Psssh, that's nothing. I've got €-0.43/kWh here in the Netherlands for 3 hours today, including tax. Energy prices are negative from 11 to 17 today.
And it's not all that sunny. A Sunday of course so lower demand.
I'm going to switch of my solar panels. We have a dynamic tarif, so I actually get these prices and will pay to deliver power.
Net metering in the Netherlands makes it not relevant for most people to curtail their solar panels. Apparently we have the most installed capacity per capita in the world, die to these incentives. They did their job, time for a next step: storage.
Interesting - so presumably you could also make a small amount of money by turning on e.g. a bunch of electric heaters. Makes me wonder whether someone could (or is) making significant money this way.
It's amazing to me there isn't some better way of using this energy in energy intensive industries e.g. electrolysis
Charging an electric car will earn you €10-€15 and you get to drive your car a nice distance too.
Battery storage could earn you more if you discharge at the right moment, but energy prices aren’t negative often enough to warrant the expenses on a battery pack. You could also trade on intra-day pricing differences (buy low, sell high) but I doubt this will be an interesting business case for the average consumer.
Of course large scale battery parks work the same way, but they will have contracts with the grid provider to balance capacity, a more lucrative market.
Large scale electrolysis has the same problem as home batteries: big investment, so you won’t recoup the investment unless you can run the electrolyser often enough. Another issue is that electrolysers can’t scale up or down very quickly, so you can’t respond to capacity issues and get lucrative deals in that market.
I think the main issue is predictability of price/power? If you could guarantee getting paid 10p unit for off-peak, and guarantee getting paid 40p to supply during peak, for say 5 years, I think a lot more of these projects would take off...but it's all still far too turbulent.
The thing is: batteries, when used for buying low and selling high only in a turbulent market, have a dampening effect on exactly that. So, if deployed en-masse, they kill their own business case. With the 'side effect' of a much more stable price market, which is exactly what we want I guess.
Then still, you'd need 5 to 8 years of very negative prices.
These prices are a nice little bonus for some ppl but not something sustainable. It's a signal from the market something has to change: be more flexible, in demand or supply.
GPUs cost a lot to exploit a small price issue like this. I would use a dirt cheap heat element heater - presumably you could acquire these very cheaply and get paid to use power.
The problem usually is that there's a physical cap on how much energy can be transmitted through a grid endpoint, and grids themselves charge a significant portion of the bill, meaning arbitrage only works if the actual price is eg. -14c (the case in my particular location)
I live off grid, and have more than my batteries can take. I considered just doing a hot water cylinder for the excess, but I’m currently instead working on a hot water cylinder heated by GPUs. May as well do some useful work while making my shower hot.
Was thinking about this too. Or mining Bitcoin and using that wate heat etc.
There's heat pump boilers apparently with some additional loops for external heating (meant for solar water heaters) that could be used for this.
I thought about this and negative energy prices make no sense whatsoever to me.
I get the whole "free market" idea, but this conveniently ignores all externalities, as well as the cost of subsidies. For example, if subsidies were used to buy generating capacity (like solar panels), subsidies should be (partially) recovered.
We have too many "free markets" where we ignore the cost of externalities.
Subsidies are fixed costs. They are not investments, they are one time payments. Under certain conditions, you have to pay those back, but these are commonly not related to pricing.
I don't know how much you know about energy grids, but there is a big reason why negative prices are needed. Energy can't float around on the network. It needs to be used (by direct usage, or storage). If there is too much energy on the grid it needs to be used. There's two ways to solve this, being stop energy from being pushed to the grid, or consume more energy. Both lead to negative pricing to create an incentive to achieve this.
I may be wrong, but I don't think this is accurate.
If the goal were to consume excess production, power plants could just heat a pool of water on-site, or some similar industrial scale "pointless" electricity use.
Rather, negative prices are there because it's in the interest of energy producers to shift demand from the peak, as all their infrastructure needs to be scaled to meet that demand.
So don't think of it as free energy at the time you're using it, think of it as a fine for running your washer/dryer etc. during peak hours.
And it's not all that sunny. A Sunday of course so lower demand. I'm going to switch of my solar panels. We have a dynamic tarif, so I actually get these prices and will pay to deliver power.
Net metering in the Netherlands makes it not relevant for most people to curtail their solar panels. Apparently we have the most installed capacity per capita in the world, die to these incentives. They did their job, time for a next step: storage.