Europe has too much solar?

Interesting article (https://www.reuters.com/business/en...its-prices-exposing-storage-needs-2024-06-21/ ) concerning the issues when there is too much supply chasing not enough loads.

OSLO/PARIS, June 21 (Reuters) - Europe has clocked a record number of hours of negative power prices this year due to a mismatch between demand and supply as solar power generation soars, potentially helping to shift investment to much needed storage solutions.
Wholesale power markets in most of Europe's key economies turned out zero or negative prices for a record number of hours in the first five months of this year at times of low demand. That means producers more frequently have to pay to offload power, or stop their plants.

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There has been some discussion about balcony solar, or the use of micro inverters on the Forum recently. The assumption on a few peoples part is that this should be allowed without regulation or need to get electric companies approval. The thing is that being able to pickup load from the grid demands that sufficient loads exist. In the past the grid was considered an infinite load where the few solar grid tie users did not need to worry that there contribution would upset the apple cart.

Does your rights to pick up grid load exceed the rights of the person down the road who has a grid tie setup? How do you apportioned share? If the electric company charges nothing for power due to more supply than needed than obviously someone somewhere is losing money. The idea of having more battery storage to shift demand supply does not simplify any of this because folks that do this are relying on selling at a higher price and buying back at a lower price. Almost like a customer of a grocery store buying an item at a slow time and than demanding the store pay them more for it during a rush period.

The shift to more solar power is proving interesting.

Too much solar but very little sunshine from my experience

Too much Solar in Europe? Good, now they can tear down all those ugly wind turbines.

ThaiTaffy said:

Too much solar but very little sunshine from my experience

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When I lived in Paris, I saw the sun once.

mvonw said:

When I lived in Paris, I saw the sun once.

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I lived in the Ardennes. Dark, cold and rainy driving to work in the morning…dark, cold and rainy driving home from work late afternoon.

But on the days I flew I got to see the Sun.

mvonw said:

When I lived in Paris, I saw the sun once.

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I grew up in Wales decided to take up welding as a hobby so I could get a tan.

Mattb4 said:

Interesting article (https://www.reuters.com/business/en...its-prices-exposing-storage-needs-2024-06-21/ ) concerning the issues when there is too much supply chasing not enough loads.



There has been some discussion about balcony solar, or the use of micro inverters on the Forum recently. The assumption on a few peoples part is that this should be allowed without regulation or need to get electric companies approval. The thing is that being able to pickup load from the grid demands that sufficient loads exist. In the past the grid was considered an infinite load where the few solar grid tie users did not need to worry that there contribution would upset the apple cart.

Does your rights to pick up grid load exceed the rights of the person down the road who has a grid tie setup? How do you apportioned share? If the electric company charges nothing for power due to more supply than needed than obviously someone somewhere is losing money. The idea of having more battery storage to shift demand supply does not simplify any of this because folks that do this are relying on selling at a higher price and buying back at a lower price. Almost like a customer of a grocery store buying an item at a slow time and than demanding the store pay them more for it during a rush period.

The shift to more solar power is proving interesting.

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this is heavily sponsored by PoCo's, that dont want to invest in storage.
Furthermore politics is too much focused on generation

of course this is IMHO

I can tell you from my country's perspective (Poland). Today is an average part cloudy summer day. Here is our grid's status at 20 minutes before 4pm:

The table reads from top left column:
Needs: 20 947MW
Generation: 21 224MW
heat generating plants 12 105MW
hydro 149 MW
wind 345 MW
PV 8 625 MW
other renewable 0
balance 306 MW Export
freq 49 979 Hz

This shows 12.1 GW of production from classic heat based power plants and 8.6GW of solar. When there is no clouds or you look at say 2pm it is 50/50. We're also plagued with "too high voltage". Our network is old, rarely a residential building will have its own transformer. Usually entire streets of houses are served by one step down transformer and when the sun shines the guy on the end of the cabe has 260V (our inverters are programmed to shut down at 253V). People are rather unhappy, because recently the country moved to net billing from net metering (EU made it manadatory was the excuse - but yet Netherlands, an EU country kept net metering so it is bull**** that EU has made it compulsory).

