This is something that has been occasionally happening in Europe (at least in Germany, don’t know about France) for well over 10 years now. Probably more like 15.
What’s sorely needed at this point is much more storage to make this energy available when it is needed instead of when it isn’t. Before that happens, you cannot really decommission any gas or coal power plants, because you still need them during times of much less renewable production.
this is why we still need nuclear, to replace the fossil fuel baseline.
France’s baseline is nuclear and has been for decades.
deleted by creator
Amazing how you get downvoted with no reply even though your comment is the truth. People who claim to be environmentalists who are also against nuclear energy are seriously dumb.
You can absolutely reduce coal and gas without batteries. Hydro is a thing, nuclear also exists. Maybe it’s cheaper and more environmentally-friendly to disconnect some solar and some wind from the grid during excess peak production and keep the nuclear running, than having huge storage? Also you’re forgetting about the possibility for instant demand response, imagine things like AC units in summer or heaters in winter, where they could be turned on automatically during peak production to keep your house comfier for no cost.
Happens in Norway occasionally. Even hits the headlines sometimes. Then you go into the price graph to see and the price is negative for an hour or so. Rest of the day it’s more expensive than it was 2 years ago before we sold our power to central Europe.
Let’s
Fucking
Go
I’m a Fiscally Responsible American Republican and this is EXACTLY why we SHOULDN’T transition away from Oil! Imagine all the RESEARCH into YACHTS and MANSIONS the CEOS can’t do now that prices are NEGATIVE!
Prices go negative in Texas somewhat regularly
In Texas so does the grid.
How could stupidity go so wrong?
I live here, and the best way I can describe it, is as “enthusiastically, and ignorantly, stubborn”
All the while waving a gadsen flag.
It’s part of their heritage! Like 4 years of it! Certainly nothing before the Confederacy had anything to do with it.
Doesn’t mean much when it collapses due to weather.
Or starts brush fires because their infrastructure’s horribly neglected.
Lol get rekt fossil fuel barons
The amount of subsidies they need just to mimic a fraction of our power!
Though it won’t show up as negative in the bill, not even a discount
If you have a dynamic pricing contract of course you get a discount… If you don’t, you chose not to in return for price stability 🤷
Though yeah, last time prices went negative in Germany I was still paying 10ct/kWh in just taxes and fees. Would be pretty cool if they’d have paid me for using electricity during that time, but of course that’s not how that works.
Depends on where you live. With my tariff I get paid to use energy during negative price periods.
Edit: typo.
*paid
rope gets payed out.
money gets paid.
Fixed :)
👍
Thats because the majority of the cost is not in the direct cost of generation but in maintaining the grid. That’s a fixed expense that does not fluctuate and there is no way generation costs will offset maintenance costs.
It does here
Yet whenever prices for something go negative we’re never paid for taking it off their hands.
That’s cuz it’s not really negative in reality. That’s not how services work.
Article is paywalled, but love the headline. Imagine a future with energy as an essentially free resource. We have a LONG way to go, but just the fact that we are moving in the right direction gives me a glimmer of hope for the future.
For a long time nuclear power was going to make electricity so cheap it wasn’t worth billing. Turns out they were right, the reactor is just 92 million miles away
Lemmy and the nuclear propaganda is so funny. France recently increased the electricity prices because nuclear energy is way more expensive than solar and they will have to increase them again because half of their plants are in severe need of repair.
The nuclear bros are carrying so much heavy water for fossil fuel capital.
it’s expensive because france is skill issuing with the EPR and EPR2 reactor which are incredibly complex and technically complicated PWR plants.
Nuclear energy while traditionally expensive, is incredibly rip for government subsidies considering most of the build cost is up front construction, which can also be eased with much simpler plants (non EPR plants) And also have a skilled manufacturing base capable of actually fucking making the thing lmao.
even if fuel is cheap it’s still has an upfront cost per production and can be manipulated based on demand to ensure prices never drop and always go up.
or i mean, super, nuclear is obviously what society needs, because energy supply is a natural monopoly and nuclear uses fuel you can burn based on demand and guaranteed awesome profit as a private entity unlike infinite energy resources that produces surplus energy and only benefits society and not the shareholders and owners who are the only ones who obviously matter.
even if fuel is cheap it’s still has an upfront cost per production and can be manipulated based on demand to ensure prices never drop and always go up.
sounds like capitalistic free markets to me. I see nothing unusual here.
unlike infinite energy resources that produces surplus energy and only benefits society and not the shareholders and owners who are the only ones who obviously matter.
i realize this is sarcastic, but who do you think owns solar and wind plants?
is this end consumer prices? This sounds more like we’re totalling in french energy exports, (france exports a LOT of nuclear energy, as well presumably, renewable)
I’m not French nut usually the price of transmission is omitted, netting in a positive cost for end consumers. If it was really negative, there would be businesses just burning energy to make money.
Battery business should be good in the future though.
yeah, the only case where power companies would pay people to consume power would be the event that they are over producing, and have nowhere for it to go, which would be actively harmful, nuclear plants will lose money if you aren’t selling energy, but it doesn’t make sense to buy that energy yourself, you would just let it burn. Or maybe the government would subsidize burning it, i don’t know. Generally this kind of thing happens in a really unstable electricity market. It’s not that ideal.
Energy storage is going to be a huge business though, i think batteries are probably going to be common than people think, compared to things like thermal storage, though i guess it all depends on how expensive batteries are in comparison more than anything.
Negative? Sounds like music to the crypto-miners. Heck, can I get paid for shorting two wires together?
Usually in addition to electricity itself you pay for using the power grid per kWh. IIRC here in Finland it’s around 0.07€/kWh. At one point due to some error the price of electricity went down to like -0.20€ and we were indeed paid to use electricity. Though we paid back with more expensive electricity a while after.
Paywalled article
Short way of saying “I use the wrong browser”
You don’t like Floorp?
Am I the only one that doesn’t understand how something could fall into a negative price range? Like does that mean the power companies have to pay the people using power? And how is power being that cheap a problem in any way? Isn’t cheap accessible power what we’ve been striving to achieve??
^oh ^no!
Just a note to say that this is the electricity market breaking down - don’t celebrate it! France has had low-carbon energy since the 70s when they built a load of nuclear power. The have started building renewable plants rather than updating the nuclear plants. Electricity cannot be stored in the amounts that we use it. So many statistics about wind/solar quote power act like we can use it all… but an installation battery that could store a country like France’s worth of energy for 12 hours (solar never works at night) would be the biggest megastructure humans have built*. During a period of high pressure a whole country might get little wind for a week. Also, check out this map if you visit regularly the low carbon energy solutions are nuclear or hydro… the only countries that reliably don’t burn fossil fuels use these. [edit: clarity, *edit: Not quite-about 100mx100mx50m, approximately the same size as the Great Pyramid of Giza, but made of flammable material - I got confused with something that could provide a week or two for windless anticyclones]
