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pkilgore parent
Where is the market for someone to get paid to pump water into a reservoir and let it fall down later for $$$?
ncruces
Partly the neighboring country. Between Spain and Portugal there's 10 GW (~20% or peak load) and 100 GWh of storage (enough for a day's worth of consumption).

But that takes time and requires some rebalancing, because much of that capacity is not closest to the producers. It also requires water, which becomes scarcer in the autumn (not the case here).

So the price can and does become negative for a window. “High frequency trading” the spot prices probably contributed to the problem.

pdpi
That market exists, but the window of time here is like twenty minutes. Pumps have inertia and take time to spin up, you can't HFT load and generation.
gusgus01
I'm not fully informed about pumped storage, but twenty minutes is more than enough for most hydroelectric plants to go from 0 to full power, and that's probably the case for pumped storage as well. Eg,

In the case of Cruachan Power Station: “It takes just two minutes for a turbine to run up from rest to generate mode,” says Martin McGhie, Operations and Maintenance Manager at the power station. “It takes slightly longer for the turbines to run down from generate to rest, but whatever function the turbines are performing, they can reach it within a matter of minutes.”

https://www.drax.com/power-generation/in-energy-storage-timi...

plorg
If you read the report there was a significant amount of solar being produced at low prices and being pumped for storage. Further, the pumped hydro is the first load to be disconnected to balance demand on their system.

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