The "last mile" of our network has not been upgraded in decades and decades despite paying pretty penny for distribution costs. And now costs of electricity were raised 3x and will go even higher.... So many people are unhappy. Is there too much solar for the current network? Perhaps, but if the network was properly upgraded during all these years it would handle it no problem. There are automatic tap switching devices that can raise/lower voltage on transformers as necessary. They are rarely used. There is suspicion the utility companies set high voltage taps for summer on purpose to prevent those people grandfathered into net metering (lik emyself) from "putting energy away for winter". While they have contracts and they have to pay big solar producers for downtime, they just need to up the voltage and they shut down all individuals with their grid-tie setups in a region. So off grid with grid backup has been becoming very popular recently.

I think the correct perspective is that Europe has not enough batteries.

Mattb4 said:

Does your rights to pick up grid load exceed the rights of the person down the road who has a grid tie setup? How do you apportioned share? If the electric company charges nothing for power due to more supply than needed than obviously someone somewhere is losing money. The idea of having more battery storage to shift demand supply does not simplify any of this because folks that do this are relying on selling at a higher price and buying back at a lower price. Almost like a customer of a grocery store buying an item at a slow time and than demanding the store pay them more for it during a rush period.

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A restaurant is a better analogy than a grocery store. Everyone is setting up restaurants, and forcing customers to buy when they have food available, regardless of whether the customer is hungry or not.

Until you get Residential Solar to sell at the same price as Electric Suppliers, it is the poor person who can't afford solar that pays the price. Someone has to pay the negative price for energy, and that is baked into the average rate the utility charges for residential power.

Firm scheduled power (from a gas power plant) has more value than non-firm unscheduled power (residential solar without battery). Thus enters the opportunity for people to install batteries. If I can get power for free or negative cost, and store it for when I need it later in the day, why bother with solar panels? 1-1 net metering means solar produces what it can and batteries sit idle until the grid goes down. TOU means batteries time shift free and negative cost power, and solar panels sit idle until the grid goes down. If you don't care about grid down, then don't install panels.

You might think that if you are only picking up the loads from your home that how can it hurt? You may be taking those loads away from the system as a whole and so now the neighbor who paid thousands for a solar grid tie setup has no loads to send their production to. As I say it does get interesting.

I'm pretty sure I read somewhere recently that Australia are now thinking about charging residential solar produces for offloading power to the grid...

ThaiTaffy said:

I'm pretty sure I read somewhere recently that Australia are now thinking about charging residential solar produces for offloading power to the grid...

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Doing the same here..
But shutting down coal plants ?
No sir

mvonw said:

When I lived in Paris, I saw the sun once.

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LOL - that's once more than when I went to Seattle

Wholesale power markets in most of Europe's key economies turned out zero or negative prices for a record number of hours in the first five months of this year at times of low demand.

So, before summer? Yea, that's the same problem most people with solar have in the spring.

Until last month, even my meager amount of solar made more power than I could use ... i.e. no heat or airconditioning needed from February to May. But now? If I quadrupled my panels I could still manage to use it all up running air conditoning. I didn't need it, but I started running an air conditioner in May because with cool days and lots of sun the power potential was otherwise wasted. Now, heat is up, output is down, and I can use everything I make. That's one reason I have been up on the roof every morning for the past week, putting up more panels.

olivinelife said:

I think the correct perspective is that Europe has not enough batteries.

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Exactly. They need more batteries. A lot more.

Governments obsessed with solar installation and not increasing storage capacity are in for a horrible surprise when trying to stabilize a grid. You would think that this is common knowledge but doesn't seem to be.

Will Prowse said:

Exactly. They need more batteries. A lot more.

Governments obsessed with solar installation and not increasing storage capacity are in for a horrible surprise when trying to stabilize a grid. You would think that this is common knowledge but doesn't seem to be.

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Most of that knowledge is asked on to the market or lobby groups..
Guys what they are interested in..
Not storage, doesn't make enough money, that's for sure

Will Prowse said:

Exactly. They need more batteries. A lot more.

Governments obsessed with solar installation and not increasing storage capacity are in for a horrible surprise when trying to stabilize a grid. You would think that this is common knowledge but doesn't seem to be.

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This is one of the reasons behind "the switch to net billing" in Poland as well as increased subsidies and (intended) lessened regulatory burden for home battery storage.

