It’s still not earning you money to spend electricity because you still have to pay the transfer fee which is around 6 cents / kWh but it’s pretty damn cheap nevertheless, mostly because of the excess in wind energy.
Last winter because of a mistake it dropped down to negative 50 cents / kWh for few hours, averaging negative 20 cents for the entire day. People were literally earning money by spending electricity. Some were running electric heaters outside in the middle of the winter.
Thank you for proving me wrong regarding the discussion. It just felt insulting to read, as if the sun only stops shining when the earth doesn’t spin. The tiny fraction of output on overcast days is negligible.
Yes, Dunkelflaute is not impossible to deal with. But we can not bridge these gaps with batteries, as you already pointed out. I doubt that we can bridge it with power from intercontinental transmission lines, given how the politics look like today and how much they need to change first + then actually starting to plan and build it… In 50 year perhaps. But we need a CO2 reducing solution now. Right now. Not in 30 years. Batteries are not relevant now and won’t be in the foreseeable future due to monetary, resource and manufacturing bottlenecks. Storage of electricity to later use it as electricity is simply not feasible right now, apart from the minutes you get from existing hydro storage.
Right “now”, so in the next decade, if we push modern nuclear instead of fossiles (which we need to keep building due to said fluctuations) we will get far less CO2 quickly. At the same time, we can burn the old nuclear “waste”.