Germany Already Met Its 2028 Goal for Reducing Coal-Fired Power (bloomberg.com) 105
Germany has already met its 2028 goal for reducing coal-fired power generation, so won't need to order the shutdown of any plants for a second year running, the country's regulator said. From a report: Germany has an interim 2028 target of reducing coal-fired power by 8.7 gigawatts, and as of Sept. 1 it had exceeded this level by about 10%, the Federal Network Agency said on its website on Monday.
Almost two thirds of Germany's electricity comes from renewables and excess solar power production has frequently pushed prices below zero, making burning coal less profitable. Yet Europe's largest economy remains heavily dependent on the fossil fuel and is still the European Union's biggest polluter.
Almost two thirds of Germany's electricity comes from renewables and excess solar power production has frequently pushed prices below zero, making burning coal less profitable. Yet Europe's largest economy remains heavily dependent on the fossil fuel and is still the European Union's biggest polluter.
Re:France (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:France (Score:5, Insightful)
Last summer, Germany had to sell power to France, because of low rain, France's nuclear plants had to reduce power output. In general, Germany is a net-exporter of electrical energy.
In general, France is the largest electricity exporter in Europe.
https://montel.energy/resource... [montel.energy]
Re:France (Score:5, Informative)
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It actually is.
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Debt is not a useful metric by itself.
Actually it is, especially if you trend it over time and see it goes only up. Your local power company isn't the USA Treasury. They can't print money and hope the rest of the world doesn't dump them. At some point cash needs to flow.
Saying France's energy production is in the red isn't necessarily the right problem to mention, the problem is they had literally no path to keeping the lights on other than massive taxpayer bailouts.
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France has also killed the least people with it's electricity production, certainly per capita.
More French people have died in France from Germany's coal pollution than french coal pollution.
Germany externalises it's costs, France doesn't. If you compare the mix of debt, cost and externalised costs, France looks a whole lot better.
Re:France (Score:4, Informative)
If you’re going to broaden the lens, you have to do it a bit further still:
- France extracted lots of its uranium from Niger, with less than 15% of the uranium value staying in the country, and substantial environmental and economic harms, as well as terrible labour conditions and harms to governance arrangements as France sought to control Niger and its access to uranium. The same is true for Gabon. We don’t know the mortality rates associated with uranium extraction in these countries, because the collection of such data has been, frankly, actively discouraged. But we do know that respiratory mortality rates in Arlit, a mining town, are twice the national average
- France’s civil nuclear program was built using expertise from its military program, which included plenty of testing that caused massive harms in the Sahel and Algeria. Given the lack of protections provided (including to French conscripts), we can be sure there were lots of lives harmed and lost due to radioactive exposure, but cannot know how many
I’m not cheerleading for coal in any way. But nuclear power in France is not free of harm, by any stretch of the imagination
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A big chunk of that increase in debt was liabilities for the new nuclear plants it is building, e.g. in the UK. Hinkley Point C was delayed again, and the cost has risen yet again.
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Re:France (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes. But they pay through the nose to do it and they are only doing it because it is cheaper to sell electricity dirt cheap at low-usage hours than to reduce output from their crappy nukes. And they quite often have to buy at very high prices during peak hours.
Fact of the matter is that without the European grid (and those German coal plants), France would have regular large-scale power outages.
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cheaper to sell electricity dirt cheap at low-usage hours than to reduce output from their crappy nukes.
That is a feature, not a bug.
Losing tons of money is a feature? In what deranged world?
And they quite often have to buy at very high prices during peak hours.
They do that rarely, not often. I rather suspect you have learned everything you "know" about nuclear energy from Greenpeace.
You suspect wrong. And you are clearly an idiot. The transfer graphs are open and there have been many analyses by many different groups as to why electricity prices did raise allover Europe. The most important reason is France buying at peak hours.
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Yes, nukes run 24/7. This way you don't need storage.
Completely wrong. Overproduction kills a grid just as surely as underproduction. That is why France has to pay regularly for others to take its electricity.
But you obviously do not even have a minimal clue as to how a power-grid works. Without France, the European grid would be significantly more stable end electricity would be cheaper.
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Without France, the European grid would be significantly more stable end electricity would be cheaper.
That is the stupidest thing I've seen here in a long time. Perhaps you have some sort of link to this expert analysis? Greenpeace does not count.
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According to Agora Energiewende, Germany has been a net importer since 2023.
