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

Xatolos@reddthat.com to World News@lemmy.world – 467 points –
Germany has too many solar panels, and it's pushed energy prices into negative territory
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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.

That's so. At the same time I'm seeing heaps of stories about me ways to cheaply store power with cheap and common materials lately, so it seems like more of an engineering and infrastructure problem

What you’re hearing about is lab experiments. Moving something from the lab to something in production, with the reliability and life span required to participate on the public grid is hard.