One of the nicer upshots of cutting the cord with Russia is the sky high price of electricity incentivizing big investments in renewable energy.
Biomass may well be renewable, but I still don’t think it counts as green.
Why not? Doesn’t creating the biomass require sequestering carbon?
Electricity imports also rose to 24.9 TWh, driven by lower generation costs in neighboring countries during summer.
For the love of God, please just build nuclear instead of virtue signaling with solar panels while you import your energy needs.
All our nuclear plants are shut down and weren’t maintained for further usage, than that few years ago when they were shut down, for decades. They are basically trash. Now just take a look at UK or France how cheap and easy it is to build new ones (when you can’t sacrifice workers and environment like China). And then take a look at France’s nuclear power production in recent heat summers. And finally take a look where that sweet little uranium is coming from when imported (Germany has none). And now give me a single good reason why investing in nuclear is better than investing in dirt cheap, decentralizeable renewables to cover future electricity needs.
Btw French Nuclear Power Company went bankrupt last years. Because of this cheap Nuclear. It’s owned by the Government now. In South Corea the Nuclear company is due 150 Billion dollars. Bankrupt very soon. Sellafield the British nuclear dump expects costs of 136 Billion pounds until 2050. Already owned by the Government.
It’s so fucking cheap this nuclear.
The “just use nuclear” crowd is so dumb. They make it so obvious they have no idea what they are talking about. Which I would not mind on its own, but they always think they are the smartest people in the room and that’s infuriating.
There’s no sense in spending limited public funding on nuclear now - renewables and storage is winning on all fronts.
Shutting down what nuclear existed was a costly mistake, but going down that path again is an even worse one
I love it, I like it like my new contract they send me with new prices for electricity (44% up)
You should change your provider. I do it every year because thata how you can lots of money.
Are you sure its the actual cost of the electricity or the fact that many other costs are often bundled into your bill?
Obviously, you don’t live in Germany or the EU, and it’s questionable whether you’ve ever paid a single bill. Because the electricity bill is always separate from other bills and is a special contract.
Prices mainly go up due to things like transmission fees.
Sounds off, because renewbles are typically cheaper than the alternatives.
Any chance you got a ‘fossil only’ contract?why would market electricity prices have any relation to what you pay on your power bill? turns out that companies will charge whatever they know they can, regardless of the cost of acquiring something to sell, should the cost of something be more than they know they can sell it for, they just won’t sell it.
The idea that market prices influence what you pay for something is basically one of the main lies of supply side economics.
In Germany, from 1st of January each local power provider has to offer a flexible contract that gives through the market price. But I think it’s too early right know as it has some peaks. Otherwise choose Tibber, Voltego or others. Once you can load your car at night, it’s worth to take a flex tariff
It sounds strange, but that’s how it is, and it’s Ökostrom. Luckily, I can change my provider when they raise the price, so it won’t increase that much for me, but it will still go up, and I’m not the only one in my area because some friends of mine received the same ‘greeting.’ (To those who give dislikes, that won’t change the facts no matter how much you would like it to.)
Buy a Balkonkraftwerk. It’s cheap right now in Wintertime. If you take one without battery, it has a return of invest of 1-2 years. Just 2-4 solar panels for your balcony or somewhere else and you plug it into your power plug (schuko stecker). It‘s worth, easy to install and allowed without applying the landlord in Germany.
Are you sure that the investment will be recouped so quickly? I’m not a local here and I’m not familiar with all the rules, but I’ve been told that I can’t put anything on the balcony that will change the appearance of the building until I get permission from the Rathaus.
That was until 2023. In 2024 the regulations were changed and kow it can’t be stopped. Neither stopped by your landlord, by the city, nor the local power company. Just buy it for around 400€ and install it (no Deye inverter though). You’ll get 2 or 4 solar panels, an inverter and a cable with schuko plug to connect inverter to your flats power network.
