Germany has too many solar panels, pushed energy prices into negative territory | Hacker News Reader

Germany has too many solar panels, pushed energy prices into negative territory

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23 pointstmalsburg286 comments

Same over here in The Netherlands. We have subsidised solar panels and now have an abundance of solar energy, but only during sunny days. The remainder of the time we still have to burn gas and coal. There is some nuclear, which we’ll need much more of if we want to stop with fossil fuels. Meanwhile policy is still heavily pushing for electrification while the power grid is overloaded and will take years and billions to address.

Yep, apparently The Netherlands have the most negative hours:

https://x.com/BM_Visser/status/1793536590821617769

160h with negative energy this year only (last year 71h on this date), Germany and Spain have around 140. Those water electrolyzers can't come soon enough

It can even happen on cloudy windy weekend days because of the massive wind farms

Wait, you guys basically have similar problems? I thought it was only our politicians who were incompetent. Well...I'm sure they are more incompetent than yours for sure, but at least we're in the same boat there!

That's a disadvantage ⇒ they're incompetent?

I thought about it, and to me it seems that ① having everything ready at the same time was not possible and ② PV ready first is the smallest problem.

Consider some of the alternatives. What would you think of your politicians if they built a bunch of batteries that lost money for years because of a lack of zero-cost midday PV? Or if they built lots of nuclear power that then turned out to be so expensive that big power users found it better to install their own PV and reschedule their power use around PV availability?

I might have looked at what they wrote through the "Germany"-lenses.

While increasing solar is certainly a success, falling short in wind, hastily getting out of nuclear years ago, heavily using coal, failing to even install a high capacity power line from the north to south to bring wind energy to where it's needed...Nimby-ism everywhere. Local state politicians that do nothing but populism aka Nimby-ism on a state level. Explosion of bureaucracy. You mention "getting everything ready". This just implies seeing the big picture and having a plan. Knowing our political system I have my doubts because it feels like it's too static and, if at all, rather reactive than active.

I'm sorry, sometimes I get taken away by negativity because of all of this and I forget to look at the bright (and sunny) side.

Why incompetent?

Having a lot of solar is good.

We can export it to neighbors and it motivates other actors in the market to invest in getting this cheap sun energy which creates more pressure on dirty energy.

That we don't life in a planed market is obvious otherwise all those things would not be necessary but we don't life in a perfect market

Exactly. I imagine that green energy production (hydrogen, ammonia) can be made flexible so that it consumes the cheap/free energy, whether from solar or wind, and greatly stabilises the prices. But to get there we first have to have that cheap energy available, nobody will build the plants with just some vague promises.

So what will happen when you get rid of "dirty sources"? It all looks good on a paper, but when your clean solar energy is not available, like during winter time, and you got rid of your dirty sources, what are you going to do?

How is energy company going to pay for grid maintenance, wages and general passives, when energy price is negative? This all looks like 1 step before bankruptcy of energy companies.

You just turn them on.

Keeping a coal or gas plant on standby is not that expensive and you still saved a ton of fuel.

Isn't energy storage possible? Or at least, isn't that a sensible frontier for protecting the solar investment?

The cost of storing electricity in batteries is down to $80/MWH.

This evening batteries in California peaked at 6.3GW. Last year they were peaking at 2.3GW in the evening. I think that means is they installed 15GWH worth of batteries last year. That's close to 0.4KWH per person.

The whole economic landscape of solar and batteries has changed radically in the last 4 years.

Everyone talks about batteries but I'd imagine that hydrogen and ammonia production would be much more lucrative, no? Much cheaper storage and potentially direct usage in industry, or just consuming back to electricity when prices are high.

I've done calcs for using hydrogen from electrolysis for ammonia production.

I think it's 40kwh per kg to make hydrogen. Ammonia is 17.6% hydrogen by weight.

So you need 7kwh/kg to make ammonia. At $40/MWH

Cost is $280/ton.

This source (I can't vouch for) range is $303/ton to $1058

https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight...

Looking more, appears that ammonia producers are already building out electrolysis plants. You don't hear about this because the companies that do this don't care what the public thinks about anything.

https://ammoniaenergy.org/articles/technology-status-ammonia...

Thanks for providing numbers. There's a lot of hype currently about hydrogen/ammonia production and how cheap renewables can change the energy infrastructure. Will be interesting to see how this will actually turn out.

