Idea: Convert a cargo ship into an Aluminum Smelter. Regularly relocate it to ports where the price of electricity is minimal or negative. Profit.

Transmission prices are a big chunk of the total per MWH cost even in times of normal prices. This is also why prices go negative in the first place, it costs money to use it.

I wonder what reasonable alternatives there are to fixed transmission prices. Though probably in times of high production, transmission would be more likely to be a bottleneck and priced even higher...

Using excess electricity to generate hydrogen would be ideal,right?

A vote for underwater compressed air energy storage here. Simpler and less dangerous all round than hydrogen.

Underwater? I’ve heard of underground compressed air storage, but not underwater.

Big balloon tethered to sea floor. Pump air in when you've got spare energy, hydrostatic pressure forces air back out when needed. The neat bit is that the air pressure doesn't tail off as the bag empties. Site near offshore windfarms and you don't need much more infrastructure.

Oh, that sounds really workable! And you can store more energy in a smaller space due to the water pressure I guess.

The main issue as I understand it is that you lose a lot of energy to heat if you just pump air straight in. To be efficient you need to chill the compressed air down to water temperature and store the heat before you pump the air underwater. Then add the heat back to the air when you release it from the balloon. This is all doable, but with all those heat pumps it's not quite as simple/cheap as it might seem.

I suspect it helps with temperature regulation for the tanks.

Do you have a favourite resource to learn about UWCAES, please?

Not me, but I hope an SME will be along in a minute so we can both learn...

Just be careful not to dump the waste chemicals…

Or site big batteries at every unthrottleable power plant.

Check the prices. At the current prices, they won't pay for themselves. I did the math on a 100kWH and a 10kWh battery assuming 60 days of negative energy prices (5 hours per each such day) and even assuming you can charge them fully within that window, you won't recover their cost in the 10 years they are guaranteed to work. Not even 1/3rd of their price. With abundant energy during sunny and windy days in Northern Europe, investing in panels or batteries is questionable at this point. Chances are, your neighbours are already subsidizing your energy consumption.

Pump water to a higher location.

A bit of a challenge in the Netherlands :-)

Not so hard… almost anywhere they pump to will be a higher location. The Atlantic Ocean, for example.

Do they use water towers for pressurising mains water in Netherlands?

What numbers did you use? How much cheaper would batteries need to become to be viable?

You will need to pay for a whole lot of fuel.

And probably not get to the place in time.

In the NL, energy prices are settled a day earlier - at 3pm, if memory serves. That floating smelter needs to be quick.

To sail the ship around? I'd think the smelting operation would cover those costs.

We have Bitcoin for that.

It's happening in the Netherlands over the last two weeks as well. Many days where there are a few hours during which energy is either free or you get paid to consume it. (Taxation still makes it hard to turn profit - each consumed kWh is taxed at 0.15c regardless). Basically, if there is sun and wind, energy is very cheap.

The tax is 0.15 euro cents / kWh?! That's higher than my total rate (amortized connection fee, per kWh cost, taxes)!

In Finland, sadly, it's closer to 2 cents. And in my particular part of the country distribution is charged at a further 5, plus VAT. Plus 30Eur/Month connection flat fee.

How little do you actually pay for electricity?

For the last 3 months my total (connection charge, per kWh, taxes) was:

- April: $70 for 635 kWh. USD$0.110/kWh

- March: $71 for 570 kWh. USD$0.124/kWh

- February: $79 for 650 kWh. USD$0.121/kWh

That looks significantly higher than 0.0015€/kWh.

I'm dumb. I misread that as a 15 cent tax. Not sub cent.

I pay €0,394/kWh (Tax included, Netherlands). That price does not include fixed connection costs (0,19 per day) and a bunch of other things.

Prices are insane here. The provider will pocket the money they make off of cheap production of energy. Us consumers will see nothing of the low electricity price.