You plug it into your power plug and as soon as the sun glares, your little power net in your flat gets cheap power. If you adapt your behavior accordingly - start laundry, dryer, ironing at noon - you can save some bucks.
I have no quick start guide in englisch. May be you google around a bit. If you live in an older building, you should read about old power cables as well and start with low wattage- 600w inverter. It’s really that easy now 😋
renewbles are typically cheaper than the alternatives
But firms will charge market rate regardless of the source of energy. This is a problem we have in Texas under ERCOT.
Green power can come in at such high rates that local power is practically free. But because the energy is bundled and auctioned with coal and gas across the grid at large, and because electricity is priced at the maximum auction rate, a shortage in one municipality that’s filled with high priced fossil fuel power raises the retail price of energy into the hundreds or even thousands of dollars a MWh.
I wonder how long it takes to bundle renawables only with batteries and sell that without subsidising fossil based electric energy.
May the fossil burners go bankrupt rather sooner than later as it’s a more reliable way to get them out of the mix than regulation is.bundle renawables only with batteries and sell that
Significantly less efficient than a green grid. Roof solar isn’t going to practically compete with industrial scale solar or wind, much less state subsidized gas.
May the fossil burners go bankrupt rather sooner than later
The demand for energy is only increasing. I don’t think anyone is going to go bankrupt selling electricity into this market.
Remember Berlin has a latitude of 52.5°. That puts it far north of the 49th parallel border.
Sure, but Munich is south of the 49th parallel. I’m not sure how amenable it is to solar down there, but surely there are some areas that would work, no?
If baveria wasn’t one of the worst NIMBY hell holes in the (known by me) world.
True, but climate in Central Europe is different to the US-Canada border.
I’m thinking solar is hard.
Yeah, you get even more clouds.
My friend is dumb and doesn’t know the significance of the 49th parallel. Can you explain it to them?
US/Canadian border from roughly Vancouver to Winnipeg. Berlin is further north than Saskatoon, Karlsruhe is on the 49th parallel. The lot of mainland Europe is north of Albuquerque. In fact much of Tunesia is north of Albuquerque. Miami is on about the same parallel as Bahrain, Orlando on the same as New Delhi.
Wasn’t Germany that weird one where ‘gas’ was labeled as ‘renewable’? Or was that something diffrent?
No, that was France labeling Nuclear as Renewable. Because, because it doesn’t emit CO2, I guess. Don’t know what „Re-New“ translates into French and I‘d be surprised if it is „Split Atoms“.
Yes it was, but I can’t find the sources now. It was some time after the recent invasion of Ukraine by the eastern hordes; titles were something like "Germany reclasified natural gas as renewable’. My memory fails me, so it may have been different gas and different purpose than electricity. Anyway, it came as a very poor taste.
In other news, Germany imports quite some percentage of its electricity from other countries, like nuclear-produced electricity from France. So, in a sense and to a degree, it outsources the emissions to other countries.
In other news, Germany imports quite some percentage of its electricity from other countries, like nuclear-produced electricity from France. So, in a sense and to a degree, it outsources the emissions to other countries.
That is simply not true. You might get an update of the actual state of energy production AND imports vs exports here: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/01/03/germany-hits-62-7-renewables-in-2024-energy-mix-with-solar-contributing-14/
My memory fails me, so it may have been different gas and different purpose than electricity. Anyway, it came as a very poor taste.
Even this is not true or just blabla at least. It’s Biogas, gas made out of animals poo, plants and other degradable things.
I strongly suggest that you either check sources before posting a comment. Or just stay quite instead „there was something I heard somewhere…“
Wasn’t Germany that weird one where ‘gas’ was labeled as ‘renewable’?
Biogas from decomposition is renewable. That definition is accepted internationally.
Doesn’t mean it’s ecological. There’s a difference.
No, worse, they labeled it as green. Naziland never fails to be on the wrong side of history
Original chart source: https://www.energy-charts.info/downloads/Stromerzeugung_2024.pdf
Slide 17
I wish people would stop conflating energy with electricity.
