Germany Power Prices Turn Deeply Negative on Renewables Surge
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Negative prices have no effect on grid stability. It just means that the day-ahead market was cleared below 0, i.e. for every consumer (buyer) there is a producer (seller) selling at this price. The market is still balanced with consumption==production.
Now, you can ask the question: Why are so many producers willing to sell below 0? That has to do with misplaced incentives. For older or home-installed renewables there is a feed-in tarrif which guarantees a fixed revenue at all times. So there is an incentive to sell even for negative market prices. Newer installations can't opt for the guaranteed revenue model with revenue during negative prices any more.
Redispatch follows afterwards, if the market result clashes with physics: The physical grid can't transport the power from producer to consumer. There was no unusual amount of redispatch during easter.
Source: I work on this stuff.
No, it doesn't. The article is explicitly about intraday-prices. So day-ahead clearance made invalid assumptions about generations and consumption that were not met during the day. This kind of miscalculation does require additional (costly) redispatch measures to mitigate the overproduction, and it can affect grid stability.
The redispatch was not extraordinary: https://energy-charts.info/charts/power_redispatch/chart.htm...
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/clouds-shield-german-po...
This weekend, prices were more negative than usual, but still not that negative.
"However, BDEW warned that around half of the new capacity came in the form of small-scale systems under 100 kilowatt each, which under current rules feed into the grid whatever they produce, without the option to curtail production when this is necessary to ensure grid stability."
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-adds-record-175...
Smart electric meters for individual PV producers that signal and account for negative prices would help. e.g. if your balcony solar power pushes electricity during oversupply you pay penalty.
It'll result in a lot of misinformed shrieking from people, but probably the way forward is to remove the guaranteed price subsidy for individual household producers, and make it so thar they have to join a VPP if they want to sell to the grid.
https://www.mvv.de/photovoltaik/ratgeber/solarspitzengesetz-...
Back yard plasma furnace? Artificial diamond making? Aluminum smelting?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_thermal_energy_storag...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_storage
There have wildly different prices for unit of stored energy and wildly different storage times.
https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/us-grid...
It's not cost effective run aluminum smelting only during peak electricity production.
The price was known ~1 day in advance so I had the choice to fill up the battery with cheaper (but still high) prices overnight and reduce the impact
Business energy users aren't protected, so they buy long-term contracts, hedge, or go-under in the event of an unforeseen energy-shortage.
So yes, it sure does!
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2503532-australia-is-ge...
But that is only reserved for the big players I guess.
He is retired and mostly just a hobby.
So there is not only a market for buy/sell, you can also be stand-by for charging your battery when grid frequency increases and consumption needs to increase.
The actual payoff calculation is a lot messier than that because you have to factor in the NPV of buying batteries vs. just throwing the money in the market, AND you have to be able to forecast that growth vs. growth in power prices. So the honest truth is I have no idea if it's going to be a net good investment vs other options.
Fortunately, I don't have to care, because I bought the batteries for UPS runtime, which I value independent of the time-shifting. The time-shifting is just a way to squeeze money out of an investment I already made. Had I been going for payoff, there are cheaper battery/inverter options out there with a sub-5y payoff.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/72h/hourly
That shows that they still had roughly 5% gas and 5% coal running at the lowest price point.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#/media/File:...
Total installed capacity 2026:
Pumped hydro Germany 35 GWh Battery storage 26 GWh
Average daily German electricity production is 1300 GWh.
Some people don't know about the primary energy fallacy, others know about it and try to exploit it, so you should be suspicious of the opinions of anyone trying to use it suggest lack of progress and futility.
If you use fossil fuel to directly drive an industrial process, for example melting of ores/metals/glass then the efficiency is much higher.
From JP Morgan's 16th Annual Energy Paper, March 2026
https://cdn.jpmorganfunds.com/content/dam/jpm-am-aem/global/...
> In 2024 we estimated that had Germany not decommissioned nuclear power after the Fukushima accident, it would have needed 50% less electricity generation from fossil fuels, 84% less generation from imported natural gas, 27% less fossil fuel capacity and 42% less natural gas capacity. Another road less traveled: Germany’s electricity prices in 2024 were almost 25% higher than they would have been had the country kept its nuclear power online . And as shown below, Germany might not have experienced such a sharp increase in its electricity imports which are 2x higher than a decade ago as a share of consumption.
> More nuclear shutdown repercussions: Germany’s industrial power prices were 3x higher than the US and China in 2024, and part of the reason why Germany has been experiencing the deindustrialization shown on the right.
On the positive side we in Norway have 10x higher energy prices because we now have to export energy to Germany during the winter and then our water storage is empty in the summer so we get fucked both ways as well.
From JP Morgan's 16th Annual Energy Paper, March 2026
https://cdn.jpmorganfunds.com/content/dam/jpm-am-aem/global/...
> In 2024 we estimated that had Germany not decommissioned nuclear power after the Fukushima accident, it would have needed 50% less electricity generation from fossil fuels, 84% less generation from imported natural gas, 27% less fossil fuel capacity and 42% less natural gas capacity. Another road less traveled: Germany’s electricity prices in 2024 were almost 25% higher than they would have been had the country kept its nuclear power online . And as shown below, Germany might not have experienced such a sharp increase in its electricity imports which are 2x higher than a decade ago as a share of consumption.
> More nuclear shutdown repercussions: Germany’s industrial power prices were 3x higher than the US and China in 2024, and part of the reason why Germany has been experiencing the deindustrialization shown on the right.
My apologies, that was poorly worded - I didn't mean to imply that all energy prices were low across the board. Of course they are not.
