By P Gosselin on 16. April 2025
Blackout News here reports on how Germany’s uncontrolled solar production without appropriate storage and consumption models is putting a huge burden on the domestic market and consumers.
At the same time, neighboring countries are benefiting from all the free electricity Germany uncontrollably overproduces and consumers just don’t need!
Image generated by Grok AI
Experts are warning of the collapse of an over-regulated energy system that is increasingly moving away from reality. Germany has significantly expanded its solar PV capacity in recent years. According to the Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur), the total installed solar PV capacity in Germany reached 99.3 GW at the end of December 2024.
The country’s massive solar power production is leading to a growing problem due to mass overproduction and the resulting negative electricity prices, which occur particularly when the sun is shining midday and demand is low: all the surplus electricity flows abroad – free of charge! This sort of absurdity is what happens when politicians and bureaucrats take over energy engineering.
In 2023, the proportion of hours with negative prices averaged 18%, in May it was as high as 31%. Despite billions being invested in the expansion of photovoltaics, basic measures such as storage technologies and smart meters are being neglected.
Experts criticize the lack of powerful battery storage systems and the sluggish expansion of smart electricity meters, which could enable the flexible use of surplus electricity. Energy market expert Björn Peters criticizes the current legal situation, which does not allow operators of solar systems to participate in negative prices and thus creates false incentives.
He is calling for a halt to the expansion of PV and the abolition of the EEG green energies feed-in act.
Peters advocates a fundamental change of course towards a more reliable energy supply, including a return to nuclear power, the expansion of coal-fired power generation and the use of domestic gas reserves. The current energy system is neither sustainable nor financially viable. So far, politicians have not provided any clear answers or concrete measures to relieve the burden on citizens and companies.
Originally reported on by Bild.
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“The country’s massive solar power production is leading to a growing problem due to mass overproduction and the resulting negative electricity prices, which occur particularly when the sun is shining midday and demand is low: all the surplus electricity flows abroad – free of charge! “
Why are we suddenly against free and abundant electricity?
Hahahahaha…you last sentence is indeed the joke of the day
The thing with Solar is that you really have only 3 options…
1) Use it WHEN it’s produced
2) If production is over demand needs dump it on the open market even at negative prices. (pay a neighbor to take it)
3) Build costly and potentially explosive back up storage batteries to hold the overproduction until needed so you don’t have to pay someone to take the excess.
Of course you could install Switches on rooftop solar to segregate it from the grid in times that it is overcapacity to demand
“ Use it WHEN it’s produced”
Yes. And hold back on your gas, dam storage or whatever until the sun goes down.
Who’s keeping the grid frequency and voltage going?
It still works just fine.
Mr. Stokes: Well, that’s reassuring, why are we worked up about this? Why are Norwegians opposed to it??!! You can’t grasp why folks are upset about free electricity. Marie Antoinette couldn’t understand why folks didn’t just eat cake, there was so much of it about the palace.
History teaches that when europeans decide they won’t take it anymore, things get ugly. It’ll work fine, until it doesn’t.
“Why are Norwegians opposed to it??!”
Yes, we had that one a few days ago. The poor Norwegians were somehow being forced to make up for Germany’s failure to generate by selling them power at very high prices. Now the complaint is that Germany is overflowing with power and forcing its neighbours to buy it at negative prices.
I love the way Nick has to lie about other articles in order to protect his paycheck.
The issue with Norway is that by increasing demand, they are increasing the cost of energy in Norway.
A negative price means someone is paying to have someone else take the power. So who pays? Certainly not the producer. I’m guessing the rate payers in Germany – or is it the taxpayers?
So we pay capital costs for two parallel sets of infrastructure, one so ‘it’ can still work when needed and one which overproduces when not needed and underproduces when needed. Sounds really sensible. Not.
It’s not just capital costs. The fossil fuel infrastructure has to be maintained in a constant state of readiness so that it can take over when wind and solar fail.
The cost of running at standby is only a few percent cheaper than the cost of running flat out.
The thing that keeps grid frequency and voltage stable is the fact that there is enough gas, coal, nuclear and/or hydro in the system.
