French Power Price Plunges Below Zero as Solar Swamps the Grid

Solar can be non-destructively disconnected and the remote control infrastructure is there

WOW, thank you for this write up! I am able to follow most if not all of this thankfully.

I'm still learning things like this for myself, so I'm happy to share knowledge.

I recently had the tug of war analogy used in an explanation given to me regarding some engineering work to sync a new generator to the grid and it is effectively eye opening.

The tug-of-war was my third attempt at an analogy when I was writing this, so I'm glad the concepts made it through. I was thinking I should have put made Squid Games reference for more clarity about the stakes, like this:


I also assumed that the ERCOT situation was largely or entirely due to gross negligence and Texas things, so it’s nice to learn otherwise. I’d done some reading on the matter awhile back but I mostly just recall the discussion revolving around winter weather without highlighting concerns such as these.

Oh, don't worry, as I understand it there is still plenty of ERCOT negligence. Apparently Texas's ability to deal with over-production or under-production is seriously compromised because of its very small connection to the other grids around Texas (by intentional Texas design). From memory, there's a small link west of Texas through New Mexico, but it can only pull or push a tiny fraction of the electricity riding on the Texas grid so its effectively useless to handle big gridscale swings.

Texas has finally figured out this is a bad idea, and got a check written by Biden's DoE for $360M to make big boy connections to the national power grids. source.

I'm fine with some of my non-Texas tax money going to help the people of Texas step into to the grid the rest of us use. We're all citizens of the USA after all. That is unless Musk and trump decide that $360M is waste that Texas doesn't deserve and cancels the grant through DOGE. Then Texas is back where it started or will have to foot the entire bill themselves.

WOW, thank you for this write up! I am able to follow most if not all of this thankfully.

I recently had the tug of war analogy used in an explanation given to me regarding some engineering work to sync a new generator to the grid and it is effectively eye opening.

I also assumed that the ERCOT situation was largely or entirely due to gross negligence and Texas things, so it's nice to learn otherwise. I'd done some reading on the matter awhile back but I mostly just recall the discussion revolving around winter weather without highlighting concerns such as these.

Not the dude you’ve been responding to, but I’m curious about the infrastructure and tech limitations just in attempt to be more educated.

Warning: GIANT WALL of text incoming. Buckle up.

We all know what happens when there isn't enough power on the grid at a given moment: a blackout.

However, do you know what the extreme result of *too much power* on the grid is at a given moment? Also a blackout.

**Curtailment**

The term to start reading up on is "curtailment". Its used in demand (consumption of electricity) but also supply (generating electricity). Meaning grid operators are always on a knife's edge of generating *just enough* electricity on the grid without being too much. For a small amount of waste, they have ways to burn it off. Think giant space heaters running outside. The loss of money from that "burned off" electricity is there, but its not that big and its considered a cost of doing business. However, there isn't much "burn off" capacity infrastructure. Historically there hasn't needed to be.

Grid operators usually have systems of communication they use to contact their generation partners and ask for more juice to be produced, or more frequently these days telling them to hold off generation. At the grid level though, this isn't like a light switch of "on and off" it can take many minutes or even hours for a grid scale generator to spin up or spin down generation. Also these systems aren't meant to be rapidly spun up and down so it gets expensive to operate like that.

So up to know its just been the grid operator guessing demand needs and talking to a handful of generators to scale up and down. Now with *massive* amounts of electricity generated by thousands of smaller operators (residential as well as smaller commercial) there isn't the same mechanism for the grid operators to halt production.

So what happens when there is a huge excess of electricity and that relatively small "burn off" capacity is quickly consumed? If that excess electricity is allowed through, things literally blow up in the electrical grid, in businesses, and in homes. Those gigawatts of electricity that *cannot be allowed to exist on the grid*. So grid operators can use another mechanism to try to burn off that excess electricity: negative electricity prices. They can *pay people and businesses* to use the excess. A note here, in the years and decades ahead, our society will evolve to use this excess more efficiently by timing high consumption at times of excess, but except in a few small examples, we just aren't there yet. If there aren't enough people taking money to use the electricity, the grid operator may have to cut off sections of grid to keep from blowing them up. Here's the blackout from too much electricity. A full blackout also means coming back online later is a much slower process as sections of the grid are brought up slowly to make sure the demand can meet supply.

