This energy scam has been going on for more than 30 years in Europe and the UK.
The former Economic minister and professor Yanis Varoufakis explains [1].
My Fiberhood cooperative has a solution: the Enernet smart grid where you pay $0.01 per kWh. We wire up one in three houses or more in a neighborhood with power routers. People buy and sell only solar electricity from panels in the neighborhood, from batteries and from every ev charging station on every parking spot in the neighborhood and from every parked ev. Each participating house saves $2000 to $5000 per year for 30 years or more[2]. You also get free 25 Gbps internet. You heat your house with a heatpump or cool the house with an ice storage ac powered only by solar. If the cooperative makes any money the share the profit with all the members or they vote to buy more solar panels and batteries. The cooperative gives loans to houses that can not afford their own panels.
People seem to have trouble understanding how commodity markets naturally price their goods but the whole point of this website is to show that electricity prices are finally decoupling.
edit: I didn’t watch the videos, I don’t have time first watch a video and then to dissect bullshit from truth.
But the solar electricity is still overpriced and taxed. People pay several times more for solar electricity from the grid than what they get if they sell to the grid.
It's not overpriced. If it was, the grid operator would be raking in massive profits because they're selling way above cost. In reality grid operators have small margins, this indicates there is no overpricing.
Do you get paid less for power fed to the grid than power sold at retail? Yes. Because they're different things. You get say 5 cents for a kWh fed back to the grid, while you pay more like 25c. But guess what? Wholesalers also get 5 cents to sell to the grid. It's just that there's an additional 20 cents in grid operation and taxes for a retail price.
Taxes you can't avoid, it's not a 'scam'. It's money you pay that goes into public funds and returns to the public, and is spent by people you can vote to elect to represent you.
Grid costs also aren't a scam, they're just a cost of doing business. Again, profit margins are small, so they're pricing based on cost, not based on scam.
And it's all entirely optional. You can just install batteries yourself. You can do whatever you want. You don't have to use the grid. But surprise surprise, there's no reason to think that a small network is on average cheaper than a big network. The bigger the network the easier it is to share storage capacity and offload excesses from one place to another. It's the reason most states and countries try to build interconnectors to even build international grids, and why islands like Cyprus that don't interconnect and have small markets have the highest electricity prices. It's why anyone who builds a home and has the choice to connect to an available grid or not, does so. And why land and homes in locations without grid-access are valued less, because they're more expensive to set-up.
The cost of a nationwide grid is significant. Depending on the terrain and population density, it usually nets out at somewhere between 30%-50% the overall cost of electricity. Sure, if you run a microgrid among a few houses, you won't pay those costs, but someone has to pay the cost to maintain the km of lines to reach deep into the mountains of Bavaria.
Microgrids also have some black swan events that can result in outage; if you are reliant on solar and storage but then experience a 7-day long period of stormy weather and no production. As you note, off-grid is always an option, and when you seriously look into it, you quickly find that costs to have that 24/7/365 service are many times more than just paying to connect to the grid.
At least in the us - the only way a utility can really make more money is by spending more money (as they get a return from the utility commission on a vested capital - massive oversimplification) but it means utilities are not incentivized to spend less rather than more…
Same in Australia, after they were corporatised (turned into companies run for profit rather than run as a service by some level of government) it was recognised that as natural monopolies there would need to be some sort of regulation on how much money they could recover, it was decided a method based on their costs was best, so they spent bad money agter good im expanding the network hugely (based on crazy projections of growth in demand to nowhere) rather than building resilience into the network and lowering their costs.
And that’s not even the cost of marketisation, that’s just the regulated network costs.
The government employees who approve or deny the utility’s priced have an incentive to not approve higher prices. Their bosses are usually elected, and higher utility prices are very unpopular.
I was told by a former southern company exec that the McKinsey did a study for them and their largest competitive advantage was regulatory capture in the states in which they operate - unfortunately I think the politicians are more beholden to the utilities than their constituents..
If you are selling to the grid, there is probably over-supply. Prices are driven by supply and demand. If you want to avoid selling at lower prices and buying at higher, try and get a battery. Check ecoflow to get an idea of the costs.
Ecoflow is a good example of overpriced American tech. I payed $1500 for a 2 kWh battery. Our Fiberhood coop sells a 16kWh battery for $1800. Prices in China are lower still.
Prices have been dropping like crazy as the various battery manufacturers have been competing with each other. They are all pretty similarly priced at this point.
A 2kwh ecoflow now costs $800. Still overpriced, but the gap is steadily narrowing.
Also, $1800 for 16kwh is a great price. That's $112/kWh. That's pretty close to raw cell costs.
Does the battery pack also come with charge circuitry, inverter, bms?
Of course it comes with our charge and discharge circuitry which is the inverter and also acts as the bms. As far as I am aware as a scientist, we are the only one in the world who charge each battery cell in parallel and slower or pulsed without maxing out or overheating, that's why we get 20000 discharge cycles versus the 5000-8000 the battery manufacture quotes.
Is that available in the US? Can you share a link? That’s an amazing deal. I’ve been recommending server rack batteries (5kwh for $750) to people but if there is something better I’d love to see it.
Fiberhood has an office in Tucson Arizona and will ship to the US if you want to to pay Trumps tariffs. I'm not aware of reasonably priced good battery or inverter makers in the US, besides ourselves (we are a non-profit so we are cheaper).
It is however not that simple to just give you a link, we need to hear from you for what electronics the software system needs to be fine-tuned. We need to understand what battery and electronics you need for each situation. As a scientist I know for a fact that no one in the world makes good battery systems yet, they are all wrongly designed (especially the ev and car batteries). You can easily spot that yourself, no one charges each individual battery cell individually in parallel. Everyone, including the scientists, charges battery packs in series and has battery management systems and ac-dc or dc-dc inverters that are not designed for the particular battery type and brand. Not a single one. If you ever find one that does charge and discharge each cell in parallel and slowly between 50% and 80%, please tell us and we'll tell the world. Right now only Fiberhood electronics charges cells correctly with specially made charger circuitry. The $0.50 to $2 networked printed circuit boards per battery cell we currently sell are the prototypes for the $0.10 battery charging microcontroller chips that we are making.
You can find dozens of Youtube influencers who test and or build cheap serially charged battery packs and your server rack batteries and inverter systems that you can find on professional China business directories, Tabao, Aliexpress and the like. But they are not exactly what you need and they damage your cells by charging them wrongly. No service, no warranties, no insurance, no buyers protection, buyer beware.
Be aware that ordering such systems directly in China is fraught with difficulties, its easy to lose your money.
The price for grid power ought to be somewhat higher than the the grid operator(s) pay at the place where the power is delivered into the grid plus their own costs for running the actual grid. So what do you think is a fair price for building/maintaining/running the grid?
The grid is a nationwide electrical circuit with requirements to connect to most buildings, and with demanding uptime and safety requirements. How much ought building and maintaining that to cost?
>So what do you think is a fair price for building/maintaining/running the grid?
Zero. I think we do not need the national grid and its vastly overpriced (order of magnitude) electricity anymore. A local DC grid, an abundance of solar and huge batteries is all you need.
For example in the Netherlands, 18 million people, 9 million houses or buildings, the national grid needs to triple in size and 1 million houses and almost 20.000 large companies are on a 10 year waiting list to get a connection (so the move abroad or build their own solar grid).
And even if you are on the grid, you pay 50% taxes and €0,31 to €0,78 per kWh. If you are on our Enernet, you only pay around €0.0044 per kWh ($0.0051756/kWh). That is 70 times to 177 times overpriced!!! (calculations in this thread lower down).
It’s really not - we built a rather large solar plant for one of our facilities offsetting like at most like 15% of demand, but because we were paying high utility rates it was a low double digit ROI project just on the spread between us it commercial rates and our cost of production (even higher when you added in the tax incentives) if you can build solar at utility scale costs and defray commercial or retail rates it’s a pretty good deal the problem is getting those utility scale cost structures when the projects are small…
The value of electricity is extremely time dependent. You can easily overproduce solar power for your house during the day fairly cheaply. However batteries + gas generators for cloudy day quickly make the cost significantly higher.
The grid gives you expensive guarantees about reliability. Just giving power does not do that.
You can sign up by becoming a member of the Fiberhood cooperative for free. Send an email to Fiberhood at icloud dot com. We must have your address and map location link or Google map address code so we can draw maps and make a website for your neighborhood to sign up and form an Enernet.
We will do a small survey and put up a detailed map of your neighborhood (like openstreetmap, see the slide in this talk [1]). We hand out door to door flyers and organise a weekend barbeque neighborhood party where everyone can come see how the cable between neighbours goes roof-to-roof, window-to-window or garden-to-garden between power routers. See our cost price bifacial solar panels and the large batteries.
We find that within a few weeks a few hundred people signed up for the cooperative and we start installing the first 10 houses. Most people invest in solar panels and batteries at wholesale prices installed by volunteers. Others get a loan to pay for this. You wind up getting payed for the panels you bought or paying around 1 dollar cent per kWh, saving a few thousand dollars per years for decades.
In the US the Rocky Mountain Institute and its founder Amory Lovins describes this as 'grid defection' and it happens on a large scale now.
Fiberhood has cooperatives forming all around the world, both rural and urban: Ukraine, Peru (near Iquitos by the Indian tribe on the Amazon River Bank, Southern Spain, Slovenia, Finland, The Netherlands, Australia.
The Fiberhood planner maps are in the first slides in the first minute of the video. We used to have an interactive zooming map of Fiberhoods for every house in the Netherlands online but now we only have them available for Fiberhood members because of privacy rules. On the maps you can see where the batteries, solar panels and power routers are located in a Fiberhood version of Google Streetview.
Hi, I tried to find more details of this initiative which sounds quite interesting (I'm living in Belgium) but it seems there is no website or summary info available - is the only way to learn more about the model a 4h lecture recording? Would you have any kind of package or info you can share on how this really works, wha the financing model is, etc?
We used to have a public website but Enernet is a technical and political solution for whole communities, companies and factories, not for single individuals.
Please send an email to Fiberhood at icloud dot com with the location of the proposed Enernet smart grid and we'll find out if there is enough interest in your neigborhood (around 10 participants) to set it up.
Enernet is a high tech solution for getting the best ,cheapest, sustainable energy, internet, mobile phone, transport (cars, busses, trucks) and housing in a neighborhood for people and companies.
If you wire up all buildings with fiber and cables to each other you can replace the national grid, its laws, taxes and always high prices with a solar energy system at cost price, saving several thousand euro's per house per year. Instead we put an abundance of solar cells up and install insulation, thermal and electrical storage tailored to the local situation. We fund it from the large savings we create. The participants will decide what will be installed, so every Enernet smart grid is different. Our Fiberhood coop has special electronics that make batteries a lot cheaper and safer and replace the National AC grid with a DC grid that has almost no transmission losses. We also distribute 25 Gbps internet and establish a small datacenter to heat water cheaply with the waste heat. The savings from all your utility bills pay for the installation and upkeep of the Enernet network.
Yes and no, not really. There are many smart grids and more not-so smart grids around the world, but only a few are non-commercial or owned by the members.
Fiberhood is unique in that we have our own Enernet power routers (a software controlled multi-port bidirectional AC-DC-DC inverter peer to peer network) that can share large amounts of DC current, has special power aggregation to enable megawatt EV chargers in every house, battery nano-inverters that make cheap batteries last up to 20000 charge/discharge cycles, integrate (free) discarded solar panels and has a range of software defined networking options including 4 x 25 Gbps internet ports per house. Most smart grids are just a different meter and payment scheme, not a radical rewiring of the entire electricity system in the neighborhood without a commercial company or government controlling what citizens pay. Other smart grids raise the cost of grid defection, Fiberhood tech makes it possible to have abundant redundant solar energy at its cost price $0.01 per kWh, many times cheaper than national AC grid pricing anywhere in the world. The tech was made to prevent making money on energy but incentivize solving the climate crises by making Solar by far the cheapest option. Stop almost all carbon and methane greenhouse gas emissions by going 100% solar.
Please give some proof of Varoufakis lying. I always check what he claims in his books and talks and I never spotted a lie. I also check Saul Griffith and Amory Lovins talks, books and papers on factual errors and never spotten one in two decades.
They say $0.01/kWh is the target price, to be reached after some decades.
Don't get me wrong, I am excited about solar power but careful about the economics: the capital cost of solar right now is well over 1$/W (panels+inverters+installation/hookup) and even though it is falling nicely, the amortization schedule needs to be considered.
A rule-of-thumb figure is 1kWh of power per year from 1W nominal installed, so the capital cost will have to be amortized over 100 years to reach $.01/kWh. The installed price has to come down by a factor of 10 for this to work out.
No, $0.01/kWh became possible in 2024 and is easy to achieve in 2026. But you have to follow the Fiberhood procedures based on our simulations and our electronics to actually achieve prices under one dollar cent per kWh. We reach this price in China, most of Europe and Australia but in the US you generally pay thrice as much (in labour cost, tarifs, etc).
You can only get an accurate cost if you create a simulation of every step of the industrial processes of manufacturing the silicon ingots, the glass, aluminum, the silver and labour that goes into making solar panels. Same for batteries, electronic components, etc. You have checks and balances in the simulation, for example you get the cost price of all the material components that you can check against the actual price for sale at the factories, the shipping cost, the wholesale prices on offer, the retail prices in different countries, the installation cost, the underlying loans and their interest rates and labour. But that simulates just the cost of the materials, you have many other factors. For example did the energy used to make the solar cells come from solar or from coal plants? Did you make thin film solar or silicon wafer solar cells. What battery chemistry. How much losses if your solar panel overheats 3 percent of the time. What latitude and longitude did the solar panels operate, at what angle to the sun?
Compared with such accurate cost simulation models calibrated with actual prices paid your claim is very vague and hand-wavy.
The Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) is a metric representing the average total cost of building and operating an energy-generating asset over its lifetime, divided by the total energy output produced during that period. It serves as a, "break-even" price per unit of energy (e.g., $/MWh), allowing comparisons between different technologies.
I don't doubt that you can have a low marginal cost, but you still have to invest money to get this system installed. You dismissed my argument as 'vague and hand-wavy', so please give a concrete estimate how much it would cost to install a 10kW system on a typical house in the US midwest, and maybe in Europe or Australia.
25 400W solar panels at $0,08/Wp =$800.00 solar panels bought in bulk
metal poles and brackets $275
10 EVE 334AH 3.2V= 10,680 kWh $70.30 =$700.30 batteries bought in bulk
Enernet Power Router components $290 (I left out 2/3 of components because this is such a small installation and needs no 4x25 Gbps internet)
Cables $230,50
Metal enclosure $61
Install fee 5 hours two people $23 per hour = $230
==============================
$2,587.80
So your "capital cost of solar right now of 1$/W" is 0.26$/W
10000 x $1W nominally installed =10000 kwh per year times 30 years = 3000,000 kWh total power yield
$2587.80/300,000=$0.00862333 per 1 kWh LCOE 30 years
$2587.80/500,000=$0.0051756 per 1 kWh LCOE 50 years
These numbers are of day prices of today. Currently the battery and solar prices are high because of the high oil and gas prices of the US/Israel/Lebanon/Iran/Ukraine/Sudan wars, there is a steep battery and solar panel price rise.
The overal LOCE is still hand-wavy in that several costs might happen in the 50 year of operation:
Drop of 20% solar panel yield by breaking glass, cost of cleaning the panels, cable replacement, accidental electronics wear en tear, extra maintainance labour cost.
Also, I doubt you need a loan to pay for $2582.80. If you did at a compound 3% interest rate with you would pay over 50 years, $11,344.67, more than 4,3 times than if you payed up front (from an online calculator, if you payed off per month than just the interest it would be lower).
But whoever is right, you'll certainly stay under $0,01 per kWh from solar and round trip storage cost in batteries.
If you are lucky, it will be almost half that, $0,005 per kWh.
To heat your apartment and drive all over the American continent with your electric car you'll need more than 10kW for an average US midwestern house.
Thank you, great info. You have great suppliers though: I can get close on batteries (I see four for $355, so $88 instead of your $70) but for panels the best I can get is $220 instead of your $32---how do you go about getting them at those prices?
Also, what Ethernet Power Router for $290? Is that a Fiberhood product? How and where would I order it?
>how do you go about getting them at those prices?
Buy a 40 shipping container with aproximately 770 panels in the factory loading lot, truck to Shenzen harbor, ship to a port in the USA, Belém/Natal/Manaus or Rotterdam, Our own truck to the customer.
