Solar Generation Surge Sends European Power Prices Below Zero

We are going to see a toooooon of battery storage too. Building HVAC is great, water heaters are great, because thermal storage is easy and present in all of existing infrastructure.

I hope that we can have enough vehicle chargers at workplaces that help absorb excess supply too.

It won't be long until during seasonal peaks we will have multiples of demand available to be dispatched on the grid, during the sunny hours.

I've been trying to think of applications that will benefit from this coming future for about a decade, but have not yet hit upon the sort of application where capex is low enough that this sort of big swing is easy to use.

Its not a market that in not elastic. It is physics, you can't just close the pipe and electricity stops flowing. Deal with this. There are ways to handle the problem, like pumped storage power plants, but they require very particular terrain (a mountain next to the big lake). "grid-interactive buildings" are fun, but this is not the scale that can make any substantial difference. So far we do not have effective, long-term energy storage and no amount of hand waving is going to change that. So, let's be realistic and build nuclear power plants.

For some figures on demand reponse Kraken energy manage devices across Europe and the US:

"And today, to give you the exact numbers, we manage close to 400,000 devices in real time. That's about 1.6 gigawatt of power that can be turned up or down at any moment in time and space. And that's where consumer devices become really powerful." [1]

1. https://www.volts.wtf/p/making-sure-smart-devices-can-talk

While true I suspect that the future of energy storage is overwhelmingly dominated by large scale battery storage. A lot of the alternatives fall in the "cute, but complicated, situational, and/or doesn't scale" category.

pumped water storage and compressed gas are also great

Additionally, cost is no longer a problem for choosing solar. Safe and scalable energy storage is the new bottleneck.

You do know that Hinkley Point C will require €170/MWh 24/7 excluding transmission costs for 35 years.

Forcing new built nuclear power on the ratepayers would today lead to a self inflicted energy crisis.

The question is also how do you match said nuclear plant with the grid load?

In California it swings between 15 GW and 50 GW over a year.

Or do you suggest that we build peaking nuclear plants?

The UK decided to build a nuclear power station as well in 2010: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...

It is still not operational. Nuclear is too slow. As well as not especially cheap either.

There's also a lot of market stupidity in the UK: the marginal price for the most expensive generation sets the price for all generation. In some cases this results in weird situations like wind farms paying back the government because the electricity price was too high for their CFD.

It is cheaper to build out a large (continent wide) network of renewable energy generation with the necessary surplus production and storage than it is to build sufficient nuclear power to adequately provide power. Not to mention much faster and less political contentious (most people like nuclear power in the abstract but are vehemently opposed to power plants or long-term storage close to their home).

The UK's problem is not too much green energy. It is the insufficient integration of the European power grid and less than ideal investments into green energy on the part of other European governments.

Even if you ignore safety concerns and political resistance, nuclear will always loose on the economics.

Your conclusion makes absolutely zero sense.

You are against gas peaker plants (for renewables) because they are expensive/produce CO2, but as a solution you suggest building nuclear reactors (which are much more expensive) and then ALSO need the very same peaker plants on top (or buying electricity, or massively overprovisioning nuclear power, which would be ruinous)?!

Running gas turbines on H2 is absolutely possible (there are already operational plants made to run it), and thats a perfectly viable longer term contingency in case the battery approach stops improving.

You are interpreting the entire story from the perspective of the utility and ISO (which are distributors, neither a maker of energy nor a net consumer of it). They're Edison-era inventions, borne of the lumbering size, toxicity, noise, and poor capacity factor of mechanical engines.

Why don't you interpret it from the perspective of companies (which need to buy energy to do stuff) and consumers (who need to buy energy to be comfortable)? These are the actual buyers.

Then you'll see why solar and batteries win all, and utilities, with their badly potholed power highways with massive tolls to consumers, slowly reduce in importance.

You don't eliminate the paradoxes. You substitute new ones. The question with nuclear power plants is, what do you do when the consumption is below what is produced? You need to find a power sink. In days past, utility companies gave away nighttime lighting such as streetlights, security lights, etc., because it was way to sell electricity that otherwise would be wasted. The downside is we now have a massive light pollution problem.