So Germany had ⅔ of it’s electricity from renewables, but still has gas for warming homes, petrol for cars, diesel for trucks, and so on.
That’s fair, but it’s still a very relevant metric. It shows the automatic transition made in electrification when people switch over to heat pumps, electric stoves or EVs.
Exactly. Both numbers are interesting, because electricity will likely be scaled up in the same proportions. If we’re comparing countries, we should use total energy, but if we’re just looking at progress within a country, looking at electricity generation is totally valid.
Well, from where I stand it’s a useful number to understand the value of electrification. You hear a lot of misinformation along the lines of “why move to EV/heat pumps/whatever if the electricity they use is made by burning gas”.
Which is a big “if”, and knowing what the energy mix is in your country/area is an important rebuttal and answer to that particular question.
It skews the metrics though. By the title you’d think Germany is already more than halfway through to become carbon neutral, when it is obviously still extremely far away from that goal. People read this and think we’re actually doing okay.
The hell is “doing okay”?
I am so frustrated by the discourse around renewables and climate change. Everybody online seems to be treating it like a puzzle or a board game, where you “win” at climate change when you find the “right” solution.
That’s not how it works. I don’t care about the “carbon neutrality” of Germany any more than I care about the “carbon neutrality” of a patch of the Atlantic Ocean. It’s a global process that is never going to end. We’re always going to need energy, it’s always going to come from a mix of sources and we need to eventually find a global equilibrium we can strive to maintain.
Data is data, but taking issue with news, and particularly positive news, as if they were propaganda in a campaign where eventually people will have to elect the one source of energy they consume is kind of absurd. Yes, renewables are gaining ground, solar is moving faster than expected and no, that doesn’t make the issue go away and we still need to accelerate the process and remove additional blockers to that acceleration. There are no silver bullets and there never will be.
positive news
The point is that it’s not positive, not more than an article telling you that tomorrow it will be sunny.
It’s at best mild.
Now who is confusing weather with climate?
It’s an article telling you that inflation wasn’t as high as intitially expected. Doesn’t mean prices went down, but it’s still good news against the alternative.
We’ve looped back around to arguing about the meaning of “positive”, which mostly tells me this is entirely a discussion about vibes, and maybe that’s the best takeaway anybody can get from it.
I feel like you agree with the person you’re replying to but don’t see it.
You hate when people/media describes it as a winnable scenario. They are saying that the chart misrepresenting energy gives people the impression that the “fight” is almost “won” and the government has it covered - no need to keep it part of the conversation.
Kinda, but I’m frustrated with both sides of the argument. There is a cohort of very online people at the ready to clarify how whatever initiative or proposal is “not it” or “greenwashing” and will not “fix” things.
The activist argument is not so much that this is an ongoing thing we’re going to be considering forever, it’s that this or that solution is a corporate trap or a fake solution or whatever else. Often there isn’t even an agreement on what the “real” answer is supposed to be, just a willingness to be the savvy, jaded one that calls out the latest snake oil handwavy solution.
So yeah, we probably don’t disagree on the first part, but that post really tickled my sensitivity to the second part.
Fair enough! Thanks for elaborating.
Not doing nearly enough isn’t “positive news”. But thanks for proving my point. This is literally not going to do anything for us as a species with the current trajectory we’re on, because, again, it’s not enough, not even close to it.
Okay, so beyond nihilism, what’s your point?
I mean, obviously this is at least an intermediate state towards whatever survivable endgame we want to reach. We need to be at this stage at some point to get to where we want to go.
Should this stage have happened sooner? Probably. Was it possible? Maybe.
But we’re here now, so… what’s your take? Because you seem concerned about good news discouraging people from something, but you also seem to be claiming there is no valid path forward, which seems way less productive to me.