Even in state sponsored electrical grids (like I assume France is), grid operators are expected to cover their own costs at least when providing the electricity service to the state. So forget that they still have to maintain the grid with all its equipment and employees when electricity prices are at zero, during these peak times they're having to *pay people to use more electricity*. So even if they were at break-even before, they're now at a loss because they've had to give out money to use their service. Again, in the future societies and technologies (power storage) can address this, but we're not in the future. We're here today with these problems. At its extreme, how many of us will continue to work at if we aren't receiving a paycheck?

**Grid forming/Grid following**

One other difference in grid scale generators vs many/most solar generators is the responsibility for forming the grid. This means, keeping the frequency (60Hz in the North America and half of Japan) (50Hz in most of the rest of the world and the *other half of Japan*). This is done by grid scale generators with GIANT spinning generators and are required by their mandate to make sure the frequency is always stable.

Imagine a game of tug-of-war. The grid scale operator would be the leader closest to the middle and the leader of the team. This is the grid former. All the solar producers are behind the leader all pulling at the leader's instructions. These are the grid followers. So in the middle of a match it is clear that our team is losing and slowing being pulled toward the line. The grid followers don't want to be hurt in the fall, so some of them start dropping the rope protecting themselves. As each one drops, the amount of force on the leader and those remaining increases. More team members drop the rope. The forces increase again! The leader cannot drop the rope because they are not allowed to even though they can see what's coming and is eventually *very violently* pulled across the line and seriously hurt while all the team members (grid followers) are unharmed because they dropped the rope before anything bad happened to them.

This is what happened in Texas a year or so ago. The result was huge blackouts across the state.

This feels like something that should be celebrated regardless of needing to clean up and awareness to improve the grid and electrification moving forward.

It should be celebrated, but it should also be recognized that it creates its own set of problems. We can't simply "take the win" and not make any changes. We've got systems set up for different circumstances and we haven't change the system even though the circumstances have changed.

Not the dude you've been responding to, but I'm curious about the infrastructure and tech limitations just in attempt to be more educated.

It's my personal assumption that there's more overreaction to affecting shareholders as if that matters most when discussing our collective mortality and longevity.

This feels like something that should be celebrated regardless of needing to clean up and awareness to improve the grid and electrification moving forward.

I appreciate your attempt to engage in good faith, but no, my question was very rhetorical. I am not really interested in discussing any answers to that question that neither you nor I would support.

I understand. I've faced some of the same frustrations I'm feeling in your post.

I think most of the opposition to solar panels comes from disingenuous efforts by companies with a financial interest in fossil-fuel,

Most is, I agree. However there are some truthful reasons too because of currently deployed infrastructure or technological limitations, but I agree the majority of anti-solar/ant-wind are bad faith arguments used by fossil fuel invested companies and industries to continue to justify their existence.

I just thought of a reason why trying to explain the downsides of solar power generation always goes so poorly for me.

*Where I live, solar=good is a given. No amount of oil lobbying can overcome the simple fact that thanks to historically heavy subsidies, PV is free money and therefore anti-solar sentiment is fringe because everyone loves free money.*

(Which is its own can of worms because ungoverned PV has externalities which the owners may not be bearing or only partially, while people who can't install PV are essentially using up some of their own taxes to give a tax break to the bourgeois down the street with a solar mansion, and sure that's more solar which is environmentally good but it's also another indirect tax on the poor which is socially deleterious).

Anyway my point is that in a country where nearly everyone has PV or wishes they did, I don't see any issue with plainly stating "PV is causing major headaches to grid operators". Because pragmatically we *need* to justify solutions like dynamic pricing, solar taxes, and the phaseout net metering which are predictably unpopular policies with PV owners who were promised endless riches.

But I suppose from a North American perspective where "renewable energy is good" is somehow the fringe opinion and PV deployment is pathetic, then it makes sense to push back against such messaging.

Nah, let’er rip. Just a clueless bystander here. Tell us why capitalism demonizes free energy. We’ll pretend to be shocked, surprised and to have learned something new along the way.

Capitalism demonizes anything free because free is the antithesis of a version of trade that requires differing values of goods.

Do keep in mind that “lost profits” are not a real thing in the space we’re trying to move in.

Keep in mind MOST of the arguments you hear are bad faith fossil fuel operators so I'm not going to defend those. However, there are a number of issues that this abundance of temporary solar energy creates today with the systems and infrastructure we have deployed today. Keep in mind grid operators are measuring and changing the grid an intervals of fractions of a second to keep everything up and running.

Primary difficulties:

• Electrical generation curtailment

• Scaling non-solar generation back up when the temporary energy isn't there to avoid blackouts

Our grids today aren't built the way they need to to properly take advantage of large scale solar. We need to change how grids are built, and how we behave with how we use electricity as consumers and businesses.