A better answer is to deploy more storage technology, such as better and distributed batteries, in communities. In addition to sucking up the excess power from the solar wind, it also makes local grids more resilient because the power is held near where it is needed and not dependent on a centralized power plant.

Isn't there a third options of building long term energy storage, or is that not feasible at current tech levels?

I read online 10+ years ago the same comment that you’re writing right now. Wind and solar energy didn’t get widely implemented for good reasons that we can debate between citizens, they’re a scam here to profit some specific industry, to please the media and reduce feeling of ecologic guilt among some people

If you are in the US, unaffordable residential solar is by design. First, there's the fragmented permitting scheme, second there's the boom-and-bust regulatory process of making it a financial winner or loser based on the PUC and utility whims of the years (and typically the utility wins and solar is uneconomical). This means that the successful solar installers are those that swoop in to a state/region when solar is a good financial idea, and install a ton, until it's made less of a good idea by the PUC. Then the solar installer needs to move on to other areas. The installers who succeed in this environment are the ones who spend a ton of money on customer acquisition; a few years ago I heard this was north of 30% of the costs of solar installers.

Australia does it right. First, they allow a global free market of panels, second they have uniform and cheap permitting, third they have consistent policy on interconnection of the panels to the grid. IIRC US residential solar is typically >$3/kw, and it's usually $1/kW or less in Australia.

In the US, take a minute and look for 'shared renewables' or 'community solar' offerings in your state. They're the next best thing:

https://www.epa.gov/green-power-markets/shared-renewables

There is inherent cost in such installation. And I am starting to question if connected to grid they will make sense soon. If cost of energy produced is very low the payback might not happen. Specially with normal risks involved that is weather events and just being unlucky with things like inverters.

Two factors really, cost of connecting to grid won't change, you will be more directly charged for peak load capacity. And on other hand produced power either pays little, or you could get it from grid for very cheap.

Depending on where you are, residential pv usually pays for itself within 10 years, if dimensioned correctly and specced according to available subsidies. But you'll need a decent roughly south-facing roof.

This is done at larege scale, but IIRC if you invest in photovoltaic for your home you're supoosed to break even in about 10 years. But it may depend on local laws (read, incentives) and sun irradiation.

At least in Germany solar panels are absurdly cheap right now.

You can get a ~440W panel for around 40€. Latest generation and industrial grade.

There are dozens of shops where you can pick them up after ordering.

A kW of panels, an inverter and a few kWh of batteries can be had for 1k€ and can satisfy a large part of typical household demand.

It's driving up the cost of fossil fuels? Is that supposed to be bad?

The cheap energy future will not come from seasonal storage. It will come from massive amounts of overcapacity. This is exactly what we already have now, even combined cycle gas turbines have capacity factors that are only about 50%. We will see the same for solar and wind: during the seasonal peak, not all of that free energy will be used. And during the seasonal valley of renewable generation, almost all of the renewable energy will be used.

This is going to be far cheaper than fossil fuels. And by having all the storage we're building out, we will see massive increases in electricity reliability that are simply not possible with traditional big grids and large single points of failure.

> so in winter when the sun doesn't shine, the only reliable energy comes from fossil fuels.

Sure but we also don't have to care. The production capacity is already there, the CO2 to build it has already been spend. It's only running it, that's adding to the badness. And if we do that for 5% of the year. Then we have gotten 95% of the way there.

But what it does is: 1) it makes fossil fuel based electricity extremely expensive (about 20x except for the fuel) and 2) it endangers secondary uses of those plants. We currently use a significant fraction of the coal-fired power plants (at least 5GW) mainly for their heat. And _those_ needs will need to be covered before we can really turn coal off. Nevertheless: Reducing fossil's capacity factor is a good thing and buys time for other bridges (e.g. power-to-heat and storage) to arrive.

So the renewable buildout massively decreasing these countries emissions are at the same time increasing it???

The great thing is that those generating solar power can turn it off in a millisecond, they won't pay anything they don't want to pay. (Though depending on contracts or even subsidies, they may be getting some amount of profit even when prices are nominally negative on the grid.)

It's traditional thermal generation like natural gas, coal, and nuclear which can't be turned off in time, and they are the ones paying the negative prices.