this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2025
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They introduced some kind of caps (don't remember the details) on negative pricing quite early on, from what I understand it would have been very lucrative in the last decade or two to get into grid-scale battery storage without those caps.
One thing I remember is Flensburg building, pretty much on a whim, a water storage tank with immersion heater, an investment that amortised within a month or two as they were literally getting paid to fuel their district heating.
There's got to be some rules as to what you can do with electricity you by at negative prices, e.g. not just put an immersion heater in the ocean, maybe some prioritisation as to who gets the energy first just as there is on the production side (fossils have to shut down and pay if they don't do that fast enough while renewables get to produce energy), but overall I don't see why there should be a limit on negative prices.
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.