It’s still not earning you money to spend electricity because you still have to pay the transfer fee which is around 6 cents / kWh but it’s pretty damn cheap nevertheless, mostly because of the excess in wind energy.
Last winter because of a mistake it dropped down to negative 50 cents / kWh for few hours, averaging negative 20 cents for the entire day. People were literally earning money by spending electricity. Some were running electric heaters outside in the middle of the winter.
To be honest, I’m struggling to keep track of the points you are making because you brought in several tangential topics all at once without much context (shale gas vs. oil, oil exports, LCOE, Poland all in a thread about solar energy in Finland compared to fossil fuel energy in Texas). I’ll just point out that the US is #4 in oil exports, by either barrels or export value (source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_exports) and the number one oil producer (source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_production), so I think it is pretty obvious that the investments into fossil fuel infrastructure in the US are well and above what is necessary for a “strategic reserve” use case
It brought it up because I know that most these analysis are just misleading at best. Once again, I know exact numbers for Poland and these are very, very poor. It’s beyond my surprise that somebody says that in Finland where they have polar days and nights and almost in arctic circle (the strongest sun radiation is on equator), its energy effectiveness balance could be positive. Nobody has provided numbers so far
Here: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/12/07/finlands-gold-rush-navigating-the-solar-landscape/
We shall see only then how the solar panels market develops without subsidies. It can’t be done without energy storage which will be beyond expensive (which is the most cases for now) and power networks / providers don’t want to buy the energy back. That’s the current state in Poland - I know, my father has solar panels