Germany Power Prices Turn Deeply Negative on Renewables Surge
bloomberg.com62 points by rustoo 2 hours ago
62 points by rustoo 2 hours ago
So many questionable comments in here.
Negative prices have no effect on grid stability. It just means that the day-ahead market was cleared below 0, i.e. for every consumer (buyer) there is a producer (seller) selling at this price. The market is still balanced with consumption==production.
Now, you can ask the question: Why are so many producers willing to sell below 0? That has to do with misplaced incentives. For older or home-installed renewables there is a feed-in tarrif which guarantees a fixed revenue at all times. So there is an incentive to sell even for negative market prices. Newer installations can't opt for the guaranteed revenue model with revenue during negative prices any more.
Redispatch follows afterwards, if the market result clashes with physics: The physical grid can't transport the power from producer to consumer. There was no unusual amount of redispatch during easter.
Source: I work on this stuff.
> It just means that the day-ahead market was cleared below 0
No, it doesn't. The article is explicitly about intraday-prices. So day-ahead clearance made invalid assumptions about generations and consumption that were not met during the day. This kind of miscalculation does require additional (costly) redispatch measures to mitigate the overproduction, and it can affect grid stability.
You are right that intraday went even more negative than day-ahead. But I disagree about the rest of your comment. A spread between day-ahead and intraday does not imply additional redispatch. Only some of it might have been countertrading by the grid operators.
The redispatch was not extraordinary: https://energy-charts.info/charts/power_redispatch/chart.htm...
Similar situation last year over Easter:
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/clouds-shield-german-po...
Germany experiences negative electricity prices on a near daily basis now from spring through fall.
This weekend, prices were more negative than usual, but still not that negative.
It really depends on the size and placement of the oversupply, this could cause localized grid overloading.
"However, BDEW warned that around half of the new capacity came in the form of small-scale systems under 100 kilowatt each, which under current rules feed into the grid whatever they produce, without the option to curtail production when this is necessary to ensure grid stability."
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-adds-record-175...
Smart electric meters for individual PV producers that signal and account for negative prices would help. e.g. if your balcony solar power pushes electricity during oversupply you pay penalty.
Yeah. Going forward, I suspect the way to handle this will be requiring the small producers to join a "virtual power plant".
It'll result in a lot of misinformed shrieking from people, but probably the way forward is to remove the guaranteed price subsidy for individual household producers, and make it so thar they have to join a VPP if they want to sell to the grid.
For absolutely no good reason bidirectional charging in Germany is still forbidden. Electric cars could be used to store and buffer the overproduction of electric energy. But no, the german burocrats forbid this solution. Ridiculous!
I thought that bidirectional charging increases the complexity of the equipment used for the electric grid and can introduce a fire risk in homes if the equipment or wiring is sub-standard or faulty. Basically, it's costly to implement.
As if negative prices trickle down to the consumer. The electricity market is byzantine, rigged and has resulted in higher energy prices in the last 20 years.
In the UK you can get energy plans with a price that updates every half hour, published a day ahead. From 12:30pm - 4pm today that price is negative. It was also negative for around 16 hours of Easter Sunday. https://www.octopriceuk.app/agile
Well dynamic pricing only ever works until you have a power outage in the winter and suddenly you pay a years worth of money for the 1 hour you could use your fridge, during a snowstorm.
It’s still capped at £1/kWh, which is a lot but also a price I’ve seen maybe for a few slots on a couple days in the last three years.
The price was known ~1 day in advance so I had the choice to fill up the battery with cheaper (but still high) prices overnight and reduce the impact
That is the trade off for renewables. Power is very expensive when needed and very cheap when not.
Electric power is very expensive when demand is greater than supply, very cheap when supply is greater than demand.
Where’s profitable crypto mining when you need it?
Back yard plasma furnace? Artificial diamond making? Aluminum smelting?
There are may different energy storage systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_storage
There have wildly different prices for unit of stored energy and wildly different storage times.
https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/us-grid...
It's not cost effective run aluminum smelting only during peak electricity production.
You need something that's valuable, energy intensive, easy to stop and start, and cheap to build capacity for. Either or both of those last two tend to be the problem for most industrial processes (and also crypto mining).
