This morning in Germany, wind power created the need to pay consumers to use electricity. This is probably some sort of historic event, but if you take a step back, it isn’t hard to see how wind and solar power could shatter the world as we know it.
According to estimates, sometime on Sunday morning, the windfarms in Germany are going to pump out nearly 40,000 Mega watts of power. Or enough to power half of the country. This means that there is so much power, the utilities need to pay users to do something with it.
Amazing.
A Not So Brave New World
Here is the thing, for my whole life I have been told that everything costs money, there are huge problems that involve endless wars against poor people, and that money for sure doesn’t grow on trees.
I have come to find out, that today, all of this might be high grade bull$#&%.
Not to say that I was lied to, things have just changed. Today wind power offers some of the cheapest power there is, and apparently, it is so efficient that the utilities now have to pay people to use energy.
Where To Go From Here
Now, I have a few ideas, because I am not sure that the Germans are ready for this.
And I know they want to be.
Firstly, it seems like we should have seen this coming. The prices for wind generation have been dropping like crazy, and sooner or later, we were going to hit the point where the modern economic model hit the wall.
Clearly all that hard work in Germany has paid off, and now they are the first one to have free power.
Secondly, given the rise in cryptocurrencies, this seems like a brilliant way to make some serious loot. The power that crypto mining operations suck up is pretty significant, so if wind energy creates free power, well, it seems like a no brainer to mine Bitcoins with it.
They could sell the Bitcoins for more stuff to make windmills, and the whole thing just keeps making free power etc…
Finally, it seem like the sustainable energy debate is over. This morning in Germany wind power cranked out so much power, the grid didn’t know how to handle it.
It is time for wind and solar power to ram archaic forms of generation like…well…anything that isn’t free into history. We need to get onto designing a new economic structure that involves lots of leisure, maybe some really fast EV’s that are built by machines, and an entire economy that is automated.
To say that this sort of technology puts nations that adopt it at an advantage would be one of the biggest understatements in history. So now it becomes a race to install and automate, and then dominate any economy that was late to the party.
For whatever reason.
[via independent]
The first move is to store the energy by charging huge storage batteries; utilize any pumped storage then create hydrogen using the surplus electricity and store it for when we decide to power ships and air planes with it. …in all cases shut down any unneeded fossil fuel plants.
Presumably bats no longer exist in Germany if they have this many wind turbines there? RIP bats.
There is no such thing as free energy. Wholesale prices are not accessible to average consumers. Negative wholesale prices mostly occur due to oversupply such as low demand (weekends) and inflexible power plants, that can’t ramp fast enough so they keep selling. Renewable energy production gets guaranteed returns. So if the renewable energy is sold at negative prices, consumers have to make up the difference via renewables surcharge. In other words, negative wholesale prices are the most expensive time for consumers.