It's an interesting indicator, not (yet) a systemic change. And as I said in answer to the parent comment, it's a important subject right now because of the petrochemical price shock.
Nevertheless, if I were to interpret your statement as unilaterally as you interpreted mine: you said "negative prices are not low prices", which is wrong as a matter of arithmetic.
I really hope, this happens on a big scale and further reduces the dependency on fossil fuels (at least over 24h. winter is a different question)
There’s enough profit to make the payback period for a decent battery quite short.
For consumers, power prices consist of the actual price of power, plus network fees. Network fees are fixed at (on average) something like 10ct/kWh or 100€/MWh. So negative prices are only really negative if the power price drops below those -100€/MWh, which rarely happens (the usual dips are at low single-digit cents per kWh).
And even then, there is the issue of network fee double-dipping: Depending on the contract you have with your power company, the size and kind of storage you are operating, and the phase of the moon and your donations to the ruling party, you will be charged network fees twice, once when buying the power, once when selling it again. In that case, the threshold would be even worse, at -200€/MWh.
And all that doesn't factor in the cost of the storage infra.
Edit: And there is another factor: The current very low dip is in the intra-day prices. But contracts for consumers use day-ahead prices, which usually don't include those very large dips that result from miscalculations of weather and dispatch capacity.
Edit2: Just check https://tibber.com/de/preisrechner (use e.g. 10119 as Postleitzahl) and scroll down for the graph. Today, they give a negative day-ahead price of -1.5ct/kWh, but including network fees, taxes and their cut, you still end up paying 18.2ct/kWh...
Below -100€/MWh, you don't need to sell the power to profit; you'd make at least some money just using it to heat up a big resistor.
And even if there were negative end prices happening: There are metal smelting works and other operators of big resistors who will happily heat up even more. So prices will probably never get so negative that a normal consumer can ever profit from them.
The wholesale price system is not a reliable signal or incentive for electricity generation supply and demand in Europe. There are various subsidies, taxes, levies, and fixed costs not shown at the wholesale level that completely change calculations.
These numbers will make customers upset and complain about price gouging if they don't understand the disconnect. Or, it makes customers think that renewables are cheap because they are not seeing the subsidies that on net result in higher payments to renewable providers than carbon-based producers.
From JP Morgan's 16th Annual Energy Paper, March 2026
https://cdn.jpmorganfunds.com/content/dam/jpm-am-aem/global/...
> In 2024 we estimated that had Germany not decommissioned nuclear power after the Fukushima accident, it would have needed 50% less electricity generation from fossil fuels, 84% less generation from imported natural gas, 27% less fossil fuel capacity and 42% less natural gas capacity. Another road less traveled: Germany’s electricity prices in 2024 were almost 25% higher than they would have been had the country kept its nuclear power online . And as shown below, Germany might not have experienced such a sharp increase in its electricity imports which are 2x higher than a decade ago as a share of consumption.
> More nuclear shutdown repercussions: Germany’s industrial power prices were 3x higher than the US and China in 2024, and part of the reason why Germany has been experiencing the deindustrialization shown on the right.
It doesn't seem that hard. All you need is a load, but obviously harder as you increase the scale.
Heck you could build some large bodies of water and boil them from time to time.
Some suppliers already do that. When a power plant also supplies the city heating, it makes sense for them to put the power surplus into pre-heated water which they can store and later distribute to the buyers of the heat.
Obviously this needs some huge and well insulated tanks.
Here's an article (in Polish) about one built in Warsaw, 10TJ capacity: https://globenergia.pl/najwiekszy-wodny-magazyn-ciepla-w-eur...
2. Isn't cheaper electricity a good thing for the manufacturing industry?
Yes, and that is in fact done. However, there it is still a bad deal with negative electricity prices.
> Isn't cheaper electeicity a good thing for the manufacuring industry?
It technically is, but its not as simple as that. Industrial manufacturing is a relatively steady load, which means the consumption is constant. The lowest prices do not matter all that much, the average price does. And that average price is relatively high here, even for industrial consumers.
> "They could export the surplus"
Transmission capacity and interconnectors are usually the bottlenecks.
Peaker plants gamble that there are going to be peaks (sure financially plan for but they are not guaranteed to make their profits).
In the peaker plant categories the storage options are different from the spin options because the incentives are slightly different. Specifically battery storage is not just a peak plant exercise it is a grid connection optimization exercise. Grid connections limit how much power one can sell from a generator. A battery system can be placed on the grid or between the grid and the generator. In the case of between grid and generator, it allows a generator to run at it's optimal speeds more often than not, and sell more because one can guarantee a wider range of output for a longer amount of time.
Some of the first battery storage systems were sold to gas peaker plants because it allowed them more time to react. i.e. idle at a more efficient level their gas turbines or even shut them off and start them on demand.
This is all actually beneficial. It creates real economic pressure for just about everyone to build and install more batteries everywhere to profit from the price swings.
Most importantly, it motivates the wind and solar producers to buy up batteries and install them on site, so that they can shift the times where they sell power to the grid to times of day where its more profitable.
1) Commercial entities generally try to sell their products for a profit (positive price).
2) Negative prices make this quite hard.
3) To get back into positive profit, they're going to need to charge a higher price later on.
There are 3 ways the overall market can go if prices are negative - either prices go positive at some other time to make up for the losses the power providers are making, someone figures out a use for the free power and the price stops going negative or power providers go out of business. Typically what this seems to result in for renewable-heavy grids is occasional (even regular) negative wholesale prices and some impressively high retail prices. Free electricity turns out to be very expensive; it shows the grid isn't coping.