Wind and solar have a DE-STABILISING effect.
but… but… it makes people feel progressive! /s
Now you’re just phoning it in.
The fact that the system hasn’t collapsed is proof that there are no problems. This is low, even by your pathetic standards.
That’s all part of the hidden cost behind solar PV and wind.
There are companies these days that make money just providing rotational inertia services to offset the solar PV and wind impact on the grid. One such company literally repurposed from making cruise ship engines to “rotational inertia” sources.
One manufacturing facility that I toured early in my career, had a mechanical voltage smoothing device to handle short term spikes and drop outs in the line voltage.
It was a motor that was driven directly from the grid, that turned a generator which provided the power for the facility. (It was a small facility). The motor and generator combined weighed close to 1000 pounds.
Yep now consider that kind of motor but much MUCH bigger i.e. cruise ship engine. Dozens and hundreds of them.
Yeah, motor generator had one of those back in the early 80’s, cost $15K, never worked as it would overheat and shut itself down. It had a solid rubber axle connected to the generator which electrically isolated it, a 3″ concrete disk 18″ diameter. Heavy tech but useless…
And they do so for nothing right? Nick’s point is that the electricity is free and abundant. It can’t be free if companies charge for their equipment and services, right?
Yes, of course. These guys are purely in it for saving the planet lol.
The wind energy thing is so bad that ERCOT, for example, was forced to build a transmission line connecting Lubbock to the West Texas grid just so that the demand inertia of that smallish city would smooth out the massive jags induced by wind turbines turning off and on.
Which once again illustrates how little is understood about the grid by these dumbfucks assuming that said grid works like the electrical system in their house.
It’s produced mostly when nobody wants it. If that were not the case, there would be no problem.
European electricity grids operate at 50Hz, US at 60Hz, and have to be maintained to within less than +/- 1Hz – or the grid shuts down for safety reasons. Solar output being direct current cannot stabilise frequency which needs the inertia and angular momentum provided by machinery like gas or steam turbines and/or large mechanical (flywheel) batteries common in fossil fuel power stations.
Furthermore solar output fluctuates with time of day and atmospheric condition so that means fossil fuel power stations will always be needed running in back-up to provide grid stability. This adds to the cost of the “free” sunbeams.
In order to “believe” in replacing fossil fuel power stations it requires a complete ignorance of physics and economics. It appears schools and universities actually teach ignorance these days.
And once again, little Nickie tries to pretend that shutting down fossil fuel plants at random times during the day, saves money.
You’ve been corrected on this many times.
When did you stop being a scientist?
Stokes never began being a Scientist.
i’ve always considered nick a mathematician, Good with numbers but clueless when it comes to critical thinking. He thinks numbers create reality rather than reflect reality.
It’s not only Nick!
Solar output drops off well before the sun goes down.
And that was the way it was with towns gas. It could only be used or stored, hence those massive gas holders in cities up and down the U.K. over production has to be stored somewhere. Problem with electricity – storage is not cheap.
Demand that all Germans do their laundry at midday with a temperature setting of at least 40ºC.
All EV charging should be during that same time period.
People would find a way if it’s free.
Even better if we could get paid to consume the useless energy.
It is even worse than that.
A common myth is that electricity is cheaper and easier to transport than other forms of energy.
THIS IS FALSE.
When you factor for the massive capital and maintenance requirements, electricity is actually almost an order of magnitude more expensive to transport than say, gasoline or oil.
So the transport of excess electricity to other nations is not only costing the negative price of the electricity transported, it is also costing the grid money for the transport itself. If this transport was part of the grid design and economic planning, that’s one thing but clearly this is not a “normal” expense for the grid hence yet another hidden cost paid by the German grid customer – feeding into Germany’s world and EU highest electricity pricing structure.
Also energy loss to overcome resistance in the cabling and inverters and transformers. The greater the distance travelled, the more inverters/transformers between generator and point of delivery, the greater the loss.
That lost energy is part of the production cost and is factored into end-user prices.
Normal grid operations have estimated losses of between 8% and 15% depending on conditions.
