Germany has too many solar panels, and it's pushed energy prices into negative territory

They could always just close their coal power plants. Idk why they don't.

The thing is that it does represent some problems. First of all if Germany has already reached the limit of what it can do with solar then that’s sobering news because it is far from 100% sustainable. More solar than it can use? We should ask why. Not enough storage capacity: that’s a problem when consumers use more power in solar off-hours. And if energy prices become too volatile or even negative, that could harm the non-solar energy provider who provide the backup that solar requires.

I get the anti-corporatist message and all, but really we should look a little more deeply than our favorite narrative if we want to understand things. Reddit also needs to realize that business pages cater to business interests and investors, so not every headline is framed in terms of consumer benefit. News outlets can publish articles for business readers whether or not they are owned and puppeted by them.

The problem isn’t that the energy is too cheap, it’s that there’s too much of it, which is why it’s so cheap. An electrical grid can only support so much power and there is no cost effective way to store enough energy to run the grid for any appreciable amount of time, so it all must be used or else the system becomes unstable.

I can hear Nikola Tesla rolling over in his grave

Not to be too much of a contrarian, but it sorta is a problem if it is too cheap to support the people that are required to repair it and the parts/replacements for stuff that has failed. Plus, in 20-30 years you are going to have to have enough money on hand to replace todays panels, which if energy costs are almost free/negative, you might not. These are somewhat solvable problems (make energy costs just a tax to support the grid and cut out profit from the equation for the public good), but it is a bit of an issue that probably needs to be planned for.

Won't someone think of the poor capitalists who can't love better lives then those around them!

/s, just in case.

Well in a very basic way, more solar than we can use means there is waste. Too many panels produced and installed. And if solar generation capacity is going to waste, that means Germany doesn’t have enough storage to keep it in, and that’s a problem. And who knows what negative energy prices will do to the other power producers who back up solar (which, you know, doesn’t produce at night). That would be a problem. So there is a little more to this than just the headline. Also, Reddit needs to learn that business stories are written for investors and business readers and they don’t frame everything in terms of broad human interest.

It costs something to build and maintain the infrastructure to distribute power. Typically that cost is recovered through payments for the generation of the power, which becomes a problem if generation costs get too low. It suggests that we should probably consider a different model of paying for that infrastructure now that the reality of generation has changed.

Did you know that the best way we currently have to store energy are dams? In most dams you can install a pump to take water and store it higher, then when energy is needed you simply open the turbine.

Seems like a great profit opposite grid storage!

Germany has lots of grid connections to other countries, and are pretty surely selling off what they can get rid of, but France has nuclear, Sweden and Norway have hydro, Denmark has wind and solar. All these markets are also currently negative. We've had negative prices for almost 14 days now, but somehow they went into plus today here in Denmark, although we (personally) had lots of sun and could sell 61,9 kWh from our solar panels.

I just checked, and the prices are near identical between: Germany, Belgium, Poland, Austria, France, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

https://data.nordpoolgroup.com/auction/day-ahead/prices?deliveryDate=latest&currency=DKK&aggregation=Hourly&deliveryAreas=AT,SYS

Oh no, it’s too bad Germany isn’t surrounded by other countries it could sell that excess power to!

Your sarcasm is misplaced.

It probably wouldn't be negative prices if they could. I'm guessing it can't be sold easily due to distance or some other factors? Which is why it maybe has to be used. But I'm just guessing.

I don't know how EU grids interoperate so this could be irrelevant:

There is a fear, with this sort of thing, of falling into the innovators curse. By moving first/fastest (especially when it comes to infrastructure) you make all the mistakes, have the oldest equipment, and the most technical debt. Now if Germany is able to make a market (that didn't previously exist) out of this excess daytime generation they could get undercut by a neighbor who learned from all of Germany's mistakes and who bought newer, more efficient panels. Which would effectively take Germany's costs associated with making the new market and set the money on fire.

Basically the fear of capitalism can be as detrimental as the capitalism.

You are right, this is BS.

I recently researched this and Germany's grid is quite "smart" (the oldest technologies involved, such as DECABIT or VERSACOM over PLC, very much predate the term "smart grid" but whatever) and power plants and households are connected for production and load control. Power plants are required to participate but households can use a load management system for water tank heating (the basic premise is that specific frequency impulses are sent over the power grid for primitive (originally relay-based!) logic in DECABIT meters to switch depending on the assigned device group, and meters count in lower-price mode while the load is activated for a guaranteed number of hours each day; you can manually override the switch for expensive on-demand water heating) and/or HVAC (here, a smart thermostat is usually used that gets real-time energy prices and decides based on its temperature range settings if it saves money to run heating/cooling).
People in Texas apparently hate this (muh freedom), and look how reliable their grid is!
Anyway, solar, unlike coal or nuclear, is absolutely capable of going off-grid if necessary. There is an MPPT system in their inverters that usually works to operate the panels at the optimal voltage & current so that it can suck the most power out of them but it can be overridden to work at below 100% efficiency, or even 0%. This will cause the panels to run with no current draw and get about 20% hotter but they are designed to withstand this. Similarly, wind turbines can be braked, water can be passed outside turbine shafts and so can pressurized steam if you really need to cut production quickly. Still, this is an emergency condition, it is preferred to use pumped hydro (responds in 1 minute, limited capacity) or batteries (respond in seconds, very limited capacity) or lower coal/gas-based production (responds in 3-20 minutes for as long as you wish) or load-side management to regulate the grid, as it wastes no power.
The system is very complex and robust, the frequency (the variable most dependent on production/load balance) only dips below 49.8 Hz about once per a few years (the emergency value that was reached in February 2021 in Texas and can only be sustained for minutes before total blackout is -1% from nominal (49.5 or 59.4, respectively) and has never been touched in Europe's modern history).
(You'd think it would be voltage what falls in case of too little power but it can be readjusted quite easily with switched transformer taps and, oddly enough, reactive power management (connecting a few capacitor/inductor banks to mains) when necessary, however frequency control is the difficult part.)