Please, where do you get your 4 LifePo4 batteries for $355?
I only have one source for $70, I want more sources.
Edit: Thank you, I just ordered 8400 of your batteries (see h3lp his comment's Google link below) for less than $600,000 (at a discount). Picking them up in two weeks.
My company product, you'll get the datasheets and video as part of the order contract. See my white paper for the old model, its much upgraded since.
>Is that a Fiberhood product?
A Morphle and a Fiberhood product. Morphle is the company mass-producing electronics and chips, including the chargers, dischargers, mppt a.k.a. the Enernet Power Routers. Fiberhood cooperative sells and installs the complete infrastructure systems: Enernet systems and fiber optic internet (since 1987, we were one of the first internet providers), batteries, solar panels, power routers, tiny houses and water tanks.
>How and where would I order it?
With me in Europe or Ukraine or our office in Tucson or Montreal. +31617428596 Signal, Facetime, Whatsapp, Telegram.
You can also bundle your solar panel or battery bulk orders with us, we'll ship them directly to you in the US from the Shenzen factory region or the Poland or US wharehouse. We won't charge you a profit margin, we get a larger joint order and that gets us both a discount, less chipping cost and lower insurance. We have an agent in Shenzen overseeing the loading at the factories.
When you say "power router," what product are you referencing specifically? I'm trying to search online to find a similar product but I don't think I'm finding the right thing.
Enernet power router is the name for the hardware that my small research institute developed since 1997. You find partially similar power router designs at the Fraunhofer institute and in several scientific papers.
A power router routes "packets" of electricity around (converting from low voltage DC to high voltage DC or AC and vice versa), packets of internet data and packets of matter (like hot water in a district heating system). It is a fully software defined electricity network and internet router, power meters, firewall, inverters/converters, ground vault protection, vibration measurement and electrocution prevention cable monitoring system.
I'm referencing all the prototypes I built over the years, the final mass manufactured model will be an order of magnitude cheaper because it will from only CMOS and SiC chips that we designed.
Current 4x25Gbps/40kW models cost under 800 euro's (936 dollars excluding VAT and import tariff), the mass produced custom chip based model will be under 100 euro's.
A power router replaces your breaker box, your solar panel and battery inverters and obsoletes all the power supplies in your house. It starts your washing machine, dryer, fridge, freezer, heatpump and optionally runs a small datacenter in your hot water vat from which you shower or brew tea.
A power router saves more than 10% electricity now lost in your power inverters. It bypasses the national grid and the laws, taxes, grid costs, profit margins and transmission losses and the price for electricity generation. It saves thousands of euro's per year on your energy use and internet bills and optionally your water and sewage bills.
A power router rewires the electricity infrastructure of the planet, energy expert Saul Griffith references it in the names of his organisations Rewire America and Rewire Australia, his youtube lectures, his books Electrify, Plug in and the Big Switch. Amory Lovins references it in his books and talks and Eben Moglen in two of his talks.
It is a bunch of chips in a network of conductors (metal cables) and optical fiber that connects buildings together in a neigborhood.
You directly connect a network of solar cells (there are between 60 and 122 solar cells in each solar panel) to mppt dc-dc inverter chips that output around 3 volts directly to a network of battery cells (that form a battery pack) and that aggregate flows into a runtime programmable first stage dc-ac-dc inverter module that than outputs (power routes) high voltage AC to legacy machines, USB-C low voltage to charge all your electronics and high voltage DC to cables to the neighborhood (a replacement of the national grid) or to the ev cars and trucks.
But it means you are simply exploiting the "normal" electricity grid this way by using it when your solar doesn't work and batteries run dry - that is, when the cost of elecitricty in a normal grid, with the high penetration of renewables, is highest. You do the normal capitalism thing: privatise the benefits, socialise the costs... And the higher proportion of renewables in the grid is the higher is your upside.
If you want to completely stop using normal grid and rely on solar alone, you will need to overbuild your solar so massively, you won't be able to afford it (and will run out of land, too). Cost of electricity produced will be several euros per kwh, and a simple calculation shows just how massively unrealistic it is.
Greece defaulted after the previous, right wing government falsified the country's accounting, but by all means, don't let reality get in the way of your ideology.
We do not know if 'leftis' would have build all of it too. We only know that capitalism did.
But we also know that capitalism is pushing our earth to a runnaway heat death for a lot of humans.
For a long time our planet and we have the capacity to rebuild our whole ecosystem on clean and cheap energy but we don't. Instead we still kill mmillions due to pollution and bring extential crisis to millions just because some lunatic behind the biggest military power on the planet decided to kill a whole civilization in one night.
Levelized Cost of Energy for Germany's existing nuclear fleet was roughly 13ct/kwh.[1] The averaged costs (YTD) from the linked article currently stands at 9.71 ct/kwh. So nuclear in the mix would have increased the costs.
The SCBOE score is a good idea. However, in the case of Germany, it is often overlooked that the power grid dating from the 1970s, which was built as a one-way system from large power plants (nuclear power plants) to consumers, would have needed to be rebuilt regardless. A large share of the grid costs would therefore have been passed on to consumers even without the transition to renewable energy. Additionally, Germany is located in the center of Europe and is thus a major transit country for electricity. Here too, corresponding capacities would have had to be expanded. The expansion of a European power grid also means that the disadvantages of renewable energy variability can be offset. As the SCBOE system also shows, the individual power plant still accounts for the largest share of costs. Many of the additional factors can actually go down in prices as renewables scale up (nuclear has still to prove that this could work there too). In that regard, LCOE remains relevant.
The average electricity price for German households is approximately 32.5 to 34 cents per kWh.
We are not doing an apple to apple comparison if we are not actually looking at what people are paying. The cost of energy is to have the a stable supply of energy delivered at the time that the consumer wants to buy it. The cost of energy production is thus not just the price of producing one unit of energy in isolation, but to have it transmitted in a stable grid at a date and time specified by the consumer. Nuclear energy and solar energy both produce units of energy, but consumers need for transmission, grid stability and time aspects are completely different depending if they buy nuclear energy or solar energy. They are not interchangeable on those aspects.
The 9.71 ct/kwh is the levelized cost of producing electricity from solar. It is not the same as the average cost of consuming energy. Adding nuclear to the mix would not necessary increase costs of consuming energy, even if the average cost of producing energy would go up.
To make a very simplified illustration of this. A energy broker would happily trade 10 units for energy for 1 unit of energy, assuming that they can dictate when and where each unit get transmitted.
The cost of energy is also full lifecycle cost including waste handling, deconstruction and security. I am not saying that everything is that equation for renewables. However, one truth at least in Germany is that we still have not solved the waste problem. Other countries have both better options and also a societal consensus. Here is a study of societal cost of nuclear energy:
Those cost don't even include the full lifecycle societal cost of nuclear energy [0] (25-39 cent by some studies). Sure the renewables also have lifecycle cost we might not pay yet, but in Germany even more important we do not even have a societal and research concesus what to do with the waste (might be much better in other countries)
No. Nuclear energy was at the same time very expensive and only a very small percentage of the energy production. Sunsetting the old plants had no negative impact at all on electricity prices, to the contrary, insofar as it made space for more green energy.
Compare emissions between France and Germany during dunkelflaute. Germany is frequently at the Polish levels of emissions and Poland is famous for huge emissions. Sunsetting would make sense if they could already generate enough green electricity even in bad conditions, which was not and is not the case. It was purely political decision - Germany wanted to be European hub for distributing gas from Russia (that's why tried to convince others than gas is somehow green energy).
Your question was how would the prices be without the nuclear shutdown, talking about emissions now is goalpost shifting. Speaking of politics and not making sense, Poland is still at these levels because they put road blocks into renewables deployment and spend their resources on nuclear plants. If those plans go well they will be at around 35% coal in 2040, which is more than Germany is now.
But 2011 was not the year the nuclear power plants were shut down. However, that is the year your previous commenter was referring to. So what exactly are you trying to say? Incidentally, the electricity that the nuclear power plants had supplied was not replaced by coal power plants, but by renewable energy.
There was not a single moment in time in which all nuclear power plants were simultaneously shut down. The shut down was gradual [1]. 2011 is relevant because it is when the German government decided to phase out its remaining nuclear power plants.
Most definitely not true. Maybe enough area to cover current electric usage, but to truly decarbonize society a lot more renewable energy is needed - for transport, heating, iron industry, chemical industries, fetilizers etc. Massive amounts of electricity is needed unless you export your industries to china.
Heating with heat pumps is highly efficient and already the cheapest way of heating your home. The grids are ready for it - especially considering the amount of residential solar.
Yes but the major energy consumption of a household is heating than transport than utility.
Using ground heat (deep ones) reduces the electricity need sign.
Also if a heat pumpt creates 3-6 the energy from 1kwh, its even more efficient to burn oil and gas to make energy out of it and remote heat than just burning it locally in your burner.
Why not? Germany's total energy consumption is estimated to be around 1-2 TWh/y. This could be generated by photovoltaics covering less than 5% of its land surface.
There are significant problems around rolling out that much capacity quickly enough, and I also don't think nuclear should have been shut down that hastily, but I don't think "only nuclear can cover long-term energy needs" is true in any way.
Wtf are your numbers from, but they are wrong. It's over 2200TWh per year. And it you truly want to be renewable, the numbers go up. Upcycling waste to plastics or using hydrogen to make steel is more energy intensive than using fossil fuels.
https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/en/indicator-final-energy-con...
Those are total energy numbers, which includes fossil fuels, but those are famously misleading because replacing those with electricity reduces the number of Wh needed. An electric car needs roughly 15kWh for 100 kilometers, a gas powered car typically at least 60kWh for the same distance.
Electrifying reduces energy consumption only in selected use cases. Such as EVs yes. However other usescases such as making steel with hydrogen, plastic fromwaste or fuel for planes require vastly more energy when electrified.
Unsurprisingly the use cases where energy consumption is going down lead on electrification (because it's a cost advantage), so it may seem like electrification reduces energy consumption.
But if you really want to leave fossil fuels behind, the electric consumption will go up, up and beyond.
Electricity consumption will go up* but energy consumption will go down. You will not need 2200TWh of energy in Germany when all is said and done. Heating is one of the top reasons we spend energy and heat pumps are just tremendously more efficient than something like gas heating. You can get the same amount of heating for 3-4 times less energy with a heat pump than gas. So obviously you will not need 2200TWh of electricity like you do now with fossil fuels for energy.
* It's also debatable how much electricity use will actually go up. Logic says this must happen, but logic is not science. We have millions of EVs now in the EU and electricity production is less than it was 20 years ago. Efficiency is a source of energy. If you look at the US for example, it uses almost twice as much electricity per capita than Germany, and I would say they both get the same high level if living. If you look at it that way, Americans can cut their use almost in half and live the same standard of living. This can power a lot of EVs and heat pumps without adding a single GW of new capacity.
Energy consumption in total in Germany will only go down if you decide to export your steel and chemical industries to china. The high temperatures needed by industrial processes can't be achieved with heat pumps.
No. If you electrify residential heating and transportation it will obviously go down. If there are sectors where you can't do that, it will still overall go down because those other sectors will not go up to make up for the reduction. Not sure what your argument is.
The number Lxgr gave, 1-2 TWh/year, is simply completely wrong. Germany's annual electricity use alone is around 500 TWh/year. 1-2 THw/year would be the electricity use of 300-600k average German houses.
I have my doubts about short and medium term feasibility, and much more importantly storage and adapting carbon-based industrial processes.
But yes, if all it took was 5% of landmass (which also doesn’t get permanently unusable nor polluted), I’d say that would be a pretty good deal, yeah. This is significantly less than what’s used for livestock farming, to put it into perspective.
Realistically, I don’t think we’ll solve storage fast enough to be able to afford zero nuclear power in Europe.
And of course, you can combine those things sometimes - I've seen cattle munching on grass under solar panels in Baden-Württemberg (state just west of Bavaria).
You can install solar panels over areas that are already developed — rooftops (lol), parking garages, highways, and so on. Some agricultural land even benefits from being covered by solar panels. This has great potential and was first researched in the United States. China is covering water reservoirs with solar panels, which has the additional positive effect of reducing evaporation. And then there is the incredibly large amount of energy that the North Sea, far from any beaches or islands, could provide in consistent wind energy.
Rooftop solar is prohibitively expensive in Germany. My installation would only cover its costs if electricity becomes so expensive that it would lead to complete economic collapse.
No. In Germany, rooftop solar is usually economically attractive, not prohibitively expensive. Especially on a decent roof and if you use a fair share of the power yourself. Verbraucherzentrale(1) says PV systems for private homes are “usually worthwhile” economically, and that self-consumption is the key driver of profitability.
Over 40% of the German landmass is currently used to produce food for farm animals. The space requirement for solar is far off from that. And you can use rooftops etc.
Although nuclear energy produces no carbon emissions, it is simply not price competitive with solar and wind in the western world. A culture of safety above all else made nuclear not price competitive. And it would be political suicide for regulators to relax safety given how accidents like Chernobyl or Three Mile Island are etched into the public mind.
We're still using lots of coal power, and it's going to take a long time to get near 90% renewable power. So I'd still like to see a lot of nuclear buildout (with a standardized design for many plants, and streamlined permitting for that design).
Building nuclear power plants still takes the longest. Especially if you want to produce the same amount of energy that will be needed in the coming years. Currently, nuclear power plants supply about 9% of the electrical energy used worldwide — and it has taken us from 1950 until today to get there. Why should it suddenly be faster and more elegant now? We also don’t have the money to pursue both in parallel.
Yes, I know China and to some extent South Korea build nuclear power plants faster. But even there, some plants have taken up to eleven years to build, and others that were built quickly only achieve a capacity factor of 60%. At least in China’s case, many of the conditions cannot be directly transferred to Western countries. Space, social and political circumstances, and other factors are simply not the same everywhere as in China. Moreover, even China, whose share of nuclear energy in its electricity mix is around 4.5%, is finding that renewables are much faster and cheaper.
> We also don’t have the money to pursue both in parallel.
According to what?
We're not spending that much money overall. In particular the US government is putting very little into energy infrastructure considering its spite for renewables.
> Moreover, even China, whose share of nuclear energy in its electricity mix is around 4.5%, is finding that renewables are much faster and cheaper.
The cost of renewables starts to grow when they get over 50% of the power mix.
I'm not opposed to enabling 95+% renewable power by having an army of natural gas peaker plants on standby, but I think nuclear could be cheaper if we gave it an honest try.
They weren't even acting as a power plant when they did that.
Buy yes I'll take a 1% chance of another 30x30 mile exclusion zone for 100k fewer coal deaths. Even if I have to personally live near it.
> Even with current standards there are a lot of nuclear power plants running just fine.
We could have a lot more of them making power for half the price and still hold them to very safe standards.
And if we focused on what was important while keeping costs under control, we'd get extra safety benefits by affordably rebuilding or replacing plants that were built in the 70s and 80s.
chernobyl affected a lot more then the exclusion zone, most of eastern europe... cancer rates spiked because of it... and it could have been a lot worse.
Effects are long term, hence question if you would live there now?, what would happen if Paris or London or Berlin were contaminated?, would you still live there?, would you live in Chernobyl city now?
When a reactor can mess up a whole country/area long term you need to take all precautions.
In spite of this, there are reactors built with plans to extend (Romania with Cernavoda for example), but they cost a lot and take a long time to build, plus areas where they can be built are likely limited.
Still preferable to the amount of people killed by coal.
> what would happen if Paris or London or Berlin were contaminated?
You can avoid building adjacent to cities.
> would you live in Chernobyl city now?
Really? I go ahead and say I'll live next to it, so you move the goalpost to living in it?
Screw it. Fine. If it will get a lot of large nuclear plants built outside Asia, I'll trade a promise to live inside any disaster zone caused by not only them but any other plant built in the West this century. Is that good enough for you? Chernobyl itself was not an example of modern nuclear power and I'm not going there.
> When a reactor can mess up a whole country/area long term you need to take all precautions.
Even setting aside the issue of being so cautious you cause harm in other ways, a lot of the precautions don't affect the odds of a big disaster!
> So it's not the standards that are the problem.
There's so much nitpicking on an individual plant basis, so I think they are a big problem.
I didn't see how "there are reactors built with plans to expand" is supposed to show that standards aren't driving the cost?
