The pessimist in me is expecting someone to come in here to tell us why this isn’t as good as it seems, but this seems good. Them stating it will only get more common seems great!
Well, negative prices for energy are probably not too good if you are a company that builds solar and wind energy parks.
It depends. In Germany a lot of renewable are guaranteed to get a certain amount of money per kwh, so they don’t care about negative prices. The ones that loose are coal/nuclear that can not be turned off fast enough.
It’s really good. So called “dynamic contracts” with hourly pricing known only a day in advance are on the rise. Lots of people whithout access to solar can still benefit strongly this way by timing useage of things like washer/dryers etc. Lots of these devices are also becoming “smart” now to automatically pick a good pricing window.
Funny, how even this, which was an often cited use case for smart contracts of more sophisticated blockchain token like Ether, is totally not dependent on any blockchain.
I have yet to see anything legal which actually benefits from a blockchain (and isn’t about the blockchain stuff itself, like trading crypto currencies).
I’ve been working with a company that uses a very common blockchain to timestamp documents/artwork/data etc.
It’s a niche use case but it simply couldn’t be done before the existance of blockchains.
Could you elaborate why a blockchain is beneficial here? The use case “timestamp documents/artwork/data” does not call for a blockchain to me.
How can the price get negative? Why would a producer pay someone to take their electricity instead of just shutting down?
Yes, because that’s cheaper than shutting down.