Even just a large water tank which you can choose when to add heat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_thermal_energy_storag...
As with many of these renewable cause negative price stories, the data shows something they never talk about:
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/72h/hourly
That shows that they still had roughly 5% gas and 5% coal running at the lowest price point.
If it were just easy to buy a bunch of batteries and profit from this by selling the same energy during evening/night.
But that is only reserved for the big players I guess.
No, it is not at all reserved for big players. You just need to get a dynamic price electricity contract, and a smart-meter in your home and you can do this right now.
In Sweden you can also register your battery to an aggregation service that makes money (and gives you a share) from balancing the grid.
So there is not only a market for buy/sell, you can also be stand-by for charging your battery when grid frequency increases and consumption needs to increase.
I know someone who does this in Mew Zealand with power walls.
He is retired and mostly just a hobby.
Clearly they need more datacenters!
For anyone thinking negative prices is a good thing: It's not. It's a panic signal because there are no takers for an oversupply of energy, making the grid unstable.
The grid is not unstable and it was also not unstable the last view days when prices were negative. Germany has one of the most stable grids in the world. Negative prices are good when you need to buy electricity and they are bad when you are selling, but of course generally in a functioning market there shouldn't really be too many days with negative prices. It does mean that there isn't enough storage currently on the grid.
Now what we need is a cheap grid interconnect for home users running solar panels that automatically starts charging a battery when grid prices go negative, to absorb that extra power.
Yeah, the curtailment is a simple way to deal with instability. I wonder who chooses which power plants should curtail their output. The Bundesnetzagentur?
The plants that are willing to give supply for the most negative price are the ones that will not be curtailed. So market forces. Basically at such points power plants are paying for the privilege to be allowed to supply power. This is dominated by restart costs and as such is often paid by classic "baseload" plants such as nuclear ones. i.e. they will accept losing money during one part of the day/week so that they can make money during a different part of the day/week.
So, the economic incentives favor peaker plants and storage (natural gas plants, peaker coal plants, batteries, pumped storage).
They are working on that https://battery-charts.de/
Sure, and negative prices will send a strong signal to the market to hurry up with adding storage. So, this will probably be more of a temporary situation and in the future there will be very few days with negative prices, however there will then also be fewer days with very high prices.
The grid is not unstable, Germany has a gigantic amount of batteries, flywheels, and giant resistors that can soak up the power, and is able to order wind farms and solar producers to curtail production if its still too much for the grid. Contrary to what a lot of folklore about Germany's grid suggests, these investments in stability are actually the primary reason Germany's electricity is so expensive compared to a lot of other countries
This is all actually beneficial. It creates real economic pressure for just about everyone to build and install more batteries everywhere to profit from the price swings.
Most importantly, it motivates the wind and solar producers to buy up batteries and install them on site, so that they can shift the times where they sell power to the grid to times of day where its more profitable.
For anyone interested, the dynamics are something like:
1) Commercial entities generally try to sell their products for a profit (positive price).
2) Negative prices make this quite hard.
3) To get back into positive profit, they're going to need to charge a higher price later on.
There are 3 ways the overall market can go if prices are negative - either prices go positive at some other time to make up for the losses the power providers are making, someone figures out a use for the free power and the price stops going negative or power providers go out of business. Typically what this seems to result in for renewable-heavy grids is occasional (even regular) negative wholesale prices and some impressively high retail prices. Free electricity turns out to be very expensive; it shows the grid isn't coping.
1. They could export the surplus. No?
2. Isn't cheaper electeicity a good thing for the manufacuring industry?
> 1. They could export the surplus. No?
Yes, and that is in fact done. However, there it is still a bad deal with negative electricity prices.
> Isn't cheaper electeicity a good thing for the manufacuring industry?
It technically is, but its not as simple as that. Industrial manufacturing is a relatively steady load, which means the consumption is constant. The lowest prices do not matter all that much, the average price does. And that average price is relatively high here, even for industrial consumers.
The negative price is an indication that consumers can't utilize all the energy. That is, no one is willing to pay to consume more.
It's a good thing if you can profit from it.
It doesn't seem that hard. All you need is a load, but obviously harder as you increase the scale.
Heck you could build some large bodies of water and boil them from time to time.
> Heck you could build some large bodies of water and boil them from time to time.