Nuclear power plants produce CO₂ emissions. The only point at which they do not emit CO₂ is the electricity generation itself. Everything that happens before and after produces CO₂. The amount of CO₂ is debatable, even the major meta-studies (UNECE 2022) point out that across all collected studies, parts of the lifecycle emissions are consistently missing because, drumroll, the nuclear power industry is so non-transparent.
Important factors include the mining of uranium ore. If the concentration of uranium ore in the rock is low and the more nuclear power plants are built and the more ore is needed, the sooner such deposits will have to be tapped, mining becomes increasingly CO₂-intensive. The same applies to enrichment. Both processes would greatly benefit if renewable energy were expanded to the point where uranium mining and enrichment could be operated with lower CO₂ emissions.
It's widely accepted that sunsetting nuclear energy had a positive impact on the deployment of renewables, and consequently on the longer term energy prices. It was one of the better energy policy (and environmental, and security) decisions Germany has made in the recent past.
Do you mean the nuclear power that the free market companies very explicitly said wasn't worth doing? That one? Why are we pleading the government to use a horrendously expensive technology that even the free market hates?
Nuclear in 2006 was 160TWh. Coal in 2025 was 93TWh. So a big portion of nuclear would have been replaced by renewables by now anyways (natural gas has a different role in the grid and cannot be replaced bu nuclear).
Also a lot of coal plants have been / are used in district heating in addition to electricity. Replacing them is much harder and takes longer than nuclear which is electricity only. Shutting those down was never a short term option.
Calling it the worst decision ever is really funny, when it really is just a question of the order of the transition to renewables. And much of that order was dictated by technical needs.
Merit order pricing and the fact that you need fossil peakers will make the price effect completely negligible to consumers. You are comparing the MWh price of slightly more efficient fossil power plants to slightly less efficient fossil power plants.
You know that nuclear energy was heavily subsidized?
And they still don’t have a long term storage but therefore rotting barrels with nuclear waste in the interim storage facility Asse which have to be retrieved. Cost estimate around 14 billion Euros.
CO2 doesn't stay forever in the atmosphere and what's does that have to do with nuclear energy? Building massive power plants also sets CO2 free, same with mining uranium.
Nuclear energy still has a waste problem, is expensive, creates massive single points of failure and given the current situation with the latest advances in drone
warfare is a huge security risk while construction and operation.
Nice! This is the first time i see anyone providing a quantitative answer to this. When the effect becomes more pronounced, it will hopefully remove political barriers for renewable electricity.
A widening gap between electricity cost and gas cost (and fuel cost) will be THE main driver of electrification! Installing a heat pump will be a no-brainer, driving an electric car will be a no brainer.
This can only happen once electricity decouples from gas prices - but that requires lots of renewables in the mix!
Heat pump prices + cost of installation was so high the last time I looked 2years ago, that it wasn't worth it even with free electricity (rooftop solar).
Air to water heat pumps (which usually are used in Germany) should be quite cheap nowadays. Maybe they tried overcharging you or a significant rework was required?
Obviously that's impossible to answer without knowing your specific situation, nevermind even knowing which country you are speaking of. Heat pump prices aren't high here, heat pumps are just aircons with some extra cheap parts after all.
I was thinking in general. But specifically: I'm in Croatia (so prices should not be that far off from German ones - equipment perhaps more costly but manual work a bit cheaper) and was quoted (two years ago) for a €15k total installation cost for the size I needed, which would be 15-20 years' worth of my natural gas usage.
Even at zero electricity host (I have rooftop solar), the investment didn't make a lot of sense at the time, assuming the costs would be falling in the next few years.
I'm not deep into electricity pricing dynamics, but based on my intuition, shouldn't that rather have a dampening effect on electrification, as the gap widens?
High gas prices + gap is small -> Big opportunity to undercut via cheaper methods like solar -> attractive investment -> more new builds
High gas prices + gap is wide and widening -> Smaller and smaller opportunity to invest in solar, as the market is already dominated by solar prices -> less attractive investment -> less new builds
Quite frankly, Germany already has a lot of renewables in the mix. Why did it take so long for the effect to appear and why is it still so modest? What should be renewables share be (vs ~60% today), for complete decoupling?
Essentially it's not an isolated market, but part of a bigger whole.
As an example imagine a village that constituted 1% of the population of a country. The village was 100% renewable, and the country was 0% renewable. If the village disconnected its grid, in isolation its prices would be dictated by its renewables. But if its connected, its renewables just get traded on a market with marginal prices. If a person elsewhere in the country has more expensive generation, they'll but your cheap renewables at their price level. Thus the village will experience high prices like everyone else.
Now suppose Germany is that village in an interconnected EU market. Of course the numbers from my example are exaggerated, but the point remains: Germany's renewables aren't enough, if pricing is set at a much larger market, with fewer renewables.
Today about 20% of Germany's electricity was exported. While only about 6% of its demand came from gas. In other words if Germany was disconnected, it'd have needed no gas, and thus prices would've been lower.
Of course disconnecting isn't a good idea for other reasons, as on other days Germany imports. And Germany's ability to export its renewable excess generates significant revenues, creates incentives to build more renewables, and offsets emissions and pollution in other countries, too.
But long story short, it'll take more for one part of the whole to go renewable. As the EU is generally transitioning towards renewables we see a decoupling happen.
You need quarter-hours where renewables set the price for power. That's only happening now that renewables have reached sufficient penetration of the market.
And it will get more as batteries come online.
In a commodity market, the price is always set by the most expensive producer that is still able to sell. That's natural - why would I sell my apples cheaper than the other farmer if you need so many apples that you have to by from both of us?
... because you may have signed a longer term contract that might in turn guarantee offtake from you rather than the other farmer?
This marginal price is only for the spot market right? So the key question is more what % of the mix is spot vs longer term. And thus what the overall impact is on total blended price.
A dependency on solar panels which needs to be replaced every 5 years is less bad then a dependency on gas which is burned every day. Having said that nuclear decommission was a huge mistake.
Even 20 years is much below what most studies show. Panels tend to keep functioning well beyond 30 years, with degradation at 86%. It might be true that economically in 30 years they're so much cheaper that it's worth replacing them with new panels, but that's an optimisation, not a question of replacement need.
50 years from now when those panels produce less than 75% of nameplate capacity they'll really regret not depending on a market where the swing producer is a cartel of theocratic dictatorships.
An installed solar panel will continue producing electricity, no matter how the relationship with the country that produced it develops. Unlike natural gas, oil or uranium where the fuel itself is the actual imported good.
Good for the Germans, in the UK we use marginal cost pricing, so consumers pay for the highest costing output regardless of how much if any they use. Means even if we get gas down to 1% well still be paying gas prices.
It's true that even 2% of usage being gas, means 100% of the demand pays the gas price.
But (!) that's only true for the spot market at that particular point in the day. And that changes all the time.
Example: if you use zero gas for 80% of the day, and use just 10% gas for remaining 20% of the day, then that day gas was just 2% of total demand, like we said earlier. But it's not true that gas prices dictated 100% of the price that day.
After all, gas prices dictated only 20% of the day's prices. The remaining part of the day there was no gas demand, and thus it did not dictate the price. And that happens more and more often.
The more renewables + storage are built out, the more time of the day that gas is displaced, not used and thus not part of the price mechanism.
Second, if the market pays at the gas price, the renewables reap all the profits (because their costs are far below the gas price). This incentivizes further renewable capacity build-out, eventually displacing gas entirely. This incentive structure pushes the market the fastest towards lowest-cost generation, which is renewable nowadays.
It's the same in Belgium, and I believe for the majority if not all of Europe.
What I never understood from this arrangement: can a renewable provider legally refuse to accept the gas-price (either by charging less, or simply refunding a large chunk of the difference?
I understand growth may appear to suffer if renewables refunded the difference between gas prices and renewable prices+profit+moderate-growth-expenses; but it would also mean the public would flock massively to that provider, which may allow for faster growth under certain conditions.
Are renewable bound by law to accept the instantaneous peak-demand-electricity-prices (typically gas peaker prices)? And even if they were forced to accept that payment, are they explicitly forbidden to return a large chunk of the extortionate difference to their customers, in order to comply with acceptance of the price while reimbursing their customers?
This may sound contradictory, but if a major expense for renewables is the siting and commissioning of a renewable wind/solar farm, it may be possible to rake in more profit by growing customer base instead, and then use that money to outcompete the competitors in the siting and commissioning landscape?
A bureaucrat can dictate that x Euro's correspond to y Dollars, but the free market tends to find a price rediscovery mechanism returning closer to true rates. Do we really believe that of the huge search space of all possible policies that this pricing strategy (of forcing everyone to sell at the instantaneously most expensively generated energy) happens to be the most optimal trajectory at a fundamental level? Or do we believe some undiscovered or unused known policy could actually grow renewables faster? If the real world differs from fiat, the market will find a way to bypass fiat and unmask its weak points, at the end of the day money talks.
Furthermore the current setup may result in unintended consequences: at a certain point renewables may be disincentivized to expand capacity, as it would decrease the percentage of time the peakers are needed, and thus decrease their income! It's almost a politically introduced stranglehold, to prevent gas peakers from being displaced.
The reason why power prices can still decouple: Because there are more and more quarter-hours where gas plants are NOT setting the price and the marginal cost is set by renewables.
The same is happening in the UK.
> , so consumers pay for the highest costing output regardless of how much if any they use.
No, if no Gas is needed (!) for power production in any quarter-hour, the price is not set by gas.
PS: Emphasis on needed. Gas plants may still be running at a loss for whatever reason (heat coupling, special contracts), but if they are not needed to provide the power, they will have to bid at a loss, and then they will not be able to drive the price.
> Gas plants may still be running at a loss for whatever reason
My assumption, given how the UK numbers look when there are negative prices but still a little bit of gas running, is that shut down/ start up for a CCGT is so undesirable (expensive maybe?) that a 100MW plant which can say throttle to 5MW would rather pay to give you 5MW of electricity for the next half hour than switch off the plant and provide nothing then need to start it back up in a few hours.
I don't know what "throttling" looks like for this equipment. It seems implausible that these units have no ability to control their fuel usage/ power output at all, just binary on or off, but on the other hand presumably in practice it's far from infinitely variable.
I imagine it's just be keeping the equipment warm and moving, especially for something like a steam turbine. Partial output sounds like a reasonable guess to me.
But IIRC, in Belgium at least, these plants are also remunerated on "secondary" markets for non-productive tasks. These secondary markets are mostly for grid balancing.
As others have pointed out the electricity price is only set by gas when gas is needed, but that's only part of your bill. Renewables now make up over half of UK electricity generation and they are financed through Contracts for Difference which are ultimately paid for by a supplier obligation levy on electricity bills.
When market electricity prices are lower than the strike price for a CfD, electricity users end up paying the difference through the levy and when the market price is higher it reduces the amount levied. So for the renewable portion of UK electricity generation we effectively pay the fixed strike price of the CfD whatever the market price.
CfDs only cover about 15% of renewables, though it's increasing.
When the Ukraine invasion spiked prices one suggestion was to offer the non CfD renewables a chance to enrol for CfDs, which would reduce their short term profits but guarantee long term predictable profit. I don't think it was actually done though.
My understanding is that it's the same here in Germany. From the website
> What does "decoupled" mean? In a gas-dominated electricity market, the marginal generator setting the price is almost always a gas-fired power plant (CCGT). That means electricity prices are structurally linked to gas prices — when gas rises, electricity rises with it. Decoupling happens when enough zero-marginal-cost renewable generation (wind, solar) pushes gas off the margin for enough hours that the annual average electricity price no longer tracks gas.
Marginal pricing is not specific to electricity in UK, that's just how commodities end up priced.
Saudis pump oil at cost of $10 per barrel. Will they sell it to you at $10? Nope. The average oil price? Nope.
Saudis will sell the barrel at the highest price people are willing to pay - the marginal price. So if the most expensive oil needed to match the global oil demand is some super expensive arctic oil project, the oil will be priced according the marginal cost of that project even if only 1% is needed.
Indeed. For others who may wonder why this is the case, a simple example will explain it:
Suppose Saudi can produce 100 barrels at $10 (cost+profit) each, and Brazil can produce 100 barrels at a price of $50 (cost+profit) each, and John wants to buy 120 barrels.
- John will pay what is necessary for his Oil, but seeks out the cheapest price available.
- Sellers Brazil and Saudi will accept a sale of their own production if their minimum price of $50 and $10 is met respectively, but will sell to the highest bidder for their supply.
You'd think John will go to to Brazil to buy 100 barrels at $50, and then buy 20 barrels in Saudi at $10.
But guess what, Brazil could simply go to Saudi and buy their 100 barrels for $10, and then sell them to you for $50.
So now Saudi has demand from both John and Brazil at a $10 price. Who gets to buy? Well whoever decides to bid more to convince Saudi to sell their oil.
If John increases his bid to $15, Saudi will prefer that to Brazil's $10 bid. But Brazil would then increase its bid to $20, knowing they can sell it to John for $50.
This bidding keeps going up until the $50 point. For Brazil there is no longer any profit in buying Saudi Oil at $50, and selling it to John for the same price. For John there is no point in bidding more than $50 for Saudi Oil, because he can get a $50 price from Brazil.
Any point below $50 means a bidding war starts between John and Brazil, because at less than $50, Brazil has a cheaper source of oil (Saudi) than their own production cost.
And this is true for every commodity in a free market. It's not some 'UK system', it's just the consequence of free trade.
Of course in reality it's trading intermediaries that do the bidding, it's not Brazil buying from Saudi, but traders jumping in to arbitrage. But this is a simplified example.
The irony is at the time of me writing this; gas is down to 4.6%[^1] and renewables are a whopping 88.5% and yep - the cost is based on the 4.6% of gas.
Exactly. That's clearly not a price dictated by gas. That's an example where CCGT generators were willing to pay you to take away their electricity. Obviously the gas they bought to do this cost money and so they're making a small loss when this happens and it would be good to understand why and how this makes sense for them in order to develop policies which get us the outcomes we want.
I'm far from an expert here but isn't that spot price rather than future deliveries? Few people pay for actual spot pricing because it can go the other way, and you want known pricing. You would have a forward contract to delivery gas at say 20p. This is a known price for operation and likely has profit baked in anyway. The excess is what we see now. They can't just switch off as they have a contract to fulfill, but the grid doesn't need the excess, therefore priced at a negative.
In https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-... under
"Why does the price of gas drive electricity prices?" it suggests that, at the time the CMA report linked was written (now over 10 years ago) the CMA thought as much as 40% of electricity is traded at spot prices.
Now, the CMA report that's linking is talking about a world we no longer live in, in that world the UK burns coal, Russia hasn't invaded Ukraine and so on, and thus the numbers might be entirely different now, but that's the best I could find.
The how and why is that gas takes up space, cutting usage to zero when your site storage is full can cause issues (you can do this short term and get a bit of line pack going but it all eventually has to go somewhere).
I think gas turbines can turn off completely without issue (unlike coal) but there may also be situations where it costs more money to restart the generation process completely than to idle it at low capacity for a few hours when there is no demand for gas generation.
In Vancouver, we have somehow reverse curve - the incentive is to use more electricity at night when there's lower demand. As I understand, our main energy source is water, and so it has mostly flat generation. Nothing new - combining the two would make it cheaper all together.
Yes, and they are higher due to 2 reasons. And both seem to work.
Number 1 reason is that power was quite highly taxed, since it is directly linked with pollution and CO2. All powers, but that also means electrical power. The effect is, that european cars are smaller and use less. And also european houses are better insulated. You can measure this, the typical german 4 person household uses less than 50% of the electric power of a 4 person US household. Before COVID I even saw a statistics that this less usage compansated the higher electricity prices, so both norm-households payed the same for electricity. Unsure if that is still true post-COVID.
The other reason is that also a good amount of money is directly invested into the grid, to make it more resilient. And you can also measure that. If you lookup the SAIDI (system average interuption duraction index) of e.g. USA and compare it to Germany, you immediately see why over there uninteruptible power supplies are hardly used except in data centers. SAIDI Germany 12.2 minutes per customer per year, USA 125.7 minutes per customer per year. That's a whopping 10x worse. Not just as number, but also for the industry.
And I heard that the SAIDI in Texas is even worse than the US average.
You have to ask how much of it is subsidized, otherwise it's pointless. It's very easy to 'decouple' electricity price from natural gas if the government simply pays it with tax money (which is how it works in many asian countries where the electricity prices are less than one third of EU level.)
