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Comment by nawitus | Hacker News Reader

Are you saying the price is negative during high PV production? In sane markets like Finland solar panel owners need to pay for generating electricity to the grid if the price is negative (which is it sometimes).

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> In sane markets like Finland solar panel owners need to pay for generating electricity to the grid if the price is negative

If this were the case, why would solar panel owners not stop "selling" power to the grid at their expense when that happens? What incentive would ever exist to pay to put power on the grid?

I think the point is to encourage people to have a way to stop exporting when there is not the demand by passing on the negative price that all generators would see in that situation.

Apparently not generating power will cause the panel to slightly overheat which will add additional tear on the panel, so it might make sense to pay the negative prices instead.

Note that electricity generated will first be used by the consumer and only excess is sold to the grid.

Regular consumers don't offer their production on the energy markets so they don't set the price. Maybe your panels can be counted as part of the energy company's solar production, in that case I guess they could indirectly have an influence? I'm not sure if this is done though. A negative price can just be a result of tax subventions (in case you still make a profit even if the price goes negative) or when it's simply cheaper to bid a negative price so that you can keep producing instead of having to turn off production and then reboot it at a later time.

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