No, it’s not. It’s a practical problem, not an economic one, but leave it to the tankies here to take it as an opportunity to show how many slogans they have learned.
I wasn’t talking about a fire department, and neither were the tankies so I’m not sure what you’re on about
Except it’d be much less of a practical problem if the question “but who gets paid” would be taken out distributing excess energy.
How about this: power generation and distribution is not as easy as you think, it requires lots and lots of infrastructure and maintenance and that has a cost. If prices go negative too much it might become a problem to keep that running. There, that wasn’t so hard, now was it?
Negative prices are short-term self-regulation reactions of the market, they can’t stay negative long-term, just because of how the system works. So I’m not sure what you’re worried about.
Also, cut the condescending tone, it does nothing but make you look like an asshole.
So why was the problem expressed in economic terms? The practical problem isn’t “oh noes there’s a price label with a minus on it”; it’s that there’s a surplus of power which is dangerous.
In reality what that represents is an opportunity for someone to come in, and store the excess power, and sell it back to the grid when supply is lower – but energy companies only want to model the flow of money going one way.
