the current environment in Europe. If you build nuclear, you would have to allow for defending it too.
      - realusername 2y ago
        The proof is in the pudding, if a replacement existed, they would use it.
  - chomskyole 2y ago
    The lack of cooling water would be a concern. Then, in addition, every nuclear reactor being a military target. How would you pay for that insurance?
- Koemul 2y ago
  Germany doesn't have too much solar power, some of it just needs to be moved to the evening. This process has just started but needs to go much further. There are currently 1.4 million electric cars in Germany. If they charged @11KW during the day, they would draw 15.4GW, or roughly the equivalent of 3 Gravelines [1] nuclear power plants running in reverse. However, most Germans pay the same for electricity throughout the day, so instead they charge when they arrive at home after work and Germany needs to cover 3 Gravelines worth of energy with wind, hydro, coal, and gas instead. If consumers could charge with solar for 20 cents per kWh during the day or with brown coal for 80 cents per kWh in the evening, many would alter their usage. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravelines_Nuclear_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravelines_Nuclear_Power_Stati...
  - distances 2y ago
    Lot of Germany still uses legacy electricity meters. I don't understand why a switch to remote readable meters still hasn't been mandated. This would allow companies to offer market priced electricity with as short as 15 minute price intervals, and would in turn allow consumers to optimise their energy usage to the cheap hours. I know Nordics do this already, it would be about time for the rest of Europe to follow suit.
- realusername 2y ago
  Depends which part of the year these headlines are. In summer they have plenty of energy that they don't know what to do with it and in winter they depend on France to not burn too much coal just to keep the lights on despite not even transitioning heating yet.
bouke 2y ago
Same over here in The Netherlands. We have subsidised solar panels and now have an abundance of solar energy, but only during sunny days. The remainder of the time we still have to burn gas and coal. There is some nuclear, which we’ll need much more of if we want to stop with fossil fuels. Meanwhile policy is still heavily pushing for electrification while the power grid is overloaded and will take years and billions to address.
- aprilthird2021 2y ago
  Isn't energy storage possible? Or at least, isn't that a sensible frontier for protecting the solar investment?
  - yobbo 2y ago
    Not with any known technology.
  - Gibbon1 2y ago
    The cost of storing electricity in batteries is down to $80/MWH. This evening batteries in California peaked at 6.3GW. Last year they were peaking at 2.3GW in the evening. I think that means is they installed 15GWH worth of batteries last year. That's close to 0.4KWH per person. The whole economic landscape of solar and batteries has changed radically in the last 4 years.
    - distances 2y ago
      Everyone talks about batteries but I'd imagine that hydrogen and ammonia production would be much more lucrative, no? Much cheaper storage and potentially direct usage in industry, or just consuming back to electricity when prices are high.
      - Gibbon1 2y ago
        I've done calcs for using hydrogen from electrolysis for ammonia production. I think it's 40kwh per kg to make hydrogen. Ammonia is 17.6% hydrogen by weight. So you need 7kwh/kg to make ammonia. At $40/MWH Cost is $280/ton. This source (I can't vouch for) range is $303/ton to $1058 https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insights/latest-news/energy-transition/051023-interactive-ammonia-price-chart-natural-gas-feedstock-europe-usgc-black-sea https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight... Looking more, appears that ammonia producers are already building out electrolysis plants. You don't hear about this because the companies that do this don't care what the public thinks about anything. https://ammoniaenergy.org/articles/technology-status-ammonia-production-from-electrolysis-based-hydrogen/ https://ammoniaenergy.org/articles/technology-status-ammonia...
throwaway4good 2y ago
I guess they need to buy some batteries …
- KingOfCoders 2y ago
  Most people I know who have small solar panel installs plan to buy batteries this year. The offers for batteries dropped in price significantly.
- zeeed 2y ago
  If only they hadn’t recently defunded battery tech research they could’ve developed it themselves
  - KingOfCoders 2y ago
    A lot of storage capacity will come from recycled EV batteries, so this will take some time. The EU has battery tech research, also https://northvolt.com/career/locations/heide/ https://northvolt.com/career/locations/heide/
  - throwaway4good 2y ago
