Isolated this is a zero sum game in favor of buyers (someone has ti take the electricity), but longer term, this shows there needs to be better greater electricity storage solutions available, i.e batteries or similar.
Negative prices allow for some weird actions to become profitable - like starting an empty washing machine, turning in the light in an empty room or needlessly heating some water tank. Basically everything we are used to think of as waste. It sounds absurd, but it's not really a big deal.
Without a proper grid not possible. The various countries block the expansion for political reasons. They would loose their power.
* Long term I have to imagine this is just "cheap" because there's got to be tons of industries that can use intermittent free energy.
Like I'm not an expert on fertilizer production, but it seems pretty likely to me that you could draw that box around ammonia production and build out capacity that relatively cheaply, while leaving what I imagine to be the more operationally complex and capital intensive steps of extracting phosphates (via sulphiric and phosphoric acid) and potassium (which has nitric and sulphiric acid as biproducts), and combining that nitric acid with the ammonia (into ammonium nitrate) alone.
In some cases if you have excess production capacity (because you have unpredictable or seasonal load and you aren't currently at a peak) you don't necessarily even need more production capacity at all, just the ability to store a bit more of the inputs and outputs in a buffer.
Usually clients want consistency in the output. (they depend on the product/service)
Business owner usually wants consistency in employee/machinery output. (They cost money)
To me it seems that only low priority computation (incl. con-coins) is such industry. (Investment kind of reused, and relatively few employees)
There will be some shift to adjust to intermitency (e.g. Worker hours might be shifted to the time when solar generates the most energy to take advantage of the price)
A market where a good fluctuates between profitable and not is not one very attractive to investment.
Playing the video game Victoria 3 has taught me a lot about healthy markets. You have to play both sides of supply and demand to get to the prices you need
This is the most wild thing I've ever read on this website. Pick just about any security and you'll see that buying and selling it over time fluctuates between profitable and not profitable. If something was always profitable everyone would do it and get infinitely rich. Arbitrage wouldn't exist. Economies would shut down.
Oil briefly went negative a few years ago. If you decided to build a storage business dependent on negative oil prices for profit, you might just be coming online around now, and very much poorer than you were before. (Of course you would in fact have stopped a long time ago.)
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/04/25/california-achieves-major-...
https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
https://cleantechnica.com/2024/06/02/solar-passes-100-of-pow...
https://futurism.com/the-byte/california-solar-electricity-p...
https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-CAL-CISO?wind=false&...
Solar panel production on the other hand is exponential and growing much faster than overall power consumption. It can be very, very favorable to build batteries and that's why grid scale battery production is taking off. There is in fact a storage business dependent on energy arbitrage over time, it's lucrative, and all indications suggest it will continue to be lucrative for many years to come.
There is good news though. With electric car sales slowing down (at least in the west) there is a surplus of batteries on the market, which makes grid storage projects more affordable. The incentives are currently pushing us towards decarbonizing our electric infrastructure faster and that is wonderful. As long as the politicians don't do anything dumb like slap huge tariffs on solar cells or something we should be making some real progress towards a green future.
But they do. Often literally.
Negative prices usually happen because of laws requiring minimum utilization, or subsides, or because they are so small and rare that it is not worth having someone on place to turn the switch.
You are correct that they are not.
But this is due to policy, not physics. It's obvious to shut-down the fossil fuel plants first, but after then, there's no physical reason why they can't keep shutting power plants down.
Anyway, agreed, adding storage is a much better solution than focusing on the management of renewables.
Since we're being pedantic, as I understand it, the grid operators don't usually tell plants what to do (outside of system stress response, curtailment, etc), the grid operator shares the forecast, and when the price forecast is low, fossil fuel plants are likely tell the grid operator they'd rather shutdown than produce power at low/negative prices. For solar plants, there's no fuel cost, and there might be subsidies, so producing at a negative market price might still be positive for the generator and there's no reason to turn it off. For nuclear, fueling schedules don't really change based on use, so there's no reason to not provide optimum power outage other than for grid stability.
Grid scale storage should reduce price swings, since storage plants will tend to show up on the demand side when prices are low and the supply side when prices are high; although perhaps price swings will become bigger when prediction fails --- if storage fills up by noon you'll have a lot of excess supply until sunset; if storage empties by midnight, you may have a lot of excess demand until sunrise.
In Australia, this has been happening for some time - plants are literally having their output dialled back (or even being disconnected entirely) during peak times by the market operator.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-23/solar-farm-overload-h... [2] https://reneweconomy.com.au/aemo-slashes-output-of-five-big-...