Note that "gas" in this context means natural gas, not gasoline
As noted in the methodology below, they are measuring the gas-implied level as the marginal running costs of a combined-cycle gas turbine plant: the price of the natural gas necessary to generate a given amount of electricity, plus the cost of the necessary carbon credits to burn that natural gas. Then they compare that to the actual electricity price
> Note that "gas" in this context means natural gas, not gasoline
What's up with Americans consistently calling things "wrong" like this? "Gas" isn't even the right state of matter for the subject, nor is "football" actually a sport where the ball is mostly for the foot, almost like things are intentionally named bad.
"Gas" is short for "gasoline" which means "gas oil". That is a perfectly cromulent name for a liquid.
"Football" is a different game in the US because it arrived there from England in the 19th century when carrying the ball was allowed. In England the sport eventually split into distinct sports: association football (aka soccer) and rugby. In America they evolved the game independently but didn't change the name.
Because changing a name that's been in use for decades is very confusing and unnecessary. A rose by another name etc.
The full names of the two rugby codes are "rugby union football" and "rugby league football". So Americans aren't alone in their cavalier use of the word "football".
It is the British that changed things. They also used to call it soccer and then changed in the 1980s. Canada and Australia still use soccer, probably cause they have native footballs.
What's up with the British calling refined gasoline "petrol"? It's not even an abbreviation for the word, it's a totally different material? You don't go calling refined aluminium "bauxite", but you do call gasoline "petrol".
We're both wrong. It's a liquid at room temperature, and it's called not petroleum.
Seems cromulent to me. One of the common meanings of essence is "a product of distillation" (compare e.g. essential oils - oils won through steam distillation). And gasoline is won through fancy distillation
You know, the first five times I read your comment it didn't make sense. This time I got curious enough to investigate what the hell you're talking about...
Apparently in some countries there is something called "Danish Pastry" or "Danish" for short, I had no idea! Funnily enough, where I grew up, those are called "Wienerbröd" (and in Danish it's "wienerbrød", the same basically) which quite literally translates to "Viennese bread".
So no, I didn't know "Danishes" were Austrian, but I did have the suspicion that Viennese bread was indeed Austrian :)
For me personally it did not. I was a happy Tibber costumer until recently, meaning I was charged the quarterly hour spot price per kWh. The Iran War let to a significant jump in the price during the hours when renewables were low. I switched back to a traditional fixed price per kWh plan because of the high gas prices.
It is incredibly volatile. Spot prices in the day-ahead auction for tomorrow are between -39€/MWh and 201€/MWh. And that's a pretty normal amount of volatility for this time of year
Would be good to have more than a one sentence explanation of what you mean, but this is a result of low storage. In the oil market, if prices are too volatile you just stick it in a tank until they stabilize. You only get negative prices if all the storage is full, which happened to WTI once.
Nope. They pay more than they were with the "old" energy mix of more gas and nuclear.
Telling people it could be worse isn't really something to be proud of.
I personally now have solar panels on the roof and a heat pump so we only use electricity and don't rely on gas. Germany's strategy is really beneficial to households like my own. Unless you're relatively well off or on benefits, you're losing big time. The costs are constantly increasing with people telling others to just take money (you don't have) to install some solar panels on the house (you don't own) or buy an electric car (you can't afford).
The whole point of this website is to show that the price of electricity is year-to-date 22% cheaper than it would be in a gas-dominated grid without renewables.
So I don't know where you're getting the "No" from?
You could argue that maybe investing all those subsidies into nuclear would have been cheaper, but that would have had a lot of path dependencies that simply did not pan out in Europe.
And economists agree that schemes similar to ETS is the most economically efficient way to achieve carbon targets.
So, if you want to say: "I don't think governments should have agreed to the Paris agreement" then you should just say that, rather than attack various highly efficient ways of achieving those goals.
I don't support it because it doesn't work (at least for me, I guess there's some middleman in the grand scheme of things who is profiting off of this). E.g. Texas has a high share of renewables too without carbon taxes and with much cheaper electricity.
If my electricity prices are no longer linked to gas prices, I can have cheaper electricity - my provider only produces green energy. But in the past raising gas prices would have also raised my prices, regardless. So yes, regular consumers can profit from this.
> my provider only produces green energy. But in the past raising gas prices would have also raised my prices, regardless. So yes, regular consumers can profit from this.
It's one single grid. You get coal, nuclear, wind, solar, and everything else. If you buy from a provider, you get that mix.
Well, the electrons arriving in your home will the same as your neighbours, regardless of which supplier you choose. But by choosing a different supplier you can steer which energy sources will be used to feed that grid, so it still makes a difference, just not exactly where you live.
What if the whole point of the strategy was to incentivize households to become more like yours?
An energy transition isn't just some big centralized state planned enterprise. It's also the sum of people putting up their own solar (on the balcony if they're renters!) etc.
An 800W plug-in solar system for your balcony can be had for 200 euros these days, breakeven is super quick.
Decoupling of energy prices from fossil fuel is going to be spreading around the globe. It's not that hard to grasp. If you are spending non trivial percentages of your GDP on stuff that you burn once in exchange for some twh of energy delivered, lowering that significantly will have a notable impact on your trade balance.
Recent events in the middle east will have made a few countries keenly aware of how overly dependent they are on stuff coming from that region and how easily their economies are disrupted when stuff goes wrong there.
I live in Berlin, electricity is rather expensive here and people are not treating their gas dependence with enough urgency yet. The city is surrounded by flat country side with lots of wind mills and solar installations. Yet most apartment buildings in the city are still gas heated. Mine is no exception. I have to pay into fueling the gas boiler every month to the extent of about 150ish euro per month. Down from 250ish during the worst of the aftermath of the Russian gas pipeline shut down. I'd love my building to be switched to a heat pump. That's 1800 euro down the drain every year. I'll take a 30-40% cut on that please. It's technically very feasible and measured over 10-20 years, there should be a very clear financial payoff. Done right it should pay for itself probably within a decade. The building has about 20 apartments. Monthly gas bills are 2.5K based on yearly statements. Or about 30K. All out the chimney. That's one hell of a budget to tackle a bit of energy efficiency in the building.
But this is where Germany is its own worst enemy. We're talking a lot of vested interests. Nimby's somehow blocking the notion of literally saving money (as opposed to setting it on fire and chucking it out the chimney). A lack of incentives. A lot of bureaucracy, etc. Even the decision to stop building completely new buildings without a gas connection is somehow controversial in this country where gas is expensive. It is in the middle of a years long gas crisis of its own making and it can't get the decision to stop hitting itself with the proverbial hammer actioned.
A bit of system thinking could turn this around relatively quickly though. For example starting to think of this as investments with clear ROI as opposed to just cost would change the decision making and could also open up a lot of financing. Banks love investments with predictable ROI, for example. And Germany has an excellent credit rating.
However, Germany is grid locked on an irrational fear of financing and debt. It has very little of it relative to e.g. the US or even most other EU countries. It also has huge infrastructure problems. Addressing those requires investment. Investment requires financing. Investments have ROIs which should enable said financing. But that's where penny pinching politicians seem to have a mental block confusing investments for cost and consistently opting to "save cost" rather than to invest. And generally not seeing the forest for the trees.
But the picture is pretty clear. Switch most house holds to heat pumps while at the same time investing in cables, on/off-shore wind, a bit of solar on the side. With lots of battery storage. Etc. would do wonders for the amounts of gas it has to import at great cost. The country has millions of apartment blocks like mine using about 2-3x more energy than needed for heating. Almost all of it in gas form. A program to change those buildings could be executed in 10-15 years and break even in about the same time. It would result in many billions of savings in gas imports per year. That's the few percent of GDP that makes the difference between growth or recession. Germany has been in and out of recession for the last few years. Even powering that exclusively with gas fired electricity plants would yield substantial savings. And it already is transitioning to a grid that is mostly not gas powered. This should be a no brainer. But it somehow isn't. And that's just domestic heating.
I wonder how heat pumps would work for apartment building central heating systems. The circulated water has to be a lot hotter than heat pumps are capable of, as far as I've understood. Is there already a system that could viably replace gas in the existing building stock?
Another problem is that most people in Berlin/Germany are renting, so the incentives do not align. The building owner doesn't pay for the heating, so they are unlikely to do any investments where the upside is for the tenants only.
Heat pump hot water is very common in Europe. Just as it's possible for the pump to make a box so cold that food stays frozen despite the hot summer's day in Florida, it's also possible to heat up a tank of water this way, it just costs more energy.
Unlike modern natural gas boilers which have only a very small tank of water kept hot and use a fire to make more on demand with only a few seconds of delay (you might not even realise this is happening, but of course it isn't actually instant and so there is a small tank of very hot water) the heat pump will need a large tank because you're going to put about a day's supply of hot water in the tank and gradually, over a whole day, re-heat it as needed.
The problem is the old building stock (say, large apartment buildings from early 1900s) which isn't energy efficient at all, and on cold winter days require very hot water to keep warm. The radiators were designed with assumption that the water can be boiling hot (coal/gas).
It doesn't seem feasible to renovate everything, so I'm wondering what are the practical options. A hybrid system where a gas boiler is kept for the peak demand?
There's no chance at all that you're using boiling hot water (373K) because that stuff is both dangerous and unreasonably expensive to make at volume.
My guess is that what you're thinking of is the water being say 320 to 340K, which is obviously far warmer than you'd heat a home, but isn't boiling water. Heat pumps will be more efficient at lower temperatures, so maybe it's keeping that tank of water at 320K while your gas boiler was 330 or even 340K -- but the gas boiler is more efficient for lower temperatures too, ask any manufacturer or installer, the way to get lower costs is to turn down the local thermostat, it's just that people are used to "instant" heat from a gas boiler and won't tolerate answers like "Run it for a whole day" whereas that is what your heat pump needs.
It is true that because of this "Run it all day" approach an uninsulated home is so expensive to heat that it's impractical, when I grew up there was ice inside my bedroom window when I woke on a winter's morning, it had been under 270K at night, and a gas boiler would heat it in an hour or so -- but that's not because it's literally impossible with heat pumps it's just far too expensive.
No, 47°C to 67°C is way too low. The buildings are not actually circulating boiling water, but not too far either:
> Typically, heating systems in Europe use water flowing through pipes and emitters (radiators) heated to high temperatures (70-90°C). [0]
The radiators are often designed for these temperatures. Supplying with lower heat will not work without replacing the radiators and/or renovating for better energy efficiency.
And heat pumps, AFAIK, can't supply 70-90°C. Thus my original question of what is the current plan to solve this problem.
So, firstly yes, exactly, even in the 19th century they aren't using boiling water, it's just needlessly expensive to make. 90°C seems unnecessarily hot to me (as you can see, by the time I was born it wasn't being used to heat homes) but it isn't boiling.
And yes, some older buildings will need refurbishment, these building often pre-date electric light so that's happened before. The 1970s house example starts with a 70°C flow, but with a combination of insulation and replacing radiators they get to 41°C flow which is a much cheaper 318K in real numbers.
The thing is making 90°C water was expensive and unnecessary even when gas boilers start being commonplace, the manufacturer will tell you that you should turn it down until it's heating the home as slow as you can tolerate. That got more true as the boilers got more efficient, because the efficiency is from recovering more heat energy from burning methane and you do that at lower flow temperatures, the heat pumps are just more of the same. Notice how those diagrams show gradually reducing flow temperatures over the years, in the 1930s recovered heat from an industrial district at 90°C is plausible, but the gas boiler manufacturer fifty years ago will go white when you say you need 90°C -- he's going to suggest 70°C, and his successors will keep bargaining you down because the efficiency numbers are better as flow temperature reduces and while "instant heat" feels good in the moment, the bills for the gas you're burning will not.
We can pump these temperatures but they don't make economic sense. Unlike low outside air temperatures this is just economics. The low outside air temperatures mean you need to defrost the pump, which if it got cold enough might literally become impossible, but if you want to pay far, far more money to heat water to 90°C that would be technically possible, it's just silly, like burning $50 bills to keep warm - use singles they're 50x cheaper.
This energy scam has been going on for more than 30 years in Europe and the UK.
The former Economic minister and professor Yanis Varoufakis explains [1].
My Fiberhood cooperative has a solution: the Enernet smart grid where you pay $0.01 per kWh. We wire up one in three houses or more in a neighborhood with power routers. People buy and sell only solar electricity from panels in the neighborhood, from batteries and from every ev charging station on every parking spot in the neighborhood and from every parked ev. Each participating house saves $2000 to $5000 per year for 30 years or more[2]. You also get free 25 Gbps internet. You heat your house with a heatpump or cool the house with an ice storage ac powered only by solar. If the cooperative makes any money the share the profit with all the members or they vote to buy more solar panels and batteries. The cooperative gives loans to houses that can not afford their own panels.
[1] Best version with info graffics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3bo-s_OY4Q or
Longer version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NicE0-N9ux0&list=TLPQMDcwNDI... or
short version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaHepQyE37Q
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Merik-Voswinkel/publica...
People seem to have trouble understanding how commodity markets naturally price their goods but the whole point of this website is to show that electricity prices are finally decoupling.
edit: I didn’t watch the videos, I don’t have time first watch a video and then to dissect bullshit from truth.
But the solar electricity is still overpriced and taxed. People pay several times more for solar electricity from the grid than what they get if they sell to the grid.
It's not overpriced. If it was, the grid operator would be raking in massive profits because they're selling way above cost. In reality grid operators have small margins, this indicates there is no overpricing.
Do you get paid less for power fed to the grid than power sold at retail? Yes. Because they're different things. You get say 5 cents for a kWh fed back to the grid, while you pay more like 25c. But guess what? Wholesalers also get 5 cents to sell to the grid. It's just that there's an additional 20 cents in grid operation and taxes for a retail price.
Taxes you can't avoid, it's not a 'scam'. It's money you pay that goes into public funds and returns to the public, and is spent by people you can vote to elect to represent you.
Grid costs also aren't a scam, they're just a cost of doing business. Again, profit margins are small, so they're pricing based on cost, not based on scam.
And it's all entirely optional. You can just install batteries yourself. You can do whatever you want. You don't have to use the grid. But surprise surprise, there's no reason to think that a small network is on average cheaper than a big network. The bigger the network the easier it is to share storage capacity and offload excesses from one place to another. It's the reason most states and countries try to build interconnectors to even build international grids, and why islands like Cyprus that don't interconnect and have small markets have the highest electricity prices. It's why anyone who builds a home and has the choice to connect to an available grid or not, does so. And why land and homes in locations without grid-access are valued less, because they're more expensive to set-up.
The cost of a nationwide grid is significant. Depending on the terrain and population density, it usually nets out at somewhere between 30%-50% the overall cost of electricity. Sure, if you run a microgrid among a few houses, you won't pay those costs, but someone has to pay the cost to maintain the km of lines to reach deep into the mountains of Bavaria.
Microgrids also have some black swan events that can result in outage; if you are reliant on solar and storage but then experience a 7-day long period of stormy weather and no production. As you note, off-grid is always an option, and when you seriously look into it, you quickly find that costs to have that 24/7/365 service are many times more than just paying to connect to the grid.
At least in the us - the only way a utility can really make more money is by spending more money (as they get a return from the utility commission on a vested capital - massive oversimplification) but it means utilities are not incentivized to spend less rather than more…
Same in Australia, after they were corporatised (turned into companies run for profit rather than run as a service by some level of government) it was recognised that as natural monopolies there would need to be some sort of regulation on how much money they could recover, it was decided a method based on their costs was best, so they spent bad money agter good im expanding the network hugely (based on crazy projections of growth in demand to nowhere) rather than building resilience into the network and lowering their costs.
And that’s not even the cost of marketisation, that’s just the regulated network costs.
Series of awful blunders.
The government employees who approve or deny the utility’s priced have an incentive to not approve higher prices. Their bosses are usually elected, and higher utility prices are very unpopular.
I was told by a former southern company exec that the McKinsey did a study for them and their largest competitive advantage was regulatory capture in the states in which they operate - unfortunately I think the politicians are more beholden to the utilities than their constituents..
The price doubled in 6 years.
If you are selling to the grid, there is probably over-supply. Prices are driven by supply and demand. If you want to avoid selling at lower prices and buying at higher, try and get a battery. Check ecoflow to get an idea of the costs.
Ecoflow is a good example of overpriced American tech. I payed $1500 for a 2 kWh battery. Our Fiberhood coop sells a 16kWh battery for $1800. Prices in China are lower still.
