German power prices dropped below zero on the first trading day of the year, an increasingly frequent phenomenon in Europe as renewables expand.
Intraday prices in Germany, the region’s biggest market, turned negative during four hours overnight as wind-energy output reached as much as 40 gigawatts, far outstripping demand."
And there are 180GW battery storages planned to store this energy for the next day. But guess who has to confirm the plans? The 4 almighty German power companies. And guess why it‘s just in planning phase? And who is loosing money if energy prices don’t fluctuate that intense? And who tried to slow down the renewables last decade? Same shit as the petrol and gas heads did. Change can’t be stopped, so they play for time.
180 GW is power.
If you’re talking about energy I suppose you mean 180 GWh.
Changed it. Thx
They introduced some kind of caps (don’t remember the details) on negative pricing quite early on, from what I understand it would have been very lucrative in the last decade or two to get into grid-scale battery storage without those caps.
One thing I remember is Flensburg building, pretty much on a whim, a water storage tank with immersion heater, an investment that amortised within a month or two as they were literally getting paid to fuel their district heating.
There’s got to be some rules as to what you can do with electricity you by at negative prices, e.g. not just put an immersion heater in the ocean, maybe some prioritisation as to who gets the energy first just as there is on the production side (fossils have to shut down and pay if they don’t do that fast enough while renewables get to produce energy), but overall I don’t see why there should be a limit on negative prices.
The thermos approach is unfortunately almost the best we currently have, because every storage solution would have to pay taxes twice, once for buying, once for selling. Not VAT, but Stromsteuer.
Also, these dips don’t occur that often, are usually not very long and it’s kind of a reverse game of chicken. The more storage we have, the less profitable each one gets. All that makes it rather unattractive to install grid scale plants.
The dips occur more often in last two years. We build more renewables. There’s definitely a need to build energy storages. Please don’t forget that the price dips increases the funding need for the small pv-owners. They‘ll get the EEG (fixed governmental subsidies ) price for each Watt they produce. Only bigger pv‘s get nothing/ cut off the grid for that time. So, negative power prices costs much governmental tax money - the difference of market price and the EEG fixed price.
Source: amount of days with negative price https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/618751/umfrage/anzahl-der-stunden-mit-negativen-strompreisen-in-deutschland/
I’m not arguing against the need, I’m saying that the economic incentives for private investors are not really great.
Good thing then that Bundeskartellamt and Bundesnetzagentur are looking more closely at this now
They’ll only block it until they can be the ones to own the battery plants. There is a hell of a market incentive to be able to purchase literally free electricity ans resell it later.
Right now it has a ROI of around 4-5 years. However, this playground isn’t for standard people.
Domestic scale storage ROIs a lot longer than that, despite 1 kWh going for over 0.3 EUR.
Oh of course, grid scale energy is never for the “normal person”. The point I am making is established fossil-fuel based energy majors do not want any pip-squeak independent startups to start siphoning profit off from their system or possibly making it more efficient or cheaper for the consumer. Vertical integration of monopolies is the name of the game.