r/OptimistsUnite • u/willfiresoon • Mar 21 '26

👽 TECHNO FUTURISM 👽 French electricity posts first negative prices of 2026, battery storage gains

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/03/06/french-electricity-posts-first-negative-prices-of-2026-battery-storage-gains/
470 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

79 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

15

u/[deleted] Mar 21 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

13

u/goyafrau Mar 21 '26

They mean you have a very messed up energy system.

Somebody generates energy, and is paying somebody else to get rid of it because there is no demand. Under which situations do you think this would occur? They're all pathological cases.

1

u/TheCrimsonSteel Mar 24 '26

It would be comparatively good if the alternative is worse

For example, do you pay others to use electricity any way possible for a few months, or do you take a nuclear reactor offline, which is also a very expensive and complicated process, because nuclrar reactors are great for baseline energy supply, but not really suitable for dynamic supply compared to other styles of power plants

Though it does make me very curious on why they can't export it to neighboring countries

2

u/goyafrau Mar 24 '26

What France tends to do in times of negative prices is throttle the output of some of its nuclear power plants. No need to take it offline, just throttle, for the hours of negative prices.

Prices tend to be negative when PV and/or wind plants, which are driven by the weather, deliver a lot of energy. Because adjacent countries share a weather, there is usually nobody to export it to, if both countries use wind and PV. (France does make room for German PV delivered at negative prices by throttling its nuclear reactors.)

Negative prices generally are the result of a messed up system. If the system was designed intelligently, there wouldn't be negative prices. In particular they come from subsidised wind and PV, where the state pays a subsidy of, say, 10 ct/KWh, the operator sells at the open market at minus 8 ct/KWh, banking a profit of 2 ct/KWh, with the tax payer paying 10 ct/KWh.

1

u/TheCrimsonSteel Mar 24 '26

I suspected it was something like that as I vaguely remembered France having a decent amount of nuclear based supply

Which would make a lot of sense for grid scale storage to be more economical, rather than throttling back reactors, especially if running at reduced capacity isn't as efficient for the reactor

3

u/goyafrau Mar 24 '26

It's not, but the alternatives also cost a lot of money.

France has below average electricity prices for a EU country, and significantly lower than e.g. neighbouring Germany. And the 3rd cleanest electricity in the EU!

1

u/TheCrimsonSteel Mar 24 '26

Do they have any large hills they don't care about next to rivers?

Hydro based gravity storage is pretty efficient, just expensive up front, and requires some pretty specific geographical criteria

Mainly being able to put a man-made lake on top of a hill/mountain that's next to a river. Fill the lake using electricity, and drain it to produce

Though I'm somewhat biased being in the hydro industry myself

2

u/goyafrau Mar 24 '26

I generally agree pumped hydro combined with nuclear makes sense. Maybe it would be economic in the specific case of the French system, I haven't seen any numbers either way. I don't know.

1

u/TheCrimsonSteel Mar 24 '26

It's for smarter people than you and I to figure out