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It could be partially your neighbor's solar panels or batteries. A lot of domestic power that gets contributed to the grid never leaves the neighborhood. These things aren't always as clear cut.

The key to lower prices on the grid is more flexible and localized pricing. Power suppliers don't like this because it favors cheaper sources of power that push their more expensive legacy generation out of the market. But it would create price incentives for demand and supply to align better.

A good example is the UK, which has national energy pricing and a lot of excess wind power in Scottland that is often being curtailed at the same time gas plants further south need to power up to power local demand there. End result: the Scottish pay the same high rate even though they are literally discarding energy they don't know what to do with. If they had local energy pricing, their rates would go down a lot because they have a lot of wind power most of the time.

And further south, people would either invest in local power generation (instead of far away in Scottland) or actually relocate data centers and other energy intensive businesses to where the power is cheap. As opposed to e.g. Slough.

This was an interesting read. I still don't quite understand the pricing during emergencies or shortages, though.

There is no tolerable scenario where providers could choose not to generate electricity for a grid if it were necessary and they were the only provider available.

I want to assume that in the freest of markets the state could still compel electrical generators to operate in the events of an emergency.

I really need to read up on what happened in Texas in 2021.

> There’s pretty much no way for them[renewables] to lose money if they’re connected to the grid, especially because many get outside incentives for every megawatt-hour they generate. They even submit negative bids in some cases, meaning they’re willing to pay money to stay connected to the grid.

The negative price reflects their incentive, not their willingness to pay.

If I am guaranteed $18 a MW/h for my solar farm, then I will bid -$18 (or maybe slightly less to account for costs). The state, or federal government will ensure I am paid at least $18.

Without these incentives we would not see negative prices, zero perhaps, but not negative.

For instance the IRA offers upto $33.00/MWh incentives.[1]

This is a problem if you have a power plant that must run - such as a nuke. You may end up paying that negative price, unless the market offers you some sort of make whole payment. But where does that come from?

[1]https://www.energy.gov/eere/water/inflation-reduction-act-ta...

This article discusses the “deregulated” energy markets that allow many different participants to be involved in the generation of electricity.

One consequence of having many market participants is the availability of data that is published to make the markets function.

If you’re interested in seeing more about the real-time operations, I built a site that tracks all this data: https://www.gridstatus.io/live

I was hoping for some website where I could plug in my address and find out.

What mechanism exists in the initial bid phase to deter lower cost producers from offering less power than they will actually supply? This would push the price per unit up. Supplying more than they offered would get them a larger chunk of it.

I'm not sure how the market works in my country, but I understand there are bitcoin miners that work directly with suppliers to buy power that can be cut off at a moments notice so extra supply can be generated and sold cheaply if not needed, eliminating spin up time.

I think it might be at the pilot program stage, but it does seem like a reasonable option to provide resiliency in an economical fashion.

I didn't think I would say that but sometimes state regulated industries are just simpler than free market.

I read it all, it feels like overly complicated and at the end the user pay more because the price is based on the last highest seller, 30$/MWh in his example when nuclear did cost only 20$ and provides 3 times more energy.

Some things like water, electricity and health shouldn't be left to the free market, that's how the richest country in the world ends up with a healthcare system slightly better than Bosnia.

They also have a marvelous youtube channel.

A lot of discussion focuses on the supply side (not unexpected given the article).

The demand side is where we can take individual / small group action. On the one hand, you have CA (and most of the US) phasing out incandescent light bulbs (great - lowers baseline demand) - but you also have an order of magnitude increase in compute (model training anyone?) as well as a push towards electrification of cars, household appliances, heating etc. All fine - but that energy has to be moved (unless you're generating locally with Solar Panels).

Grid scale batteries and similar ancillary services do a pretty good job of levelling this out - making the market more "liquid" (to borrow a stock market term) - but they take 3-7y to bring up depending on the usual infra variables.

<shill> We think batteries to absorb household demand are part of the solution. [www.energyapplied.com]

If you can control when these batteries act in unison (and, as with anything, the devil is in the details) - and deploy them densely enough to absorb forecasted demand spikes (another comment ITT mentioned LMP markets - astute) - then you complement grid scale storage with something you can roll out in weeks to cover a high stress area, not years </shill>

Another comment mentioned "differently regulated" - and that's right - in order to participate in any of the supply and demand programs on the grid, you need to do a lot of things a certain way. The more you can encapsulate that for the user (don't have a household participate in Demand Response, do it through Nest or something similar and have 1mm households participate) - gets a lot more achievable.

In a funny way, power markets are probably the US's last real free-trade market. My first few years deep in the back office of an investment bank, there were 31 NYSE floor traders, when I left 13 years later in 2020, there were 2, and most volume is program trading / etfs / electronic trading. Ditto fixed income (bonds and bond like instruments), foreign exchange (though these latter two are slower).

Financial Markets inherently move towards being vanilla and scalable because it's cheaper - and this has been one area where the race to the bottom hasn't entirely harmed the consumer (there once was a time when you had to pay a broker a commission on each stock trade. Etrade / Robinhood anyone?).

Power still has a long way to go before it's there - but it will _probably_ be a good thing when it does, and given that it touches hard infrastructure and nobody's forgetting Enron any time soon - it _probably_ will end up better off for the consumer.

Interesting. I had no idea that these sorts of things happen in countries that never went through 70 years of socialism. We have "the" electric utility that services each particular city/area, it's a monopoly. The bill never breaks anything down, it's just "electricity" or "electricity (day)" and "electricity (night)" depending on what kind of meter you have. The power plants, the transmission lines, and the utilities are all owned by the government.

Though I am pretty sure that most of my electricity comes from the nuclear power plant near my city.