Some suppliers already do that. When a power plant also supplies the city heating, it makes sense for them to put the power surplus into pre-heated water which they can store and later distribute to the buyers of the heat.
Obviously this needs some huge and well insulated tanks.
Here's an article (in Polish) about one built in Warsaw, 10TJ capacity: https://globenergia.pl/najwiekszy-wodny-magazyn-ciepla-w-eur...
Here is one in German for one in Berlin https://group.vattenfall.com/de/newsroom/pressemitteilungen/...
This has happened in the Netherlands many times. The North Sea is a wind turbine paradise but Dutch people are asleep 8 hours a day- weak!
> Excess electricity produced during periods of low consumption cannot yet be stored at scale, as battery capacity remains limited.
Batteries are the next frontier of the renewable explosion. It's already happening.
...and batteries are unsuitable for seasonal storage.
First lets handle single summer day using renewables + storage (California is slowly getting there). Then we can talk about seasonal problems.
How is seasonal storage relevant here? This is the usual few-hours-fluctuations, I assume? (can't read the article)
It will be more relevant in the future, but it's still worth thinking about. Right now intermittent energy sources cover around 15-18% of the total energy consumption in Germany[1]. And seasonal variability is covered by other methods (natural gas and others).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#/media/File:...
But since 2/3rd of the fossil energy is wasted, it's more like 40% of the useful energy.
Some people don't know about the primary energy fallacy, others know about it and try to exploit it, so you should be suspicious of the opinions of anyone trying to use it suggest lack of progress and futility.
Who talks about futility? It's about tradeoffs: seasonal storage/nuclear power, batteries/wind+interconnections and so on.
And Germany right now have battery storage equivalent of fully powering Germany for about 30 minute sand raising up every month, which is quite wild.. https://battery-charts.de/ With those feeding on negative-priced electricity, intermittent sources will only get more economical to the detriment of gas and nuclear.
Unfortunately Germany closed down its nuclear power plants.
Germany should use it to search for Marsenne primes
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where's the bitcoin miners when you need them ??? /s
They are experimenting with buying excess energy during low-demand or supply surges. https://www.rechargenews.com/wind/german-telecoms-giant-to-t...
German excellence, shitting the bed both ways.
From JP Morgan's 16th Annual Energy Paper, March 2026
https://cdn.jpmorganfunds.com/content/dam/jpm-am-aem/global/...
> In 2024 we estimated that had Germany not decommissioned nuclear power after the Fukushima accident, it would have needed 50% less electricity generation from fossil fuels, 84% less generation from imported natural gas, 27% less fossil fuel capacity and 42% less natural gas capacity. Another road less traveled: Germany’s electricity prices in 2024 were almost 25% higher than they would have been had the country kept its nuclear power online . And as shown below, Germany might not have experienced such a sharp increase in its electricity imports which are 2x higher than a decade ago as a share of consumption.
> More nuclear shutdown repercussions: Germany’s industrial power prices were 3x higher than the US and China in 2024, and part of the reason why Germany has been experiencing the deindustrialization shown on the right.
On the positive side we in Norway have 10x higher energy prices because we now have to export energy to Germany during the winter and then our water storage is empty in the summer so we get fucked both ways as well.
Does someone want to elaborate why it's interesting/important that wholesale electricity prices were low one day during a long weekend?
it makes private energy storage a viable investment option. You can just invest in a large battery (or other storage system) and make a profit over buying/selling energy.
I really hope, this happens on a big scale and further reduces the dependency on fossil fuels (at least over 24h. winter is a different question)
It doesn't, for reasons of price.
For consumers, power prices consist of the actual price of power, plus network fees. Network fees are fixed at (on average) something like 10ct/kWh or 100€/MWh. So negative prices are only really negative if the power price drops below those -100€/MWh, which rarely happens (the usual dips are at low single-digit cents per kWh).
And even then, there is the issue of network fee double-dipping: Depending on the contract you have with your power company, the size and kind of storage you are operating, and the phase of the moon and your donations to the ruling party, you will be charged network fees twice, once when buying the power, once when selling it again. In that case, the threshold would be even worse, at -200€/MWh.
And all that doesn't factor in the cost of the storage infra.