Phasing out nuclear power before replacement sources were built, was probably not ideal. It's one of several reasons electricity prices across Europe has shot up since 2021, after being stable since 2008 (as far back as I found statistics for in the time I wanted to spend digging).
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According to Agora Energiewende, Germany has been a net importer since 2023.
That is true, but with the import rate at low single % figures, no drama, really. The European power grid was designed for that purpose and we cannot all be net exporters on the grid, can we?
Phasing out nuclear power before replacement sources were built, was probably not ideal. It's one of several reasons electricity prices across Europe has shot up since 2021, after being stable since 2008 (as far back as I found statistics for in the time I wanted to spend digging).
Cudos to the conservative CDU-led coalition in power in 2011/2012 panicking after Fukushima, when a solid 80+ % majority of the German population demanded a quick nuclear exit. It would have been much wiser to stick to nuclear as a bridging technology and phasing out coal and gas much earlier, but that would have requir
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Developing new nuclear technology would've been a better choice than kneejerk exiting the business, but Siemens chose to exit nuclear, probably because the government wanted to exit it, so it died there. Exiting nuclear was a horrible plan, Germany restarted multiple lignite coal plants, which are the worst polluting coal there is. Guess what spews more nuclear radiation into the environment, nuclear or lignite coal... yeah, the latter. The smoke is full of heavy metals, including radioactive ones.
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Germany restarted multiple lignite coal plants, which are the worst polluting coal there is.
That is just wrong. Germany did not "restart any lignite coal plants". I live right next to them (in the west of Germany) so I should know. All shut-down plants will remain terminated. The last plants in the west will cease operation by 2030 and in the east near the Polish border by 2038.
Got any further information?
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panic you say? you spelled russian influence wrong.
Whatever you want to make of it. Corruption would be another option.
That is actually my entire point, total neglect for the common good. Anything else would be "socialism".
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Those numbers are meaningless. For power you always have to look at the details and at what times what was imported.
Oh, and nice lie you have there. The reason electricity prices have gone up in Europe is that France (!) had to buy a lot of very expensive peak-hour electricity to keep the lights on, again and again. And yes, it is right there in the detailed graphs. No, I am not going to look it up again and again because the nuclear morons just will keep lying even in the face of hard evidence.
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Maybe France can ask Arizona, UAE, Combustion Engineering, and/or KEPCO how to operate nuclear power plants with little water available.
As I recall the issue was a matter of France to save some money on their nuclear power plants by keeping their cooling towers small, or use no cooling towers at all, on some power plants near rivers. They chose to use river water directly for cooling water as opposed to a source of making up water that evaporated like nuclear power plants in warmer climates. I guess they
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The year before as well. France is selling cheap surplus electricity in low-usage time and buying very expensively at high-usage time. France is also the reason that electricity got more expensive all over Europe because of that buying. Result from their failed nuclear strategy.
And to all the idiots claiming differently: You can fucking see it in the published graphs! No, not looking them up again and again, because you people just keep lying about it.
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Hello, French guy here...
Germany (and spain for that mater), which you both hear boasting about "renewables", are only able to pull "ecological stunts" because when they are in the hole they know that they can rely on France to sell them nuclear electricity...
France does have issue with it's power generation (a lot of it self inflicted on overly agressive regulatory rules, not technical ones BTW, such as: the river is hot, so you can't use the water to cool down the plant, with a "regulatory temperature" th
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The flip-side to that is that in 2023, which is the last year I can find data for, Spain exported 17.8% more electricity to France than it imported from France. Maybe the diversity is mutually beneficial?
Re: France (Score:2, Insightful)
Almost two thirds of Germany's electricity comes from renewables and excess solar power production has frequently pushed prices below zero, making burning coal less profitable.
That's Great!
Yet Europe's largest economy remains heavily dependent on the fossil fuel and is still the European Union's biggest polluter.
Wait, what? Germany ("Europe's largest economy") relies on Fossil Fuel and is the EU's "biggest polluter"!
Just so I understand, we're celebrating Europe's worst polluter imperceptibly reducing its reliance on coal a wee-bit faster than they planned to?
Really?
This is like celebrating China slightly reducing the number of NEW coal-fired power plants it builds year after year... I mean, yay, but really?
Re: France (Score:2)
You do realise Americans still use more coal per person than Germans.
Which means what, exactly, in the context of my comment?
And have every year for the last 100 years.
Either provide a citation or admit you simply made that up...
