German power prices dropped below zero on the first trading day of the year, an increasingly frequent phenomenon in Europe as renewables expand.
Intraday prices in Germany, the region’s biggest market, turned negative during four hours overnight as wind-energy output reached as much as 40 gigawatts, far outstripping demand."
The thermos approach is unfortunately almost the best we currently have, because every storage solution would have to pay taxes twice, once for buying, once for selling. Not VAT, but Stromsteuer.
Also, these dips don’t occur that often, are usually not very long and it’s kind of a reverse game of chicken. The more storage we have, the less profitable each one gets. All that makes it rather unattractive to install grid scale plants.
The dips occur more often in last two years. We build more renewables. There’s definitely a need to build energy storages. Please don’t forget that the price dips increases the funding need for the small pv-owners. They‘ll get the EEG (fixed governmental subsidies ) price for each Watt they produce. Only bigger pv‘s get nothing/ cut off the grid for that time. So, negative power prices costs much governmental tax money - the difference of market price and the EEG fixed price.
Source: amount of days with negative price https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/618751/umfrage/anzahl-der-stunden-mit-negativen-strompreisen-in-deutschland/
I’m not arguing against the need, I’m saying that the economic incentives for private investors are not really great.
Oh sorry. Didn‘t get your point. For what I‘ve read, the driver of PV this year were mid-sized companies to get cheaper power. And small PV‘s for house owners. Yes, investors and big PV farms rather look for battery storages.