Prices have been dropping like crazy as the various battery manufacturers have been competing with each other. They are all pretty similarly priced at this point.
A 2kwh ecoflow now costs $800. Still overpriced, but the gap is steadily narrowing.
Also, $1800 for 16kwh is a great price. That's $112/kWh. That's pretty close to raw cell costs.
Does the battery pack also come with charge circuitry, inverter, bms?
Of course it comes with our charge and discharge circuitry which is the inverter and also acts as the bms. As far as I am aware as a scientist, we are the only one in the world who charge each battery cell in parallel and slower or pulsed without maxing out or overheating, that's why we get 20000 discharge cycles versus the 5000-8000 the battery manufacture quotes.
> Fiberhood coop sells a 16kWh battery for $1800
Is that available in the US? Can you share a link? That’s an amazing deal. I’ve been recommending server rack batteries (5kwh for $750) to people but if there is something better I’d love to see it.
Price quote in this thread below, 10.680 kWh for $700.30, $230 for charge circuitry, electronics, we call Enernet Power router.
Fiberhood has an office in Tucson Arizona and will ship to the US if you want to to pay Trumps tariffs. I'm not aware of reasonably priced good battery or inverter makers in the US, besides ourselves (we are a non-profit so we are cheaper).
It is however not that simple to just give you a link, we need to hear from you for what electronics the software system needs to be fine-tuned. We need to understand what battery and electronics you need for each situation. As a scientist I know for a fact that no one in the world makes good battery systems yet, they are all wrongly designed (especially the ev and car batteries). You can easily spot that yourself, no one charges each individual battery cell individually in parallel. Everyone, including the scientists, charges battery packs in series and has battery management systems and ac-dc or dc-dc inverters that are not designed for the particular battery type and brand. Not a single one. If you ever find one that does charge and discharge each cell in parallel and slowly between 50% and 80%, please tell us and we'll tell the world. Right now only Fiberhood electronics charges cells correctly with specially made charger circuitry. The $0.50 to $2 networked printed circuit boards per battery cell we currently sell are the prototypes for the $0.10 battery charging microcontroller chips that we are making.
You can find dozens of Youtube influencers who test and or build cheap serially charged battery packs and your server rack batteries and inverter systems that you can find on professional China business directories, Tabao, Aliexpress and the like. But they are not exactly what you need and they damage your cells by charging them wrongly. No service, no warranties, no insurance, no buyers protection, buyer beware.
Be aware that ordering such systems directly in China is fraught with difficulties, its easy to lose your money.
Ecoflow is actually a Chinese company.
Ecoflow is overpriced crap for people who have no idea what ESS systems are like and so just buy a terrible product from a powerbank manufacturer.
The price for grid power ought to be somewhat higher than the the grid operator(s) pay at the place where the power is delivered into the grid plus their own costs for running the actual grid. So what do you think is a fair price for building/maintaining/running the grid?
The grid is a nationwide electrical circuit with requirements to connect to most buildings, and with demanding uptime and safety requirements. How much ought building and maintaining that to cost?
>So what do you think is a fair price for building/maintaining/running the grid?
Zero. I think we do not need the national grid and its vastly overpriced (order of magnitude) electricity anymore. A local DC grid, an abundance of solar and huge batteries is all you need.
For example in the Netherlands, 18 million people, 9 million houses or buildings, the national grid needs to triple in size and 1 million houses and almost 20.000 large companies are on a 10 year waiting list to get a connection (so the move abroad or build their own solar grid). And even if you are on the grid, you pay 50% taxes and €0,31 to €0,78 per kWh. If you are on our Enernet, you only pay around €0.0044 per kWh ($0.0051756/kWh). That is 70 times to 177 times overpriced!!! (calculations in this thread lower down).
It’s really not - we built a rather large solar plant for one of our facilities offsetting like at most like 15% of demand, but because we were paying high utility rates it was a low double digit ROI project just on the spread between us it commercial rates and our cost of production (even higher when you added in the tax incentives) if you can build solar at utility scale costs and defray commercial or retail rates it’s a pretty good deal the problem is getting those utility scale cost structures when the projects are small…
That’s because that’s how the grid is paid for.
Maybe a max-capacity price would be better for household grid connections, but that doesn’t change the fact that the grid needs to be paid for.
The value of electricity is extremely time dependent. You can easily overproduce solar power for your house during the day fairly cheaply. However batteries + gas generators for cloudy day quickly make the cost significantly higher.
The grid gives you expensive guarantees about reliability. Just giving power does not do that.
We don't care. We want cheaper electric like other countries and want our politicians to make it happen
Blah blah contracts blah markets blah always an excuse in the UK for why everything is more expensive than other countries
Is there a wall in the way? Tear it down. Make it happen
God we demand so little of our politicians in reality
Is this a thing that people can actually sign up to, or is it vaporware? Varoufakis says a lot of things that aren't necessarily true.
You can sign up by becoming a member of the Fiberhood cooperative for free. Send an email to Fiberhood at icloud dot com. We must have your address and map location link or Google map address code so we can draw maps and make a website for your neighborhood to sign up and form an Enernet.
We will do a small survey and put up a detailed map of your neighborhood (like openstreetmap, see the slide in this talk [1]). We hand out door to door flyers and organise a weekend barbeque neighborhood party where everyone can come see how the cable between neighbours goes roof-to-roof, window-to-window or garden-to-garden between power routers. See our cost price bifacial solar panels and the large batteries.
We find that within a few weeks a few hundred people signed up for the cooperative and we start installing the first 10 houses. Most people invest in solar panels and batteries at wholesale prices installed by volunteers. Others get a loan to pay for this. You wind up getting payed for the panels you bought or paying around 1 dollar cent per kWh, saving a few thousand dollars per years for decades.
In the US the Rocky Mountain Institute and its founder Amory Lovins describes this as 'grid defection' and it happens on a large scale now.
Fiberhood has cooperatives forming all around the world, both rural and urban: Ukraine, Peru (near Iquitos by the Indian tribe on the Amazon River Bank, Southern Spain, Slovenia, Finland, The Netherlands, Australia.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbqKClBwFwI&t=5574s
The Fiberhood planner maps are in the first slides in the first minute of the video. We used to have an interactive zooming map of Fiberhoods for every house in the Netherlands online but now we only have them available for Fiberhood members because of privacy rules. On the maps you can see where the batteries, solar panels and power routers are located in a Fiberhood version of Google Streetview.
Hi, I tried to find more details of this initiative which sounds quite interesting (I'm living in Belgium) but it seems there is no website or summary info available - is the only way to learn more about the model a 4h lecture recording? Would you have any kind of package or info you can share on how this really works, wha the financing model is, etc?
Thank you!
We used to have a public website but Enernet is a technical and political solution for whole communities, companies and factories, not for single individuals.
Please send an email to Fiberhood at icloud dot com with the location of the proposed Enernet smart grid and we'll find out if there is enough interest in your neigborhood (around 10 participants) to set it up.
Enernet is a high tech solution for getting the best ,cheapest, sustainable energy, internet, mobile phone, transport (cars, busses, trucks) and housing in a neighborhood for people and companies.
If you wire up all buildings with fiber and cables to each other you can replace the national grid, its laws, taxes and always high prices with a solar energy system at cost price, saving several thousand euro's per house per year. Instead we put an abundance of solar cells up and install insulation, thermal and electrical storage tailored to the local situation. We fund it from the large savings we create. The participants will decide what will be installed, so every Enernet smart grid is different. Our Fiberhood coop has special electronics that make batteries a lot cheaper and safer and replace the National AC grid with a DC grid that has almost no transmission losses. We also distribute 25 Gbps internet and establish a small datacenter to heat water cheaply with the waste heat. The savings from all your utility bills pay for the installation and upkeep of the Enernet network.
A short description https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Merik-Voswinkel/publica...
Sounds like Fiberhood is adjacent to https://solarunitedneighbors.org/ ?
Yes and no, not really. There are many smart grids and more not-so smart grids around the world, but only a few are non-commercial or owned by the members.
Fiberhood is unique in that we have our own Enernet power routers (a software controlled multi-port bidirectional AC-DC-DC inverter peer to peer network) that can share large amounts of DC current, has special power aggregation to enable megawatt EV chargers in every house, battery nano-inverters that make cheap batteries last up to 20000 charge/discharge cycles, integrate (free) discarded solar panels and has a range of software defined networking options including 4 x 25 Gbps internet ports per house. Most smart grids are just a different meter and payment scheme, not a radical rewiring of the entire electricity system in the neighborhood without a commercial company or government controlling what citizens pay. Other smart grids raise the cost of grid defection, Fiberhood tech makes it possible to have abundant redundant solar energy at its cost price $0.01 per kWh, many times cheaper than national AC grid pricing anywhere in the world. The tech was made to prevent making money on energy but incentivize solving the climate crises by making Solar by far the cheapest option. Stop almost all carbon and methane greenhouse gas emissions by going 100% solar.
Please give some proof of Varoufakis lying. I always check what he claims in his books and talks and I never spotted a lie. I also check Saul Griffith and Amory Lovins talks, books and papers on factual errors and never spotten one in two decades.
They say $0.01/kWh is the target price, to be reached after some decades.
Don't get me wrong, I am excited about solar power but careful about the economics: the capital cost of solar right now is well over 1$/W (panels+inverters+installation/hookup) and even though it is falling nicely, the amortization schedule needs to be considered. A rule-of-thumb figure is 1kWh of power per year from 1W nominal installed, so the capital cost will have to be amortized over 100 years to reach $.01/kWh. The installed price has to come down by a factor of 10 for this to work out.
No, $0.01/kWh became possible in 2024 and is easy to achieve in 2026. But you have to follow the Fiberhood procedures based on our simulations and our electronics to actually achieve prices under one dollar cent per kWh. We reach this price in China, most of Europe and Australia but in the US you generally pay thrice as much (in labour cost, tarifs, etc).
You can only get an accurate cost if you create a simulation of every step of the industrial processes of manufacturing the silicon ingots, the glass, aluminum, the silver and labour that goes into making solar panels. Same for batteries, electronic components, etc. You have checks and balances in the simulation, for example you get the cost price of all the material components that you can check against the actual price for sale at the factories, the shipping cost, the wholesale prices on offer, the retail prices in different countries, the installation cost, the underlying loans and their interest rates and labour. But that simulates just the cost of the materials, you have many other factors. For example did the energy used to make the solar cells come from solar or from coal plants? Did you make thin film solar or silicon wafer solar cells. What battery chemistry. How much losses if your solar panel overheats 3 percent of the time. What latitude and longitude did the solar panels operate, at what angle to the sun? Compared with such accurate cost simulation models calibrated with actual prices paid your claim is very vague and hand-wavy.
The Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) is a metric representing the average total cost of building and operating an energy-generating asset over its lifetime, divided by the total energy output produced during that period. It serves as a, "break-even" price per unit of energy (e.g., $/MWh), allowing comparisons between different technologies.
I don't doubt that you can have a low marginal cost, but you still have to invest money to get this system installed. You dismissed my argument as 'vague and hand-wavy', so please give a concrete estimate how much it would cost to install a 10kW system on a typical house in the US midwest, and maybe in Europe or Australia.
25 400W solar panels at $0,08/Wp =$800.00 solar panels bought in bulk
metal poles and brackets $275
10 EVE 334AH 3.2V= 10,680 kWh $70.30 =$700.30 batteries bought in bulk
Enernet Power Router components $290 (I left out 2/3 of components because this is such a small installation and needs no 4x25 Gbps internet)
Cables $230,50
Metal enclosure $61
Install fee 5 hours two people $23 per hour = $230
==============================
$2,587.80
So your "capital cost of solar right now of 1$/W" is 0.26$/W
10000 x $1W nominally installed =10000 kwh per year times 30 years = 3000,000 kWh total power yield
$2587.80/300,000=$0.00862333 per 1 kWh LCOE 30 years $2587.80/500,000=$0.0051756 per 1 kWh LCOE 50 years
These numbers are of day prices of today. Currently the battery and solar prices are high because of the high oil and gas prices of the US/Israel/Lebanon/Iran/Ukraine/Sudan wars, there is a steep battery and solar panel price rise. The overal LOCE is still hand-wavy in that several costs might happen in the 50 year of operation: Drop of 20% solar panel yield by breaking glass, cost of cleaning the panels, cable replacement, accidental electronics wear en tear, extra maintainance labour cost. Also, I doubt you need a loan to pay for $2582.80. If you did at a compound 3% interest rate with you would pay over 50 years, $11,344.67, more than 4,3 times than if you payed up front (from an online calculator, if you payed off per month than just the interest it would be lower).
But whoever is right, you'll certainly stay under $0,01 per kWh from solar and round trip storage cost in batteries.
If you are lucky, it will be almost half that, $0,005 per kWh.
To heat your apartment and drive all over the American continent with your electric car you'll need more than 10kW for an average US midwestern house.
Thank you, great info. You have great suppliers though: I can get close on batteries (I see four for $355, so $88 instead of your $70) but for panels the best I can get is $220 instead of your $32---how do you go about getting them at those prices? Also, what Ethernet Power Router for $290? Is that a Fiberhood product? How and where would I order it?
>how do you go about getting them at those prices?
Buy a 40 shipping container with aproximately 770 panels in the factory loading lot, truck to Shenzen harbor, ship to a port in the USA, Belém/Natal/Manaus or Rotterdam, Our own truck to the customer.
Please, where do you get your 4 LifePo4 batteries for $355? I only have one source for $70, I want more sources.
Edit: Thank you, I just ordered 8400 of your batteries (see h3lp his comment's Google link below) for less than $600,000 (at a discount). Picking them up in two weeks.
From googling, didn't actually use them https://eelbattery.myshopify.com/products/original-grade-a-e...
>Also, what Ethernet Power Router for $290?
My company product, you'll get the datasheets and video as part of the order contract. See my white paper for the old model, its much upgraded since.
>Is that a Fiberhood product?
A Morphle and a Fiberhood product. Morphle is the company mass-producing electronics and chips, including the chargers, dischargers, mppt a.k.a. the Enernet Power Routers. Fiberhood cooperative sells and installs the complete infrastructure systems: Enernet systems and fiber optic internet (since 1987, we were one of the first internet providers), batteries, solar panels, power routers, tiny houses and water tanks.
>How and where would I order it?
With me in Europe or Ukraine or our office in Tucson or Montreal. +31617428596 Signal, Facetime, Whatsapp, Telegram.
You can also bundle your solar panel or battery bulk orders with us, we'll ship them directly to you in the US from the Shenzen factory region or the Poland or US wharehouse. We won't charge you a profit margin, we get a larger joint order and that gets us both a discount, less chipping cost and lower insurance. We have an agent in Shenzen overseeing the loading at the factories.
When you say "power router," what product are you referencing specifically? I'm trying to search online to find a similar product but I don't think I'm finding the right thing.
Enernet power router is the name for the hardware that my small research institute developed since 1997. You find partially similar power router designs at the Fraunhofer institute and in several scientific papers. A power router routes "packets" of electricity around (converting from low voltage DC to high voltage DC or AC and vice versa), packets of internet data and packets of matter (like hot water in a district heating system). It is a fully software defined electricity network and internet router, power meters, firewall, inverters/converters, ground vault protection, vibration measurement and electrocution prevention cable monitoring system.
I'm referencing all the prototypes I built over the years, the final mass manufactured model will be an order of magnitude cheaper because it will from only CMOS and SiC chips that we designed. Current 4x25Gbps/40kW models cost under 800 euro's (936 dollars excluding VAT and import tariff), the mass produced custom chip based model will be under 100 euro's.
A power router replaces your breaker box, your solar panel and battery inverters and obsoletes all the power supplies in your house. It starts your washing machine, dryer, fridge, freezer, heatpump and optionally runs a small datacenter in your hot water vat from which you shower or brew tea. A power router saves more than 10% electricity now lost in your power inverters. It bypasses the national grid and the laws, taxes, grid costs, profit margins and transmission losses and the price for electricity generation. It saves thousands of euro's per year on your energy use and internet bills and optionally your water and sewage bills.
A power router rewires the electricity infrastructure of the planet, energy expert Saul Griffith references it in the names of his organisations Rewire America and Rewire Australia, his youtube lectures, his books Electrify, Plug in and the Big Switch. Amory Lovins references it in his books and talks and Eben Moglen in two of his talks.
It is a bunch of chips in a network of conductors (metal cables) and optical fiber that connects buildings together in a neigborhood.