Nihilism isn’t the same as realism. We need to make great leaps, not babysteps. We were on our way to a catastrophic 3 degrees Celsius globally already, and that was before the result of the US election. Do you seriously believe the rest of the world, who already failed to do their own part, is going to now also compensate for the addition of the US emissions under Trump? That’s not happening, especially not if we continue to delude us with misleading headlines like this. Toxic positivity is absolutely not helpful when the world needs a serious reality check.
No toxic positivity here.
I will note, though, you haven’t met the brief. The closest thing to a target I see there is “great leaps, not baby steps”. I’m gonna need something slightly more specific than that.
carbon neutral
That’s a propaganda term by people who promote bullshit like e-fuels because “the only CO2 emissions are what was already out of the air, so bottom line it’s neutral”.
Please stop spewing climate denial propaganda. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net-zero_emissions https://unfccc.int/news/a-beginner-s-guide-to-climate-neutrality https://sustainability.yale.edu/explainers/yale-experts-explain-carbon-neutrality https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20190926STO62270/what-is-carbon-neutrality-and-how-can-it-be-achieved-by-2050
Please stop spewing climate denial propaganda.
The only one spewing propaganda is you. The world needs “net negative” to remove the CO2 from the atmosphere that was already blasted into it since the industrial revolution, not “net zero”/“carbon neutral”.
Get a clue.
Those are stepping stones on the same path you dingus. Calling literal climate scientists & institutions propaganda just proves my point about your climate change denial.
proves my point about your climate change denial.
Your brain is broken.
The world needs “net negative”
Of course.
And carbon neutral is a major step in that direction. Carbon neutral not the end goal, and most people don’t claim that it is.
You seem to be a bit dense then. Carbon Neutral is a huge step to getting net negative.
You’re right, but if you read beyond the title it’s clearly stated that it’s about electricity generation.
Nice graph with no freaking labels.
Original chart source: https://www.energy-charts.info/downloads/Stromerzeugung_2024.pdf
Slide 17
Germany has the EU’s highest energy prices. Just saying.
Why is that?
I wish I knew.
Yet, you spout innuendos as if you’re knowing what you’re talking about.
It does seem awfully like you’re implying a connection to the topic at hand.
Because the price we pay is determined by the most expensive source, that’s to ensure low costing energy like wind and solar make the biggest profit and get expanded further and faster.
Because Germany is not at 100% renewable yet. Soon.
IIRC it’s because there is a pseudo monopoly for the power lines which can increase prices for using them and the price for electricity orients itself on the most expensive form of electricity (coal I think), so the price benefits of renewables only benefit the seller and not the buyer
Same in the US… I don’t have any choice on where my power comes from. Though the government tries to go after them for price fixing/gouging, it’s always way late and a smaller penalty that nut should have been while they’re currently making money hand over fist.
Norway has some of the lowest in Europe. Less than a third of Germany’s prices. Norway is producing more (hydro) energy than it’s able to use.
That’s why it’s exporting some of it to other countries today. Before Norway did this their prices were even lower.
Norway has one of the lowest. And they don’t have only 62.7%.
99% of their energy comes from renewables.And in the USA, some of the states with lowest prices have the highest % of renewables.
To be fair, Norway and those states rely heavily on hydro, which is great if you have the geography for it, but it’s not a route that can work for every region.
Excluding hydro renewable sources tend to cost more if you include storage currently, though that premium has been and is coming down.
Exactly. I grew up in WA, USA, and power was always quite cheap due to how much comes from hydro. Now I’m in Utah, and it’s only cheap because we use coal and natural gas (and produce a ton of the latter), though we’re replacing a lot of that w/ solar (turns out deserts get lots of sun) and prices are remaining pretty low.
Renewable energy will certainly look different in each region. I don’t know what would work best for Germany since I don’t know the geography very well, but comparing Norway to Germany isn’t going to be a productive conversation.
Norway regularly has very high energy prices… in fact, they’re so high they want to cut exports.