When the transport is being done in AC, there are also parasitic losses as the alternating current induces eddy currents in any conductor near the lines.
Yes correct, transmission line losses are eaten by the grid since the wind and solar PV generators are paid basically at the substation level i.e. grid entry. And of course, the majority of the solar PV and wind generation is far, far away from consumers – much farther than typical fossil fuel generators and often even farther than dam and nuclear sources, in aggregate kWh/km measures.
Coal is also cheap to transport.
Coal is cheap to transport and the cheapest to store. A coal plant can literally just stack up weeks and months of use. But terrible CO2 and ash sources.
Cost of transport and storage is actually why the $ per MMBTU (unit of heat) for natural gas is so much lower than oil.
Just short the electricity to ground…the sunlight would have warmed the ground anyway if the PV panels weren’t in the way….energy conservation and all….
I’m not sure if Nick intentionally made a hilarious remark or just posted a dumbass remark as usual to provoke others and drag the thread off topic.
Either way, I for one would appreciate free and abundant electricity and since Nick seems to be advocating for that, I’d sure he won’t mind supplying it.
Humor – a difficult concept.
— Lt. Saavik
It isn’t “free” if you have to PAY the homeowner for producing it then PAY a neighboring country to take your excess production
And it isn’t “Abundant” if it isn’t also constant, its simply uncontrollable overproduction that is costly to deal with.
I’m not, Nick. I can handle as much as you are prepared to give me.
I have a feeling you are just bumping your gums, and can’t find any “free electricity” for me at all! Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.
Because the free and abundant electricity is produced usually when there is no demand. Solar is not despatchable, and never will be.
It ain’t free because it’s expensive and difficult to manage the temporary nature of the feed. Western Australia has the same problem and we introduced new rules in 2022 and updated this years so the new PV installs have to be able to be removed from grid.
https://www.wa.gov.au/organisation/energy-policy-wa/information-industry-emergency-solar-management
To manage the crap we need 4 grid batteries the first one being built now
https://colliebattery.com.au/
That thing was expected to cost $1.6B it is already over budget and will probably come in closer to $3B and will hold 500 Mega Watts for 4 hours. It annual maintenance cost is yet to be disclosed by WA gov because it will probably scare the crap out of us.
So Nick please don’t tell us it’s free because we can put dollar numbers to it when the government will tell us.
Look up Moss Landing. The costs and maintenance are relatively small compared to the impact when, not if, one of these battery farms catches fire.
For the same reason that people in flood plains are against free and abundant water, Nick.
Nice one.
Indeed. Short and sweet.
“Why are we suddenly against free and abundant electricity?“
Which is why Germany has some of the most expensive electricity in the world.. right !!
If its only abundant when people don’t need it.. it is USELESS. !
Who is against free and abundant electricity?
Presumably the Greens who you would think would be demanding that Germany construct storage facilities to store all this energy, and save billions of Euros each year.
Is there any particular technical reason why billions of Euros worth of free, renewable energy has to be wasted because it is useless at present?
Free abundant electricity at present is like the free abundant car parking you can find if you park your car in a quiet village at 3:30 in the morning , rather than in a city centre at 9am.
Perhaps we can solve the problem of car parking charges by increasing the number of car parking spaces available in rural towns between 11pm and 5 am?
It’s not free. Tax payers paid for the construction of the panels, pay for the grid to take the electricity at favourable prices, pay for the cost of curtailing conventional production, and pay for the excess to be exported at a negative price.
But that’s all Other People’s Money, so ‘free’ as far as Nick is concerned.
You left out labor, maintenance, and repair.
More to the point than my previous frivolous reply, is that the electricity isn’t free at all. The infrastructure to generate this electricity costs a lot of money. Possibly even more than the useful electricity generated is worth, especially if it’s being thrown away like this.
I know that you like to believe, and do keep telling us, that the infrastructure is irrelevant, and it’s all ‘free electricity’, but the complete reverse is the case. All methods of generating electricity require expensive infrastructure. All of it needs to be built and maintained. Not using it to generate electricity is a total waste of that investment, whether you are stopping gas turbines from turning because the sun comes out for 5 minutes or a breeze blows, or if you’re generating electricity that needs to be given away or even paid to be used.