I find it hard to believe anyone has been tracking per-person coal usage since 1925, but I'll give you a chance to back up your claim.
My quick google turned up this site:
https://ourworldindata.org/gra... [ourworldindata.org]
And it shows something very interesting:
In 2024, Germany used 5,183.02 KWH of coal energy, and in 1965 Germany used 24,609.08 KWH of coal energy per capita.
In 2024, the US used 6,356.28 KWH of
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Well we did celebrate the fact that China's CO2 emissions peaked in 2024 and are now decreasing. Yes they are still building coal-fired power plants to replace some old dirtier plants, but they are also building renewables at an world-leading rate.
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Remember to compare like-for-like. Germany is more industrialized than some other EU countries, and has the largest economy overall. They are also further north than some of the others.
As for China, the new coal plants are replacing multiple older ones, just like they did when Germany built some new ones a few years ago. The total greenhouse gas and pollution output goes down, as the newer plants are more efficient and emit less. It's the managed decline of the coal power industry, as it is replaced.
Well done Germany (Score:2)
please continue to reduce use of coal in spite of some other countries trying to burn more. Future generations will thank you.
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please continue to reduce use of coal in spite of some other countries trying to burn more. Future generations will thank you.
Germany isn't doing great on CO2 emission right now, both on total emissions and per capita. They are able to reduce emissions so easily because they started so far behind. If they took reducing CO2 emissions seriously then they'd not have shut down their nuclear power plants before the end of their originally planned decommission date. For a while Germany was pushing over windmills to get to the coal in the earth beneath them as they were so desperate for energy. With a combination of some factories pa
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They still burn coal for power, and without nuclear power to replace that electric generation capacity it will be difficult to close them all.
You do know that coal is being phased out in Germany until 2030 while electric power generation already is at >60% renewable and increasing, don't you?
Also, nuclear energy production in Germany has fallen victim to short-sighted political opportunism on the conservative side of the political spectrum. The current DU-led coalition knows full well that nuclear is no longer an option after the 2012 exit post-Fukushima.
The modern AfD differs, but then, they always do, without any expertise in the field, of c
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I'll believe that Germany will have phased out coal power in 2030 when I see 2031 on my calendar, and even then it might take a few months to get all the data collected, verified, and published to the public.
I've seen a lot of "5 year plans" that didn't pan out. Unsurprisingly these often come from politicians that plan to retire in 4 years, and so are using their 5 year plan to get one more term before retirement, then when their plan inevitably fails then it's the fault of someone else.
Sorry for being wrong but the open-cast lignite mining sites in the east of Germany will only cease operation by 2038, in the west they will have shut down by 2030. My bad. But still, Germans tend to stick to their agenda. Usually :)
I live in the western part of Germany near the Dutch border and the federal energy transformation strategy has had concrete effects on local industry for a few years, already.
Nuclear power was still an option after Fukushima. It only required educating the public than fuel their fears. I'm confused on what Fukushima had to do with so many nuclear power plants nowhere close to the sea, they weren't likely to take a tsunami to the face like Fukushima. Had this been about coastal reactors then it may have made some sense.
The first sentence is just not true. Public opinion was strongly anti-nuclear after Fukushima, globally.
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Nuclear is an even more deeply unserious religion than Scientology.
Clearly Psychological Projection [wikipedia.org] from an antinuclear zealot.
How many countries have deep decarbonized their grids with just solar and wind? Wait it's zero! Looks like we will need nuclear after all!
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shut down their nuclear power plants before the end of their originally planned decommission date.
The shut down their plants as a result of the scare of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident [wikipedia.org], this is now seen as a mistake but at the time the big worry was escaping radiation.
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The shut down their plants as a result of the scare of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident, this is now seen as a mistake but at the time the big worry was escaping radiation.
I know why they made that decision. The reason they made that decision didn't make sense then. They are paying a price for it now though.
I saw a news article that up to 6 nuclear power reactors could be restarted. I'll believe that when I see it. Maybe the plan changed since. The plan is likely to change in the future.
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America actually jumped the gun and killed its new nuclear development in 1994, for all the wrong reasons (well, ok, proliferation was a valid concern, but everything else was wrong). The IFR was pretty much no chance of meltdown, almost no waste, nearly all fuel used, on-demand power.... yeah.
Lukewarm applause (Score:2)
They ought to be using this slight advance on their schedule to accelerate their path out of coal-dependency, especially for lignite.