    At the moment heavy import duties on Chinese batteries are being considered in the EU - similarly to those just imposed by the US. So I guess we too will have to figure out whether we want to fight climate change or the Chinese.
- Koemul 2y ago
  Germans are already buying batteries: According to [1], the installed battery capacity in Germany went from 6.7GWh in 2022 to 12GWH in 2023. Given the growth and falling cost of battery storage, I expect that more and more solar will stored during the day and consumed in the evening, pushing out coal and gas. [1] https://www.ees-europe.com/trend-paper/storage-market-booming-in-germany https://www.ees-europe.com/trend-paper/storage-market-boomin...
  - Gibbon1 2y ago
KingOfCoders 2y ago
Which will push getting storage capacity online.
- tmalsburg2 2y ago
  Large-scale storage technology is still elusive, though.
  - Delmololo 2y ago
    Sooo all those new Megawatt projects happening in Germany are elusive?
    - tmalsburg2 2y ago
      Megawatt seems like the wrong unit as it doesn’t measure capacity. Please provide a link.
      - Delmololo 2y ago
        Rwe is building 235 Megawatthours capacity with 220 Megawatt output.
        tmalsburg2 2y ago
        So when there is demand, the thing is depleted after ~1 hour.
    - TheLoafOfBread 2y ago
      When you consider that Germany closed 4GW of nuclear power generation, then few MW (Don't you think MWh?) projects are magnitudes off what is necessary.
      - Delmololo 2y ago
        It's about day storage and regulationary skills not about replacing nuclear.
KingOfCoders 2y ago
If all cars in Germany would be EV, Germany could store 2 days of electric energy usage.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  If I could afford one, and didn't had to drop a electricity cable out from the appartment, alongside the trees, to its parking place, maybe.
  - KingOfCoders 2y ago
    New tech is tricky, Bertha Benz had to refuel her car in pharmacies.
    - tmalsburg2 2y ago
      After Bertha Benz’ famous drive [1], it took multiple decades for cars to really go mainstream. I wonder if we’re looking at a similar timeline. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_Benz#First_cross-country_automobile_journey,_1888 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_Benz#First_cross-coun...
      - wodenokoto 2y ago
        > it took multiple decades for cars to really go mainstream. I think you are trying to insinuate that electric cars are decades away from today. The first electric car was built decades _ago_. Electric cars are mainstream today. So I suppose you can argue that it is a similar timeline, we are just decades after Bertha Benz' famous drive. > Globally, around 1-in-4 new cars sold were electric in 2023. In Norway, this share was over 90%, and in China, it was almost 40%. https://ourworldindata.org/electric-car-sales https://ourworldindata.org/electric-car-sales
        duskwuff 2y ago
        > The first electric car was built decades _ago_. Well over a century ago, in fact. For quite a while early on, they were more popular than internal combustion cars.
KingOfCoders 2y ago
The most astonishing thing about solar energy to me, and I didn't know that until recently, on a cloudy day a house roof can produce 1-2kw of solar energy.
- moring 2y ago
  This seemed very much to me, so I immediately jumped to the conclusion that you might have mistaken kW and kWh, and were talking about energy for a whole day... but no, you're right. A quick google search gives 50 W/m^2 even for a rainy day, 150 W/m^2 for heavily clouded. So 1-2 kW might be a bit high, but not off by an order of magnitude. (Confirmed by looking up multiple sources to make sure they didn't confuse kW and kWh)
  - Delmololo 2y ago
    I asked a few. They make between 1-4 kWh on a cloudy winter day.
    - moring 2y ago
      Do you know for what area of solar panels that is?
      - Delmololo 2y ago
        Puh no. They are both roof systems
Someone 2y ago
If you invest in a coal or gas power plant, there are times where supply outstrips demand, spot prices drop below your marginal costs, so you have to shut down your plant, making your capital investment seem wasted, too. There also basically always is more supply than demand because customers value reliability (possibly more so at times where demand is high) What’s different here is that, for solar panels and wind power, the marginal costs of producing electricity are zero, that solar panel ownership is way more distributed, and that supply varies with the weather. The main question for both cases though is whether the investment makes sense in the long-term.
joshspankit 2y ago
High-quality problems being touted as catastrophic.
rasz 2y ago
Article: OMG negative energy prices!!1 Reality: 72 Euro/MWh https://euenergy.live/country.php?a2=DE https://euenergy.live/country.php?a2=DE

