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Comment by fboerman | Hacker News Reader

author of the post here, thanks for posting it here! If there are any questions feel free to ask!

You mention renewables and especially solar as a contributing factor to these negative prices when combined with capacity constraints. Can you explain how this works?

A PV installation can easily start and stop production as long as the sun is shining, right? Then it seems like PV producers should bid to produce as much as possible whenever the price is positive, and not produce anything whenever the price is negative. Is this how they operate, and if so, how does this contribute to negative prices and not just to bringing the price towards 0?

In theory yea, and where possible they will, but a lot of PV installations lack the ability or the incentive to curtail.

Households are usually not exposed to spot price signals, so residential PV will always produce electricity (network permitting).

Utility scale PV up to a few MW may not have the ability, or the operator may not have the option to curtail contracted.

In our country, dynamic pricing is on the raise for consumers and many consumers already profited from these pricing.

Certainly for wind operators in the UK, there is a "contract for difference" payment process such that they are not paid the spot price. Instead they're paid a guaranteed price within a range (i.e. the difference between the spot price and a benchmark). And there will be an agreement in place that if they're not allowed to export this power they will be paid for "curtailment".

I wanted to reply but then I saw that rphilipsen already explains it. what he says is indeed the case!

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