Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?

https://kaikenhuippu.com/2020/02/18/why-germans-wont-heat-their-homes-even-with-free-electricity/

by ericdanielski • 6 years ago

302 387 6 years ago

kaikenhuippu.com

dacohenii• 6 years ago

NPR's Planet Money podcast recently had a relevant episode on Germany's feed-in tariff.

https://www.npr.org/2020/01/17/797322305/episode-965-das-gre...

fishmaster• 6 years ago

I don't heat because I want it cold. It's hot enough in summer, in winter it's finally cool.

9nGQluzmnq3M• 6 years ago

The article is about energy politics, not personal preferences.

devmunchies• 6 years ago

There was an article I read on that solar powered website that's been shared on HN a few times that changed by view on heating.

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/02/heating-people-not...

Basically, just wear a sweater and long pants in the house in the winter so you don't have to heat it so much. And if you need to, put a heat source near you, but there's no need to heat the whole house.

jimmaswell• 6 years ago

Still not comfortable having skin exposed to the cold, and texting gloves never seem to work that great for me.

docflabby• 6 years ago

Hypothesis I would like to test one day - does the increase in calories (and therefore additional energy used to produce food) to heat your body offset the energy saved by reduced heating. Start by assuming person living alone.

Then could take it a step further increase number of people and take into account the body heat of each person (people produce alot of heat + water)

rvp-x• 6 years ago

This comment is making me feel poor. I regularly wear a winter coat (and more) indoors instead of heating.

ficklepickle• 6 years ago

Assuming you live somewhere where the pipes won't freeze. That makes one heck of a mess.

nottorp2• 6 years ago

You're going to pay for that in home repair bills in the long run though.

Unless you're living in an area that never goes below zero, which is not the case in most of Europe.

kaybe2• 6 years ago

Mhm, sounds good. But when your walls are too cold and your humidity too high (cooking, showering, breathing, plants...) you run into mold issues fast, so it's not that easy.

tssva• 6 years ago

Germans are heating their homes just not with electricity. A better title for the article would be, "Germans won't heat their homes with electricity even when it is free."

tau2552• 6 years ago

Why not capture carbon from air with surplus energy? Build few capture plants and buy energy to keep price positive, then sell carbon cerificates on european market.

kasey_junk• 6 years ago

It would be more efficient for Germans to pay for new energy production in their neighbors. Poland for example has lots of coal that makes it untenable to do green energy.

[edit] though frankly it’s probably even easier for Germans to just pay their domestic coal producers not to produce.

skybrian• 6 years ago

You'd have to do the math, but it might be because the surplus doesn't last long enough to pay for the equipment. Even if the prices were low enough for half the year, this means the equipment sits idle half the time. Most energy surpluses are shorter than that.

tau2552• 6 years ago

Yes, probably it would not be making enough money to sustain operation.

But I still think that we (as a world) should start capture carbon actively during this decade. Last summer in Europe was hottest yet and with such hot winter we are for even hotter summer this year. Keeping energy prices up would be just added benefit.

buzzkillington5• 6 years ago

Because this is pure greenwashing.

Tepix4• 6 years ago

There isn't a industrial scale process for doing it and there isn't enough surplus energy either.

duxup4• 6 years ago

"Only turbines built in 2016 or later take even a small hit to their revenues if prices go below zero, and more than 75 % of the production capacity was built before that."

That seems like a recipe for folks just building endlessly regardless of demand, pulling money from government... and an eventual mess when you fix it and nobody is making money suddenly...

inetknght2• 6 years ago

Mess? Turn that around into an opportunity: charge for clean-energy-powered carbon capture.

duxup4• 6 years ago

I'm not sure I follow, charge ... who for what?

lispm25• 6 years ago

building endlessly regardless of demand, pulling money from government

But that's not what happens. Germany has a tight control over how much is build every year. Actually there are lots of complaints that currently Germany builds not enough renewable energy capacity per year.

duxup4• 6 years ago

Very weird... drive the market into a very non market and price to 0...but still manage it the other way.