Too bad there's no infrastructure in place for producing synthetic fuel with the surplus electricity. It might not be efficient, but if we're producing surplus electricity anyway, then even inefficient storage/usage won't be a waste.

Compared to any (currently practical) storage, just laying more wires to places that don't currently have too much wind/sun is much more efficient.

Turns out, cables are relatively cheap, compared to batteries.

Absolutely! Alas, the Finnish administration seems more interested in using areas with cheap electricity to attract electricity-intensive industry rather than, say, exporting it to other countries. Heck, in neighbouring Sweden they have issues transferring power from the large hydro dams in the north, to the densely populated south where the power is needed.

While building better grids is practically doable, I don't see it happening anytime soon; the idea, of using cheap electricity to entice a FAANG to build a data center in one's backyard is preferable to most elected officials here.

In that situation it's probably better business to just buy cheap electricity off the market and use it to do something useful.

How cheap are international cables compared to electrolysis for hydrogen production paired with lorries for transport?

The conversion ratio is quite bad, however if you MUST burn something (like in Steelmaking mentioned in the sibling comment) then it starts to make more sense but iirc it's still calculated to be slightly more expensive steel compared to coal currently (but if we continue building out variably producing power like wind, solar while augumenting the regular production the general idea is that the intermittent spikes could be used for affordable production).

Honestly, wasting the energy is cheap compared to batteries.

It's okay to waste excess capacity so long as it is wind/solar/nuclear.

Over longer distances the transmissions losses makes cables more inefficient (otherwise all of Europe could easily be powered by Saharan solar-power). The flooding mentioned in the article is about 1000km away from the major population centers in Finland and Sweden.

Transforming to burnable fuels via electricity is actually useful for some applications and actually in the planning stage with some steelmakers (as a replacement for coal!) like h2 green steel in the same region of Sweden as the floodings. They claim that steelmaking is up to 7% of global co2 emissions and being able to move to gas produced with cheap electricity might be only marginally more costly than coal.

https://www.h2greensteel.com/

Not necessarily. For a worked example, it's cheaper to power Boston with a large number of local solar panels and batteries than it is to power it with a small number of solar panels and batteries in Arizona connected to Boston via HVDC lines.

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/12/27/the-future-of-...

Why would we produce synthetic fuel when we have batteries? We also have other ways to store electricity.

Am I missing sarcasm in your comment or something?

Batteries (lithium particularly) are not storage devices. They're grid stabilising devices. They are simply not able to store meaningful quantities of energy at an affordable price. In our city, we are installing a battery that can power 160k homes for 2h, at the cost of AU$200m. That's just not "storage", it's designed to flatten out peaks and troughs in supply.

The batteries are not cost efficient, and take up lots of space. Not great for the Northern Europe - expensive land, strict zoning laws, etc.

Gasoline has an energy density like 100x batteries. As an energy storage medium, it's excellent.

The thousand pounds of batteries in a Tesla contain the same amount of energy as ~3 gallons of gas.

This. It, along with diesel, is also the power source for most wheeled veichles in current operation on the planet.

I'm sure EV's is going to take over in most areas given enough time. Until then, it's only logical to run ICE's on green fuels if available. Synthetic fuels made with excess solar/wind certainly sounds like it would fit that description.

Also, we already have infrastructure in place for handling large amounts of petrol and diesel, so storage and handling is a solved problem.

How many gallons of gas need to be burned to account for the entire lifespan of that battery?

My point is that when talking about storing excess energy from the grid, maybe storage density isn't as important as storage availability.

Cost of storage is the big question. Synthetic fuels might have bad efficiency. But building huge container for liquid or gas is not expensive.

Let's say you want to store fuel now and keep it for 6 months, might be realistic with gas or fuel. On other hand single cycle from battery is awfully expensive. Even if you get to use it for 100 years.

Let's say it takes n batteries to store electricity produced one day and use it the next day. Then it takes 10n batteries to store electricity produced during ten days and use it during the next ten days.

