[upsuper]

It's only -€0.2/kWh, not that bad at all. I've been seeing spot price predicted to be -A$1/kWh in several states in Australia (which is the lowest possible bid allowed by regulation). Even in Europe, I recall seeing some post desperately trying to figure out how to curtail their solar export because the price was reaching -€0.34/kWh. Not sure an error of -€0.2/kWh is anything newsworthy TBH.

[Ndymium]

That's the average for the whole day, the max negative price is -€0.5/kWh which is limited by regulations. It starts from 15.00 and continues for the rest of the day. Other than those hours, the price is normal, so the average is not as drastic.

[RayVR]

Depends what the market rate was at the time and how the exchange handled the error.

People unfamiliar with markets are often surprised how often there are serious issues. It’s not uncommon for trades from a specific time period to be invalidated.

[amluto]

Are there really large solar PV installations that can’t curtail, continuously, all the way to zero? An MPPT ought to be able to operate arbitrarily far away from the maximum power point.

Or is there some other limitation that prevents this?

[upsuper]

I think it's mainly because of large amount of rooftop solars which are either unable or don't have incentive to curtail, and then there are coal generators already running at their lowest output level.

[amluto]

The grid could, at least in principle, curtail rooftop solar by messing with the frequency. This might be a bad idea.

[jeeeb]

No need to screw with frequencies.

In Australia, we’re moving towards dynamic operating envelopes for solar and other “distributed energy resources”. That potentially includes EVs and ACs.

The idea is the solar inverter is sent a dynamic stream of operating constraints by the distribution business based on network conditions.

It’s already being piloted in places like South Australia, which has very high solar penetration. Regulations are also moving towards requiring smart meters at all households (already the case in Victoria) and all new inverters be network connected.

[grecy]

> -A$1/kWh in several states in Australia (which is the lowest possible bid allowed by regulation)

It's telling they regulate the price and won't allow it to go "too low", just like they halt trading on the stock exchange if things go down too much.

Free market my backside - can't let those profits dip!

[upsuper]

The regulation applies in the opposite side as well. I think the highest bid allowed is like A$16.8/kWh or something like that.

It's not fully clear to me how the market work as a whole. I learnt that generators may have swap contracts with retailers and big users, which, based on my understanding, can distort the price to arbitrarily low, because generators get paid for the difference from the other side regardless of spot price, so they can set the lowest possible to ensure they can dump their power to the grid.

Also when it's predicted to be this low (or that high), there is likely some operations (market or not) behind the scenes to level the price. Usually when it gets to the time, the actual spot price has been in a reasonable range.

[zie]

On the stock exchanges in the USA, they do that because we didn't use to and trading bots that were mis-configured went nuts and broke the markets for a while.

Now they stop trading for (15?) minutes to let everyone make sure it's real and not their trading algorithms being stupid.

It's not about not letting the stocks crash to far, it's about making sure the pricing is accurate.

The Federal Reserve however is a different story. :)

[grecy]

> It's not about not letting the stocks crash to far, it's about making sure the pricing is accurate.

If that were true, they would do the same thing if it was going up "too quickly".

To the surprise of nobody, they don't.

[astrange]

Yes there are, it's called LULD.

https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/all-about-lulds

Don't think the entire market has ever gotten unreasonably high due to a trading error.

[astrange]

Price floors don't mandate high profits because you can just not purchase if you don't want to. Subsidies would.

[grecy]

They mandate the price will never go so low they will loose money.

Imagined you could buy gas wholesale for a dollar a gallon and the price floor retail was two…. Guranteed to make money

[astrange]

They're losing money if nobody buys from them, because they have overhead to stay open.

[grecy]

If you are guaranteed by law to buy it for less than you can sell it, you can price it mighty low to attract customers and still make money.

It's funny, your comment reads like a business has some kind of right to make a profit, rather than letting the free market figure out if it should exist or not.

[astrange]

> If you are guaranteed by law to buy it for less than you can sell it, you can price it mighty low to attract customers and still make money.

That's not a price floor, it would be a price ceiling on the second level supplier, and they could just choose not to sell. There's no way this scenario could happen except for subsidies and mandated production like the Defense Production Act.

> It's funny, your comment reads like a business has some kind of right to make a profit, rather than letting the free market figure out if it should exist or not.

You seem very confused.