Looks like a good time to have a battery!
this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2026
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If they're paying you to take the power, does anyone have resistors to convert all the 200 or 400KW the power company is willing to give you into heat? 400kw40 cents1hour=160 euro/day.
Well, it doesn’t stay at that rate for a full 24 hours. You’d have to just do it whenever the price is negative.
Correct, I calculated if it was just 1 hour per day.
Nice, I missed that
Basically 40 space hearers
Do your part to help global warming!
If prices are negative, then all fossil fuel power generation that can be turned off has already been turned off. So you are not helping global warming by consuming the power.
I was 100% just meming, but thank you for the serious response, you make a good point! 🙂
If you were already going to use the heat later in the day when fossil fuels are burning again, then whatever you can do to reduce that future consumption, through storing some thermal heat produced now, can still reduce that fossil fuel consumption overall. Water heaters, warming any living spaces that might need to be heated at night, etc.
It doesn't even have to be efficient when prices are literally negative. All it has to do is be somewhat effective at reducing later consumption.
through storing some thermal heat produced now
If prices are going negative, then I would think that people are already doing this all they can.
Huge freezer on max.
One thing to note, these spot prices are the price before any fees, your network fees and all that are per kWh and usually more than the negative sum the electricity price goes to. (probably in this case though -38 cents is a lot)
Negative prices usually only truly exist for enterprise customers that pay 1/5 of the consumer network fees.
These are the electricity spot prices in Germany: https://energy-charts.info/charts/price_spot_market/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE
Here in Canada I pay a flat rate of 9.97 cents per kWh, not sure how that compares to your currency..
Edit: 1 CAD is 0.62EUR
I think these are wholesale prices, not residential.
Large consumers, like steel mills and refineries can adjust their consumption to smooth out fluctuations in base load power production.
For producers, it's often cheaper to give power away for free or pay consumers to take it rather than spin down a whole gas turbine/reactor/coal furnace. It wastes a shitload of energy to cold start one of those again and synch it with the grid.
Ah that makes sense. Our electricity is mainly hydro electric as well so our system is a fair bit different, and also depends on the time of year for heavy commercial use due to us being buried in snow for half the year lol
Electricity is quite expensive in Germany. It's around 30 ct/kWh but 20 ct are taxes and stuff.
Lol DEM hasn't been used in almost 25 years. 1CAD = 0.62EUR
Ah I kinda thought so but that's what the currency converter gave me.
Where I live in SoCal it's around 70 cents canadian per kWh.
Welp, I won't be complaining about my electric bill during the winter anymore.
Is this because of solar? And everyone going out to lunch? Lol So if storage solutions get better, that could flatten out more? Storing for later instead of fire sale.
At midday? Yes it's solar.
What app is it? It was 140€ last night…
Tibber. It's Cent/kWh.
Here you can find some data, but it seems different (the data, not only the representation) from OP's
Yeah the prices are not the same between the apps. No idea why.
They include taxes etc
Thanks
Ah of course. Electricity Maps is without tax.
I truly want to find someone I can do at the home scale with electricity, which isn't buttcoin, to take advantage of overproduction.
It may not be a direct benefit to you, but if you have some spare compute, you could donate the compute to a project with BOINC.
Look into hydrogen production from water electrolysis, if you're really producing a significant surplus.
There is no meaningful way I can do something with hydrogen outside of as a feedstock into another process.
Things I've considered that would help me, running a gravel crusher, or if there was some scaled down hauber Bausch machine. I use a significant amount of gravel and I am always in need of fertilizer.
sell energy buy gravel, we invented money for this very reason.
You can run an ICE on hydrogen, with some minor modifications. If you have enough space you can store the produced hydrogen at near atmospheric pressure in a gas holder/gasometer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_holder
As to nitrogen fertilizer, there have been recent improvements in air nitrogen fixation by way of an electric arc/plasma: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=nitrogen+fixation+electric+arc&ia=web e.g. https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2021/ra/d1ra01357b
Yeah I've seen the plasma arc thing. I'm vaguely associated with some in the agrovoltaics research community and have considered reaching out. It's not available to retail consumers yet
I know on a small garden scale, clover is a very good companion plant because it affixes nitrogen to the soil. It also acts as a ground cover to reduce moisture loss and suppress weeds, and on top of all of that it attracts bees.
Yeah but I can't turn electricity into clover
Oh hello! You posted on /r Technology and latelly /r Collapse before it all went to shit! I'm a big fan of you!
Oh, hi. Glad you liked my posts. The latest /c/collapse incarnation on Lemmy (we've had to move twice) is on https://lemmy.zip/c/collapse btw.
Are you talking about computing power?
I've been pondering about this because and feel the need. I don't have any solar, but I'd like to play around with local AI a bit. I don't even have the hardware at the moment because driver support isn't ready on my laptop.
I'd even like to try a coding agent to find out if there are any useful cases. I don't want to do it in the cloud though. So I thought it'd be cool if someone with cheap or excess electricity could provide their hardware. I think it's quite a challenge to do that, though.
Right now I'm thinking, maybe running a decentralized Libre Translate service or something similar could be a nice project. Mastodon uses this for post translation and self hosted instances could use it as a translation service. Somewhere, the sun is always shining on someone's roof with solar, cheap energy and a spare GPU, I assume. I don't think it makes a difference if a post is being translated in Australia when I browse my timeline at night in Germany.
Peer Tube video encoding could also be done like this.
If anyone has links to ideas about decentralized data centers or whatever that would be, I'd be very interested. I think it would also help with protest against data centers being built, because it's nice to be able to have examples for alternatives. A way of using what's already there without building a grid only big tech and the fossil fuel industry need.
Without relying on the internet, people could offer to back up BluRays for friends or the community. Or optimize the hell out of HomeAssistant to run Jellyfin tasks and stuff when there's lots of solar.
Uhm...that is not possible, unless you are recieving your own taxes.
weird. my -15€ power usage I just used says otherwise
They are fixed (in total ca. 20 ct/kWh) so they are simply added to the negative price making it less negative.
Negative prices happen all the time, prices in ACER (Europes power market) are calculated on a 15 minute cycle (used to be 1hour) and your provider will be charging you negative prices if the electricity price is so low it overcomes the network fees. I've seen this exact thing happen on my own power bill.