Am I the only one that doesn't understand how something could fall into a negative price range? Like does that mean the power companies have to pay the people using power? And how is power being that cheap a problem in any way? Isn't cheap accessible power what we've been striving to achieve??
this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2024
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Just a note to say that this is the electricity market breaking down - don't celebrate it! France has had low-carbon energy since the 70s when they built a load of nuclear power. The have started building renewable plants rather than updating the nuclear plants. Electricity cannot be stored in the amounts that we use it. So many statistics about wind/solar quote power act like we can use it all... but an installation battery that could store a country like France's worth of energy for 12 hours (solar never works at night) would be the biggest megastructure humans have built*. During a period of high pressure a whole country might get little wind for a week. Also, check out this map if you visit regularly the low carbon energy solutions are nuclear or hydro... the only countries that reliably don't burn fossil fuels use these. [edit: clarity, *edit: Not quite-about 100mx100mx50m, approximately the same size as the Great Pyramid of Giza, but made of flammable material - I got confused with something that could provide a week or two for windless anticyclones]
^oh ^no!
Yet whenever prices for something go negative we're never paid for taking it off their hands.
That's cuz it's not really negative in reality. That's not how services work.
Negative prices mean the companies are paying people to burn energy because too much energy in the grid is also a problem!
It's really meant for industry because a couple households turning on their hair dryers isn't going to cut it
is this end consumer prices? This sounds more like we're totalling in french energy exports, (france exports a LOT of nuclear energy, as well presumably, renewable)
French government make electricity price scale on the most expansive one. So with the war in Ukraine, the price of gas plumed up, and so do every electricity bill that was never so expansive, by far.
The "liberalization of energy market" force everyone to buy electricity from courrier that don't do anything; they do not produce or invest, they just buy and sell electricity. This firms take all the money between the price and the cost. This severely threat the electricity production, that is still made by the former public firm (ex « Électricité de France » ); even if it's electricity is the cheapest, and it's the firm that invest the more in renewable energy.
I wonder if people will soon realize that that rage they have for scalpers is just directed at the amateurs and that the upper class is full of people doing pretty much the same thing just in less obvious ways.
Your employer (if you work for a private for-profit company) pays you x for your labour and then takes the proceeds of the labour and sells it for y where y is (generally) much higher than x. A business is profitable when the sum of all y is higher than the sum of all x.
If it's a non-profit, then the difference between y and x must be put back into the business in some way, which could be an investment into an expansion of its scope or it could be a raise for some or all of the workers (payroll is not profit, it's an expense). And that could mean just the CEO gets a raise, because some of the leeching is via different pay levels for different people that isn't based on just the difference they are directly making to the income.
Public services can vary. If the service is profitable, then the profit goes into the budget of the government entity(s) that run it, as determined by legislature. So everyone is acting as the middleman there. If it's not profitable, then it's covered by taxes, at cost. There's still varying salaries but it's subject to government oversight, so things shouldn't get as unbalanced as they would in the private sector, at least in theory. Though even in the public sector, there's this assumption that promotions should come with big raises, regardless of how the workload changes, so you can still have people at the top making orders of magnitude more than people at the bottom.
yeah that sounds about right, we have a similar structure here in the US with power co-ops, and generation sellers, and then end consumers. In our local case we have generators, running through a co-op. Which is running through another co-op which is then being sold to end consumers.
Gotta love modern economics.
I'm not French nut usually the price of transmission is omitted, netting in a positive cost for end consumers. If it was really negative, there would be businesses just burning energy to make money.
Battery business should be good in the future though.
yeah, the only case where power companies would pay people to consume power would be the event that they are over producing, and have nowhere for it to go, which would be actively harmful, nuclear plants will lose money if you aren't selling energy, but it doesn't make sense to buy that energy yourself, you would just let it burn. Or maybe the government would subsidize burning it, i don't know. Generally this kind of thing happens in a really unstable electricity market. It's not that ideal.
Energy storage is going to be a huge business though, i think batteries are probably going to be common than people think, compared to things like thermal storage, though i guess it all depends on how expensive batteries are in comparison more than anything.
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