23 points by tmalsburg2 2y ago

I don’t understand: one day you read that Germany made a mistake closing their nuclear plants (they were old and at the end of their life cycle, by the way) and is relying on carbon plants, and the next day you read that they have too much solar power ??

undersuit 2y ago
You can't shutdown the coal plants quickly when their energy is no longer needed, like on a bright sunny day. It's still a problem that Germany wants to use coal for their base load generators.
- KingOfCoders 2y ago
  Germany needs to use coal, the government fears being replaced by a far right movement, which has strong roots in the coal areas of East Germany - politicians feels that closing coal production would be the tipping point for a far right and far left coalition to get into government. It's always about the jobs. The challenge on top is the replacement of coal after the exit from nuclear power. The anti-nuclear stance of many people and politicians in (West-)Germany is from the 1970s and the 1980s, especially when PershingII missles were installed in Germany. People of many other countries had no contact with nuclear weapons, stored somewhere in the wilderness. In Germany a nuclear missle facility was near to many people (I grew up next to a PershingII depot). Chernobyl didn't start the anti-nuclear stance but later accelerated it. So decades later Germany got out of nuclear energy. Which now poses the problem of getting out of coal.
  - reducesuffering 2y ago
    > The challenge on top is the replacement of coal after the exit from nuclear power. Solar when the sun is shining, windmills when the wind is blowing, batteries, hydro, and maybe 1 backup nat. gas plant when somehow all of that is out and you need to ramp up. Looks like some more wind and a lot of batteries is what's left.
- Delmololo 2y ago
  Of course you can.
  - TheLoafOfBread 2y ago
    Sure, once. Then you can switch it off for good, because it will get damaged - the combustion chamber inside needs to be heated up or cooled down slowly, otherwise it will crack. When you are "not using" coal power plant, you still need to keep the combustion chamber hot.
    - Delmololo 2y ago
      The question is not if you can, you can, it's about speed and how fast. And solar is predictable per day good enough that you can compensate the short intervals with gas and batteries.
Ekaros 2y ago
Both can be true at same time. You need power also during night. And that will not come from solar. You really want to support at least that demand from non-carbon sources...
hcfman 2y ago
The cost of a nuclear power plant is enormous. Surely they can buy a hell of a lot of batteries for the cost of one of those things and the maintenance costs thereof? The current leaders in the Netherlands also want to start projects for new nuclear power plants. The Netherlands is also over producing apparently. Surely, they also should be investing in massive battery plants instead of new nuclear reactors. Imagine the maintenance costs of protecting the nuclear reactors when the global warming flooding starts in these low lands.
- realusername 2y ago
  Unfortunately no they can't. China themselves, the biggest producer in the world, only has the equivalent of a few days of winter consumption of Germany. Batteries to smooth out the production yearly is still sci-fi. There's no replacement for a nuclear plant yet for this purpose until a very large breakthrough is made. The only realistic large scale storage at this level is a dam and since the tech is old, most places in the developed world where one can be built has one already.
  - chomskyole 2y ago
    There has been plenty of replacement for nuclear. It's something that really never made it big due to costs. I would also highlight risks, given the current environment in Europe. If you build nuclear, you would have to allow for defending it too.
    - realusername 2y ago
      The proof is in the pudding, if a replacement existed, they would use it.
- chomskyole 2y ago
  The lack of cooling water would be a concern. Then, in addition, every nuclear reactor being a military target. How would you pay for that insurance?
Koemul 2y ago
Germany doesn't have too much solar power, some of it just needs to be moved to the evening. This process has just started but needs to go much further. There are currently 1.4 million electric cars in Germany. If they charged @11KW during the day, they would draw 15.4GW, or roughly the equivalent of 3 Gravelines [1] nuclear power plants running in reverse. However, most Germans pay the same for electricity throughout the day, so instead they charge when they arrive at home after work and Germany needs to cover 3 Gravelines worth of energy with wind, hydro, coal, and gas instead. If consumers could charge with solar for 20 cents per kWh during the day or with brown coal for 80 cents per kWh in the evening, many would alter their usage. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravelines_Nuclear_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravelines_Nuclear_Power_Stati...
- distances 2y ago
  Lot of Germany still uses legacy electricity meters. I don't understand why a switch to remote readable meters still hasn't been mandated. This would allow companies to offer market priced electricity with as short as 15 minute price intervals, and would in turn allow consumers to optimise their energy usage to the cheap hours. I know Nordics do this already, it would be about time for the rest of Europe to follow suit.
realusername 2y ago
Depends which part of the year these headlines are. In summer they have plenty of energy that they don't know what to do with it and in winter they depend on France to not burn too much coal just to keep the lights on despite not even transitioning heating yet.

