In reality, this doesn't mean that consumers are reimbursed to use electricity, as they're not paying raw market price.
So this is literally just pure profit for the producers, and they're still complaining
No it's not, it's a clear loss situation for producers. The companies that sell to end users may make a bit extra, but even when they have fixed price agreements, this is calculated in to some degree.
Here (Denmark) we have variable price agreements by the hour, and most companies stopped offering fixed prices at all, after the price hikes when Russia invaded Ukraine. That was a situation where many electricity traders (middlemen) made huge profits, and the bill was handed down to consumers. Some companies expected prices to increase more than they did, so the fixed price agreements were awfully expensive, Often more than double what they should have been. They were also generally payed in advance, which caused huge bills even if you cut consumption hard.
The electricity market is an awful market, because it's treated as if it's a free and open market, but in reality it isn't, because it's tied to a lot of infra structure, and it's also tied to a lot of long term agreements, because that's the only way to plan infra structure properly.
No, it's pure profit for energy intensive industrial/commercial consumers as they get paid for using energy. The producers have to decide to either lose money by paying someone to use the energy or lose money by idling their power plants as upkeep still costs money.
I wonder if this could open the door to cost-effective desalination, carbon capture, and similar projects.
Maybe. The problem with these systems currently is that they also have large capital costs. So if you only run them during times when electricity is cheap, you end up having less production/revenue to offset those costs. So it doesn’t really pencil out yet, unless electricity becomes cheap all the time or you figure out how to build them really cheaply.
Sounds like its time to invest in some energy storage. Batteries are one thing but at that kind of scale it's probably better to go with momentum storage or something
They shourd hurry up with district heating. It's the cheapest energy storage there is.
So how does that work? Could you make money running a big energy-wasting heating coil?
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