With synthetic fuel let's say it takes m fuel producers / consumers to store electricity produced one day and use it the next. Then it still takes m fuel producers / consumers to store electricity produced during ten days and use it the next ten days. The only thing you need to scale up is your fuel tank, but that is very cheap.

The problem is any plants that would be producing synthetic fuel, fertiliser, etc would all be operating 100% of the year. They wouldn't be an "on demand" plant - the economics wouldn't support it (mostly due to capex).

With excess wind/solar, pumped hydro would be the storage mechanism, but that clearly doesn't apply when a country has an excess of hydro too!

I’m guessing they are referring to liquid hydrogen fuel production. Are those plants so expensive to setup that they have to run 24/7 to make up their investment? Lots of articles say it might eventually be economical, like https://inl.gov/article/using-excess-energy-to-split-water-c....

There’s several thresholds here. Something that operates 50% of the time can limit things to cheap power. Something that’s viable operated 10% of the time can always get cheap power.

Do you have any examples of this? I've never come across any major capital project that wasn't designed for 85%+ uptime (and the downtime was simply for maintenance)

A lot of infrastructure isn’t 100% 24/7 even if it gets regular use. Subway systems both shut down for much of the day but they also operate well below maximum rush hour capacity.

Many factories, office buildings, and even stores spend the majority of the day/week empty or very close to it.

Below that you have schools which often close for several months a year.

Entertainment venues even multi billion dollar sports stadiums may spend a lot of time empty. Where possible they aim for year round operations, but often it’s not viable.

Below that you have peaking gas electric power plants, as many grids pay for reserve capacity that’s very rarely used. Some extreme cases might not even be used beyond validating it still works in a given year.

Sure but all of these use cases are entirely different to a production plant, say an oil refinery.

A synthetic fuel refinery can operate 24/7, so would be budgeted to do so.

I could potentially see a hydrogen "battery"/electrolysis setup absorbing excess power in an affordable way, but I'm just saying to date I haven't seen a single one.

Ahh, I was going for Major Capital project.

The closest thing to a low utilization fuel refinery is probably some desalination plants. Very high energy costs + wild demand swings means some shutdown quite a bit.

There is a few some hydrogen manufacturing plants which only operate on very cheap renewable electricity. However, as I understand it those are currently operated as relatively inexpensive test facilities.

Gas peaker plants don't run all that often.

I was thinking more in the line of e-Fuel and the like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrofuel

But sure, if hydrogen can be used, stored and then consumed then I can't see why it couldn't be a good idea, assuming demand. The thing about making petrol and diesel is that there's a guaranteed demand for the product, assuming the price is right.

Or a country that doesn't have enough unserviced demand spikes to make pumped hydro useful.

Many industrial processes have a high capital cost. If you build a plant that can make synthetic fuel, you don't want it sitting idle 70% of the time. If the plant is extraordinarily cheap capital-wise, then you are ok to use if for load balancing. But the usual suspects (aluminum smelting, water desalination, production of synfuels) don't qualify. Maybe making hydrogen via electrolysis qualifies, but then you have a storage and transportation problem. Still, I think hydrogen is probably the best use case for cheap but intermittent electricity.

This guy keeps track of it nicely, 75 hours with negative prices so far this year:

https://nitter.net/BM_Visser/status/1660605197142351875#m

Consumers can sign up for dynamic electricity price to get the benefits (and risk a huge bill like in Texas last year): https://enever.nl/grafieken-stroomprijs-vandaag-morgen/

This is false, Griddy waived the bills:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/griddy-energy-charged-9000-powe...

They're still risking getting a huge bill. Hoping your risk gets mitigated by a company trying to avoid bad PR isn't a gamble I would take.

How is that affecting the ROI of people that invested in Solar at home?

Crypto mining?

