Psssh, that's nothing. I've got €-0.43/kWh here in the Netherlands for 3 hours today, including tax. Energy prices are negative from 11 to 17 today.<p>And it's not all that sunny. A Sunday of course so lower demand.
I'm going to switch of my solar panels. We have a dynamic tarif, so I actually get these prices and will pay to deliver power.<p>Net metering in the Netherlands makes it not relevant for most people to curtail their solar panels. Apparently we have the most installed capacity per capita in the world, die to these incentives. They did their job, time for a next step: storage.
This isn't that rare once large enough portion of production is wind/solar. Sometimes there just is "too much wind" and you get 0 or negative prices.<p>For example today we got to -5c/kWh in Finland and it will be negative most of the day. Currently hydro is scaled down by ~1500MW and nuclear ~600MW. Also a bunch of wind is probably turned off due to the negative prices (there is enough wind today to almost max the total wind production of 3200MW today but only ~600MW in use at the moment)<p><a href="https://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market/power-system/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market/power-system/</a><p>Though not all electricity is bought/sold on the spot market but instead a lot of consumers are on fixed rate contracts and the companies usually buy futures to cover most of the fixed price contracts they have.<p>This is also why there is now a lot of investment in storage and hydrogen. Basically as more and more renewables (mostly wind here in Finland) is being built they want to buy this negative (or 0) price electricity and make money by selling it later. Though even negative electricity costs to use due to taxes (0.063c/kWh for industrial usage) and transmission fees (between 4 to 10c/kWh depending on location)
I hope we’ll get automation that’ll allow us to adjust demand at scale. It’s a shame smart meters have such a bad rep in Europe due to the privacy issues. I’d like to have a water heater that maintains a range, goes to the maximum when energy is cheap or free and the minimum otherwise. Dishwasher and integrated washer dryers could be loaded and waiting to start during the time of the day where there’s excess energy. Some of this is coming as part of solar on everyone’s roof to maximize the ROI but we could do much more.
Presumably it's because the jet stream is currently over Britain and the wind farms are actually producing a significant amount of power:<p><a href="https://renewables-map.robinhawkes.com/#5/55/-3.2" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://renewables-map.robinhawkes.com/#5/55/-3.2</a>
This happens almost daily in California — it’s called the “duck curve” and prices peak dusk and dawn, stable through night, and go negative during the daytime from excess solar.<p>You could often profit in CA by just arcing electricity into the ground, at least until more storage capacity comes on grid
Maybe a stupid question, but who is producing for negative prices? Wind and solar should be easy to shut off. Gas power plants, too - at least in a matter of hours. So does all this energy come from massive coal and nuclear power plants that can't shutdown quickly?
It will be very interesting to see how the renewable energy transition will play out. Energy drives the economy. Zero price energy is something akin to zero interest rates.<p>While abundance is a positive, it also makes all sort of absurd projects feasible.<p>In the short term we have a storage problem but I dont think this be an issue for much longer.
It was because the wind was blowing and solar was doing well. At 14:30, wind was 15GW and solar 7GW against demand of 28GW. Nuclear was an additional 5.3GW. See <a href="https://grid.iamkate.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://grid.iamkate.com/</a>. I don't know the specifics of why this results in such negative prices, but it's relatively unusual to have both high solar and wind simultaneously, and it happened at the weekend when demand is lower.
So what does this mean? Someone produced too much electricity, and the network had to find a way to get rid of it, so they were willing to pay consumers to take it? Makes sense.<p>So now my question is, consumers aren't looking at electricity price in real time[1], so making negative isn't going to get consumers to consume more. So what's the point of making it negative? It's not gonna help you achieve your goal of getting rid of it.<p>[1] Marje we're going negative!, get the extra kettles out of storage!
There are a few dynamic pricing energy retailers in Australia too. It often goes negative, sometimes for many hours at a time. Usually it’s hard to make money off it because it’s often at times of the year and day that there is no need for heat/cooling.
I’d be curious what changes people are making to their routine to cope with a service like Octopus Agile.<p>I have a fairly extensive smart home setup so toggling devices off during peaks is easy, negotiating with the wife is going to be more challenging.