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They ought to be using this slight advance on their schedule to accelerate their path out of coal-dependency, especially for lignite.
... Germany already accelerated the phasing-out of lignite (and coal in general) by 8 years, the last remaining lignite power plants will cease operation in 2030, a resounding success of the former Socialdemocratic/Green/Liberal coalition. Yep, all communists, I know.
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It’s great that it’s happening, but 2030 is still a good way off. I am just impatient, that’s all. The risks of going slowly are so high
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It’s great that it’s happening, but 2030 is still a good way off. I am just impatient, that’s all. The risks of going slowly are so high
How are other western powers faring, e.g. the US? Got any figures?
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I suspect you're coming from a place of defensiveness on this, and assuming I'm American. Both of these are misconceived, and we have to look squarely at the facts: Belgium, Sweden, Austria, Portugal and the UK are already coal free; Spain, Slovakia, the Netherlands, Italy, Hungary, Greece, France, Finland and Denmark have all committed to specific dates between now and 2030; Germany's phase out date is 2038, eight years later than the Paris agreement. The US is obviously a shit show, but that gives the wor
Still not impressed (Score:5, Informative)
Germany has squandered over half a trillion euros on Energiewende, and to show for it they have the second filthiest grid in Europe, has some of the highest electricity costs in the world and still relies on coal. Half a trillion euros could have bought dozens of gigawatts of clean and reliable nuclear capability.
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Germany has squandered over half a trillion euros on Energiewende,
... successfully invested to substantially reduce reliance on coal and gas.
and to show for it they have the second filthiest grid in Europe,
Improving rapidly, hampered by Germany's still strong industrial sector actually producing high-quality goodies.
H2 conversion does not fly well, though.
has some of the highest electricity costs in the world and still relies on coal.
Due to the merit order principle and power net distribution cost, NOT due to (decreasing) cost of generation. That is a political problem for the government to fix. Just today a cost reduction programme was announced. Funny, innit? BTW, coal is being phased out over the next five year
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The vast majority of money in the Energiewende did not go into grid. It went into everything. It funded charging stations for EVs, it funded a lot of gas plants too, it funded hydrogen projects, it funded insulation programs, it funded subsidies for heat-pumps, and upgrading gas boilers. It funded overhauls in municipal waste processing. If it could contribute to greenhouse gas reduction it was in scope for the Energiewende - and in that regard it was highly successful.
Pointing to the grid is like saying th
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They started from a very bad position where they were heavily dependent on coal and gas.
The money has hardly been squandered. The transition has been a huge economic boon to them. Lots of jobs and manufacturing and skilled labour goes into it.
German's cost of electricity is fairly typical for Europe. Some countries are cheaper, but e.g. in France it's because of massive subsidies so in reality they pay about the same, or because they have even better renewable resources like Spain does.
You also must not con
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Deindustralization in Germany is the cost of this (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Deindustralization in Germany is the cost of t (Score:1)
When wholesale prices often go negative, but retail prices are sky high, should one question the whole idea that prices are rational, not psychological noise?
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False. Germany's goal here has significantly helped elevate the problem. Energy costs in Europe are based on last effort for peakers to stabilise the grid, that means gas. Nuclear France pays gas prices. Polish coal pays gas prices. Germany's solar pays gas prices. And COVID + Putin has upended the gas market in all of Europe.
Germany isn't facing a deinstrialisation problem, all of Europe is including countries which haven't shut down coal.
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Saves pollution and saves gas (and with that money)
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Would not suffice. Further, you do not "restart a nuclear reactor" just like that. The engineers were sent into early retirement many years ago and won't come back.
Renewables are not the issue in Germany. The old stakeholders are.
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Deindustrialising (Score:4, Informative)
Germany is deindustrialising so fast, they will only need 3 hamsters in a spinning wheel by 2030.
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So is all of Europe, this isn't a Germany problem, it's an energy cost problem, pushed along by the fact that energy prices in Europe are set at the cost of gas peakers regardless of the source, and that the cost of gas got fucked by Putin.
Thanks Merkel (Score:2)
Yay ! Equality !
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Shut down the nuclear plants and fuck up your country for decades
Citation needed. By all accounts Germany's energy grid is doing just fine and the problems facing the cost of energy has zero to do with nuclear wind or whatever because in all of Europe the cost of energy is set fundamentally by gas. France didn't shut down nuclear and yet they are facing the same crisis. Maybe your anger is based on a misunderstanding of how the world woks?