Last year, 2000 MW of wind power was built, at the end of the year total power was 5200 MW. Olkiluoto 3 nuclear reactor was brought online, 1600MW. Solar power nearly doubled, from 358 MW to 606 MW. So far this year 500MW of wind power and 100MW of solar has been added to the grid.

Queries for grid connections pass already 100GW. Over twenty electrolysis plants are in planning.

Any large battery installations you're aware of?

No large batteries (100MW+), but they are maxing out exporting power to Estonia constantly after that recent nuclear generator came online (which is leading to Estonia having a very clean carbon profile at the moment). Both countries recently signed a MOU to build a new 1GW interconnector ("EstLink3"), but it won't be done for a decade.

"Too much clean energy" is a good problem to have! Probably means Finland can pull forward retiring the 2.6GW of coal generation capacity they have.

https://www.energy-storage.news/worlds-first-large-scale-san...

https://elering.ee/en/elering-and-fingrid-launch-joint-activ...

https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FI?wind=false&solar=fal...

https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/EE?wind=false&solar=fal...

There's a 30 MWh one in Lappeenranta and there's a 36 MWh being built in Lempäälä.

https://www.hs.fi/talous/art-2000009377977.html

OL3 has a big one for grid support purposes: https://www.tvo.fi/en/index/news/pressreleasesstockexchanger...

This shows why taking 15-20 years from decision to operational status, like nuclear power in the west does, is hugely risky. The world has moved past the need. Add on another 20-40 years to turn a profit and the prospects are laughable.

> The output of Finland's newest nuclear power facility, Olkiluoto 3, has been significantly cut back because electricity has become too cheap, according to the plant's owner, Teollisuuden Voima (TVO).

https://yle.fi/a/74-20032375

> taking 15-20 years from decision to operational status, like nuclear power does, is hugely risky.

It takes China 6 years to build a reactor, and they build them in parallel.

> The world has moved past the need.

Except when, you know, it's a quiet night

> It takes China 6 years to build a reactor, and they build them in parallel.

China have a foot in the nuclear industry, but they are betting on renewables. Also, do you want to have a Chinese reactor in your backyard? Try the nimbyism for that!

> Except when, you know, it's a quiet night

The research is quite clear that designing a renewable energy system to handle nights is economical:

> Much of the resistance towards 100% RE systems in the literature seems to come from the a-priori assumption that an energy system based on solar and wind is impossible since these energy sources are variable. Critics of 100% RE systems like to contrast solar and wind with ’firm’ energy sources like nuclear and fossil fuels (often combined with CCS) that bring their own storage. This is the key point made in some already mentioned reactions, such as those by Clack et al. [225], Trainer [226], Heard et al. [227] Jenkins et al. [228], and Caldeira et al. [275], [276]. However, while it is true that keeping a system with variable sources stable is more complex, a range of strategies can be employed that are often ignored or underutilized in critical studies: oversizing solar and wind capacities; strengthening interconnections [68], [82], [132], [143], [277], [278]; demand response [279], [172], e.g. smart electric vehicles charging using delayed charging or delivering energy back to the electricity grid via vehicle-to-grid [181], [280]– [282]; storage [40]– [43], [46], [83], [140], [142], such as stationary batteries; sector coupling [16], [39], [90]– [92], [97], [132], [216], e.g. optimizing the interaction between electricity, heat, transport, and industry; power-to-X [39], [106], [134], [176], e.g. producing hydrogen at moments when there is abundant energy; et cetera. Using all these strategies effectively to mitigate variability is where much of the cutting-edge development of 100% RE scenarios takes place.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910

Has the world moved past the need? Last summer, we were talking about the possibility of rolling blackouts during the winter. And while that was not necessary, a kilowatt-hour of electricity was tens of cents during the winter. I remember at least seeing 0.40€/kWh and it probably exceeded 0.50€ at points.