Edit: And there is another factor: The current very low dip is in the intra-day prices. But contracts for consumers use day-ahead prices, which usually don't include those very large dips that result from miscalculations of weather and dispatch capacity.
Edit2: Just check https://tibber.com/de/preisrechner (use e.g. 10119 as Postleitzahl) and scroll down for the graph. Today, they give a negative day-ahead price of -1.5ct/kWh, but including network fees, taxes and their cut, you still end up paying 18.2ct/kWh...
If you're buying and selling the power, then you don't care much about the absolute price, but rather the delta between the purchase and sale prices.
Below -100€/MWh, you don't need to sell the power to profit; you'd make at least some money just using it to heat up a big resistor.
You didn't read what I wrote. The news is about trading prices. End users never pay those, because there are fixed network fees to be paid on top. So the actual bill will practically never have a negative price on it anywhere.
And even if there were negative end prices happening: There are metal smelting works and other operators of big resistors who will happily heat up even more. So prices will probably never get so negative that a normal consumer can ever profit from them.
It does not make private energy storage viable on its own. You need to get enough charge/discharge cycles out of it in a certain time period. This means you need almost daily high price fluctuations. We aren't seeing that in Europe. We see high winds push down prices for multiple days and we see multiple weeks with consistent high prices in the winter, with occasional drops on the weekend.
It’s a daily event now in Australia. Very low prices during the middle of the day, and higher in the morning and evening. Anyone with a battery or an EV they don’t need to drive far can play the market, usually with scripted sell/buy trigger points.
There’s enough profit to make the payback period for a decent battery quite short.
Yes, I see energy-intensive industry moving away from extreme latitudes in the long run. Most of Europe is at an unfortunate latitude and has surprising levels of cloud cover.
The only interesting part is that renewable production in Europe is so random that there can be far too much for short periods.
The wholesale price system is not a reliable signal or incentive for electricity generation supply and demand in Europe. There are various subsidies, taxes, levies, and fixed costs not shown at the wholesale level that completely change calculations.
These numbers will make customers upset and complain about price gouging if they don't understand the disconnect. Or, it makes customers think that renewables are cheap because they are not seeing the subsidies that on net result in higher payments to renewable providers than carbon-based producers.
It's an indicator of how far they've come in supplanting fossil fuels. Today it's one day; soon it will be two, then a week. They can start thinking about next steps.
No.
From JP Morgan's 16th Annual Energy Paper, March 2026
https://cdn.jpmorganfunds.com/content/dam/jpm-am-aem/global/...
> In 2024 we estimated that had Germany not decommissioned nuclear power after the Fukushima accident, it would have needed 50% less electricity generation from fossil fuels, 84% less generation from imported natural gas, 27% less fossil fuel capacity and 42% less natural gas capacity. Another road less traveled: Germany’s electricity prices in 2024 were almost 25% higher than they would have been had the country kept its nuclear power online . And as shown below, Germany might not have experienced such a sharp increase in its electricity imports which are 2x higher than a decade ago as a share of consumption.
> More nuclear shutdown repercussions: Germany’s industrial power prices were 3x higher than the US and China in 2024, and part of the reason why Germany has been experiencing the deindustrialization shown on the right.
Energy prices being low is interesting and important right now, since we are undergoing a petrochemical energy price increase shock.
Prices being negative for one day does not make energy prices low. The "green shift" in Germany has increased the use of fossil fuels and the price of energy.
From JP Morgan's 16th Annual Energy Paper, March 2026
https://cdn.jpmorganfunds.com/content/dam/jpm-am-aem/global/...
> In 2024 we estimated that had Germany not decommissioned nuclear power after the Fukushima accident, it would have needed 50% less electricity generation from fossil fuels, 84% less generation from imported natural gas, 27% less fossil fuel capacity and 42% less natural gas capacity. Another road less traveled: Germany’s electricity prices in 2024 were almost 25% higher than they would have been had the country kept its nuclear power online . And as shown below, Germany might not have experienced such a sharp increase in its electricity imports which are 2x higher than a decade ago as a share of consumption.
> More nuclear shutdown repercussions: Germany’s industrial power prices were 3x higher than the US and China in 2024, and part of the reason why Germany has been experiencing the deindustrialization shown on the right.