Scoundreller2• 6 years ago

I feel like the issue is that a lot of consumers get stuck paying a fixed per kWh delivery/transmission fee.

IMO: this doesn’t make sense. Transmission and distribution costs are largely the amortization of the cost of building the system peak carrying capacity.

There’s no shame in charging higher D&T rates during peak times and near-zero rates at 3AM.

Could also make electricity taxes a percentage instead of a fixed $ per kWh.

Germany could encourage domestic consumption of its overproduction, which would further encourage demand smoothing, but instead exports it.

lnsp• 6 years ago

About encourage domestic consumption: the local power infrastructure does not have enough capacity to distribute all the energy produced by wind turbines (in the north) across the country.

Scoundreller2• 6 years ago

Possibly true, but I have a doubt that their local D&T rates in that area reflect that.

MauranKilom• 6 years ago

FWIW, there are systems/installations in Germany for having different electricity prices at day and at night (source: my home). There used to be a large difference (like 10 vs 20 cent/kWh according to landlords), but now it's pretty insignificant with 23 vs 25 cent/kWh.

Mvandenbergh• 6 years ago

In the UK, heavy users do pay T&D charges based on time of use.

binichgross• 6 years ago

Tradition! Tradition!

rini172• 6 years ago

Here in a central european country, end-user price for Russian natural gas is about 4 eurocents/kWh. Electricity is 12 cents/kWh, in Germany even more iirc.

I have no idea about wholesale spot prices, but I don't see any incentive to switch to electricity as the price isn't going below 4 cents so often.

robocat• 6 years ago

“ An Air Source Heat Pump (ASHP) will typically produce around 3kW thermal energy for every 1kW of electrical energy consumed” i.e. modern electric heating might cost you 4¢ per kWh of heating.

Comparing kWh for natural gas (some loss up flue) with a heat pump in your case it seems they cost roughly the same marginally (although you might have grossly different installation costs, risks of outages, and CO2 impact depending on your individual circumstances).

akvadrako6• 6 years ago

Heat pumps vary widely in efficiency based on temperature and you don’t mention what you are using.

It isn’t just efficiency but size. A heat pump that can work on the occasional very cold day is impractical.

pritovido• 6 years ago

Air sources Heat Pump in Germany are extremely inefficient because, guess what? Germany air is very cold in Winter, as most of it has continental climate.

What you can do is make a hole in the ground, put pipes on it and recirculate fluids. But this is way more expensive.

grafporno• 6 years ago

Germany is at about 30 cents/kWh.

tom85• 6 years ago

I think he talks about the market price and not the end user price with taxes infrastructure etc.

nickysielicki• 6 years ago

That’s crazy. I use Griddy in Texas and my price has been generally below $0.02c/kWh the past two months.

Tepix4• 6 years ago

You're talking electricity cost? $0.02c/kWh doesn't really cover the cost (not to mention the environmental cost if it's made from coal). So yes, that's crazy.

scbrg• 6 years ago

"$0.02c" - does this notation mean 2 cents? Honest question, not American and never seen this format before. Is it considered more clear than just "$0.02"?

I'm guessing it really can't mean 0.02 cents.

See also: Verizon Math :-)

Aaargh20318• 6 years ago

But the price in a certain month doesn't really matter as usage is only recorded once a year. It's the average price over a year that matters.

allendoerfer4• 6 years ago

Using electricity to heat buildings should be one of the last steps to take, after almost everything else using energy is renewable. Electricity is a precious form of energy, while heat is primitive. Converting in both directions is not lossless, so you want to keep the precious form.

The author makes it seem like that the negative prices are constant, which is not the case. Germany also does not have 100% renewable energy. Once you have an electric heater at your home, you will be using electric energy generated by burning coal to heat your home.

It also does not solve the problem of the German electricity market, which is mostly that renewable energy is not steady. Power is not distributed evenly across space and time. So you need to store the energy and move it from North to South. But storage and transmission lines are lacking to say the least.

