It's a moot point because negative electricity prices reflect producing more than is necessary, the reason why it's negatively priced is because it's being generated at the wrong time (which is the stupidity of solar, it works best when there's less load)
It's easy to make negative priced electricity with coal, simply shove a tonne of coal in the burner and then try to find someone to take the load before your generators / boilers blow up.
I'm not saying coal is the future, merely that arguments about negatively priced electricity are stupid, which is why companies try to focus on baseload generation because that's where most of the generating capacity needs to be.
I strongly suspect we're going to see a shift of the power grid from demand-matching via dispatchable generation to supply-matching via dispatchable load.
High-intensity manufacturing processes, banked chilling or thermal storage, pumped and other forms of direct electrical storage, and electricity-to-fuel synthesis are all examples of dispatchable loads which can opportunistically take advantage of excess generating capacity.
Yup, however whether that's the future really depends on where you live, as they say the future is not even distributed.
In BC, 85% of our generating capacity already does both. We can match generation to load, or continue to store the kinetic energy, as long as it snows in the mountains we'll have big batteries for on demand generation or storage of electricity.
We also have some of the cheapest rates in the world.
>It's a moot point because negative electricity prices reflect producing more than is necessary, the reason why it's negatively priced is because it's being generated at the wrong time (which is the stupidity of solar, it works best when there's less load)
This is simply a new market reality that electricity consumers have not quite adapted to yet.
(Efficient) markets take care of this kind of thing. They're really good at it. It's stupid to keep pretending that they don't.
The only reason why it works in Germany and not, say, in the US is because the corporations that run the grid in the US are also producers and they are more interested in milking their monopoly than actually improving their networks.
Similar to how Comcast refuses to upgrade their networks.
What do you mean it works best when there's less load? Solar works best when the sun is shining, and that is when the demand for electricity is highest (especially in places with air conditioning).
Peak temperature lags peak solar by several hours, most energy intensive industries run 24/7, so the peak is caused often by home AC/heating which lags peak output by several hours.
>Peak temperature lags peak solar by several hours, most energy intensive industries run 24/7
Energy intensive industries were only built that way because it matches the output profile of electric grids pre-renewables. You usually had a coal or nuclear power station that delivered the same amount of electricity 24/7.
Energy intensive industries are already (in Germany at least) adapting to match their demand with the electricity spot price. There's nothing inherently that difficult about an aluminum smelter matching its highest production rates to when electricity is cheapest.
That's not really true, especially as regards aluminum.
The aluminum industry has some weird physical constraints.
Alcoa has put out some engineering-heavy white papers on what actually happens and how the price and availability of power works in that industry. I can't find them at present but they were revelatory to me.
In brief, you can't just arbitrarily turn up or down your aluminum operation. At some point the giant molten pots of aluminum freeze up and destroy your capital equipment.
It's easy to make negative priced electricity with coal, simply shove a tonne of coal in the burner and then try to find someone to take the load before your generators / boilers blow up.
I'm not saying coal is the future, merely that arguments about negatively priced electricity are stupid, which is why companies try to focus on baseload generation because that's where most of the generating capacity needs to be.