Europe's storms send power prices plummeting to negative

Karolin Schapps and Vera Eckert in Reuters: North Europe's devastating storms sent wind turbines spinning and helped strengthen a new winter phenomenon for the region - negative electricity prices. Damaging for utilities losing money making electricity, delighting traders who cash in on price swings, they will not, however, mean cheap power for households.

A raft of elements to subsidize the green energy boom make up half of most consumer power bills, shielding them from immediate wholesale market price swings.

Over the Christmas holiday, which typically causes a drop in energy demand, wholesale electricity prices in Germany, the Nordic region, the Czech Republic and Slovakia turned negative on excessive renewable energy production and mild weather.

Wind and rain bring out the best in renewable energy from turbines and hydro power, a major source of Nordic electricity. Calm weather hampers green energy output. Meteorologists say mild and wet weather could continue until March.

When renewable energy output is higher than necessary, as in stormy weather, producers face negative market prices because electricity cannot be stored in high volumes. "I think negative prices will become more common with more wind farms being built. With more wind farms the chances of having supply outstripping demand are higher and this is the cause of the negative prices," said one European power trader....

A windfarm in Germany, shot by Prankster, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication 

Utilities ready for 2013 hurricane season, says Connecticut's governor

Luther Turmelle in the New Haven Register: Gov. Dannel P. Malloy insists that the state’s utilities are ready to handle whatever the 2013 hurricane season dishes out, despite the fact that a Monday night thunderstorm left 21,000 Connecticut Light & Power customers without power.

“Our storm preparations have never been better,” Malloy said Tuesday at the state’s Emergency Operations Center after meeting for more than a half-hour with state utility executives.

The governor said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is predicting an active season this year, with between 13 and 20 named storms, with three to six of them possibly becoming major hurricanes.

Malloy and the utility executives said they have dual goals during this hurricane season, which lasts through the end of October: To strengthen the electric grid to prevent loss of service whenever possible and to restore electricity quickly to homes and businesses.

“Last night’s storm was really severe,” said William Quinlan, senior vice president for emergency preparedness at CL&P. “We can’t prevent every outage.”

Mitch Gross, a CL&P spokesman, said the bulk of Monday night’s outages — 17,000 in East Hartford — were the result of two trees taking out a pair of electric circuits. Gross said the circuits “serve as a major distribution channel” that transfer and control large amounts of electricity...

A dark night at Carbon Based headquarters, shot by Brian Thomas, public domain