One intermediate strategy you could take, would be to convert abundant electric energy to hydrogen, which you can feed into the already existing natural gas pipes and burn inside the already existing gas heaters, the author is criticizing. This way you would solve both problems (missing network and missing storage) at the same time.

nostromo3• 6 years ago

I couldn't disagree more.

Electric heating via heat pump is ridiculously efficient and has a much bigger bang for your carbon-reducing buck than anything else a homeowner can do.

endorphone4• 6 years ago

Bizarre that you were downvoted, when your point is spot on.

Yes, heating with a big electric radiator is wasteful. Heating with a heat pump, on the other hand, is fantastically efficient.

gsich2• 6 years ago

The term "electric" does mean something different when it comes to heating. Not a heat pump, but large resistors with low resistance.

johnr22• 6 years ago

Electric heating via heat pump is ridiculously efficient

Strictly speaking that's "electrically assisted" heating. What most people refer to as electric heating is the conversion of electricity directly into heat, eg. by a resistive element.

Retric6• 6 years ago

The issue with heat pumps is you may need far less heat at 15c when their very efficient than at -15c when their not. Couple that with the losses from heat to electricity at power plants and burning natural gas at home is about as efficient on average depending on your area.

So, it really does depend on how cold it gets where you are if it’s better to burn fuel at home or at a powerplant.

PS: Solar hot water heaters are generally the best overall option any place heat pumps are actually efficient.

allendoerfer4• 6 years ago

I don't have anything against heat pumps. I just don't think that they would solve the problems the article is talking about. I would put heat pumps all over the place, once electric energy, transportation etc. are 100% renewable.

raxxorrax4• 6 years ago

I don't know why you are downvoted because this is pretty correct. Electricity is the most valuable form of energy that currently should only be used for heating in exceptional cases if no alternatives are present.

allendoerfer4• 6 years ago

In my experience renewable energy, electricity and nuclear are highly controversial topics on HN. Like with this post, I often get heavily up- and downvoted by different camps. It correlates with time of day, so I suspect I have a European perspective.

nostromo3• 6 years ago

This is why identifying unintended consequences beforehand is so important.

"We want green energy -- let's subsidize green energy by taxing electricity."

Seems fair enough... fast forward several years and:

1. People burn fossil fuels for heating because electricity is too expensive, increasing their carbon footprint.

2. Poorer people in apartments and cities pay out the nose to fund rebates to wealthier suburban homeowners with solar roofs.

somerandomness• 6 years ago

Can somebody explain why electricity rates would go negative? That blows my mind.

Edit: also why don’t they just mine some coins?

nostromo3• 6 years ago

Because the German government is paying for renewables, via a tax on electricity, even when there is no additional demand.

They can't turn off power plants, because the renewables are ephemeral.

gsich2• 6 years ago

You have too much energy and you need to get rid off it.

diroussel• 6 years ago

This happens when the electricity supply is higher than the demand. It only affects the wholesale rate, not consumer rates (at least in Uk and US)

Normally supply and demand need to be matched to obtain a balance. If the supply is not enough for demand then the frequency drops below 50Hz, if it drops too low bad things happen.

cameronh902• 6 years ago

Actually there's at least one provider (octopus) that occasionally passes the negative rate onto the consumer with their dynamic plan.

olau• 6 years ago

While subsidies are one cause, another cause is demand response problems:

Imagine you have a greenhouse factory producing strawberries. The strawberries come out of the factory on a conveyor belt. Now, you can't just turn off this factory easily since it might take a week to get it up running again and you don't have any storage, so what happens when nobody wants your strawberries for a day?

You pay someone to take them.

And yes, it happens to physical products too, e.g. household electronics - you need to pay someone to scrap them.

victorNicollet• 6 years ago

A better example would be plastic production. In an emergency stop, factories need to change several pipes because the plastic solidified inside. Stopping production properly takes days, and even then, resuming it also takes days.

cameldrv• 6 years ago

The renewable generators get a subsidy for each kWh that they pump on to the grid. The logical thing to do if electricity were oversupplied, i.e. you have to pay people to take it, would be to temporarily shut down some renewable generation, but then the renewable providers would lose out on the subsidy for those kWh.

lispm25• 6 years ago

The electricity rate only for short-term traded electricity goes negative. Much of the volume is on long-term contracts.