But locals argue it shouldn't be the consumers job to fix the crappy utility network they've been paying through the nose for, for last 5 decades with no substantial upgrades. It should be the utilities job to build battery storage (in style of container batteries placed next to final distribution transformers etc).

So, do we have enough batteries? No, we definitely need more. Should consumers pay for them and put them in their homes(maybe even give utilities control of them - we already hear murmurs of this)? No. This may seem an unusual stance from an individualistic point of view. Who wants to be dependent on a utility when you can be independent? Why don't we buy our own batteries instead of crying to nanny government to force the utilities to supply us with them? But this overly simplistic. Utilities here have been state owned before and they built their entire networks with public money. Then elements of this system were sold (sales, billing etc) but distribution is in hands of few state mandated regional monopolies. They enjoy monopoly status in exchange for some things they are supposed to do. One of which is to keep the network up to date to meet current demand (and that has included talk of PV for last 50 years and actual public policy supporting it for last 30). Also over decades distribution network bill increases were justified by "modernising the network for renewables", but money went and gone and last mile is not modernised(even just adding automatic tap switches to transformers would help enormously in many locations) ...

Then there is a matter of laws requiring almost every home owner building a house to be the utilities consumer. You would not get a building permit if you didn't want to connect to the utility. People that were in places miles away from any line that got connection quotes for more than their house was worth had to invent stupid stuff like "I request 24KW of capacity at safe voltage of 12V" just to get a letter from the utility saying there is no technical capability to connect that house so they can take this letter to building permitting place and show "look, I wanted to connect, it's the utility that doesn't want me!". That was the only way to have a truly off grid setup not that long ago. (now it's your choice - to an extent).

So you have to pay for the utilities in taxes, you're forced to be their customer and pay distribution charges, but no one forces you to have PV right? Wrong. My sister is building a house now and her local council (as many others) only pre-approves buildings that have a heat pump as a heat source. With our winters and the electricity prices it basically gives you a choice of a heat pump + PV or a very lengthy permitting vary process.

So if we are pretty much forced to be their customers, there is and has been a huge push for PV for ages and we've been paying to modernise the network. It is not unreasonable to expect they put the bloody batteries in place and not make us pay for them.

(I have my battery, but it's a hobby for me and I need ups capability).

Will Prowse said:

Exactly. They need more batteries. A lot more.

Governments obsessed with solar installation and not increasing storage capacity are in for a horrible surprise when trying to stabilize a grid. You would think that this is common knowledge but doesn't seem to be.

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I wonder how feasible it is to frequency shift the grid vs negative power prices.

ThaiTaffy said:

I'm pretty sure I read somewhere recently that Australia are now thinking about charging residential solar produces for offloading power to the grid...

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You should see how it works here.

1. Each kWh exported to EMS is being charged 4.5 (storage fee)
2. Each credit kWh drawn from EMS is being charged 1.5 (tax fee)
3. Credit cannot be drawn during night as it wasn’t produced during night
4. Credit is annulled each 1st April but paid fees are not returned

Average power cost per kWh is 7.0 …..

This is how EMS in my place started dealing with residential solar, to discourage everyone. Hence, my 4 packs in garage.

liberumyu said:

You should see how it works here.

1. Each kWh exported to EMS is being charged 4.5 (storage fee)
2. Each credit kWh drawn from EMS is being charged 1.5 (tax fee)
3. Credit cannot be drawn during night as it wasn’t produced during night
4. Credit is annulled each 1st April but paid fees are not returned

Average power cost per kWh is 7.0 …..

This is how EMS in my place started dealing with residential solar, to discourage everyone. Hence, my 4 packs in garage.

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Yikes thank god Thailand is still decades from having anything like this, they can't even keel up demand for ac-units and they are currently pushing EV's. They buy electricity from the neighbouring country loas who are currently selling so much, even their own residents are going without power.

Will Prowse said:

Exactly. They need more batteries. A lot more.

Governments obsessed with solar installation and not increasing storage capacity are in for a horrible surprise when trying to stabilize a grid. You would think that this is common knowledge but doesn't seem to be.

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Batteries or pumped hydro, anything, but no.

Area where I live in has so many spots where pumped hydro can be used but EMS has no interest in doing it. Some official forecast is that they will finish one around 2050…..

With 8x 1MW project on hold I as a supplier have to have 15% of balance capability for installed power. That’s their idea of balancing grid, quite neat and on my dime.