The grid needs the supply and demand to be balanced for the power to be stable. Otherwise you get fluctuations in voltage and frequency which are both bad for anything connected to the grid.

There can absolutely be an oversupply of energy. We need to either find ways to store that surplus energy, or use it for something positive like desalination or carbon capture.

Free energy should mean algae production

This is a jump I'm not understanding. Do you mean that energy having no cost would mean that the electricity generated can be used to make algae? Or that it's a byproduct of?

Germany actually spends money to stop Denmark producing power on windy days when prices get too low. Instead we could be making hydrogen and storing it in so many creative ways

Its 'free' anyway so there should be no concern about how much of it is lost in conversion

Could you elaborate how to grow algae with electricity?

Physicists are warry about splitting atoms; historians are warry about splitting Germany.

"South Germany" Du meinst Bayern, oder ist Hessen auch dabei? xD

It's bad because the owning class has less control.

Sure they do all they need to do is a bit a regulatory capture and free electricity for them means more profits while you continue to pay the same or higher prices.

German power plants communicate with each other and coal power can go to 50% capacity in 15 minutes, during which the excess power can be sucked up by pumped hydro, for <1 minute long deviations there is enough battery and flywheel storage too. And most people in Germany have utility-controlled tank water heaters, which can be turned on not just at fixed hours but also based on the grid status (this causes the meters to go into Low-Tariff mode too), and sometimes even smart thermostats, enabling remote load management.

In emergency power excess, solar can go off grid safely or brakes can be applied to wind turbines, which wastes power but is preferred to overheating transformers due to higher mains frequency (yes, power overproduction causes the frequency to go up, not so much the voltage).

But maybe the coal lobby keeps convincing the distributor that operating plants below 80% doesn't do their workers justice, or some nonsense like that

The nuclear reactor shutdowns were a push by the Greens in the early years of this millennium. Probably the biggest change they succeeded with in German politics, so that tells you a lot about the quality of that "party".

Germany has been building some really big battery installations already with a lot more to come. These things take time.

Oh for Darwin sake! This is a distribution problem, and relates to optimising efficiency.

Yeah, negative prices finally incentivize storage technologies such as battery storage.

It's more the negative energy of a reluctant teenager.

That's a global problem unfortunately.

We do not yet have effective and economical means of storing energy in grid scale quantities that are readily deployable near where that power is consumed.

It's a huge problem actually, the biggest one facing renewables like solar.

It's pretty funny. The article says that this is where money is being spent next (it implies it's government funded), but the author acts like that's a bad thing.

Unless new installations are spurred on by subsidies or power purchase agreements, oppressed profitability could eventually halt Germany's solar expansion, Schieldrop said.

Instead, focus is likely to move onto improvements that will make more use of the energy produced, such as investments in batteries and grid infrastructure.

It's wild. This guy is suggesting that they subsidize solar installation, in the exact same article where he's saying there's too much solar. Either the article is disingenuous or he's an absolute idiot.

The US has enough resources that scarcity is already mostly a prioritization problem rather than a supply problem, but for whatever reason we've decided we'd rather have billionaires.

If the problem is that energy is too cheap, then the power grid should be entirely nationalized. We don't need to prop up their profits.

It's just a question of shifting load. As electric cars become more common you could program the residential and parking chargers to only charge when electricity is free and stuff like that.

Ironically pursuing high voltage low potential and low voltage high potential are required in equal amounts for future energy grids lol.

EDIT: Had some words flipped mb

Europe and the US already have UHV transmission lines. Grid interconnects and long-distance transmission have voltage between 500kV-1,000kV

China is still developing its national grid.

There's a big difference between what consumers pay and what companies pay the producers

Someone along the supply chain is verarsching us.

It’s almost as if you can’t just dump more renewable capacity onto a grid and think that will solve our crisis, right?!

That's the big, trillion-dollar question, right? Pumped hydro or air is the solution that definitely works, but air is extra lossy and hydro requires a huge reservoir. A battery system would be great, but Li-ion is expensive, so you need a new chemistry. For grid storage, density, hazard and even operating temperature and pressure are not strict requirements, only cost, so it seems likely they exist, and at least sodium is in the early stages of commercialisation already.

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.

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.