It’s all wasted money. It’s all our money, not the government’s. Our money is being wasted by renewable energy sources coming and going. All the while, people are lining their pockets with our money and laughing.
Are you laughing, Nick? I’m beginning to think that you must be.
Your economic knowledge is a century out of date. It’s not wasted. Somebody gets it. The faster you can spend money, the more it boosts the economy. The more government you have, the more the economy is a function of government spending. The more taxes are, the more the government can spend, and the more do-gooders the government can hire to insist they are doing good…..well you get my drift…you’ll be rich in no time due to the stimulated economy…just follow the spinning spinners….
Because it is not free. Solar PV and wind are generating electricity when nobody wants it – hence negative prices – not when people need it – which is why Germany has the highest electricity prices almost in the entire world.
Yes, consider that “anomaly”: massive curtailment payments combined with some of the highest electricity prices in the entire world as well as even just within the EU.
I do have a quibble with the article: solar PV certainly contributes to negative pricing because of mid-day duck curve negative pricing. The bulk of alternative energy curtailment though, is certainly due to wind – specifically overnight wind. Solar PV at least can be shifted, *relatively* cheaply, to the afternoon duck curve spike since the storage requirement is only about 4 hours. But this is a fart in a hurricane when you are forced to overbuild solar PV and wind by 4x or 5x tro try and replace 1x dispatchable generation,
Who pays for it and who gets it for free to resell for profit is the issue.
Giving it away to people who didn’t pay for it, while those who did are charged insane prices for what they do get, and continuing incentives to keep doing wasteful things. Yes, sane people are opposed to bad planning and corruption.
It is interesting that you don’t get that.
He tries very hard not to. He really is a master at it.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Attributed to various people.
Upton Sinclair is the usual suspect.
“We” are not. The investors who get no return on their capital, are. The solution by the nitwits in charge, is to pick the pockets of taxpayers and transfer the money into the pockets of the investors.
An over supply during a short period is not evidence that wind and solar are free and abundant.
When did you stop being a scientist?
Free destroys all competition.
Nick see my comment on dumping. “Free” electricity paid for by one country’s subsidies is bankrupting essential infrastructure in another. It is not free at all. It is not “abundant” in any conventional sense. It is playing with lives and other people’s money.
Exactly Nick. If it is free, why do we have to pay for it?? The solar operators should pay the negative feed in price. Problem solved.
Nick, the “free”, which really means not paid for, electricity is delivered to neighboring countries and their utility grids. The consumers are still paying for it at the contract rates. This is a huge win for the govt and utility operators, as their bottom line is being subsidized by Germany.
If it is free and abundant, what is the problem? Let’s just spend money hand over fist to build more and more and then give away more and more. Don’t know where the capital or maintenance money will come from, but it free and abundant, right?
I can’t speak for everyone – I’m not
I’m against unreliable, weather-dependent electricity that doesn’t need back-up.
Know of anything, Nick?
You should look up the meaning of “dispatchable, reliable, controllable, frequency-stable”.
Free electricity when demand is low and super expensive when demand is high, that is a crazy way to run a critical infrastructure system. Sounds like the Ryanair way of doing business.
Stokes was a great physicist who devised the well-known Stokes’ Parameters, of critical importance in photovoltaics. That Stokes is turning over in his grave at his namesakes’ comments.
Trying to build a stable output from unstable inputs reminds me of the BC comic where one of the characters invents a triangular wheel and insists that it is an improvement over the square wheel because it has one less bump.
“The Sun is the primary forcing of Earth’s climate system.”
As said NASA, before they succumbed. You can still see their web page with those very words here, right near the end:
https://www.juststopnetzero.com/
Maybe someone could suggest the excess German solar is used in a high energy process that leaves a valuable product that does not deteriorate once the energy is unavailable.
Perhaps they could look at aluminium smelting? The energy needed to produce one tonne of aluminium is roughly 11MWh. that is from bauxite ore to an ingot of pure aluminium. The energy needed to simply melt aluminium from ingot to molten for further use is roughly 400kWh.