Dylan168072• 6 years ago

Edit: also why don’t they just mine some coins?

Nobody is going to pay for mining rigs that are idle 99% of the time.

If it happened enough you'd have people set up cheap resistor banks to eat all the excess, so that provides a natural cap on how much negative pricing there can be.

Zenst4• 6 years ago

I'm somewhat shocked that they do they not load those subsidies onto the electricity charge on consumers as a tax and mean those that use more, pay more. That's what they do in the UK, though alas they loaded it onto the standing charge that is a flat rate per day for having a supply. Idealy it should be like personal TAX, you have a certain amount you get without being taxed, then after that you pay X amount until you use another threshold and then the tax upon the unit rate of energy is taxed more. That would be the ideal fair way of doing energy. Certainly would be a socially more acceptable way. Of course you can allocate people a higher initial rate they can use without paying tax upon the charge for things like disabilities, health needs etc. Again, be no simple solution, but working on something that sees it paid for fairly always works out best for all as above all, people love fairness. At least, that is how I'd like things done.

But do remember, Germany recently went thru an anti nuclear phase and that forced many coal reactors to carry on longer, so they did need to compensate and a push on solar and wind power was a logical move. How that was subsidies and paid for was and is perhaps an avenue they need to address.

All that said, much respect to the people of Germany for responsibly using energy. That has probably done way more than anything to help.

usrusr4• 6 years ago

alas they loaded it onto the standing charge that is a flat rate per day for having a supply.

Not true, source: my electricity bill. A standing charge exists, but the vast majority of what we pay is per kWh.

The part that you misunderstood, I think, is that the EEG is fixed per kWh and not per euro paid (just like most of our fuel taxes, even if crude doubles or halves in price our price at the pump only shifts a little). The article was quite misunderstable, bordering on wrong even, in that part because it reads as if market rate had any influence on German electricity bills and only the EEG charge was fixed. In reality, it's impossible for a households to get a contract that follows market rate, you always pay the same per kWh no matter if it's Sunday or Monday, windy or calm. The electricity spot market price is only relevant for utilities and for a few heavy industrial users with special contracts (the kind of heavy use where you'd be mandated to give the utility a heads up before increasing or dropping the load).

This will have to change eventually, because load shift is so much mow efficient than storage, but it's difficult to implement because you can't really have both constant rate and variable rate in parallel due to an abundance of bad actors who would have both and ruin the pricing models by opportunistically switching between them.

Zenst4• 6 years ago

Yes, thank you for your clarity - I did a bit of digging and found https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/what-german-house... which does seem to clear up many aspects.

I will say, the shift in electric cars and more so the iminante arrival of solid state lithium batteries, distributed and more so, local home storage will start to become and more open avenue. This would be great for flats that can not avail the installation of solar panels and also those that rent (more an aspect in Germany) which are limited. A battery tech that you don't have to worry about exploding and you can literally drive nails into and be safe, will be game changing (not advocating that people drive nails into batteries, more a way to explain how much safer they are). That level of safety will open up the home storage market more as well.

slashdotdash• 6 years ago

In reality, it's impossible for a households to get a contract that follows market rate, you always pay the same per kWh no matter if it's Sunday or Monday, windy or calm.

In the UK you can use the Agile tariff from Octopus Energy (https://octopus.energy/agile/) which has half hourly dynamic pricing per electricity kWh. The next 24hrs worth of prices are released each day around 4pm and follow market cost. There’s a 12p/kWh surcharge between 4pm and 7pm during peak demand. Used in conjunction with a smart meter it bills per half hour usage and can go negative.

