It’s still not earning you money to spend electricity because you still have to pay the transfer fee which is around 6 cents / kWh but it’s pretty damn cheap nevertheless, mostly because of the excess in wind energy.
Last winter because of a mistake it dropped down to negative 50 cents / kWh for few hours, averaging negative 20 cents for the entire day. People were literally earning money by spending electricity. Some were running electric heaters outside in the middle of the winter.
Renewables dipped below $0 for us in California too this year. Fortunately for the utilities, those savings don’t get passed along to customers and I still paid $0.53 kW/h. /s
Lucky you.
I still paid $0.53 kW/h.
That is surprisingly expensive, it’s more than here (Cambodia), which is notoriously high for the region at around 20c.
Why does it feel like every Nordic country is much better then Sweden these days.
Because Sweden wants to be Nordic America these days.
We each have our problems but I have to admit that I haven’t heard many positive news coming from there recently.
The energy prices in Sweden were also mostly negative yesterday, and today as well. Although probably not quite as much as in Finland.
People were literally earning money by spending electricity. Some were running electric heaters outside in the middle of the winter.
Resistive load. Gotta dump excess energy somewhere.
My electric company here in the us mines bitcoin with it and charges us a “peak time incentive” pricing model.
Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to be born somewhere like Finland.
Welcome to the world of renewables. We have quite some negative hours in Germany in summer when sun and wind are active simultaneously. Unfortunately Finland relies on nuclear, does it?
What’s wrong with nuclear?
It’s a poor solution for what people like to call “baseline power”.
The argument goes: solar and wind don’t provide consistent power, so there has to be some power generation that doesn’t fluctuate so we always have X amount of power to make up for when solar/wind don’t suffice. Nuclear is consistent and high-output, so it’s perfect for this.
Unfortunately, reality is a little different. First problem is that solar/wind at scale don’t fluctuate as much. The sun always shines somewhere, and the wind always blows somewhere. You have to aggregate a large area together, but that already exists with the European energy market.
Second issue is that solar/wind at scale regularly (or will regularly) produce more than 100% of the demand. This gives you two options: either spend the excess energy, or stop generating so much of it. Spending the excess requires negative energy prices so people will use it, causing profitability issues for large power plants. As nuclear is one of the most expensive sources of energy, this requires hefty subsidies which need to be paid for by taxpayers. The alternative is shutting the power plant down, but nuclear plants in particular aren’t able to quickly shut off and on on demand. And as long as they’re not turned on they’re losing money, again requiring hefty subsidies. You could try turning off renewable power generation, but that just causes energy prices to rise due to a forced market intervention. Basically, unless your baseline power generator is able to switch off and on easily and can economically survive a bit of downtime, it’s not very viable.
Nuclear is safe. It produces a lot of power, the waste problem is perfectly manageable and the tech has that cool-factor. But with the rapid rise of solar and wind, which are becoming cheaper every day, it’s economic viability is under strong pressure. It just costs too much, and all that money could have been spent investing into clean and above all cheap energy instead. I used to be pro-nuclear, but after seeing the actual cost calculations for these things I think it’s not worth doing at the moment.
As for what I think a good baseline power source would be: I think we have to settle for (bio-)gas. It’s super quick to turn off and on and still fairly cheap. And certainly not as polluting as coal. We keep the gas generators open until we have enough solar/wind/battery/hydrogen going, as backup. If nuclear gets some kind of breakthrough that allows them to be cheaper then great! Until then we should use the better solutions we have available right now (and no, SMRs are not the breakthrough you might think it is. They’re still massively more expensive than the alternatives and so far have not really managed to reduce either costs or buils times by any significant margin).
Maybe fusion in the future manages to be economically viable. Fingers crossed!
The toxic and deadly trash it makes. Deadly for centuries.
In Germany we still search for an area to dig for ages. We search since 30 years.
In the mean time, you seem to be a big fan of burning coal instead, which only pollutes the atmosphere instead of easily storable material to be buried when we feel we have found a sufficient deep hole that no one is going to look in.
Your entire argument is a fallacy of saying it is either nuclear or coal, when in reality it is either renewables or coal+nuclear.
It is the same companies that want to continue both coal and nuclear, because it requires similar components in the power plants and similar equipment for mining.
Also the same government in Germany that expanded the nuclear power slashed the build up of renewables, resulting in the long time for coal in the first place.
Stop being a fossil shill. If you shill for nuclear you shill for coal too.
Congrats you’ve fallen for oil company FUD from the 70s.
In what world is nuclear + renewables not a possibility. Nobody here is wanting nuclear + coal. You sit here and bitch and whine about fallacies while your entire argument relies entirely on a strawman.
I know nuclear isn’t ideal but to rule it out completely while the alternative for stable baseline power is still coal and gas seems problematic to me
Yes indeed. Best is to move to renewables as fast as possible. This will make power very cheap in the middle run.
Luckily my energy company found a way around all of this to always charge more! We have “Basic Customer Charge”, “Summary of Rider Adjustments”, “Renewable Energy Rider”, and then Sales Tax on all of it. My base charge is over 100$ before they start calculating your actually energy usage. Yay electrical monopolies!
If I had to guess, it’s a temporary influx of “renewable” energy ( read solar nuclear energy as pretty much everything on earth including coal / water and so on ). You can’t copy this into other countries. Both Scandinavian and alpine countries have abundance of water and wind energy
You can’t copy this into other countries.
I’m currently paying $.20/kWh on a Texas grid that is heavily based on natural gas, despite being ripe for a solar/wind boom.
If you could cut my bill in half, particularly during the summer when my AC usage explodes, that would be much appreciated.
A negative price is absurd and has no physical reality, it is the result of speculation and abstract rules not grounded on reality. It always costs to build and operate whatever power source and networks were involved, you don’t have to pay electricity to f*ck off if you produce too much of it.
No, it does have a reality. The problem is that an electricity grid can collapse, due to too much electricity. However some power plants can not be easily shut down. Nuclear for example can be throttled to about 50%, but shutting it down requires a restart, which takes a day. So loosing a little money for a few hours can be cheaper then a full shut down. There are other effects, like district heating power plants, which are needed to provide heat, hydro power, which has too much water in the reservoir and waste power plants, which have to burn the waste at some point.
Then you got to keep in mind that Finland is fairly is a country with a small population, which is rather isolated. They cut the power lines to Russia and Sweden and the Baltic countries are also low population and especially Sweden also has a lot of low carbon electricity. So export is not an easy option.