So we can see the energy needed to refine the aluminium from the ore is roughly 20 times the energy needed to melt it thereafter.
Can I suggest the German energy team look at installing aluminium pot lines. The induction powered smelters will consume all of their excess energy around the 11.00 am to 2.00pm period of ‘free energy’. The smelters can then go home or go fishing until the next day. The other great plus is the raw aluminium is high value and won’t degrade in the storage period.
What’s not to like?
You’ll either end up bricking the smelters every time the sun goes down, or you’ll end up running them on other power sources over winter, with some of the most expensive electricity in the world.
Apparently the Australians can do this, I have doubts about Germany being able to do the same.
The Hexham/Tomago aluminium smelter was built specifically to minimise the cost of coal fired electricity to domestic consumers, because it allowed the Hunter Valley power stations to operate on a almost continual level basis.
Unlike domestic supply it doesn’t have peak and lull periods, and in fact produces around the clock. Domestic supply is more a side benefit. 🙂
The problem is that industrial scale electricity use – whether smelting or making hydrogen or whatever – requires 24/7/365 power supply due to the massive capital costs and the way in which supply chains work these days.
I have found and have been updating a method which can make use of intermittent electricity to produce fixed nitrogen. It is based on a process that was in actual industrial production, 100+ years ago but has been updated. But there are NO other efforts going on AFAIK, because the eggheads are focused on grant money as opposed to addressing the real economic problem.
For example: the process in question – the research universities in the EU have literally regressed to the original process, only “updating” it by making 2 alternating electrodes (stupid beyond words) or using $500K semiconductor microwave generators instead of the practical route I am working on.
The former is stupid beyond words because it is not intermittent capable; the latter is stupid as well because the massive capital cost makes Fischer Tropsch plants look cheap.
Or use it to regenerate dilithium crystals.
/h
‘Captain, the dilithium crystals are completely f’d!’
I was always amazed that a Starship with 10’ ceilings and vast amounts of unused space never bothered to carry any spare parts.
Ahh, you didn’t spot the 3 D printing room. Able to produce anything needed when combined with the teleportation algorithm.All very much in vogue at the final frontier. Or was it the final front ear? 🙂
The UK will be in the same situation in the next couple of years, with ~8GW of wind and 5GW solar in the pipeline, although we’ll probably solve the problem of exporting it for free by simply not connecting them to the network.
Of course this electricity isn’t free, thanks to the contracts for difference, the owners will get their strike price whether we want the electricity or not, so the UK consumers/taxpayers will end up footing the bill for all this.
And, of course, wind and solar generation tend to be strongly correlated across Europe, so if Germany has too much solar, the UK will be in the same position as well.
Why is anybody still surprised that increasing solar and wind generation are not making the grid more reliable or resilient and the costs to the consumer and rising accordingly. This has been predicted for decades, because of insufficient finance for maintaining dispatchable baseload energy and the lack of reliable long-term storage from batteries or otherwise.
Those governments like in the UK and Australia who are denying these realities in pursuance of global warming ideology and hide behind outright scientific / financial lies about coal, gas and nuclear energy costs, reliability and efficiency, are going to have to recant and face the public anger sooner than later.
Let’s have a look at the following article to see why: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/04/16/no-bbc-electricity-is-not-expensive-because-of-gas-but-because-of-renewables-subsidies/
So essentially, the BBC (and other broadcasters) are happy to allow renewables salespeople time on their flagship news/current affairs programme, and allow them to spread wildly misleading claims about the benefits of renewables whilst trying to offload the costs elsewhere, and even the Daily Skeptic can’t get it right.
Naturally, no alternative viewpoint from anyone sceptical about renewables or net-zero will be allowed on the air, regardless of their qualifications.
To see the scale of the problem, this time yesterday in the UK wind was producing 11.5 GW, today wind is producing 2.25 GW. At peak today solar was providing 10 Gw.
So when the solar goes down in a couple of hours there will be a total shortfall of 19.25 GW.
