Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Germany Hits Negative Prices As France Goes Subsidy-Free

This episode covers three major wind power milestones: Germany hitting 51 GW of wind output with negative electricity prices, France launching its first floating offshore wind farm without subsidies, and Australia’s Goyder South becoming South Australia’s largest wind farm at 412 MW.

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Welcome to Uptime News. Flash Industry News Lightning fast. Your host, Alan Hall, shares the renewable industry news you may have missed.

Allen Hall 2025: There is news today from three continents about wind power in Germany. Last Friday, the wind began to blow storm Benjamins swed across the northern regions. Wind turbines spun faster and faster. By mid-morning wind output hit 51 gigawatts. That’s right. 51 gigawatts the highest. Since early last year, wind and solar together met nearly all of Germany’s electricity needs, and then something happened that would have seemed impossible.

20 years ago, the price of electricity went negative. Minus seven euros and 15 cents per megawatt hour. Too much wind, too much power, not enough demand. Meanwhile, off the coast of Southern [00:01:00] France, dignitaries gathered for a celebration. The Provenance Grand Large floating offshore wind farm. 25 megawatts.

Three Siemens Gamesa turbines mounted on floating platforms. France’s first floating offshore wind project. a real milestone, but here is what caught everyone’s attention. No government subsidies. EDF, Enbridge and CPP investments. Finance the entire project themselves. Self-finance, offshore wind in France.

Halfway around the world in South Australia, Neoen inaugurated Goyder South. 412 megawatts, 75 turbines, the largest wind farm in the state, the largest in Neoen portfolio. It will generate 1.5 TERAWATT hours annually. That’s a 20% increase in South Australia’s total wind generation.[00:02:00]

The state is racing towards 100% net renewables by 2027. Goyder South created 400 construction jobs, 12 permanent positions, over 100 million Australian dollars in local economic impact. Three different stories, three different continents, Europe, Asia Pacific, all celebrating wind power. But there is something else connecting these projects.

Something the general public does not see something only industry professionals understand. 20 years ago, wind energy was expensive, subsidized, and uncertain . Critics called it a fantasy that would never compete with coal or natural gas. Today, Germany has so much wind power that prices go negative.

France builds offshore wind farms without government money. Australia bets its entire energy future on renewables, and here is the number that tells the real [00:03:00] story. In 2005, global wind power capacity was 59 gigawatts. Today it exceeds 1000 gigawatts the cost per megawatt hour. It has dropped about 85%.

Wind power went from the most expensive electricity source to one of the cheapest in about two decades faster than pretty much anyone had predicted, cheaper than anyone had really forecasted. the critics said it could not be done, and the skeptics said it would never compete. The doubters said it was decades away, and they were pretty much all wrong.

Today France celebrates its first commercial scale floating offshore wind farm. And Germany’s grid operator manages negative prices as routine Australia plans to run an entire state on renewable energy. Within about two years, the impossible became inevitable, and you, the wind energy professionals listening to this, you [00:04:00] made it happen.

Engineers, technicians, project managers, turbine designers, grid operators. Every one of you helped prove the skeptics wrong. 20 years ago, you were building a dream. Today you are powering the world.

https://weatherguardwind.com/germany-negative-price-france/

Ronald Reagan is a symbol of how far this country has fallen in terms of humanitarianism in just few decades.

As a conservative, Reagan did many things, too many to list, that upset the bejeepers out of progressives like me. But at least he wasn’t a twisted, hateful, unAmerican madman like the Republicans of today.

Think for a minute how miserably unsuccessful you’d be running as a GOP candidate on the platform that Reagan articulated at left.

Now it’s, “Unless you’re a wealthy white guy, say, from Sweden, we don’t want you anywhere near the United States.”

Ronald Reagan on America’s Greatness

In a recent post, California IS Different, But It’s Not TOO Different, I drew the distinction between the urbane sophistication of the state’s coastal region and the rural regions in its interior.

As one may expect, there is a huge chasm in terms of politics between the two areas.  Yes, California is a blue state, and Trump lost the 2024 presidential election to Harris by about 20%, but 20 points is actually fairly close compared to the thumping he gave Harris in the red states that he won by considerable landslides (see map).

Fortunately, California has masses of well-educated people in the counties adjacent to the Pacific Ocean who are generally quite liberal in their thinking.  Yes, there are a growing number of ranchers in the state’s eastern parts, but, for now at least, they’re far outnumbered by the folks fighting the traffic jams and ridiculous real estate prices in IT, entertainment, defense, insurance, professional services, manufacturing, healthcare, and banking.

California Has More Republican Voters than One May Suspect