Well, those are paradoxes of renewables. When the sun shines bright and the wind is blowing strong grid operators has to pay producers to stop producing, unless they can find someone who will take this energy for less money that they would have to pay to the renewables producers to stop windmills (this is that "price below zero").

When the sun is not shining and wind is not blowing and your country invested heavily into renewables (like United Kingdom) then you have basically two options. Build a lot of gas power plants, as only they have sufficiently quick cold start time (about 1h) or buy electricity paying (very high) spot prices.

Building gas power plants sounds good, but it costs money and you need a lot of them, plus, they emit CO2, defeating the whole purpose of this green transformation. So UK went with the second option, that's why they have the greenest energy on the World... and the most expensive one.

As a result, outside areas with predictable weather (that is deserts) it is much better to simply use technology that came into use 70 years ago (indeed in June this year it will be exactly 70 years) with great success: nuclear power plants.

And be done with all the paradoxes.

The UK decided to build a nuclear power station as well in 2010: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...

It is still not operational. Nuclear is too slow. As well as not especially cheap either.

Electricity markets are completely inelastic in the absence of storage ability. Negative prices are an indication that the grid needs the ability to absorb surpluses from sources with effectively free fuel (solar, wind).

Note that "absorbing surpluses" does NOT require energy storage in the form of batteries, which is expensive and not necessarily green. Another option is grid-interactive buildings, that can harness energy surpluses in near-real-time when they arise [0]. Hopefully we seem more of these buildings.

[0]: https://edoenergy.com/

We are going to see a toooooon of battery storage too. Building HVAC is great, water heaters are great, because thermal storage is easy and present in all of existing infrastructure.

I hope that we can have enough vehicle chargers at workplaces that help absorb excess supply too.

It won't be long until during seasonal peaks we will have multiples of demand available to be dispatched on the grid, during the sunny hours.

I've been trying to think of applications that will benefit from this coming future for about a decade, but have not yet hit upon the sort of application where capex is low enough that this sort of big swing is easy to use.

Global BESS deployments soared 53% in 2024 - https://www.energy-storage.news/global-bess-deployments-soar... - January 14, 2025 ("Storage installations in 2024 beat expectations with 205GWh installed globally, a staggering y-o-y increase of 53%. The grid market has once again been the driver of growth, with more than 160GWh deployed globally, of which 98% was lithium-ion.")

China’s Batteries Are Now Cheap Enough to Power Huge Shifts - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-07-09/china-... | https://archive.today/DklaA - July 9, 2024

China Already Makes as Many Batteries as the Entire World Wants - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-04-12/china-... | https://archive.today/8Dy4D - April 12, 2024

While true I suspect that the future of energy storage is overwhelmingly dominated by large scale battery storage. A lot of the alternatives fall in the "cute, but complicated, situational, and/or doesn't scale" category.

It depends on what you mean by future. The next couple of years certainly. But once you start looking for technology that can store weeks worth of energy over several months, batteries don’t look like the clear winner.

This is the future of all energy grids. Solar is by far the cheapest source of power and dropping every day.

If we don't build our systems to take advantage of the cheap prices, we are leaving tons of money on the table. Or rather, we are shoving money into the pockets of utilities unnecessarily.

Negative prices come from lots of places: bad predictions fo fossil fuel operators that can't adjust their thermal plants in time, subsidies that incentivize solar prices up to that subsidy price, congestion on the grid driving some of these poor decisions, etc. But zero-marginal-cost power sources like solar and wind will change the market for the better.

This is done at large scale right? I still can't affordable solar power method for my house.

If you are in the US, unaffordable residential solar is by design. First, there's the fragmented permitting scheme, second there's the boom-and-bust regulatory process of making it a financial winner or loser based on the PUC and utility whims of the years (and typically the utility wins and solar is uneconomical). This means that the successful solar installers are those that swoop in to a state/region when solar is a good financial idea, and install a ton, until it's made less of a good idea by the PUC. Then the solar installer needs to move on to other areas. The installers who succeed in this environment are the ones who spend a ton of money on customer acquisition; a few years ago I heard this was north of 30% of the costs of solar installers.

Australia does it right. First, they allow a global free market of panels, second they have uniform and cheap permitting, third they have consistent policy on interconnection of the panels to the grid. IIRC US residential solar is typically >$3/kw, and it's usually $1/kW or less in Australia.

At least in Germany solar panels are absurdly cheap right now.

You get a ~440W panel for around 40€. Latest generation and industrial grade.

There are dozens of shops where you can pick them up after ordering.

This is done at larege scale, but IIRC if you invest in photovoltaic for your home you're supoosed to break even in about 10 years. But it may depend on local laws (read, incentives) and sun irradiation.

This is hugely variable, they "payoff time" is almost entirely driven by local rates for purchasing and selling electricity. And whether you need to pay $20-$50/month no matter how much electricity you consume.

As such, the payback time is almost entirely a decision based on local regulatory policy, unconnected to the actual cost of the systems. The US also uses fragmented regulatory policy to make our residential solar cost many multiples more than other developed countries' costs.

Depending on where you are, residential pv usually pays for itself within 10 years, if dimensioned correctly and specced according to available subsidies. But you'll need a decent roughly south-facing roof.

No matter how hard I try, I can't get the math to work on 10 year period, and my electricity is expensive!

A kW of panels, an inverter and a few kWh of batteries can be had for 1k€ and can satisfy a large part of typical household demand.

Is there like a blog or youtube series about how to do this? I imagine there's a smaller (more fun?) first step for maker/diy'ers than just calling sunrun, but googling around only sent me to panels/batteries for camping trips on amazon.

Excellent! A perfect economic signal to build storage!