Europe rebuilt the entire supply chain of fossil gas from the beginning of the invasion, while at the same time half the French nuclear reactors were out of commission. [1] If having a few expensive months is the worst outcome of the largest war since WW2 in Europe then the system is hugely resilient already.

Those prices were imported to the Nordics, they did not stem from the Nordics.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-fr...

It was a remarkably warm winter.

If you could build a nuclear power plant as quickly as you can build a wind turbine you might still have a window where you could recoup the investment. Unfortunately building nuclear plants takes ages. If we started today to build the hundreds of nuclear power plants it would take Europe to go fully nuclear they wouldn't be done before renewables+storage ate their profit opportunity.

Too cheap to meter, finally!

Go nuclear.

The current (and past) electricity prices in most of Europe can be found on nordpool.

Three days ago, in Denmark, prices went as low as -41.37Eur/MWh (where 100Eur/MWh is a common price otherwise).

https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/Market-data1/Dayahead/Area-...

At the moment electricity is cheapest (and therefore greenest) in the afternoon. Probably because of solar (partially from Germany).

https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE

It's also great to see how much green energy Spain got recently.

None of this is passed over to consumers, the difference is pocked by the providers. It doesn't matter if the price slips into negative, my provider charges me €0,394/KWh regardless (Eneco in the Netherlands).

Nowhere in Europe allow consumers to take the entire risk/ reward because it's unconscionable. If the actual price of electricity on the market soars to $10000 per MWh, and you need to run your dialysis machine, European politicians (unlike apparently Texans) don't think it's OK that you're now bankrupt.

However, you can in several places choose to have a limited exposure, e.g. in the UK Octopus Energy will let you risk paying say £350/MWh at peak times, but also pay say -£50/MWh when it decides to blow a gale at 3am on an autumn night when most people are asleep. Both reward and (more significantly) risk are capped.

Of course you can. I have about a hundred options for hourly pricing here in Sweden.

One company a few friends are using is Tibber.

https://tibber.com/

Mmm. Where can I see that Tibber has complete exposure? Maybe there's a story you can link like "Thanks to Tibber I lost almost €8000 in one month, and had to move back in with my parents" ? The blurb is much the same as Octopus, lots of feel good, not much specifics, I know Octopus is prohibited from offering full exposure, and you can see in its users' metrics that sure enough on a cold still winter evening prices just stop climbing at a certain cut-off.

Several providers offer full exposure in Sweden. It is particularly used by people with electric cars who want to charge it as cheap as possible. And yes you can end up with 8000€ electricity bill if you are really not careful.

Why would that even be a thing? I would have thought that these hourly pricing schemes have some sort of price cap so that you get a localised blackout and get a chance to turn off your biggest consumers.

No individuals were bankrupted by the bills from the 2021 storm. Griddy waived the fees associated with it:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/griddy-energy-charged-9000-powe...

Is there anything preventing the Texas energy company from offering something similar? Alternatively, maybe an insurance company could effectively insure against high prices.

The residents who were paying market rate for power elected to do so prior to the event occurring. The default billing configuration is a much more stable price.

How often are the rates negative? Can they end up paying you? Would it make sense to put a large electric heater outside to max out your usage during negative rates?

To answer my own question... Most UK homes have 100 Amp supplies, so maxing out every 30 minute segment for the year would give you:

    2022  £  53.83
    2021  £   4.41
    2020  £ 111.14
    2019  £   5.45

So probably not worth it!

Data from: https://energy-stats.uk/agile-price-plunges/

Consumers in Finland (and as far as I know, in other Nordics too) can get Nordpool spot priced electricity contracts, doesn't really get truly negative since you need to pay margin, taxes and transfer anyway.

In Denmark most providers charge you hourly rates.

Here is, for example, the page of my current provider: https://www.ok.dk/privat/produkter/el/priser

This page doesn't yet include the additional costs (last mile...), but there is definitely a big difference whether I consume the energy at cheap or expensive hours.

Seems strange UK electricity price is still expensive.