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Really ? Did you look ?
From TFSummary: " Yet Europe's largest economy remains heavily dependent on the fossil fuel and is still the European Union's biggest polluter."
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I'm not sure why you're quoting what you're quoting. It's non sequitur. Still being dependent on fossil fuels has nothing to do with nuclear power, the vast majority of fossil fuel use in Germany is not used for generating electricity but is used in heavy industry and residential heating. Likewise with being a polluter, the biggest economy with the biggest population and the most heavy industry out of any EU country is the biggest polluter? No fucking shit. What else you go? Sky is blue? Yes you get a gold
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Germany depends on fossil fuels BECAUSE they threw away cheap nuclear power, for no good reason. Duh.
Below zero pricing isn't all good. (Score:1)
... and excess solar power production has frequently pushed prices below zero, making burning coal less profitable.
Would not below zero prices on electricity also make solar power less profitable?
How can solar power force prices below zero other than by subsidizing electricity production when people don't need it? The subsidies create artificial demand, satisfied by paying people to take power. I know there's people that will excuse this as some means to encourage construction of storage systems. It can also encourage people running their air conditioner while also running heaters to collect on being paid to use ele
Re: Below zero pricing isn't all good. (Score:1)
Is it time you faced the fact that retail electricity prices are administered with the express intent of disconnecting supply from demand? Ever heard of decoupling?
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Ever heard of decoupling?
Nothing comes to mind with "decoupling" in context other than Decouple Media. https://www.youtube.com/channe... [youtube.com]
I have a suspicion that Decouple Media has a different idea on what "decouple" might mean. Decouple Media is a YouTube channel with advocacy of nuclear fission for energy production as a large part of their content, Germany doesn't appear on board with that. Yet.
Re: Below zero pricing isn't all good. (Score:1)
Can I google it for you?
"In public utility regulation, decoupling refers to the disassociation of a utility's profits from its sales of the energy commodity.[1] Instead, a rate of return is aligned with meeting revenue targets, and rates are adjusted up or down to meet the target at the end of the adjustment period. This makes the utility indifferent to selling less product and improves the ability of energy efficiency and distributed generation to operate within the utility environment."
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The definition of the term wasn't helpful. How is paying people to take energy helping "meet revenue targets" when we'd want to encourage a power plant to keep costs low so as to keep prices low? I'd expect paying people to take energy only encourages waste and therefore higher costs for everyone. Well, higher costs for everyone but those manipulating the system and wasting energy to divert other people's money to them.
Their overall energy production is also way down (Score:3)
Germany's recent peak power production was around 650 TW but as of last year that was down to 500 TW. Coal and Lignite have always been "fillers" so it makes sense that such a steep reduction in power production would cut those dirty sources first.
The recent push to restart their nuclear reactors would put the final stake in the heart of coal.
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The recent push to restart their nuclear reactors would put the final stake in the heart of coal.
That is a pure bunch of lies. There is no real push. The reactors _cannot_ be restarted. The owners have zero interest in wasting more money on hugely unprofitable nuclear and have stated to publicly again and again, so there will not be any new reactors and they were pretty happy to get rid of the old ones. It is just "conservative" morons that are deeply in love with failed nuclear tech that are hallucinating.
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Nuclear is far from unprofitable if you're talking about reactivating existing plants. The majority of the expense has already occurred. And god knows Germany is going to need the power with Russia diverting their NG to China in the next few years.
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It is if the reactors are damaged and in high need of maintenance.
Indeed. And all older reactors are damaged, due to neutron flux and other things you do not have in regular power plants. This is also why it is so dangerous running older ones for a longer time than planned.
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These reactors were shutdown because of irrational anti nuclear protests, not because they were unsafe.
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Nope. The Swiss shut down one operational reactor with several years more of operating permission because it would have been a huge loss of money keeping it running. And electricity is not cheap in Switzerland. Nuclear cannot be run profitably. That it can be is a lie often pushed.
By some estimates from the operators, reactivating the shut down German reactors would take a decade or so and be almost as expansive as building new ones. Nuclear is not like other forms of electricity generation. The tolls on ma
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Oh for the love of... give it a rest. The only reason nuclear is expensive is because of irrational fear mongering and uneducated politicians over burdening the industry with unnecessary regulations.
I hate to break it to ya, but we already have thousands of nukes. And commercial reactors are not used for breeding weapons grade material in any event.
