Surplus energy? Seems like if it was really that cheap high energy use commerce and industry would eventually move in. Weird though, most Europeans I talk to complain about extremely high energy prices and actually go out of their way to shut their computers/etc off and buy low value high efficiency computers. I suppose the utilities are not passing on the low rates.
There are flexible consumer energy tariffs based on the spot market + fee now. But although you even get negative prices, I was surprised that those tariffs are not economical for me. I have 2 heat pumps that are responsible for 75% of my energy consumption. I could optimize their working hours to low/negative hours by software and work with the thermal inertia of the house / water tank.
At the moment it is not worth the effort, a monthly floating tariff is more or less the same. Especially because the net fees are not based on the spot market and are 50% of the energy bill. This is a political failure.
> Ultra-low—and indeed negative—prices suggest that it is not being put to good use at present, reflecting failures in both infrastructure and regulation.<p>The fundamental issue is that you can't control when and how much solar or wind energy to produce and it can't be stored at anywhere the scale needed.
A big part of the problem in the UK at least is we pay the same price for energy no matter where it is generated, but the grid doesn't have enough capacity to actually transport all the wind power from Scotland to the south.<p>They'll sort it out eventually.
Except in Hungary. Hungary is fucked. Solar was punished for years and just recently got promoted when Orban's friends and acquaintances got into the business. Wind turbines are still banned, while the technology gets better and better and nowadays pretty neat household setups could be installed. EU level regulations should be put in effect instead of state level ones to remove this kind of games.
I'm using Octopus mentioned in the article, I got paid £0.67 to use 12.62kWh over 4 hours due to spare energy in the UK on 8th June. So not really worth it financially, but the ability is there already to help even out the load.
As I understand it the negative prices in Germany are caused by stupid regulations that keeps the compensation to small scale solar power providers constant, regardless of the market price. I assume German tax payers are on the hook for the difference.
Bullsh*t. Im not seeing that cheap energy anywhere here. The Economist has become an economic tabloid. Or maybe it always was, and we didn't notice.
They can then build out some unusual kinds of batteries.<p>See, <a href="https://nickgrossman.xyz/bitcoin-as-battery" rel="nofollow">https://nickgrossman.xyz/bitcoin-as-battery</a><p>Forget about the bitcoin side of it, I wouldn't agree with that, lol. The story about Iceland's aluminum smelters is a real eye opener.