The reason they’re high is because of the grid in other countries being hit by low wind or grey sky days, pushing up the minimum pricing that they’re also subjected to by being part of the same grid.
Sure just saying, not trolling at all.
Solar drives energy prices down, not up. In the summer the energy price regularly goes negative because there is so much solar available.
And it isn’t even remotely true, other countries have higher energy prices than Germany within the EU. The Netherlands for example has crazy high energy prices. And that’s in absolute numbers, not even corrected for things like GDP.
It’s the coal they’re burning.
“This single thing is more expensive in this country” is a stupid way to compare prices from countries.
Meanwhile, the USA is 24%-ish renewables and 60%-ish fossil fuels. Damn fossil fuel industry and anti-progress politicians.
*state dependent. ;)
I love that chart you can’t read.
Yeah that sucks, they haven’t shared the source, only what site it’s from.
This is the closest I could find: https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&interval=year&year=-1&source=public
But this includes all sources, where the chart shown only includes renewable sources. I can’t find it on the site, but I’m kinda dumb so maybe somebody else can find it.
Original chart source: https://www.energy-charts.info/downloads/Stromerzeugung_2024.pdf
Slide 17
They’re getting poorer and deindustrializing at a rapid pace.
The ironworks in Ruhrgebiet died a century ago, in case you didn’t notice.
UK for comparison (Average over year)
GW % Coal 0.18 0.6 Gas 8.31 27.7 Solar 1.52 5.1 Wind 9.36 31.1 Hydroelectric 0.41 1.4 Nuclear 4.36 14.5 Biomass 2.15 7.1 The sum of those percentages is 87.5%. So what’s the rest, maybe import from France or Norway?
Yes it’s imports. Norway / France and Netherlands mainly.
There’s a joke in there about the power of hot air but I’m not confident enough in my knowledge of British politics to make it
Well, we’ve a single cable coming over from France that makes up about 3% (I think) of our total electricity supply. So “French Nuclear” should be a bigger entry in that table than coal, solar, hydro or bio. That’s not the only import, either, so it’s not completely impractical for the missing percentages to be imports.
There are other cables as well. One of them runs through the chunnel. The UK regularly gets upto 10% of its supply from France (seasonal, time, cost dependant)
That’s an incredible amount of wind power.
For anyone who is interested in a detailed view of these stats worldwide in real time and cross-border with carbon intensities and individual breakdowns by electricity source: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/72h
Really cool. Thanks for the share. Also quite depressing, most countries (even rich ones who have like triple responsibility) are barely even trying.
WTF is Australia doing? Aren’t they aware they have plenty of sunshine and an insanely long shoreline?
The sun doesn’t shine at night. Have a look when it is daytime there and you’ll see upwards of 60% of their electricity is solar.
Or use the EM site and check for past statistics.
The sun doesn’t shine at night.
Wind blows at night at the shoreline.
Have a look when it is daytime there and you’ll see upwards of 60% of their electricity is solar.
Well, over 12 months it’s not that rosy, except for Tasmania:
I thought you’d at least have a chuckle when you realised that it was night time when you made your dumb comment.
Over the last 12 months it is 25% solar and 13% wind. The population centres on the east coast are worse than WA, SA and TAS in that regard.
Yes, 45% of coal generated electricity is awful, but you were still incorrect in saying Australia is doing nothing.
A collosal solar farm and transmission cable to Singapore is under construction which is will be a great achievement when complete.
Australia is just an oil company, a coal company, and a mining company disguised as a trench coat. The Liberal party (essentially just American Republicans opposed to guns) spent 2 decades killing any green energy initiatives in favor of fracking the Outback
IIRC Australia mines a huge amount of coal
Australia likes its coal like america its guns.
Shame, innit? They could be the n1 Solar panel producers per capita and panel exporters…oh well. This is why the charge against fossil fuels has to be led by net consumers (in the name of defense against geopolitical risk) and the producers will reduce extraction…but local consumption of coal probably will never disappear completely unless locals complain about smog.
