Green Energy

German renewables have guranteed price floors, otherwise they would be turned off. However there are still 3GW of lignite plants running in Germany. Those will have lost about 2million€ in a single hour.

The old lowest price was -90€/MWh, so this is a new record and highly unusal. Basicly it is a lot of new solar in the last couple years on a sunny day, at about peak solar, combined with strong winds, which mean there is also pretty close to peak wind and it is on a Sunday so demand is low. Negative prices happend before, but usually on weekends with peak solar and a decent wind. Normally peak wind happens during storms, which naturally means low solar.

Not the one you are asking but:

Why does battery technology not exist? It seems to be increasingly in use?

As for the question: a fairly good overview on balancing options and the challenges in decarbonizing the energy system is offered in the 6th assessment report by working group 3 of the IPCC (PDF). See Box 6.8 on page 675, which lists an overview on balancing options, where nuclear power is one of many:

There are many balancing options in systems with very high renewables (Milligan et al. 2015; Jenkins et al. 2018b; Mai et al. 2018; Bistline 2021a; Denholm et al. 2021).

• Energy storage. Energy storage technologies like batteries, pumped hydro, and hydrogen can provide a range of system services (Balducci et al. 2018; Bistline et al. 2020a) (Section 6.4.4). Lithium-ion batteries have received attention as costs fall and installations increase, but very high renewable shares typically entail either dispatchable generation or long-duration storage in addition to short-duration options (Jenkins et al. 2018b; Arbabzadeh et al. 2019; Schill 2020). Energy storage technologies are part of a broad set of options (including synchronous condensers, demand-side measures, and even inverter-based technologies themselves) for providing grid services (Castillo and Gayme 2014; EPRI 2019a).

• Transmission and trade. To balance differences in resource availability, high renewable systems will very likely entail investments in transmission capacity (Mai et al. 2014; Macdonald et al. 2016; Pleßmann and Blechinger 2017; Zappa et al. 2019) (Section 6.4.5) and changes in trade (Abrell and Rausch 2016; Bistline et al. 2019). These increases will likely be accompanied by expanded balancing regions to take advantage of geographical smoothing.

• Dispatchable (‘on-demand’) generation. Dispatchable generation could include flexible fossil units or low-carbon fuels such as hydrogen with lower minimum load levels (Denholm et al. 2018; Bistline 2019), renewables like hydropower, geothermal, or biomass (Hirth 2016; Hansen et al. 2019), or flexible nuclear (Jenkins et al. 2018a). The composition depends on costs and other policy goals, though in all cases, capacity factors are low for these resources (Mills et al. 2020).

• Demand management: Many low-emitting and high-renewables systems also utilise increased load flexibility in the forms of energy efficiency, demand response, and demand flexibility, utilising newly electrified end uses such as electric vehicles to shape demand profiles to better match supply (Ameli et al. 2017; Hale 2017; Brown et al. 2018; Imelda et al. 2018a; Bistline 2021a).

• Sector coupling: Sector coupling includes increased end-use electrification and PtX electricity conversion pathways, which may entail using electricity to create synthetic fuels such as hydrogen (Davis et al. 2018; Ueckerdt et al. 2021) (Sections 6.4.3, 6.4., 6.4.5, 6.6.4.3, and 6.6.4.6).

Deployment of integration options depends on their relative costs and value, regulations, and electricity market design. There is considerable uncertainty about future technology costs, performance, availability, scalability, and public acceptance (Kondziella and Bruckner 2016; Bistline et al. 2019). Deploying balanced resources likely requires operational, market design, and other institutional changes, as well as technological changes in some cases (Denholm et al. 2021; Cochran et al. 2014). Mixes will differ based on resources, system size, flexibility, and whether grids are isolated or interconnected.

Given the wealth of technological options and developments, why narrow down the view on a single solution and pretend that it is the only one?

For the 3 hours or so of storage needed to exceed the grid penetration possible with nuclear due to its inflexibility there are individual storage production factories being constructed every few weeks that exceed the scale of the entire nuclear industry.

Then there is also thermal storage, existing hydro as dispatch, pumped hydro, w2e, and load shifting,

Seriously. You can’t make an omelette without splitting a few atoms, at least for now. Especially since at the moment it’s fairly straightforward to look at our carbon emissions and figure out that if we don’t switch to nuclear our ecology won’t last long enough for disposal of nuclear waste to be the thing that kills us.

Yes, I'm sorry if I presented that confusingly. That 31.7% is new record low for a first half year, both in terms of fraction of overall load and in absolute terms. The rebound after Corona was really short-lived and hopefully we'll see that record beaten every year from now on. Let's shoot for 0 fossil fuels!

statistic adjusted 🫡