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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."

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[-] barsoap@lemm.ee 14 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

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.

this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2025
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