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Nuclear is far from unprofitable if you're talking about reactivating existing plants. The majority of the expense has already occurred.
1. German plants have reached their EOL and have not been maintained to ensure future operability after the 2012 exit decision.
2. The engineers, specialists and technicians are gone for good, into early retirement or other jobs.
Nuclear is dead in Germany. But we have other options, luckily.
Re:Their overall energy production is also way dow (Score:4, Insightful)
Call me a conservative moron if you like but German coal pollution sometimes blows over my country.
Nuclear is only hugely unprofitable compared to coal if you get other people to pay the externalities, which Germany does.
Despite massively and repeatedly tooting their own horn, Germans is still burning coal and it's a higher carbon per joule emitter than France or the UK. Who both have nuclear.
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Soo, externalities like nuclear waste storage or the huge environmental damage from uranium mining?
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There's huge environmental damage from coal mining too. Likely more in fact because coal is about 7 orders of magnitude less energy dense than uranium.
As for storage: yeah that's a problem, but it's killed way way way way fewer people than coal pollution. And in fact coal had been responsible for a surprising amount of nuclear pollution from the sheet volume of ash when though the radionucleidos are not very concentrated.
Seriously coal is awful stuff.
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Seriously coal is awful stuff.
So, the answer to Germany fulfilling her coal-fire reduction goals early is .... "Yes but they are still burning coal!"
Are you being serious? May I ask how old you are?
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Yes that is my reaction because their goals are a pile of crap.
If you are shitting on the floor and tell me that your goal was to reduce shitting on the floor by 50% in 5 years and you achieved that in 3, you are still shitting on the fucking floor.
Part of the reason they are burning coal is they just lost their connecting shit about nuclear and decided that coal was somehow preferable. Coal is pretty much the single worst source of power in just about every metric. So yeah they definitely do not get props
Electricity price setting in Europe (Score:5, Informative)
It is important to understand how electricity prices are determined in a large part of Europe.
Models are used to predict the production (weather prediction like sunshine, wind etc) and consumption needs for electricity on a hourly basis (I think it is going down to 30 minutes soon). Suppliers can set prices to deliver electricity for said time-slots. We then start allocating electricity, starting with the cheapest priced suppliers. The price paid for the last 1%, is the price we pay for ALL the delivered electricity.
Example, we can cover 90% of our needs with solar powered at 0.01 euro / KWH. The next 5% is from wind at 0.10 euro / KWH. The last 5% comes from coal at 0.50 euro / KWH. In this example, we pay 0.50 euro / KWH for ALL electricity, even for solar electricity !!
This was designed with the purpose to stimulate renewable energy. You get paid a premium price for it, lowering the ROI and therefore making it a more attractive investment.
Electricity isn't something you just can store without significant loss/cost and you can't just pump it into the network. Shutting down a power plant isn't cheap, so better to sell at a loss then to pay a big price shutting down your production (and starting it up afterwards which can take time in some cases). It is a bit more complex than this, but selling at a slight loss is offset by higher prices at other moments. And more and more home owners have systems in place allowing them to disconnect from the grid when delivering negative-values electricity from their own solar panels.
Some posts talk about it becoming a financial interesting situation to waste electricity when prices are negative. This is seldom the case, as traditionally we had fixed price contracts (multi-year contracts) or dynamic contracts (adjusted every month). Hence we wouldn't benefit from temporary negative prices at all. There is now a push for dynamic contracts, i.e. you pay what you consume for the price set that hour of the day. This stimulates consumers to change their behavior by e.g. charging their EV after midnight or during sunny periods. This to balance the well known 'duck-shape'.
Btw, even when prices are negative, this doesn't mean electricity is earning you money or is free of charge. We still pay taxes and transportation costs. Not sure about other parts in Europe, but where I live the energy provider and the network provider are different entities. We are still paying for the delivery of energy which often offsets any negative pricing.
Hope this clarifies a bit more how prices set in large parts of Europe.
And the reason is... (Score:2)
Re: Excess solar power (Score:1)
Why not pay consumers to take excess off their hands?
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Because it costs money they don't need to spend. Is it that difficult to comprehend?
Unless I'm missing something the only reason I can see that can drive electricity prices below zero is government subsidy. Remove the subsidy and paying people to take electricity only costs them money.
Okay, I can see some exceptions. One might be a big slow moving thermal power plant, like a coal boiler plant, that sees demand dip to a point that they know they can't reduce power without putting this big plant on a path