For anyone thinking negative prices is a good thing: It's not. It's a panic signal because there are no takers for an oversupply of energy, making the grid unstable.
The grid is not unstable and it was also not unstable the last view days when prices were negative. Germany has one of the most stable grids in the world. Negative prices are good when you need to buy electricity and they are bad when you are selling, but of course generally in a functioning market there shouldn't really be too many days with negative prices. It does mean that there isn't enough storage currently on the grid.
Sure, and negative prices will send a strong signal to the market to hurry up with adding storage. So, this will probably be more of a temporary situation and in the future there will be very few days with negative prices, however there will then also be fewer days with very high prices.
Now what we need is a cheap grid interconnect for home users running solar panels that automatically starts charging a battery when grid prices go negative, to absorb that extra power.
Yeah, the curtailment is a simple way to deal with instability. I wonder who chooses which power plants should curtail their output. The Bundesnetzagentur?
The plants that are willing to give supply for the most negative price are the ones that will not be curtailed. So market forces. Basically at such points power plants are paying for the privilege to be allowed to supply power. This is dominated by restart costs and as such is often paid by classic "baseload" plants such as nuclear ones. i.e. they will accept losing money during one part of the day/week so that they can make money during a different part of the day/week.
The grid is not unstable, Germany has a gigantic amount of batteries, flywheels, and giant resistors that can soak up the power, and is able to order wind farms and solar producers to curtail production if its still too much for the grid. Contrary to what a lot of folklore about Germany's grid suggests, these investments in stability are actually the primary reason Germany's electricity is so expensive compared to a lot of other countries
This is all actually beneficial. It creates real economic pressure for just about everyone to build and install more batteries everywhere to profit from the price swings.
Most importantly, it motivates the wind and solar producers to buy up batteries and install them on site, so that they can shift the times where they sell power to the grid to times of day where its more profitable.
For anyone interested, the dynamics are something like:
1) Commercial entities generally try to sell their products for a profit (positive price).
2) Negative prices make this quite hard.
3) To get back into positive profit, they're going to need to charge a higher price later on.
There are 3 ways the overall market can go if prices are negative - either prices go positive at some other time to make up for the losses the power providers are making, someone figures out a use for the free power and the price stops going negative or power providers go out of business. Typically what this seems to result in for renewable-heavy grids is occasional (even regular) negative wholesale prices and some impressively high retail prices. Free electricity turns out to be very expensive; it shows the grid isn't coping.
Yes, and that is in fact done. However, there it is still a bad deal with negative electricity prices.
> Isn't cheaper electeicity a good thing for the manufacuring industry?
It technically is, but its not as simple as that. Industrial manufacturing is a relatively steady load, which means the consumption is constant. The lowest prices do not matter all that much, the average price does. And that average price is relatively high here, even for industrial consumers.
Negative prices generally indicate that the transmission connections are already saturated: as much energy as possible (or financially/technically acceptable to the third parties) is already being exported.
Transmission capacity and interconnectors are usually the bottlenecks.
> Heck you could build some large bodies of water and boil them from time to time.
Some suppliers already do that. When a power plant also supplies the city heating, it makes sense for them to put the power surplus into pre-heated water which they can store and later distribute to the buyers of the heat.
Obviously this needs some huge and well insulated tanks.
YouTube is absolutely flourishing when it comes to quality content. It‘s the only UGC platform I use anymore. Besides the only thing I consume on the internet at this point is the news and check HN once or twice a week.
Not sure if you're just trying to be edgy, but hundreds of thousands of Cubans have fled to the US over the past few years. Not very many have gone the other way.
> Can you? How would that work in practice? Isn't this just "he said/she said" with no way to resolve it
Conflicting claims or testimony are common in the legal system, and we do in fact have means of resolving them. They are not, of course, 100% guaranteed to resolve things correctly, but it is simply false to say that there is no way to resolve it.
You didn't really answer my question, you just assured me that your opinion is right. What could be used here, exactly? Like, suppose I accuse someone. They say they didn't do it. There's no physical evidence or witnesses at this point, so there's no way to deduce anything from impartial evidence. What can be done here to decide who's right with any worthwhile degree of confidence?
> You didn't really answer my question, you just assured me that your opinion is right.
Its not an opinion; whether we have a method of resolution is a verifiable question of fact, and the answer is yes, we do.
Juries make decisions where the key evidence is conflicting testimony of two witnesses all the time, where the other evidence, if any, isn't directly on the primary question but the reliability of the witnesses.
Usually, this will resolve against the accuser where the US criminal standard of proof (beyond a reasonable doubt) applies, and have more mixed results where lower standards, like the preponderance of the evidence or clear and convincing evidence standards used for various purposes (e.g., usual judgements and permanent restraining orders, respectively) in the US civil justice system, apply.
Whether this resolution mechanism has satisfactory results is, of course, a subjective question.
If you set the app to allow it to be drained overnight, then it may be drained overnight. Similar to forgetting to pump gas into the tank and getting stranded in the middle of nowhere. Most people are a bit smarter than that.
What about the top 10% or 20%? It would be just like using “reserve mode” but you’d get paid for it. And have the option to turn it off before a road trip.
And have extra wear on your battery that would far outweigh anything you’d get out of it?
I’m down about 18% capacity after 4 years of owning my current EV. It’s still plenty for my needs but I would be very disappointed if I saw this capacity drop much sooner or if it drops much more.
A replacement would be ~$15k and the cost of replacing the car would be a lot greater.
I’m very much digging the current strategy of grid-tied batteries and the myriad of companies working to re-use battery packs for grid batteries.
If it's any reassurance, I think the consensus is that the rate of degradation of your battery will slow considerably once it gets past 20% (of the order of 1-2% per year, i.e. the battery will outlast the rest of the vehicle by a long way) [0].
If $15k gets you a pretty big LFP battery, then you can get hundreds of thousands of kWh of use under gentle conditions like V2G. There are plenty of situations where 2-5 cents of wear per kWh is very worth it.
And if you do replace that battery, and you can't get a huge discount from selling the old one, then slap on a $500 inverter and install it at your house to keep using for the next 20 years.
I think it's perfectly sensible to charge it at work to full, then partially discharge in the evening after coming back home. Especially since that energy could mostly power your own home. If you have enough left in the morning to drive back to work it would be fine.
Basically you would haul (hopefully cheap) electricity form your work, to your home to use it in the evening.
I had a Samsung TV ten years ago. While watching Game of Thrones with friends, it overlayed an ad at the top of the screen recommending I play Fruit Ninja on my TV. I immediately disconnected it from my WiFi and have not bought a single other Samsung device since, except for one thumbdrive that I needed. Avoiding Samsung as a brand when buying electronics has been really easy as well.
What's also often omitted is population growth resulting in more / larger buildings being built in any given place, so the same event in the same area from 50 years ago would result in much more damage in $ today.
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