You directly connect a network of solar cells (there are between 60 and 122 solar cells in each solar panel) to mppt dc-dc inverter chips that output around 3 volts directly to a network of battery cells (that form a battery pack) and that aggregate flows into a runtime programmable first stage dc-ac-dc inverter module that than outputs (power routes) high voltage AC to legacy machines, USB-C low voltage to charge all your electronics and high voltage DC to cables to the neighborhood (a replacement of the national grid) or to the ev cars and trucks.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Merik-Voswinkel/publica...
Got it, thank you!
Plus you become indépendant from toxic decisions taken by politicians.
But it means you are simply exploiting the "normal" electricity grid this way by using it when your solar doesn't work and batteries run dry - that is, when the cost of elecitricty in a normal grid, with the high penetration of renewables, is highest. You do the normal capitalism thing: privatise the benefits, socialise the costs... And the higher proportion of renewables in the grid is the higher is your upside.
If you want to completely stop using normal grid and rely on solar alone, you will need to overbuild your solar so massively, you won't be able to afford it (and will run out of land, too). Cost of electricity produced will be several euros per kwh, and a simple calculation shows just how massively unrealistic it is.
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This is an ad hominem argument but at the scale of a whole country.
It's a bit relevant to the conversation when the person making it has an incentive to deflect blame from their own corrupted country to evil EU.
Greece defaulted after the previous, right wing government falsified the country's accounting, but by all means, don't let reality get in the way of your ideology.
We do not know if 'leftis' would have build all of it too. We only know that capitalism did.
But we also know that capitalism is pushing our earth to a runnaway heat death for a lot of humans.
For a long time our planet and we have the capacity to rebuild our whole ecosystem on clean and cheap energy but we don't. Instead we still kill mmillions due to pollution and bring extential crisis to millions just because some lunatic behind the biggest military power on the planet decided to kill a whole civilization in one night.
I wonder what prices would they have if they did not implement sunsetting of nuclear energy. Has to be the worst energy policy decision ever.
Levelized Cost of Energy for Germany's existing nuclear fleet was roughly 13ct/kwh.[1] The averaged costs (YTD) from the linked article currently stands at 9.71 ct/kwh. So nuclear in the mix would have increased the costs.
[1] https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/877586/4e4dce913c3d88...
LCOE is good for marginal cost (eg: one more solar panel), but fails dramatically at evaluating systemic costs.
A nuclear reactor moves the entire market down, including the costs to the consumer when he buys solar energy.
Here is a UN document explaining it: https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2025-09/GECES-21_2025_...
The SCBOE score is a good idea. However, in the case of Germany, it is often overlooked that the power grid dating from the 1970s, which was built as a one-way system from large power plants (nuclear power plants) to consumers, would have needed to be rebuilt regardless. A large share of the grid costs would therefore have been passed on to consumers even without the transition to renewable energy. Additionally, Germany is located in the center of Europe and is thus a major transit country for electricity. Here too, corresponding capacities would have had to be expanded. The expansion of a European power grid also means that the disadvantages of renewable energy variability can be offset. As the SCBOE system also shows, the individual power plant still accounts for the largest share of costs. Many of the additional factors can actually go down in prices as renewables scale up (nuclear has still to prove that this could work there too). In that regard, LCOE remains relevant.
The average electricity price for German households is approximately 32.5 to 34 cents per kWh.
We are not doing an apple to apple comparison if we are not actually looking at what people are paying. The cost of energy is to have the a stable supply of energy delivered at the time that the consumer wants to buy it. The cost of energy production is thus not just the price of producing one unit of energy in isolation, but to have it transmitted in a stable grid at a date and time specified by the consumer. Nuclear energy and solar energy both produce units of energy, but consumers need for transmission, grid stability and time aspects are completely different depending if they buy nuclear energy or solar energy. They are not interchangeable on those aspects.
The 9.71 ct/kwh is the levelized cost of producing electricity from solar. It is not the same as the average cost of consuming energy. Adding nuclear to the mix would not necessary increase costs of consuming energy, even if the average cost of producing energy would go up.
To make a very simplified illustration of this. A energy broker would happily trade 10 units for energy for 1 unit of energy, assuming that they can dictate when and where each unit get transmitted.
The cost of energy is also full lifecycle cost including waste handling, deconstruction and security. I am not saying that everything is that equation for renewables. However, one truth at least in Germany is that we still have not solved the waste problem. Other countries have both better options and also a societal consensus. Here is a study of societal cost of nuclear energy:
Those cost don't even include the full lifecycle societal cost of nuclear energy [0] (25-39 cent by some studies). Sure the renewables also have lifecycle cost we might not pay yet, but in Germany even more important we do not even have a societal and research concesus what to do with the waste (might be much better in other countries)
[0] https://green-planet-energy.de/fileadmin/images/presse/2020-...
No. Nuclear energy was at the same time very expensive and only a very small percentage of the energy production. Sunsetting the old plants had no negative impact at all on electricity prices, to the contrary, insofar as it made space for more green energy.
Compare emissions between France and Germany during dunkelflaute. Germany is frequently at the Polish levels of emissions and Poland is famous for huge emissions. Sunsetting would make sense if they could already generate enough green electricity even in bad conditions, which was not and is not the case. It was purely political decision - Germany wanted to be European hub for distributing gas from Russia (that's why tried to convince others than gas is somehow green energy).
Your question was how would the prices be without the nuclear shutdown, talking about emissions now is goalpost shifting. Speaking of politics and not making sense, Poland is still at these levels because they put road blocks into renewables deployment and spend their resources on nuclear plants. If those plans go well they will be at around 35% coal in 2040, which is more than Germany is now.
> Compare emissions between France and Germany during dunkelflaute
Even without dunkelflaute, the absolute bottom per kwh emissions of Germany in summer still doesn't reach the maximum emissions of France in winter.
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> Nuclear energy was at the same time very expensive and only a very small percentage of the energy production
The Guardian reports that Nuclear power produced ~20% of Germany's electricity in 2011.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/nuclear-pow...
But 2011 was not the year the nuclear power plants were shut down. However, that is the year your previous commenter was referring to. So what exactly are you trying to say? Incidentally, the electricity that the nuclear power plants had supplied was not replaced by coal power plants, but by renewable energy.
There was not a single moment in time in which all nuclear power plants were simultaneously shut down. The shut down was gradual [1]. 2011 is relevant because it is when the German government decided to phase out its remaining nuclear power plants.
[1] https://www.base.bund.de/en/nuclear-safety/nuclear-phase-out....
How much solar/wind can you really install in the area covered by a nuclear station?
That's not the problem; Germany has enough space to build solar and wind capacity to satisfy its consumption – on average. The problem is storage.
Most definitely not true. Maybe enough area to cover current electric usage, but to truly decarbonize society a lot more renewable energy is needed - for transport, heating, iron industry, chemical industries, fetilizers etc. Massive amounts of electricity is needed unless you export your industries to china.
Heating can also use heat from the ground.
Also the market should be seen more holistic with water energy from the north and sun from the south.
That's prohibitively expensive. And not possible everywhere. And Germany's grid is not ready for heating with electricity.
Heating with heat pumps is highly efficient and already the cheapest way of heating your home. The grids are ready for it - especially considering the amount of residential solar.
Ground heat pumps still use electricity.
Yes but the major energy consumption of a household is heating than transport than utility.
Using ground heat (deep ones) reduces the electricity need sign.
Also if a heat pumpt creates 3-6 the energy from 1kwh, its even more efficient to burn oil and gas to make energy out of it and remote heat than just burning it locally in your burner.
Why not? Germany's total energy consumption is estimated to be around 1-2 TWh/y. This could be generated by photovoltaics covering less than 5% of its land surface.
There are significant problems around rolling out that much capacity quickly enough, and I also don't think nuclear should have been shut down that hastily, but I don't think "only nuclear can cover long-term energy needs" is true in any way.
Wtf are your numbers from, but they are wrong. It's over 2200TWh per year. And it you truly want to be renewable, the numbers go up. Upcycling waste to plastics or using hydrogen to make steel is more energy intensive than using fossil fuels. https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/en/indicator-final-energy-con...
Those are total energy numbers, which includes fossil fuels, but those are famously misleading because replacing those with electricity reduces the number of Wh needed. An electric car needs roughly 15kWh for 100 kilometers, a gas powered car typically at least 60kWh for the same distance.
Electrifying reduces energy consumption only in selected use cases. Such as EVs yes. However other usescases such as making steel with hydrogen, plastic fromwaste or fuel for planes require vastly more energy when electrified.
Unsurprisingly the use cases where energy consumption is going down lead on electrification (because it's a cost advantage), so it may seem like electrification reduces energy consumption.
But if you really want to leave fossil fuels behind, the electric consumption will go up, up and beyond.
Electricity consumption will go up* but energy consumption will go down. You will not need 2200TWh of energy in Germany when all is said and done. Heating is one of the top reasons we spend energy and heat pumps are just tremendously more efficient than something like gas heating. You can get the same amount of heating for 3-4 times less energy with a heat pump than gas. So obviously you will not need 2200TWh of electricity like you do now with fossil fuels for energy.
* It's also debatable how much electricity use will actually go up. Logic says this must happen, but logic is not science. We have millions of EVs now in the EU and electricity production is less than it was 20 years ago. Efficiency is a source of energy. If you look at the US for example, it uses almost twice as much electricity per capita than Germany, and I would say they both get the same high level if living. If you look at it that way, Americans can cut their use almost in half and live the same standard of living. This can power a lot of EVs and heat pumps without adding a single GW of new capacity.
Energy consumption in total in Germany will only go down if you decide to export your steel and chemical industries to china. The high temperatures needed by industrial processes can't be achieved with heat pumps.
No. If you electrify residential heating and transportation it will obviously go down. If there are sectors where you can't do that, it will still overall go down because those other sectors will not go up to make up for the reduction. Not sure what your argument is.
The number Lxgr gave, 1-2 TWh/year, is simply completely wrong. Germany's annual electricity use alone is around 500 TWh/year. 1-2 THw/year would be the electricity use of 300-600k average German houses.
Yes, it should be PWh/year.
Yes those are wrong, but I didn't reply to that. The one I did reply to is also wrong :-).
Germany uses “,” as the decimal separator.
But this document does not. Note it says 12.5%, not 12,5%.
1 TWh on the scale of a country is very little - a 1 GW nuclear plant operating continuously would generate over 8 TWh a year.
Nevertheless the back of the napkin math of land requirements for solar check out, so it was probably just a typo and OP meant to say PWh.
Yeah, seems like I got a wire/SI prefix crossed there. The land use should fit in terms of orders of magnitude, though.
5% of the entire German landmass? That seems feasible and desirable to you?!
I have my doubts about short and medium term feasibility, and much more importantly storage and adapting carbon-based industrial processes.
But yes, if all it took was 5% of landmass (which also doesn’t get permanently unusable nor polluted), I’d say that would be a pretty good deal, yeah. This is significantly less than what’s used for livestock farming, to put it into perspective.
Realistically, I don’t think we’ll solve storage fast enough to be able to afford zero nuclear power in Europe.
And of course, you can combine those things sometimes - I've seen cattle munching on grass under solar panels in Baden-Württemberg (state just west of Bavaria).
You can install solar panels over areas that are already developed — rooftops (lol), parking garages, highways, and so on. Some agricultural land even benefits from being covered by solar panels. This has great potential and was first researched in the United States. China is covering water reservoirs with solar panels, which has the additional positive effect of reducing evaporation. And then there is the incredibly large amount of energy that the North Sea, far from any beaches or islands, could provide in consistent wind energy.
Rooftop solar is prohibitively expensive in Germany. My installation would only cover its costs if electricity becomes so expensive that it would lead to complete economic collapse.
No. In Germany, rooftop solar is usually economically attractive, not prohibitively expensive. Especially on a decent roof and if you use a fair share of the power yourself. Verbraucherzentrale(1) says PV systems for private homes are “usually worthwhile” economically, and that self-consumption is the key driver of profitability.
(1) https://www.verbraucherzentrale.de/wissen/energie/erneuerbar...
Over 40% of the German landmass is currently used to produce food for farm animals. The space requirement for solar is far off from that. And you can use rooftops etc.
Although nuclear energy produces no carbon emissions, it is simply not price competitive with solar and wind in the western world. A culture of safety above all else made nuclear not price competitive. And it would be political suicide for regulators to relax safety given how accidents like Chernobyl or Three Mile Island are etched into the public mind.
And that is very much a good thing.
No it's not. Our nuclear standards are so high that they have caused more radiation to be released because of demand shifting to coal.
That was then. Now we have other options, and they are good.
We're still using lots of coal power, and it's going to take a long time to get near 90% renewable power. So I'd still like to see a lot of nuclear buildout (with a standardized design for many plants, and streamlined permitting for that design).
Building nuclear power plants still takes the longest. Especially if you want to produce the same amount of energy that will be needed in the coming years. Currently, nuclear power plants supply about 9% of the electrical energy used worldwide — and it has taken us from 1950 until today to get there. Why should it suddenly be faster and more elegant now? We also don’t have the money to pursue both in parallel. Yes, I know China and to some extent South Korea build nuclear power plants faster. But even there, some plants have taken up to eleven years to build, and others that were built quickly only achieve a capacity factor of 60%. At least in China’s case, many of the conditions cannot be directly transferred to Western countries. Space, social and political circumstances, and other factors are simply not the same everywhere as in China. Moreover, even China, whose share of nuclear energy in its electricity mix is around 4.5%, is finding that renewables are much faster and cheaper.
> We also don’t have the money to pursue both in parallel.
According to what?
We're not spending that much money overall. In particular the US government is putting very little into energy infrastructure considering its spite for renewables.
> Moreover, even China, whose share of nuclear energy in its electricity mix is around 4.5%, is finding that renewables are much faster and cheaper.
The cost of renewables starts to grow when they get over 50% of the power mix.
I'm not opposed to enabling 95+% renewable power by having an army of natural gas peaker plants on standby, but I think nuclear could be cheaper if we gave it an honest try.
Would you like to live next to Chernobyl?
Even with current standards there are a lot of nuclear power plants running just fine.
> Would you like to live next to Chernobyl?
They weren't even acting as a power plant when they did that.
Buy yes I'll take a 1% chance of another 30x30 mile exclusion zone for 100k fewer coal deaths. Even if I have to personally live near it.
> Even with current standards there are a lot of nuclear power plants running just fine.
We could have a lot more of them making power for half the price and still hold them to very safe standards.
And if we focused on what was important while keeping costs under control, we'd get extra safety benefits by affordably rebuilding or replacing plants that were built in the 70s and 80s.
chernobyl affected a lot more then the exclusion zone, most of eastern europe... cancer rates spiked because of it... and it could have been a lot worse.
Effects are long term, hence question if you would live there now?, what would happen if Paris or London or Berlin were contaminated?, would you still live there?, would you live in Chernobyl city now?
When a reactor can mess up a whole country/area long term you need to take all precautions.
In spite of this, there are reactors built with plans to extend (Romania with Cernavoda for example), but they cost a lot and take a long time to build, plus areas where they can be built are likely limited.
So it's not the standards that are the problem.
> cancer rates spiked
Still preferable to the amount of people killed by coal.
> what would happen if Paris or London or Berlin were contaminated?
You can avoid building adjacent to cities.
> would you live in Chernobyl city now?
Really? I go ahead and say I'll live next to it, so you move the goalpost to living in it?
Screw it. Fine. If it will get a lot of large nuclear plants built outside Asia, I'll trade a promise to live inside any disaster zone caused by not only them but any other plant built in the West this century. Is that good enough for you? Chernobyl itself was not an example of modern nuclear power and I'm not going there.
> When a reactor can mess up a whole country/area long term you need to take all precautions.
Even setting aside the issue of being so cautious you cause harm in other ways, a lot of the precautions don't affect the odds of a big disaster!
> So it's not the standards that are the problem.
There's so much nitpicking on an individual plant basis, so I think they are a big problem.
I didn't see how "there are reactors built with plans to expand" is supposed to show that standards aren't driving the cost?
Nuclear power plants produce CO₂ emissions. The only point at which they do not emit CO₂ is the electricity generation itself. Everything that happens before and after produces CO₂. The amount of CO₂ is debatable, even the major meta-studies (UNECE 2022) point out that across all collected studies, parts of the lifecycle emissions are consistently missing because, drumroll, the nuclear power industry is so non-transparent. Important factors include the mining of uranium ore. If the concentration of uranium ore in the rock is low and the more nuclear power plants are built and the more ore is needed, the sooner such deposits will have to be tapped, mining becomes increasingly CO₂-intensive. The same applies to enrichment. Both processes would greatly benefit if renewable energy were expanded to the point where uranium mining and enrichment could be operated with lower CO₂ emissions.