Thank goodness we still have gas generation.
Imagine a bakery which produces so much bread that each customer gets 10 breads for free every day. The customer can handle only one bread per day, so 9 breads end up as waste. Who pays for the commodities and energy to produce all these breads, from which 90% end up as waste? We have to assume that that would be the customer.
Free markets are regulated by price – a rationing mechanism – which is the product of supply and demand. Undersupply = prices go up encouraging increased supply, reduced demand; over supply = prices go down encouraging reduced supply and increased demand. In both cases price is a balancing mechanism to even out supply and demand. This has been effective using Peak and Off-peak rates where electricity supply is from dispatchable power stations. It cannot work with intermittent power supply.
The intermittency of wind and solar means the market mechanism cannot work, because supply cannot be controlled to match demand, and demand cannot be controlled to match supply – reducing demand makes no difference when nothing is being supplied.
Attempts to eliminate intermittency rest on building more and more redundancy for what is an intractable problem which inevitably leads to famine or feast. Supply can never match demand at any price because the two are out of phase, and price will fluctuate widely to no good effect.
The notion that storage will solve the problem is flawed, because it too is the victim of intermittency – discharge and recharge cannot be planned to address both supply failure of the primary supply and varying demand.
An impossible situation has been engineered by people who completely fail to understand, or don’t want to understand, that an electricity grid cannot operate with intermittent supply which cannot be scheduled to match demand at particular times and days as anticipated from historic observation.
If I lived nearby I’d invest in storage systems in my own country and take advantage of that incredible arbitrage and resell (or use) at night.
The storage would cost more to build and run than any possible saving from a more conventional system.
According to the WTO it is illegal to dump any product below cost in another country.
Germany is dumping electricity (when it is convenient) on the Central European Grid at zero cost. This is then taken by countries like Czech Republic which (briefly) stop buying power form local coal-fired stations. This is bankrupting their own local generating plants. I read that the Czech Rep is suing Germany for violating WTO rules. Further, they will have to subsidize the local plants because they are absolutely required when Germany is not dumping power.
So what do the Greens say about this? They say, “See! Coal fired electricity is more expensive than renewable wind power! Bring more!”
This is cartoon environmentalism.
All part of the European Single Market, so WTO rules don’t apply.
Negative pricing drives everyone else out of business leaving only solar.
Subsidies drive everyone else out of business, leaving only wind/solar, and then only when the wind blows/sun shines.
Experts criticize….
Give those anonymous useless ‘experts’ a rest. They show up in countless ‘news’ reports, adding nothing of substance, mostly just bulking up the text and attempting to raise undefined anxieties.
Fantasy green energy pricing dissapears when the enrgy crosses an international border.
The true value is negative.
It’s pretty easy. The owners stop maintaining those solar farms. They eventually fall apart and then they run to the obliging politicians to fund the cleanup and disposal of the spent panels.
That was probably the plan anyway.
The owners are in it for the subsidies, if they get anything for the electricity that’s a bonus on top.
Nick Stokes, if you ever find yourself out of work downunder there in Ozonia, Governor Hochul probably has a job for you as Communications Director for New York state’s net zero transition program.
One of your assignments will be to convince the state’s energy planners that New York state does not need massive volumes of battery storage and/or pumped hydro storage to keep the lights on in winter.
Remove the government/politicians and your problems go away.
another day of useless wind installations in Australia – capacity factors in the basement. I wonder what fuel is holding up the grid?
https://anero.id/energy/wind-energy
“This sort of absurdity is what happens when politicians and bureaucrats take over energy engineering.”
Nothing truer was ever said
IMHO the root of the problem is to imagine that electricity is the same sort of energy as a litre of oil or a lump of coal or a cylinder of gas. It is not. The actual energy of electricity is nothing at all. It is simply the carrier of, for example, kinetic energy from moving air or photons from sunlight or perhaps water falling from a height. Electricity is simply the carrier of some other form of energy. If the other form of energy is intermittent then there is no electrical energy.
Until this basic physical fact is recognised we will continue to believe in net zero and perpetual motion machines