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Throwing Away Electricity
Germany is on course to produce more renewable energy than needed to meet demand
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There’s no such thing as a free lunch, but there could be free electricity, at least on occasion. The march of renewable-energy production means that by 2040 as much as 7.3 terawatt-hours of excess power could be produced some weeks in Germany and generators may be asked to disconnect from the grid to prevent it becoming unstable, according to Bloomberg NEF. More likely, new uses will be found for the unused output, especially if it’s cheap, said Thomas Knight, a BNEF analyst.