It's widely accepted that sunsetting nuclear energy had a positive impact on the deployment of renewables, and consequently on the longer term energy prices. It was one of the better energy policy (and environmental, and security) decisions Germany has made in the recent past.
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Why?
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Do you mean the nuclear power that the free market companies very explicitly said wasn't worth doing? That one? Why are we pleading the government to use a horrendously expensive technology that even the free market hates?
Nuclear in 2006 was 160TWh. Coal in 2025 was 93TWh. So a big portion of nuclear would have been replaced by renewables by now anyways (natural gas has a different role in the grid and cannot be replaced bu nuclear).
https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...
Also a lot of coal plants have been / are used in district heating in addition to electricity. Replacing them is much harder and takes longer than nuclear which is electricity only. Shutting those down was never a short term option.
Calling it the worst decision ever is really funny, when it really is just a question of the order of the transition to renewables. And much of that order was dictated by technical needs.
In a pieceful world, sure. But then there is this [1]. Don't blame the player, blame the game.
[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant_...>
Much better idea to just buy oil and gas from Russia /s
Better than nuclear power plants getting hit by drones.
We will have Chernobyl longer than dependency on Russian oil and gas
I suppose you can just compare it to France https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/3mo/daily?signal=electri...
Merit order pricing and the fact that you need fossil peakers will make the price effect completely negligible to consumers. You are comparing the MWh price of slightly more efficient fossil power plants to slightly less efficient fossil power plants.
Maybe 1-4% lower.
Higher
You know that nuclear energy was heavily subsidized?
And they still don’t have a long term storage but therefore rotting barrels with nuclear waste in the interim storage facility Asse which have to be retrieved. Cost estimate around 14 billion Euros.
"long term storage" for CO2 is to spew it into the air where it remains forever... free for Germany, not so much Australia, California, Florida, etc.
CO2 doesn't stay forever in the atmosphere and what's does that have to do with nuclear energy? Building massive power plants also sets CO2 free, same with mining uranium.
Nuclear energy still has a waste problem, is expensive, creates massive single points of failure and given the current situation with the latest advances in drone warfare is a huge security risk while construction and operation.
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Nice! This is the first time i see anyone providing a quantitative answer to this. When the effect becomes more pronounced, it will hopefully remove political barriers for renewable electricity.
Yes!
A widening gap between electricity cost and gas cost (and fuel cost) will be THE main driver of electrification! Installing a heat pump will be a no-brainer, driving an electric car will be a no brainer.
This can only happen once electricity decouples from gas prices - but that requires lots of renewables in the mix!
Heat pump prices + cost of installation was so high the last time I looked 2years ago, that it wasn't worth it even with free electricity (rooftop solar).
Have the costs dropped for that as well?
Air to water heat pumps (which usually are used in Germany) should be quite cheap nowadays. Maybe they tried overcharging you or a significant rework was required?
Obviously that's impossible to answer without knowing your specific situation, nevermind even knowing which country you are speaking of. Heat pump prices aren't high here, heat pumps are just aircons with some extra cheap parts after all.
I was thinking in general. But specifically: I'm in Croatia (so prices should not be that far off from German ones - equipment perhaps more costly but manual work a bit cheaper) and was quoted (two years ago) for a €15k total installation cost for the size I needed, which would be 15-20 years' worth of my natural gas usage.
Even at zero electricity host (I have rooftop solar), the investment didn't make a lot of sense at the time, assuming the costs would be falling in the next few years.
I just have been quoted 40k for an installation. So, no.
I'm not deep into electricity pricing dynamics, but based on my intuition, shouldn't that rather have a dampening effect on electrification, as the gap widens?
High gas prices + gap is small -> Big opportunity to undercut via cheaper methods like solar -> attractive investment -> more new builds
High gas prices + gap is wide and widening -> Smaller and smaller opportunity to invest in solar, as the market is already dominated by solar prices -> less attractive investment -> less new builds
Am I missing something here?
With electrification, I meant electrification of energy consumption.
Ah, of course. Thanks for the clarification!
High volatility -> Invest in storage.
Occasional negative prices -> Invest in intermittent consuming applications.
Heat pump installations are far too expensive in Germany to make any sense economically.
That's more of a political and tax decision than anything else.
Quite frankly, Germany already has a lot of renewables in the mix. Why did it take so long for the effect to appear and why is it still so modest? What should be renewables share be (vs ~60% today), for complete decoupling?
Germany is interconnected with other markets.
Essentially it's not an isolated market, but part of a bigger whole.
As an example imagine a village that constituted 1% of the population of a country. The village was 100% renewable, and the country was 0% renewable. If the village disconnected its grid, in isolation its prices would be dictated by its renewables. But if its connected, its renewables just get traded on a market with marginal prices. If a person elsewhere in the country has more expensive generation, they'll but your cheap renewables at their price level. Thus the village will experience high prices like everyone else.
Now suppose Germany is that village in an interconnected EU market. Of course the numbers from my example are exaggerated, but the point remains: Germany's renewables aren't enough, if pricing is set at a much larger market, with fewer renewables.
Today about 20% of Germany's electricity was exported. While only about 6% of its demand came from gas. In other words if Germany was disconnected, it'd have needed no gas, and thus prices would've been lower.
Of course disconnecting isn't a good idea for other reasons, as on other days Germany imports. And Germany's ability to export its renewable excess generates significant revenues, creates incentives to build more renewables, and offsets emissions and pollution in other countries, too.
But long story short, it'll take more for one part of the whole to go renewable. As the EU is generally transitioning towards renewables we see a decoupling happen.
You need quarter-hours where renewables set the price for power. That's only happening now that renewables have reached sufficient penetration of the market. And it will get more as batteries come online.
In a commodity market, the price is always set by the most expensive producer that is still able to sell. That's natural - why would I sell my apples cheaper than the other farmer if you need so many apples that you have to by from both of us?
... because you may have signed a longer term contract that might in turn guarantee offtake from you rather than the other farmer?
This marginal price is only for the spot market right? So the key question is more what % of the mix is spot vs longer term. And thus what the overall impact is on total blended price.
That exists as well it’s called PPA in the power market, a power purchase agreement.
But ultimately, due to arbitrage, PPA prices will converge towards expected spot market prices.
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A dependency on solar panels which needs to be replaced every 5 years is less bad then a dependency on gas which is burned every day. Having said that nuclear decommission was a huge mistake.
5 years is a ridiculous underestimate. 20 is more reasonable.
Even 20 years is much below what most studies show. Panels tend to keep functioning well beyond 30 years, with degradation at 86%. It might be true that economically in 30 years they're so much cheaper that it's worth replacing them with new panels, but that's an optimisation, not a question of replacement need.
Inverters a different story.
Nobody is retiring solar panels after only 20 years.
5 years is the worst case estimate, with 20 years lifetime this dependency on China is even less bad.
50 years from now when those panels produce less than 75% of nameplate capacity they'll really regret not depending on a market where the swing producer is a cartel of theocratic dictatorships.
Damn, you're right. Once they burn this tranche of solar panels the Chinese will really have them over a barrel.
oil and gas famously never requires subsidies
Oh ffs, get the FUD out of here.
Exactly, dependence on solar panels effectively means switching Saudi Arabia for China.
An installed solar panel will continue producing electricity, no matter how the relationship with the country that produced it develops. Unlike natural gas, oil or uranium where the fuel itself is the actual imported good.
sounds like an objective upgrade
Good for the Germans, in the UK we use marginal cost pricing, so consumers pay for the highest costing output regardless of how much if any they use. Means even if we get gas down to 1% well still be paying gas prices.
Same as in Germany actually.
It's true that even 2% of usage being gas, means 100% of the demand pays the gas price.
But (!) that's only true for the spot market at that particular point in the day. And that changes all the time.
Example: if you use zero gas for 80% of the day, and use just 10% gas for remaining 20% of the day, then that day gas was just 2% of total demand, like we said earlier. But it's not true that gas prices dictated 100% of the price that day.
After all, gas prices dictated only 20% of the day's prices. The remaining part of the day there was no gas demand, and thus it did not dictate the price. And that happens more and more often.
The more renewables + storage are built out, the more time of the day that gas is displaced, not used and thus not part of the price mechanism.
Second, if the market pays at the gas price, the renewables reap all the profits (because their costs are far below the gas price). This incentivizes further renewable capacity build-out, eventually displacing gas entirely. This incentive structure pushes the market the fastest towards lowest-cost generation, which is renewable nowadays.
edit: terrific 15m explanation on spot pricing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Paun0siu67o
It's the same in Belgium, and I believe for the majority if not all of Europe.
What I never understood from this arrangement: can a renewable provider legally refuse to accept the gas-price (either by charging less, or simply refunding a large chunk of the difference?
I understand growth may appear to suffer if renewables refunded the difference between gas prices and renewable prices+profit+moderate-growth-expenses; but it would also mean the public would flock massively to that provider, which may allow for faster growth under certain conditions.
Are renewable bound by law to accept the instantaneous peak-demand-electricity-prices (typically gas peaker prices)? And even if they were forced to accept that payment, are they explicitly forbidden to return a large chunk of the extortionate difference to their customers, in order to comply with acceptance of the price while reimbursing their customers?
This may sound contradictory, but if a major expense for renewables is the siting and commissioning of a renewable wind/solar farm, it may be possible to rake in more profit by growing customer base instead, and then use that money to outcompete the competitors in the siting and commissioning landscape?
A bureaucrat can dictate that x Euro's correspond to y Dollars, but the free market tends to find a price rediscovery mechanism returning closer to true rates. Do we really believe that of the huge search space of all possible policies that this pricing strategy (of forcing everyone to sell at the instantaneously most expensively generated energy) happens to be the most optimal trajectory at a fundamental level? Or do we believe some undiscovered or unused known policy could actually grow renewables faster? If the real world differs from fiat, the market will find a way to bypass fiat and unmask its weak points, at the end of the day money talks.
Furthermore the current setup may result in unintended consequences: at a certain point renewables may be disincentivized to expand capacity, as it would decrease the percentage of time the peakers are needed, and thus decrease their income! It's almost a politically introduced stranglehold, to prevent gas peakers from being displaced.
It's the same in Germany.
The reason why power prices can still decouple: Because there are more and more quarter-hours where gas plants are NOT setting the price and the marginal cost is set by renewables.
The same is happening in the UK.
> , so consumers pay for the highest costing output regardless of how much if any they use.
No, if no Gas is needed (!) for power production in any quarter-hour, the price is not set by gas.
PS: Emphasis on needed. Gas plants may still be running at a loss for whatever reason (heat coupling, special contracts), but if they are not needed to provide the power, they will have to bid at a loss, and then they will not be able to drive the price.
> Gas plants may still be running at a loss for whatever reason
My assumption, given how the UK numbers look when there are negative prices but still a little bit of gas running, is that shut down/ start up for a CCGT is so undesirable (expensive maybe?) that a 100MW plant which can say throttle to 5MW would rather pay to give you 5MW of electricity for the next half hour than switch off the plant and provide nothing then need to start it back up in a few hours.
I don't know what "throttling" looks like for this equipment. It seems implausible that these units have no ability to control their fuel usage/ power output at all, just binary on or off, but on the other hand presumably in practice it's far from infinitely variable.
I imagine it's just be keeping the equipment warm and moving, especially for something like a steam turbine. Partial output sounds like a reasonable guess to me.
That might be part of the answer.
But IIRC, in Belgium at least, these plants are also remunerated on "secondary" markets for non-productive tasks. These secondary markets are mostly for grid balancing.
As others have pointed out the electricity price is only set by gas when gas is needed, but that's only part of your bill. Renewables now make up over half of UK electricity generation and they are financed through Contracts for Difference which are ultimately paid for by a supplier obligation levy on electricity bills.
When market electricity prices are lower than the strike price for a CfD, electricity users end up paying the difference through the levy and when the market price is higher it reduces the amount levied. So for the renewable portion of UK electricity generation we effectively pay the fixed strike price of the CfD whatever the market price.
CfDs only cover about 15% of renewables, though it's increasing.
When the Ukraine invasion spiked prices one suggestion was to offer the non CfD renewables a chance to enrol for CfDs, which would reduce their short term profits but guarantee long term predictable profit. I don't think it was actually done though.
My understanding is that it's the same here in Germany. From the website
> What does "decoupled" mean? In a gas-dominated electricity market, the marginal generator setting the price is almost always a gas-fired power plant (CCGT). That means electricity prices are structurally linked to gas prices — when gas rises, electricity rises with it. Decoupling happens when enough zero-marginal-cost renewable generation (wind, solar) pushes gas off the margin for enough hours that the annual average electricity price no longer tracks gas.
Marginal pricing is not specific to electricity in UK, that's just how commodities end up priced.
Saudis pump oil at cost of $10 per barrel. Will they sell it to you at $10? Nope. The average oil price? Nope.
Saudis will sell the barrel at the highest price people are willing to pay - the marginal price. So if the most expensive oil needed to match the global oil demand is some super expensive arctic oil project, the oil will be priced according the marginal cost of that project even if only 1% is needed.
Indeed. For others who may wonder why this is the case, a simple example will explain it:
Suppose Saudi can produce 100 barrels at $10 (cost+profit) each, and Brazil can produce 100 barrels at a price of $50 (cost+profit) each, and John wants to buy 120 barrels.
- John will pay what is necessary for his Oil, but seeks out the cheapest price available. - Sellers Brazil and Saudi will accept a sale of their own production if their minimum price of $50 and $10 is met respectively, but will sell to the highest bidder for their supply.
You'd think John will go to to Brazil to buy 100 barrels at $50, and then buy 20 barrels in Saudi at $10.
But guess what, Brazil could simply go to Saudi and buy their 100 barrels for $10, and then sell them to you for $50.
So now Saudi has demand from both John and Brazil at a $10 price. Who gets to buy? Well whoever decides to bid more to convince Saudi to sell their oil.
If John increases his bid to $15, Saudi will prefer that to Brazil's $10 bid. But Brazil would then increase its bid to $20, knowing they can sell it to John for $50.
This bidding keeps going up until the $50 point. For Brazil there is no longer any profit in buying Saudi Oil at $50, and selling it to John for the same price. For John there is no point in bidding more than $50 for Saudi Oil, because he can get a $50 price from Brazil.
Any point below $50 means a bidding war starts between John and Brazil, because at less than $50, Brazil has a cheaper source of oil (Saudi) than their own production cost.
And this is true for every commodity in a free market. It's not some 'UK system', it's just the consequence of free trade.
Of course in reality it's trading intermediaries that do the bidding, it's not Brazil buying from Saudi, but traders jumping in to arbitrage. But this is a simplified example.
Yea. The merit order bidding method just reflects the natural pricing of any commodity market.
The irony is at the time of me writing this; gas is down to 4.6%[^1] and renewables are a whopping 88.5% and yep - the cost is based on the 4.6% of gas.
^1 https://grid.iamkate.com/
In Germany, the price for the 17:00 product today is about 11 Euro, which is NOT the price implied by gas. No gas plant can run at this price.
The price of gas is −£9.26/MWh? (from that link!)
Exactly. That's clearly not a price dictated by gas. That's an example where CCGT generators were willing to pay you to take away their electricity. Obviously the gas they bought to do this cost money and so they're making a small loss when this happens and it would be good to understand why and how this makes sense for them in order to develop policies which get us the outcomes we want.
I'm far from an expert here but isn't that spot price rather than future deliveries? Few people pay for actual spot pricing because it can go the other way, and you want known pricing. You would have a forward contract to delivery gas at say 20p. This is a known price for operation and likely has profit baked in anyway. The excess is what we see now. They can't just switch off as they have a contract to fulfill, but the grid doesn't need the excess, therefore priced at a negative.
In https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-... under "Why does the price of gas drive electricity prices?" it suggests that, at the time the CMA report linked was written (now over 10 years ago) the CMA thought as much as 40% of electricity is traded at spot prices.
Now, the CMA report that's linking is talking about a world we no longer live in, in that world the UK burns coal, Russia hasn't invaded Ukraine and so on, and thus the numbers might be entirely different now, but that's the best I could find.
The how and why is that gas takes up space, cutting usage to zero when your site storage is full can cause issues (you can do this short term and get a bit of line pack going but it all eventually has to go somewhere).