One thing worth mentioning is companies that make stuff like ammonia and manufacturers in general absolutely hate anything subject to wild price swings. Which natural gas totally does. The other thing is the Russian Ukrainian war exposed manufacturers to supply disruptions of natural gas. And that's generally considered intolerable.

Hence ammonia manufacturers really don't like being dependent on natural gas.

Buying solar to run a electrolysis plant has the benefit that the cost is fixed. Because it's all secured loans with low fixed interest rates. And the supply is guaranteed.

Not with any known technology.

If all cars in Germany would be EV, Germany could store 2 days of electric energy usage.

If I could afford one, and didn't had to drop a electricity cable out from the appartment, alongside the trees, to its parking place, maybe.

New tech is tricky, Bertha Benz had to refuel her car in pharmacies.

After Bertha Benz’ famous drive [1], it took multiple decades for cars to really go mainstream. I wonder if we’re looking at a similar timeline.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_Benz#First_cross-coun...

> it took multiple decades for cars to really go mainstream.

I think you are trying to insinuate that electric cars are decades away from today. The first electric car was built decades _ago_. Electric cars are mainstream today. So I suppose you can argue that it is a similar timeline, we are just decades after Bertha Benz' famous drive.

> Globally, around 1-in-4 new cars sold were electric in 2023. In Norway, this share was over 90%, and in China, it was almost 40%.

https://ourworldindata.org/electric-car-sales

> The first electric car was built decades _ago_.

Well over a century ago, in fact. For quite a while early on, they were more popular than internal combustion cars.

OP implied that we‘re experiencing the Bertha Benz moment of electric cars. Wasn’t my idea. I just spelled out the possible implication.

Electrical charging isn't new tech this past century. It's just the governments are not investing in the infrastructure needed for the EV switch which have different operational limitations than ICE cars, posing huge challenges for existing ICE users to switch to EVs, yet governments miss that part.

Unlike North America, most people in Europe live in apartment buildings not single family homes. The streets sides in my city are full of parked ICE cars like in most of Europe, but very few EVs, and even those are either company cars with chargers at the office or wealthy people from the suburbs with chargers at home. Where are the plebs without a house charger supposed to charge while at home? Via Starlink?

At least in Munich (big city btw) a lot of basement parking exist due to laws were you need to build this space when having a flat.

In my area with a lot of 4 story buildings every one of them has one.

And yes it's not just the laws it's often also old people being against it like in my case. What helped were laws.

Basements yes, what about those who don't have private parking in the basement and can only park on the street?

Also, does really every single 4-story building in Munich have charring spots for every parking spot in the basement meaning every car owner has a parking spot with charging? Even the older buildings?

You know we don't need to transition everyone tomorrow.

Plenty of capable people haven't done it yet at all.

My garage holds probably 60 cars and I'm the only electric

> If I could afford one

Alternative take: "If I wanted a giant, irreparable, disposable, spyware-ridden smartphone on wheels, ..."

It's a stupid take.

The onboard computer on my ev is the same system as on non ev fords

You're right, there's more to it. For instance, Tesla S with 75 kWh battery pack has the autonomy of, optimistically saying, ~400 km and the battery pack alone weighs 530 kg (!). This range is I think already within a 90th percentile for the EV cars currently on the market.

Now contrast that with basically any non-EV car whose tank capacity in average is 50-55 litres which is 10x less weight than the battery pack of the EV car. With pessimistic consumption of 7l per 100km you will have almost double the range of the 90th percentile EV vehicle or ~700 km. You will have none of the attached risks of the battery management (catching fire, deteriorating the capacity, replacing the pack in a few years) and you can top your fuel within minutes and literally anywhere.

> catching fire, deteriorating the capacity, replacing the pack in a few years and you can top your fuel within minutes and literally anywhere

The media have done a great job at convincing people of these myths.

* EVs are much less likely to catch fire than ICE cars: https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/electric-cars/how-much-fi...

* Deteriorating capacity and replacing the battery after a few years? Most batteries have long warranties. 8 years is standard here. If we look at NMC batteries lasting 1,000 cycles then that would be 400,000 km in your example. LFP is 2 - 3x this.

* Filling up in a few minutes? I don’t miss that at all. I charge at home. Time spent: 0 minutes.

