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Comment by miohtama | Hacker News Reader

Hmm. Everyone should just disconnect Germany, let them freeze, and enjoy cheap electricity?

You forget the times with an overproduction of electrical energy in Germany. Then they sell it for a negative price to the neighbor countries. Later, when they need more energy they buy it back at a premium. It is good business for neighbor countries with enough storage (pumping hydro, etc.).

Spain's neighbors could also have lower energy prices with more interconnection to Spain. The whole network diversifies, which would be more beneficial for Europe as a whole.

The issue is that Spain has three interconnected neighbours (France, Portugal and Morocco) and all of them are overflowing with electricity.

The best candidate for lowering prices would be France, but France would most likely re-export that electricity to other countries, and paying to build up the internal grid to carry electricity that is neither bought by nor sold to French actors isn't very attractive.

Ideally Spain would interconnect with Italy, but that's more expensive.

There has already been a serious proposal for a HVDC cable from Morocco to the UK. If that's possible, why not go for Spain-Germany?

Hvdc in the ocean requires way less right of way than hvdc over land. Running oceanic hvdc from Spain to Germany might have some trouble in the English channel where it would be in territorial waters.

Spain to UK might make more sense.

Spain has also floated he idea of a HVDC cable to the UK, but it's never happened.

Sometimes, headlines are out of control.

That would raise electricity prices in Spain just like prices in Sweden - which traditionally had low prices - went up with the 'diversification' of the European distribution network. While these price effects were mostly seen in the southern half of the country due to the way Sweden is divided into 4 price regions with most of the interconnects being found in the southern-most region the recently inaugurated 'Aurora' interconnect with Finland caused prices in the north of Sweden to shoot up [1].

[1] https://www.aftonbladet.se/minekonomi/a/Exwx4A/elprissmocka-...

France systematicaly refuses to increase the power of their interconect with Spain, as well as to make a gas pipe that would provide cheap Algerian gas to the rest of europe.

An interconnection is being built up as we speak.

That being said, building new interconnections makes no economic sense for France. The country has no unserved consumers close to the border. That means any electricity imported from Spain would have to be carried further. That involves grid spending paid for by french consumers, without any benefit for them.

The same goes for gas pipelines. No one enjoys big infrastructure projects for stuff they don't really need.

That's not my point. My point is that the price spread between EU electricity markets speaks more to the availability of interconnections than to the virtues of one country's electricity mix. The article gets to that conclusion because that's what it was looking for.

The one question the article leaves open, but which is pretty relevant, is the question about who should pays for stability services to the grid.

Absent interconnectivity, the spread of the price is literally virtues of the electricity mix.

With interconnectivity, those virtues are less visible in local prices. They would be visible in earnings.

Then you'd have people run extension cords across the border and selling their cheap electricity at inflated prices to their freezing neighbor.

normally when you buy electricity it costs money!

Many times negative spot prices.

Which is bad, it's a market and infrastructure failure. Negative prices are to get generators to turn off.

A new feature on solar inverters is curtailment mode so they can be remote shutdown when the grid goes negative, since if you're on wholesale energy pricing you'll be charged if you keep driving the grid.

It's a good thing and you explain why in your second paragraph.

What gives people the right incentives to increase or reduce curtailment? The market price being negative or positive.

If the market is being driven negative then it means there's an oversupply. Which means overall the price of electricity is higher then it should be - negative prices have to be compensated by higher positive prices at other times, and reduce the return on capital to build new power infrastructure of all sorts.

Turning off productive solar panels is wasting power.

The negative price can also be thought of as paying people to use the productive solar panels rather than turn them off, it's a two sided market that drives demand to times of clean and cheap energy, which lowers costs for everyone.

That market-maximalist strategy isn’t producing price reductions in Europe so far.

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