I think gas turbines can turn off completely without issue (unlike coal) but there may also be situations where it costs more money to restart the generation process completely than to idle it at low capacity for a few hours when there is no demand for gas generation.
We don't "use" marginal cost pricing. That's just how economics works.
If anyone is interested here are the prices for electricity in munich (dynamic based on exchange price ). The price includes taxes & fees .
0:00-5:35 : ~ 0.32€
5:35-8:45 : ~ 0.38€
8:45-10.30 : ~ 0.30€
10:30-16:45 : ~ 0.18€
16:45-18:00 : ~ 0.31€
18:00-24:00 : ~ 0.34€
In Vancouver, we have somehow reverse curve - the incentive is to use more electricity at night when there's lower demand. As I understand, our main energy source is water, and so it has mostly flat generation. Nothing new - combining the two would make it cheaper all together.
These are extremely high prices. In Texas, we pay 12-15c.
Yes, and they are higher due to 2 reasons. And both seem to work.
Number 1 reason is that power was quite highly taxed, since it is directly linked with pollution and CO2. All powers, but that also means electrical power. The effect is, that european cars are smaller and use less. And also european houses are better insulated. You can measure this, the typical german 4 person household uses less than 50% of the electric power of a 4 person US household. Before COVID I even saw a statistics that this less usage compansated the higher electricity prices, so both norm-households payed the same for electricity. Unsure if that is still true post-COVID.
The other reason is that also a good amount of money is directly invested into the grid, to make it more resilient. And you can also measure that. If you lookup the SAIDI (system average interuption duraction index) of e.g. USA and compare it to Germany, you immediately see why over there uninteruptible power supplies are hardly used except in data centers. SAIDI Germany 12.2 minutes per customer per year, USA 125.7 minutes per customer per year. That's a whopping 10x worse. Not just as number, but also for the industry.
And I heard that the SAIDI in Texas is even worse than the US average.
What’s the units?
It's per 1 kWh
Correct
You have to ask how much of it is subsidized, otherwise it's pointless. It's very easy to 'decouple' electricity price from natural gas if the government simply pays it with tax money (which is how it works in many asian countries where the electricity prices are less than one third of EU level.)
Note that "gas" in this context means natural gas, not gasoline
As noted in the methodology below, they are measuring the gas-implied level as the marginal running costs of a combined-cycle gas turbine plant: the price of the natural gas necessary to generate a given amount of electricity, plus the cost of the necessary carbon credits to burn that natural gas. Then they compare that to the actual electricity price
Ok, we've made the gas natural in the title above. Thanks!
> Note that "gas" in this context means natural gas, not gasoline
Of course it does, why would anybody say "gas" when they are talking about a liquid? :p
Don't tell this guy about LNG!
(But yeah gas is a terrible name for petrol.)
> Note that "gas" in this context means natural gas, not gasoline
What's up with Americans consistently calling things "wrong" like this? "Gas" isn't even the right state of matter for the subject, nor is "football" actually a sport where the ball is mostly for the foot, almost like things are intentionally named bad.
"Gas" is short for "gasoline" which means "gas oil". That is a perfectly cromulent name for a liquid.
"Football" is a different game in the US because it arrived there from England in the 19th century when carrying the ball was allowed. In England the sport eventually split into distinct sports: association football (aka soccer) and rugby. In America they evolved the game independently but didn't change the name.
Hope that clears it up.
> but didn't change the name.
That's the part that don't make no sense, so no, still very unclear why Americans keeps insisting on calling things the wrong names :)
Because changing a name that's been in use for decades is very confusing and unnecessary. A rose by another name etc.
The full names of the two rugby codes are "rugby union football" and "rugby league football". So Americans aren't alone in their cavalier use of the word "football".
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_rules_football
> Because changing a name that's been in use for decades is very confusing and unnecessary
Yeah, that never happens, not even with important national institutions or anything like that.
Why do Germans and Dutch call gasoline "benzin"? It's clearly not benzene.
It is the British that changed things. They also used to call it soccer and then changed in the 1980s. Canada and Australia still use soccer, probably cause they have native footballs.
Soccer is short for association football, so it still contains "football".
What's up with the British calling refined gasoline "petrol"? It's not even an abbreviation for the word, it's a totally different material? You don't go calling refined aluminium "bauxite", but you do call gasoline "petrol".
We're both wrong. It's a liquid at room temperature, and it's called not petroleum.
Yes, we all know the French are right on this one by calling it "essence"
Seems cromulent to me. One of the common meanings of essence is "a product of distillation" (compare e.g. essential oils - oils won through steam distillation). And gasoline is won through fancy distillation
Do you call water “steam juice”?
> nor is "football" actually a sport where the ball is mostly for the foot
This is untrue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football
There are lots of countries where Association isn't the "football" for the region.
Also, they drive on a parkway and park on a driveway.
Did you know that "Danishes" were... Austrian?
You know, the first five times I read your comment it didn't make sense. This time I got curious enough to investigate what the hell you're talking about...
Apparently in some countries there is something called "Danish Pastry" or "Danish" for short, I had no idea! Funnily enough, where I grew up, those are called "Wienerbröd" (and in Danish it's "wienerbrød", the same basically) which quite literally translates to "Viennese bread".
So no, I didn't know "Danishes" were Austrian, but I did have the suspicion that Viennese bread was indeed Austrian :)
For me personally it did not. I was a happy Tibber costumer until recently, meaning I was charged the quarterly hour spot price per kWh. The Iran War let to a significant jump in the price during the hours when renewables were low. I switched back to a traditional fixed price per kWh plan because of the high gas prices.
My quant mind is sprained by the implied volatility around the mean.
It is incredibly volatile. Spot prices in the day-ahead auction for tomorrow are between -39€/MWh and 201€/MWh. And that's a pretty normal amount of volatility for this time of year
https://energy-charts.info/charts/price_spot_market/chart.ht...
We need more batteries for sure.
Would be good to have more than a one sentence explanation of what you mean, but this is a result of low storage. In the oil market, if prices are too volatile you just stick it in a tank until they stabilize. You only get negative prices if all the storage is full, which happened to WTI once.
sorry, can you elaborate? I am happy to fix it or add a caveat comment to the methodology section.
Has this benefitted the regular/average consumer?
Nope. They pay more than they were with the "old" energy mix of more gas and nuclear.
Telling people it could be worse isn't really something to be proud of.
I personally now have solar panels on the roof and a heat pump so we only use electricity and don't rely on gas. Germany's strategy is really beneficial to households like my own. Unless you're relatively well off or on benefits, you're losing big time. The costs are constantly increasing with people telling others to just take money (you don't have) to install some solar panels on the house (you don't own) or buy an electric car (you can't afford).
The whole point of this website is to show that the price of electricity is year-to-date 22% cheaper than it would be in a gas-dominated grid without renewables.
So I don't know where you're getting the "No" from?
You could argue that maybe investing all those subsidies into nuclear would have been cheaper, but that would have had a lot of path dependencies that simply did not pan out in Europe.
Electricity generation from natural gas is intentionally made more expensive by the EU ETS. It could be cheaper if politicians wanted it to be.
Tbh coal definitely should be restarted and used more, there's more reliable supply for coal than for lng.
And economists agree that schemes similar to ETS is the most economically efficient way to achieve carbon targets.
So, if you want to say: "I don't think governments should have agreed to the Paris agreement" then you should just say that, rather than attack various highly efficient ways of achieving those goals.
I don't support it because it doesn't work (at least for me, I guess there's some middleman in the grand scheme of things who is profiting off of this). E.g. Texas has a high share of renewables too without carbon taxes and with much cheaper electricity.
Texas has many federal and state incentives for building renewables.
Then why the EU is hell bent on the ETS since it's clearly not working the best?
I have dynamic pricing in Germany and the cost of electricity when to literally zero for a few hours today.
Seems like the regular consumers you refer to would be paying even higher rates for gas and petrol if others weren’t electrifying.
If my electricity prices are no longer linked to gas prices, I can have cheaper electricity - my provider only produces green energy. But in the past raising gas prices would have also raised my prices, regardless. So yes, regular consumers can profit from this.
> my provider only produces green energy. But in the past raising gas prices would have also raised my prices, regardless. So yes, regular consumers can profit from this.
It's one single grid. You get coal, nuclear, wind, solar, and everything else. If you buy from a provider, you get that mix.
Well, the electrons arriving in your home will the same as your neighbours, regardless of which supplier you choose. But by choosing a different supplier you can steer which energy sources will be used to feed that grid, so it still makes a difference, just not exactly where you live.
What if the whole point of the strategy was to incentivize households to become more like yours?
An energy transition isn't just some big centralized state planned enterprise. It's also the sum of people putting up their own solar (on the balcony if they're renters!) etc.
An 800W plug-in solar system for your balcony can be had for 200 euros these days, breakeven is super quick.
Clearly it has relative to what prices would have been if it was gas powered only.
Do you have any reason to believe the methodology in the linked page is wrong?
Decoupling of energy prices from fossil fuel is going to be spreading around the globe. It's not that hard to grasp. If you are spending non trivial percentages of your GDP on stuff that you burn once in exchange for some twh of energy delivered, lowering that significantly will have a notable impact on your trade balance.
Recent events in the middle east will have made a few countries keenly aware of how overly dependent they are on stuff coming from that region and how easily their economies are disrupted when stuff goes wrong there.
I live in Berlin, electricity is rather expensive here and people are not treating their gas dependence with enough urgency yet. The city is surrounded by flat country side with lots of wind mills and solar installations. Yet most apartment buildings in the city are still gas heated. Mine is no exception. I have to pay into fueling the gas boiler every month to the extent of about 150ish euro per month. Down from 250ish during the worst of the aftermath of the Russian gas pipeline shut down. I'd love my building to be switched to a heat pump. That's 1800 euro down the drain every year. I'll take a 30-40% cut on that please. It's technically very feasible and measured over 10-20 years, there should be a very clear financial payoff. Done right it should pay for itself probably within a decade. The building has about 20 apartments. Monthly gas bills are 2.5K based on yearly statements. Or about 30K. All out the chimney. That's one hell of a budget to tackle a bit of energy efficiency in the building.
But this is where Germany is its own worst enemy. We're talking a lot of vested interests. Nimby's somehow blocking the notion of literally saving money (as opposed to setting it on fire and chucking it out the chimney). A lack of incentives. A lot of bureaucracy, etc. Even the decision to stop building completely new buildings without a gas connection is somehow controversial in this country where gas is expensive. It is in the middle of a years long gas crisis of its own making and it can't get the decision to stop hitting itself with the proverbial hammer actioned.
A bit of system thinking could turn this around relatively quickly though. For example starting to think of this as investments with clear ROI as opposed to just cost would change the decision making and could also open up a lot of financing. Banks love investments with predictable ROI, for example. And Germany has an excellent credit rating.
However, Germany is grid locked on an irrational fear of financing and debt. It has very little of it relative to e.g. the US or even most other EU countries. It also has huge infrastructure problems. Addressing those requires investment. Investment requires financing. Investments have ROIs which should enable said financing. But that's where penny pinching politicians seem to have a mental block confusing investments for cost and consistently opting to "save cost" rather than to invest. And generally not seeing the forest for the trees.
But the picture is pretty clear. Switch most house holds to heat pumps while at the same time investing in cables, on/off-shore wind, a bit of solar on the side. With lots of battery storage. Etc. would do wonders for the amounts of gas it has to import at great cost. The country has millions of apartment blocks like mine using about 2-3x more energy than needed for heating. Almost all of it in gas form. A program to change those buildings could be executed in 10-15 years and break even in about the same time. It would result in many billions of savings in gas imports per year. That's the few percent of GDP that makes the difference between growth or recession. Germany has been in and out of recession for the last few years. Even powering that exclusively with gas fired electricity plants would yield substantial savings. And it already is transitioning to a grid that is mostly not gas powered. This should be a no brainer. But it somehow isn't. And that's just domestic heating.
I wonder how heat pumps would work for apartment building central heating systems. The circulated water has to be a lot hotter than heat pumps are capable of, as far as I've understood. Is there already a system that could viably replace gas in the existing building stock?
Another problem is that most people in Berlin/Germany are renting, so the incentives do not align. The building owner doesn't pay for the heating, so they are unlikely to do any investments where the upside is for the tenants only.
Heat pump hot water is very common in Europe. Just as it's possible for the pump to make a box so cold that food stays frozen despite the hot summer's day in Florida, it's also possible to heat up a tank of water this way, it just costs more energy.
Unlike modern natural gas boilers which have only a very small tank of water kept hot and use a fire to make more on demand with only a few seconds of delay (you might not even realise this is happening, but of course it isn't actually instant and so there is a small tank of very hot water) the heat pump will need a large tank because you're going to put about a day's supply of hot water in the tank and gradually, over a whole day, re-heat it as needed.
The problem is the old building stock (say, large apartment buildings from early 1900s) which isn't energy efficient at all, and on cold winter days require very hot water to keep warm. The radiators were designed with assumption that the water can be boiling hot (coal/gas).
It doesn't seem feasible to renovate everything, so I'm wondering what are the practical options. A hybrid system where a gas boiler is kept for the peak demand?
There's no chance at all that you're using boiling hot water (373K) because that stuff is both dangerous and unreasonably expensive to make at volume.
My guess is that what you're thinking of is the water being say 320 to 340K, which is obviously far warmer than you'd heat a home, but isn't boiling water. Heat pumps will be more efficient at lower temperatures, so maybe it's keeping that tank of water at 320K while your gas boiler was 330 or even 340K -- but the gas boiler is more efficient for lower temperatures too, ask any manufacturer or installer, the way to get lower costs is to turn down the local thermostat, it's just that people are used to "instant" heat from a gas boiler and won't tolerate answers like "Run it for a whole day" whereas that is what your heat pump needs.
It is true that because of this "Run it all day" approach an uninsulated home is so expensive to heat that it's impractical, when I grew up there was ice inside my bedroom window when I woke on a winter's morning, it had been under 270K at night, and a gas boiler would heat it in an hour or so -- but that's not because it's literally impossible with heat pumps it's just far too expensive.
No, 47°C to 67°C is way too low. The buildings are not actually circulating boiling water, but not too far either:
> Typically, heating systems in Europe use water flowing through pipes and emitters (radiators) heated to high temperatures (70-90°C). [0]
The radiators are often designed for these temperatures. Supplying with lower heat will not work without replacing the radiators and/or renovating for better energy efficiency.
And heat pumps, AFAIK, can't supply 70-90°C. Thus my original question of what is the current plan to solve this problem.
[0] https://www.ifeu.de/fileadmin/uploads/Publikationen/Energie/...
So, firstly yes, exactly, even in the 19th century they aren't using boiling water, it's just needlessly expensive to make. 90°C seems unnecessarily hot to me (as you can see, by the time I was born it wasn't being used to heat homes) but it isn't boiling.
And yes, some older buildings will need refurbishment, these building often pre-date electric light so that's happened before. The 1970s house example starts with a 70°C flow, but with a combination of insulation and replacing radiators they get to 41°C flow which is a much cheaper 318K in real numbers.
The thing is making 90°C water was expensive and unnecessary even when gas boilers start being commonplace, the manufacturer will tell you that you should turn it down until it's heating the home as slow as you can tolerate. That got more true as the boilers got more efficient, because the efficiency is from recovering more heat energy from burning methane and you do that at lower flow temperatures, the heat pumps are just more of the same. Notice how those diagrams show gradually reducing flow temperatures over the years, in the 1930s recovered heat from an industrial district at 90°C is plausible, but the gas boiler manufacturer fifty years ago will go white when you say you need 90°C -- he's going to suggest 70°C, and his successors will keep bargaining you down because the efficiency numbers are better as flow temperature reduces and while "instant heat" feels good in the moment, the bills for the gas you're burning will not.
We can pump these temperatures but they don't make economic sense. Unlike low outside air temperatures this is just economics. The low outside air temperatures mean you need to defrost the pump, which if it got cold enough might literally become impossible, but if you want to pay far, far more money to heat water to 90°C that would be technically possible, it's just silly, like burning $50 bills to keep warm - use singles they're 50x cheaper.
Yes, the buildings will be renovated in time. For me it seems like a generation-long undertaking, though, and we get back to my original question.
I think we're talking past each other, so let's leave it at this.
[dead]
Thanks nuclear for subsidizing renewables
State propaganda: so you mixed in renewables as FREE?