It’s still not earning you money to spend electricity because you still have to pay the transfer fee which is around 6 cents / kWh but it’s pretty damn cheap nevertheless, mostly because of the excess in wind energy.
Last winter because of a mistake it dropped down to negative 50 cents / kWh for few hours, averaging negative 20 cents for the entire day. People were literally earning money by spending electricity. Some were running electric heaters outside in the middle of the winter.
Luckily my energy company found a way around all of this to always charge more! We have “Basic Customer Charge”, “Summary of Rider Adjustments”, “Renewable Energy Rider”, and then Sales Tax on all of it. My base charge is over 100$ before they start calculating your actually energy usage. Yay electrical monopolies!
Renewables dipped below $0 for us in California too this year. Fortunately for the utilities, those savings don’t get passed along to customers and I still paid $0.53 kW/h. /s
Lucky you.
Welcome to the world of renewables. We have quite some negative hours in Germany in summer when sun and wind are active simultaneously. Unfortunately Finland relies on nuclear, does it?
What’s wrong with nuclear?
The toxic and deadly trash it makes. Deadly for centuries.
In Germany we still search for an area to dig for ages. We search since 30 years.
I know nuclear isn’t ideal but to rule it out completely while the alternative for stable baseline power is still coal and gas seems problematic to me
Yes indeed. Best is to move to renewables as fast as possible. This will make power very cheap in the middle run.
A negative price is absurd and has no physical reality, it is the result of speculation and abstract rules not grounded on reality. It always costs to build and operate whatever power source and networks were involved, you don’t have to pay electricity to f*ck off if you produce too much of it.
No, it does have a reality. The problem is that an electricity grid can collapse, due to too much electricity. However some power plants can not be easily shut down. Nuclear for example can be throttled to about 50%, but shutting it down requires a restart, which takes a day. So loosing a little money for a few hours can be cheaper then a full shut down. There are other effects, like district heating power plants, which are needed to provide heat, hydro power, which has too much water in the reservoir and waste power plants, which have to burn the waste at some point.
Then you got to keep in mind that Finland is fairly is a country with a small population, which is rather isolated. They cut the power lines to Russia and Sweden and the Baltic countries are also low population and especially Sweden also has a lot of low carbon electricity. So export is not an easy option.