You posted probably to the wrong comment.

I talked about that person who is afraid of ev being a 'smartphone'

Sort of but not really since EVs with their battery management are not far from being a smartphone.

Ah I get it.

First of my assumption is that solid state will win out. No burning (it's already not really an issue, millions of evs are driving around), fast charging also in winter, cheaper.

A ev is only an electric engine (closed off) and a battery also closed off.

Bit of a hot take here, but if you live in an apartment, you’re in a city, and cities shouldn’t require cars.

Not that we’re there now, most places, but I think not requiring cars is a better goal than requiring them and putting a million chargers all over every city.

For anyone reading this who has never been to Germany: Apartments can also be present in villages. Some rural ones only consist of single family homes, but there are also multiple-family apartment buildings in some villages (no high-rises or big complexes of course).

So "if you live in an apartment, you're in a city" is an incorrect statement.

Whatever you call it, if there’s apartment-level density, that’s enough for public transit.

If there’s an apartment in the middle of a field… well, then there’s lots of room for chargers, I guess.

If one is lucky enough to be able to afford living in the city center and not in the suburbs.

And if you live in a suburb, plug your EV into an outlet in your garage. What’s your point?

The most astonishing thing about solar energy to me, and I didn't know that until recently, on a cloudy day a house roof can produce 1-2kw of solar energy.

This seemed very much to me, so I immediately jumped to the conclusion that you might have mistaken kW and kWh, and were talking about energy for a whole day... but no, you're right. A quick google search gives 50 W/m^2 even for a rainy day, 150 W/m^2 for heavily clouded. So 1-2 kW might be a bit high, but not off by an order of magnitude. (Confirmed by looking up multiple sources to make sure they didn't confuse kW and kWh)

I asked a few. They make between 1-4 kWh on a cloudy winter day.

Do you know for what area of solar panels that is?

Puh no.

They are both roof systems

If you invest in a coal or gas power plant, there are times where supply outstrips demand, spot prices drop below your marginal costs, so you have to shut down your plant, making your capital investment seem wasted, too.

There also basically always is more supply than demand because customers value reliability (possibly more so at times where demand is high)

What’s different here is that, for solar panels and wind power, the marginal costs of producing electricity are zero, that solar panel ownership is way more distributed, and that supply varies with the weather.

The main question for both cases though is whether the investment makes sense in the long-term.

Which will push getting storage capacity online.

Large-scale storage technology is still elusive, though.

Sooo all those new Megawatt projects happening in Germany are elusive?

When you consider that Germany closed 4GW of nuclear power generation, then few MW (Don't you think MWh?) projects are magnitudes off what is necessary.

It's about day storage and regulationary skills not about replacing nuclear.

Megawatt seems like the wrong unit as it doesn’t measure capacity. Please provide a link.

Rwe is building 235 Megawatthours capacity with 220 Megawatt output.

So when there is demand, the thing is depleted after ~1 hour.

California and China are doing it already. It's not theoretical. It's here, today, thanks to massive cost reductions.

I don’t understand: one day you read that Germany made a mistake closing their nuclear plants (they were old and at the end of their life cycle, by the way) and is relying on carbon plants, and the next day you read that they have too much solar power ??

Germany doesn't have too much solar power, some of it just needs to be moved to the evening.

This process has just started but needs to go much further. There are currently 1.4 million electric cars in Germany. If they charged @11KW during the day, they would draw 15.4GW, or roughly the equivalent of 3 Gravelines [1] nuclear power plants running in reverse.

However, most Germans pay the same for electricity throughout the day, so instead they charge when they arrive at home after work and Germany needs to cover 3 Gravelines worth of energy with wind, hydro, coal, and gas instead.

If consumers could charge with solar for 20 cents per kWh during the day or with brown coal for 80 cents per kWh in the evening, many would alter their usage.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravelines_Nuclear_Power_Stati...

Lot of Germany still uses legacy electricity meters. I don't understand why a switch to remote readable meters still hasn't been mandated. This would allow companies to offer market priced electricity with as short as 15 minute price intervals, and would in turn allow consumers to optimise their energy usage to the cheap hours.

I know Nordics do this already, it would be about time for the rest of Europe to follow suit.

Both can be true at same time. You need power also during night. And that will not come from solar. You really want to support at least that demand from non-carbon sources...

