this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
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I think people do not realize that there is a huge bonus for the first country to unlock the "negative price energy peak" achievement.
There are some businesses that will only be possible in these conditions and they will flock to the first country with it. Generating hydrogen seems like the most straightforward one, but there are also bio-ethanol processes that require some energy to be profitable.
We see intermittency as a curse, but I think we overestimate the difficulty to adapt to an intermittent schedule and we underestimate the advantage of having time spans with free energy, especially when they happen during the day.
I wouldn't be so sure, at least yet. In Europe, everything's connected, so they'll just end up selling it to other countries.
Can imagine that it's better than selling it to random local companies for next to nothing
Yes, right now we don't see this effect because the obvious thing to do is to sell it to your neighbor so they can temporarily shut down coal or gas plants. That effect will kick in when your neighbors can't do that anymore (e.g. because they also switched to the same type of intermittent power) and there won't be any easy way to cash out on additional electricity. We are not there yet.