The Daily Populous Tuesday June 18th, 2024 evening edition
Authored by fortune.com and submitted by CrispyMiner

French electricity prices turned negative as a drop in demand and surging renewables output prompted some nuclear reactors to power down.

Daily consumption from Thursday through Sunday is seen falling by an average 6 gigawatts, a Bloomberg model shows. Sunny and blustery weather has driven up solar and wind generation, prompting the grid operator to request that Electricite de France SA take several nuclear plants offline.

While more clean power is needed across Europe to reach climate goals, soaring renewables output and a lack of battery storage mean reactors sometimes have to be turned off during periods of low demand. It’s becoming increasingly common around weekends in France — which gets about two-thirds of its electricity from its atomic fleet — and also occurs in the Nordic region and Spain.

EDF halted its Golfech 2, Cruas 2 and Tricastin 1 nuclear plants, and plans to halt three others during the weekend. Some renewables producers will also have to curb generation to avoid paying a fee amid negative prices.

French day-ahead power fell to -€5.76 a megawatt-hour, the lowest in four years, in an auction on Epex Spot. Germany’s equivalent contract dropped to €7.64.

SteveThePurpleCat on June 18th, 2024 at 06:37 UTC »

This happens quite frequently, especially during times of low demand.

It's not unusual to see negative prices in the UK when the windfarms are going full whack but everyone's in bed. The old electricity bill never seems to go down though...

KnotSoSalty on June 18th, 2024 at 03:39 UTC »

Negative Prices are a symptom of insufficient battery storage. We’re at the point where there are enough renewables that they will occasionally peak out during daylight hours. Without adding equivalent storage on a 1:1 basis with electrical production from now on these periods will continue to get worse.

The more renewables take up a larger and larger segment of the grid the amount of storage increases at a parabolic rate. Up to 30% little storage is needed, at 60% 1:1 is necessary, at 90% 2:1 battery storage, at 100% 3:1 is the minimum of what is required.

Essentially we’re crossing the 30% threshold now.

ardx on June 18th, 2024 at 01:21 UTC »

Some quick notes about negative electricity prices:

The negative prices come from an algorithm essentially begging the renewable to turn off because the transmission lines cannot handle the amount of electricity being generated, so the renewable ends up having to pay up money for its excess generation. This is generally considered a not optimal outcome (but can be somewhat fixed in the long term with more investment into the electric grid, and also setting up batteries near the wind farm).

Electricity prices generally settle at whatever it costs to generate the next MW of electricity at something like a natural gas plant- the renewable collects that money even though its own cost of production is 0. This results in free-ish money. Negative prices, although good for the consumer in the short term, have the adverse effect of making renewables less attractive to invest in. If you have a bunch of wind farms, and the next wind farm you make will induce more negative prices that affect all your existing wind farms, it makes you not want to make more and it also makes you complain to your local politician about making it harder for others to do so.

Negative electricity prices are more common than you'd think... at least locally. For example, west Texas has a ton of renewable generation- see anything with WEST here https://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_spp.html