You can't shutdown the coal plants quickly when their energy is no longer needed, like on a bright sunny day. It's still a problem that Germany wants to use coal for their base load generators.

Germany needs to use coal, the government fears being replaced by a far right movement, which has strong roots in the coal areas of East Germany - politicians feels that closing coal production would be the tipping point for a far right and far left coalition to get into government.

It's always about the jobs.

The challenge on top is the replacement of coal after the exit from nuclear power. The anti-nuclear stance of many people and politicians in (West-)Germany is from the 1970s and the 1980s, especially when PershingII missles were installed in Germany. People of many other countries had no contact with nuclear weapons, stored somewhere in the wilderness. In Germany a nuclear missle facility was near to many people (I grew up next to a PershingII depot). Chernobyl didn't start the anti-nuclear stance but later accelerated it. So decades later Germany got out of nuclear energy.

Which now poses the problem of getting out of coal.

> The challenge on top is the replacement of coal after the exit from nuclear power.

Solar when the sun is shining, windmills when the wind is blowing, batteries, hydro, and maybe 1 backup nat. gas plant when somehow all of that is out and you need to ramp up.

Looks like some more wind and a lot of batteries is what's left.

Of course you can.

Sure, once. Then you can switch it off for good, because it will get damaged - the combustion chamber inside needs to be heated up or cooled down slowly, otherwise it will crack. When you are "not using" coal power plant, you still need to keep the combustion chamber hot.

The question is not if you can, you can, it's about speed and how fast.

And solar is predictable per day good enough that you can compensate the short intervals with gas and batteries.

The cost of a nuclear power plant is enormous. Surely they can buy a hell of a lot of batteries for the cost of one of those things and the maintenance costs thereof?

The current leaders in the Netherlands also want to start projects for new nuclear power plants. The Netherlands is also over producing apparently. Surely, they also should be investing in massive battery plants instead of new nuclear reactors.

Imagine the maintenance costs of protecting the nuclear reactors when the global warming flooding starts in these low lands.

Unfortunately no they can't. China themselves, the biggest producer in the world, only has the equivalent of a few days of winter consumption of Germany. Batteries to smooth out the production yearly is still sci-fi.

There's no replacement for a nuclear plant yet for this purpose until a very large breakthrough is made. The only realistic large scale storage at this level is a dam and since the tech is old, most places in the developed world where one can be built has one already.

There has been plenty of replacement for nuclear. It's something that really never made it big due to costs. I would also highlight risks, given the current environment in Europe. If you build nuclear, you would have to allow for defending it too.

The proof is in the pudding, if a replacement existed, they would use it.

The lack of cooling water would be a concern. Then, in addition, every nuclear reactor being a military target. How would you pay for that insurance?

Depends which part of the year these headlines are.

In summer they have plenty of energy that they don't know what to do with it and in winter they depend on France to not burn too much coal just to keep the lights on despite not even transitioning heating yet.

Article: OMG negative energy prices!!1

Reality: 72 Euro/MWh https://euenergy.live/country.php?a2=DE

High-quality problems being touted as catastrophic.

I guess they need to buy some batteries …

Germans are already buying batteries:

According to [1], the installed battery capacity in Germany went from 6.7GWh in 2022 to 12GWH in 2023.

Given the growth and falling cost of battery storage, I expect that more and more solar will stored during the day and consumed in the evening, pushing out coal and gas.

[1] https://www.ees-europe.com/trend-paper/storage-market-boomin...

The cost and logistics of containerized batteries hit a tipping point in the last three years and there is no looking back. Because they pay for themselves inside of 24 months.

The press and the agitprop industry goons hired by the fossil fuel companies can gloom and doom all they want but it's all over.

There are also alternative methods for storing electricity that don't require batteries.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/01/renewable-energy-stor...

Most people I know who have small solar panel installs plan to buy batteries this year. The offers for batteries dropped in price significantly.

If only they hadn’t recently defunded battery tech research they could’ve developed it themselves

At the moment heavy import duties on Chinese batteries are being considered in the EU - similarly to those just imposed by the US. So I guess we too will have to figure out whether we want to fight climate change or the Chinese.

A lot of storage capacity will come from recycled EV batteries, so this will take some time.

The EU has battery tech research, also

https://northvolt.com/career/locations/heide/

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