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1/ Negative electricity prices 
There has been a lot of talk about them in Germany recently. But how often do they actually occur and what are the trends?
To make the debate more objective, we at #DIW Berlin have put some data together for you. You can now find regularly updated charts on the frequency and severity of hours with negative prices in the German wholesale electricity market on the #OpenEnergyTracker: https://openenergytracker.org/en/docs/germany/prices/#negative-prices
Mini 
below 
2/ The most important points:
Since 2015, there have been an increasing number of hours with negative electricity market prices - with an interruption in 2021 and 2022 due to the extremely high electricity price level in those years. There have never been as many negative prices as in 2024. Negative prices mainly occur in the summer months - and over the holidays at the end of December.
3/ The vast majority of negative prices are relatively weakly negative. Extreme price levels of -€100/MWh have only occurred in three years so far, and even then in less than 10 hours each year.
4/ Negative prices have recently occurred more frequently at midday, when feed-in from inflexible PV systems was particularly high.
5/ So negative electricity market prices are still relatively rare. But the trend is not good and we should take care of it. Negative prices occur when the supply of electricity exceeds demand. Reasons for this include inflexibly operated conventional or renewable electricity generation. In the case of subsidized renewables, there can be economic incentives to produce electricity even in hours with negative prices - and sometimes there is no technical possibility of switching off (building PV).
6/ The trend indicates that flexibility in the electricity sector has recently not kept pace with the expansion of wind and solar PV in Germany. It is now important to remove barriers that hamper power sector flexibility - both on the generation and demand side. We should stop slowing down the expansion of large battery storage systems - and use the storage systems we have in a more system-oriented way - for example, PV storage used by prosumers.
7/ Kudos: Our data analysis was created in the #Kopernikus research project #Ariadne, supported by @bmbf_bund. Many thanks to my great #DIW colleagues Felix Schmidt and Nicolas Eichner 
Feedback welcome!
@wpschill a practical approach: heat up public swimming pools with excess energy. So the public could actually get paid for running those pools.
@wpschill
I suspect that there are people that are thinking about investing into grid-scale storage that have pretty comprehensive data about how many electrons they can expect to be paid to store.
Is energy storage arbitration at grid-scale much of an industry in Germany or is most of it done at small-scale with batteries in homes and businesses?
@GreenFire As you can guess, grid-scale energy storage is now highly profitable in German. Just look at this #duckcurve. But a problem is grid connection of utility-scale batteries - this is sometimes very lengthy and partly also overly expensive. We also have lots of PV-batteries in homes by now - but these are largely operated only for maximizing self-consumption benefits, and are not guided by wholesale prices whatsoever.
@wpschill
Thanks, I expect that just like California Germany will soon have enough batteries online to take care of the problem caused by electricity prices going negative.
I was just at a thread of Jenny Chase's that had turned into a discussion on it focused on mostly Australia even though Jenny is a Bloomberg reporter living in Switzerland which was the toot that started the discussion.
@wpschill I always wonder if nothing could be done about those 6GW coal that remain through negative pricing. It’s frustrating to see.
Could a cause also be a delay in electrification? There less electrical cars than expected and almost no H₂ production