bouke 2y ago

Same over here in The Netherlands. We have subsidised solar panels and now have an abundance of solar energy, but only during sunny days. The remainder of the time we still have to burn gas and coal. There is some nuclear, which we’ll need much more of if we want to stop with fossil fuels. Meanwhile policy is still heavily pushing for electrification while the power grid is overloaded and will take years and billions to address.

aprilthird2021 2y ago
Isn't energy storage possible? Or at least, isn't that a sensible frontier for protecting the solar investment?
- yobbo 2y ago
  Not with any known technology.
- Gibbon1 2y ago
  The cost of storing electricity in batteries is down to $80/MWH. This evening batteries in California peaked at 6.3GW. Last year they were peaking at 2.3GW in the evening. I think that means is they installed 15GWH worth of batteries last year. That's close to 0.4KWH per person. The whole economic landscape of solar and batteries has changed radically in the last 4 years.
  - distances 2y ago
    Everyone talks about batteries but I'd imagine that hydrogen and ammonia production would be much more lucrative, no? Much cheaper storage and potentially direct usage in industry, or just consuming back to electricity when prices are high.
    - Gibbon1 2y ago
      I've done calcs for using hydrogen from electrolysis for ammonia production. I think it's 40kwh per kg to make hydrogen. Ammonia is 17.6% hydrogen by weight. So you need 7kwh/kg to make ammonia. At $40/MWH Cost is $280/ton. This source (I can't vouch for) range is $303/ton to $1058 https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insights/latest-news/energy-transition/051023-interactive-ammonia-price-chart-natural-gas-feedstock-europe-usgc-black-sea https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight... Looking more, appears that ammonia producers are already building out electrolysis plants. You don't hear about this because the companies that do this don't care what the public thinks about anything. https://ammoniaenergy.org/articles/technology-status-ammonia-production-from-electrolysis-based-hydrogen/ https://ammoniaenergy.org/articles/technology-status-ammonia...

throwaway4good 2y ago

I guess they need to buy some batteries …

KingOfCoders 2y ago
Most people I know who have small solar panel installs plan to buy batteries this year. The offers for batteries dropped in price significantly.
zeeed 2y ago
If only they hadn’t recently defunded battery tech research they could’ve developed it themselves
- KingOfCoders 2y ago
  A lot of storage capacity will come from recycled EV batteries, so this will take some time. The EU has battery tech research, also https://northvolt.com/career/locations/heide/ https://northvolt.com/career/locations/heide/
- throwaway4good 2y ago
  At the moment heavy import duties on Chinese batteries are being considered in the EU - similarly to those just imposed by the US. So I guess we too will have to figure out whether we want to fight climate change or the Chinese.
Koemul 2y ago
Germans are already buying batteries: According to [1], the installed battery capacity in Germany went from 6.7GWh in 2022 to 12GWH in 2023. Given the growth and falling cost of battery storage, I expect that more and more solar will stored during the day and consumed in the evening, pushing out coal and gas. [1] https://www.ees-europe.com/trend-paper/storage-market-booming-in-germany https://www.ees-europe.com/trend-paper/storage-market-boomin...
- Gibbon1 2y ago