I appreciate your attempt to engage in good faith, but no, my question was very rhetorical. I am not really interested in discussing any answers to that question that neither you nor I would support. If you do have an argument to make, feel free to do so. I may or may not respond. But in case my own point's not clear, I think most of the opposition to solar panels comes from disingenuous efforts by companies with a financial interest in fossil-fuel, and I think they try to cast it in as negative a light as they possibly can, and I don't think their perspective is even worth considering as they continue their ghastly sprint to destroy the future of life on this planet so they can earn money.

Nah, let'er rip. Just a clueless bystander here. Tell us why capitalism demonizes free energy. We'll pretend to be shocked, surprised and to have learned something new along the way.

Do keep in mind that "lost profits" are not a real thing in the space we're trying to move in.

I work for a kind of data provider/dashboard/planing tool for energy grid providers. There is an issue with the "sudden" rise of solar panels and heat pumps and electric cars. Our grid isn't made for this and there needs to be modernised.

That being said: Yay abundant clean energy!

Why is this always worded in such a shitty way that makes it sound like a bad thing. “swamps the grid” “overwhelming the region” “prices slumping”.

I'm happy to provide some real answers to you questions if you're looking for discussion. Some of the answers I don't personally like myself, but they make sense. I say this as a solar advocate as I am happily watching my own solar production climbing with the change of the season.

If you're just looking to rant though, I won't get in your way.

Maybe there is a reason why they use this title. Ofcourse green energy is good, but we have been there for a while.

Obviously, not a problem yet in Canada or in the USA. So it seems Europeans should be happy, while ignoring or marginalizing the nuances and problems of the current energy & electricity systems. The grid is congested and causes electricity fall out (Grid congestion is posing challenges for energy security and transitions.

Also there are companies being paid to use electricity in energy machines that do absolutely nothing, (except deburden the grid by consuming electricity). And they make good money with that.

Ed: in( brackets)

That’s a newspaper headline in a clickbait world.

Although it's not insurmountable with the advent of improved battery storage technology, this kind of dramatic change is an issue for existing baseload infrastructure. The French grid is basically designed around a nuclear baseload which many would already consider 'green.' Nuclear also comes with a very high capital investment, typically from public funds, and energy prices dropping below a certain threshold could impact repayment, public debt and interest costs etc.

because energy grids dont work like that. if you overload them you need to pay extra

Having zero/negative prices incentivizes programs to incentivize consumers to use energy storage to get cheaper prices. Anyone who uses AC/heaters has at least their residence as a thermal battery and people can do things like shift when they do energy intensive activities as well.

Also, if you want enough power generation to power through the evening, then having excess generation during the peak generation hours/days is the expectation. When building new solar/wind is less than half the price of building any other form of energy production (even before considering the externalities of most of those other forms of energy production), its still cheaper to "overbuild" by a factor of two to reduce the need for other sources of power and provides the expectation of excess power needed to justify building storage.

We concentrated so much on solar energy we completely forgot moon energy, and now, we must pay for that oversight.

The negative price drop is likely not good - long run. That's the thing I'm talking about. If you can't sell electricity you can't maintain infrastructure. That will likely correct over time.

Don't worry just wait until, checks notes, the sun goes to bed at night. What then France? How will your solar work in clouds? Check and mate.

Well, mixed news as others have mentioned. Of course it is great how much solar is installed. But at least in Germany, new installation will require a "killswitch" which disconnects the system in cases where the price goes negative/the grid is overloaded. So the grid/storage cannot really handle renewables yet. On the brightside, this only applies if you are not able to dynamically adjust your system. So with a modern system you can just charge your battery or car instead.

Super good news.

Maybe... It's good that peak production is so high, but there isn't enough storage to take real advantage of it yet. And even if you're not paying for power generation you still need to maintain power infrastructure. Maintenance isn't free.

Why is this always worded in such a shitty way that makes it sound like a bad thing. "swamps the grid" "overwhelming the region" "prices slumping". Fuck all the "energy companies" and their bought politicians and journalists who think or at least talk this way.

Here let me fix it for you: "France now has abundant solar energy, providing free electricity to all homes and businesses that want it, while plenty of solar capacity remains in reserve, available for meeting increased demands or storing for later or night-time use by refilling hydroelectric reservoirs"

Where ate all the "solar is too complicated for s grid!!" people now?

Super good news.