Price of electricity goes below nought.

ENTSO-E reports more and more periods when the EPEX price of electricity go negative. Or do they, really? Not for you and me, it seems.

Papers get exited and indicate that customers cannot benefit from this effect due to the billing system, based on long-term contracts. Apparently, we can’t earn a few pennies when prices go negative.

As if that is the problem.

Here’s the real problem:

  1. It’s hard to store electricity, as we all should have learned by now.
  2. It’s even much, much harder to store it for a long time. In fact, it’s madness, in view of proper alternatives, such as storing chemical fuels.
  3. Wind is free, that much is true. Wind electricity however is not. It takes a trillion EUR investment to harvest the free wind and mold it into a useable form: electricity at the time you need it, at the place you need it, in the amount you need it. It’s not because the EPEX prices go negative, that the cost of wind energy is negative.
  4. Overproduction in times of low demand generate negative EPEX prices, due to a stupid accounting mechanism, that clearly does not take all cost effects into account, only marginal costs.
  5. So people are urged to waste electrical energy. As if anyone is busy organising his life around the 15-minute EPEX prices. As if the “smart grid” is doing that for you.
  6. So the consumer does not benefit from negative production prices, due to the cost of distribution, storage, opaque margins and above all: taxes.
  7. Thus he customer pays income taxes and other taxes, which are used by the government to fund wind farms and infrastructure investments required by wind farms, which would otherwise not be build.
  8. These funded wind farms cause occasionally negative EPEX prices. But the tax payer does not see a negative electricity bill.

So we are all paying a massive amount (not pennies) for a system we don’t need, as it’s not saving the climate and it’s not efficient and it deregulates the grid and it’s surely not free. Instead this system encourages people to waste electricity at times.

If you feel responsible and you adopted a life style to save electricity, you still contribute to the massive funding, but you do not experience negative prices.

The greener you think, the more you pay per kWh, plus you need to start wasting electricity on governments orders.

BRIGID avoids all this crooked thinking:

  1. The steam production is constant.
  2. Electricity is produced as demanded at any moment, in centralised places.
  3. The rest of the steam is used to produce CO2-neutral fuels.
  4. So nothing is wasted.
  5. These fuels are stored and traded and distributed by the currently existing system, and used by the existing appliances.
  6. The cost is known.
  7. The price is fixed.
  8. Budgets can be made safely.
  9. Done.