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
markets.businessinsider.com
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Germany pays Denmark money to stop creating wind energy when the prices get too low

Imagine having so much energy that you'd rather spend money not to harvest it, instead of maybe using it to make hydrogen or storing it on other ways

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

Usually investors want a business case first. Note they have free every they can sell later. Battery installations will appear.

Hydrogen generators don't pay for themselves if they only run now and then, that's why nobody has built one just to use the excess energy only.

Are you sure? Maybe they dont pay for themselves as fast as investors would want? Maybe its because the market for them is not ripe yet?

A manufacturing company around here is currently building their own energy solution involving solar panels and three wind generators, iirc. They do set up a hydrogen generator because they need the hydrogen for some processes but they are not building it bigger than necessary for that, citing that using it for energy storage as well would be less cost efficient than some short term energy storage using battery buffers on site and relying on the grid for the rest.

Interesting!

I only think that this proves that its can be though. Just because batteries and the grid are cheaper for their exact needs, doesn't prove that it's useless. Still, it the idea of stopping the harvest of energy when it is too cheap to make money on, that is wrong. There are other methods to store electricity, like pumped storage (gravity storage), heat, compressed air, flywheel energy storage etc.

People here are getting rid of their hydrogen cars, because there are no places to refuel them. (Danish articled)