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Germany has too many solar panels, and it's pushed energy prices into negative territory
(markets.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 24 May 2024
467 points (92.2% liked)
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I mean... Good? Shouldn't that be the goal, electricity at no cost to the people?
Won't someone think of the poor capitalists who can't love better lives then those around them!
/s, just in case.
Well in a very basic way, more solar than we can use means there is waste. Too many panels produced and installed. And if solar generation capacity is going to waste, that means Germany doesn’t have enough storage to keep it in, and that’s a problem. And who knows what negative energy prices will do to the other power producers who back up solar (which, you know, doesn’t produce at night). That would be a problem. So there is a little more to this than just the headline. Also, Reddit needs to learn that business stories are written for investors and business readers and they don’t frame everything in terms of broad human interest.
No such thing as too many solar panels, only not enough storage.
There’s no upper limit on either really. But why would you ever install more than you can store? That’s still waste. Solar panels have nonzero cost and environmental impact.
It is in some cases economical to install way too many solar panels, because production is variable. If you install enough for 100% production on a sunny day, then on a cloudy day you only have 70% of what you need. So instead you install 150% of what you need, so you never go below 100%.
Then the question is what to do with the excess during sunny days. Storage didn't used to be a problem because early solar adapters could sell it to other parts of the grid who are still using fossil fuels, and fossil fuel production plants can ramp down as needed (natural gas especially).
It's only now that renewables are becoming such a large portion of the grid that it's getting difficult to ramp the remaining fossil fuels down and up fast enough that we need to look into storage. Current storage options are extremely expensive though, similar in cost to a solar panel installation (at least on the residential side).
It costs something to build and maintain the infrastructure to distribute power. Typically that cost is recovered through payments for the generation of the power, which becomes a problem if generation costs get too low. It suggests that we should probably consider a different model of paying for that infrastructure now that the reality of generation has changed.
Oh well. I guess they will just have to municipalize the grid.