It’s still not earning you money to spend electricity because you still have to pay the transfer fee which is around 6 cents / kWh but it’s pretty damn cheap nevertheless, mostly because of the excess in wind energy.

Last winter because of a mistake it dropped down to negative 50 cents / kWh for few hours, averaging negative 20 cents for the entire day. People were literally earning money by spending electricity. Some were running electric heaters outside in the middle of the winter.

  • booly@sh.itjust.works
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    6 months ago

    I don’t know why you’re framing this as solely a demand problem, or why you think the elasticity of demand won’t extend to negative prices. Negative prices tend to show up only during periods of very high supply, due to a confluence of factors like weather, so supply is part of it (low or even negative prices can induce producers to curtail production). There’s nothing special about the number zero.

    And negative prices therefore take the place of disposal: oversupply and the need to expand real resources taking that energy off of the grid in that particular moment. That’s demand, too: incentivizing people to do what needs to be done, and get rid of that excess energy by disposing it or whatever.