KingOfCoders 2y ago

Which will push getting storage capacity online.

tmalsburg2 2y ago
Large-scale storage technology is still elusive, though.
- Delmololo 2y ago
  Sooo all those new Megawatt projects happening in Germany are elusive?
  - tmalsburg2 2y ago
    Megawatt seems like the wrong unit as it doesn’t measure capacity. Please provide a link.
    - Delmololo 2y ago
      Rwe is building 235 Megawatthours capacity with 220 Megawatt output.
      - tmalsburg2 2y ago
        So when there is demand, the thing is depleted after ~1 hour.
  - TheLoafOfBread 2y ago
    When you consider that Germany closed 4GW of nuclear power generation, then few MW (Don't you think MWh?) projects are magnitudes off what is necessary.
    - Delmololo 2y ago
      It's about day storage and regulationary skills not about replacing nuclear.

KingOfCoders 2y ago

If all cars in Germany would be EV, Germany could store 2 days of electric energy usage.

pjmlp 2y ago
If I could afford one, and didn't had to drop a electricity cable out from the appartment, alongside the trees, to its parking place, maybe.
- KingOfCoders 2y ago
  New tech is tricky, Bertha Benz had to refuel her car in pharmacies.
  - tmalsburg2 2y ago
    After Bertha Benz’ famous drive [1], it took multiple decades for cars to really go mainstream. I wonder if we’re looking at a similar timeline. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_Benz#First_cross-country_automobile_journey,_1888 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_Benz#First_cross-coun...
    - wodenokoto 2y ago
      > it took multiple decades for cars to really go mainstream. I think you are trying to insinuate that electric cars are decades away from today. The first electric car was built decades _ago_. Electric cars are mainstream today. So I suppose you can argue that it is a similar timeline, we are just decades after Bertha Benz' famous drive. > Globally, around 1-in-4 new cars sold were electric in 2023. In Norway, this share was over 90%, and in China, it was almost 40%. https://ourworldindata.org/electric-car-sales https://ourworldindata.org/electric-car-sales
      - duskwuff 2y ago
        > The first electric car was built decades _ago_. Well over a century ago, in fact. For quite a while early on, they were more popular than internal combustion cars.

KingOfCoders 2y ago

The most astonishing thing about solar energy to me, and I didn't know that until recently, on a cloudy day a house roof can produce 1-2kw of solar energy.

moring 2y ago
This seemed very much to me, so I immediately jumped to the conclusion that you might have mistaken kW and kWh, and were talking about energy for a whole day... but no, you're right. A quick google search gives 50 W/m^2 even for a rainy day, 150 W/m^2 for heavily clouded. So 1-2 kW might be a bit high, but not off by an order of magnitude. (Confirmed by looking up multiple sources to make sure they didn't confuse kW and kWh)
- Delmololo 2y ago
  I asked a few. They make between 1-4 kWh on a cloudy winter day.
  - moring 2y ago
    Do you know for what area of solar panels that is?
    - Delmololo 2y ago
      Puh no. They are both roof systems

Someone 2y ago

If you invest in a coal or gas power plant, there are times where supply outstrips demand, spot prices drop below your marginal costs, so you have to shut down your plant, making your capital investment seem wasted, too. There also basically always is more supply than demand because customers value reliability (possibly more so at times where demand is high) What’s different here is that, for solar panels and wind power, the marginal costs of producing electricity are zero, that solar panel ownership is way more distributed, and that supply varies with the weather. The main question for both cases though is whether the investment makes sense in the long-term.

joshspankit 2y ago

High-quality problems being touted as catastrophic.

rasz 2y ago

Article: OMG negative energy prices!!1 Reality: 72 Euro/MWh https://euenergy.live/country.php?a2=DE https://euenergy.live/country.php?a2=DE