Twice in the last two week’s it has gone below zero due to recent storms. It’s a great tariff if you have an electric car to charge in the early hours when prices are cheapest and can reduce usage during the peak three hours. A home battery would also help out as it could be charged during cheap periods and discharged when prices are too high.

eisa01• 6 years ago

You can switch to Tibber to enjoy spot based pricing

We have had that in the Nordics for ages, they are just about to launch in Germany

lispm25• 6 years ago

I'm somewhat shocked that they do they not load those subsidies onto the electricity charge on consumers as a tax

German consumers pay 6.756 cents per kwh EEG tariff.

Zenst4• 6 years ago

Aha, I have done a bit more digging into this after my post and found https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/what-german-house... which seems to clear up much.

Thank you for putting me on the right track.

raxxorrax4• 6 years ago

I'm somewhat shocked that they do they not load those subsidies onto the electricity charge on consumers as a tax

They do both. The fixed amount is (officially) for infrastructure improvements, but there is an additional tax for consumption per kWh.

Of course you can allocate people a higher initial rate they can use without paying tax upon the charge for things like disabilities, health needs etc

Probably too burocratic and inefficient in practice. Energy just has to be affordable for any household.

jakub_g3• 6 years ago

I'm rather a noob in the topic, but I've been reading in recent months about energy market and it seems like a collective insanity in the light of the climate crisis.

- In most(whole?) Europe, electricity used by trains is taxed higher than jet fuel used by planes (legacy measure from decades ago which was meant to boost air market; of course now it's hugely difficult to change it)

- Germany went strongly into renewables which is laudable, but CO2 footprint barely changed, because...

- Going away from nuclear and into renewables is in theory good, but the open secret is that you can never reach 100% renewables. So you need a backup, which is either gas or coal. In fact Germany even recently invested in new coal powered plants.

- Basically the effect of going away from nuclear is increasing CO2 emissions, and this is the last thing that we want at this time. But even Macron wants to reduce nuclear % in power production of France. Which means more CO2.

Am I missing something or this is total madness?

bulkan• 6 years ago

In fact Germany even recently invested in new coal powered plants.

Any sources on this? In Australia in the past few weeks Germany is given as an ideal example of a country decommissioning all of its coal mines and power plants.

earthnail• 6 years ago

We are decommissioning them. The plan was quite badly executed.

Basically, in order to set a deadline, politicians decided to compensate power plant owners for their losses. Problem is: suddenly, all power plant owners came up with very optimistic plans on how long they would’ve kept each plant running.

This would’ve been acceptable to a certain degree if the plan to shut down plants was aggressive to begin with. However, the phase-out plan is largely in line with the plant’s lifespans anyway, so we’re not actually shutting anything off very early.

Reactions have been very mixed, to say the least.

On the bright side, it does close the discussion around coal energy once and for all, but for an unnecessarily high price.

jakub_g3• 6 years ago

search for "Datteln 4"

Brakenshire2• 6 years ago

The UK is a better example.

xnyan5• 6 years ago

It's being done by the biggest power utility in Germany: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-13/germany-s...

You're not hearing about it because it's very embarrassing to Germans, as it should be in my honest opinion. I get that Germans have a very unique and real perspective on the use of nuclear power. I get that nuclear power has very real and serious risks. It's still done less harm to the planet and the things that live on it than the use of coal. Furthermore, the forced dependence on fossil fuels as a result of shunning nuclear power has all kinds of add on effects. There's no Germany without Russian gas, and Putin knows it.

Maybe I am wrong, but the way I see it Germany is sacrificing the overall less negatively impactful option (nuclear power) for fossil fuel because they are unwilling or unable to confront the cultural stance on use of nuclear power. That's the norm for cultures so I don't blame them for it, but I do think it's leading to the wrong choice here.

redprince• 6 years ago

The only ongoing commissioning of a coal fired plant is Datteln 4. Construction was started 13 years ago to replace several ageing coal fired power plants. Due to technical and legal delays it will go online in 2020. Several other power plants will go offline afterwards, roughly with the same generation capacity as Datteln 4. I think it is safe to assume that this will be the last newly built coal fired power plant in Germany.

Dumblydorr2• 6 years ago

There's a lot that can be done with renewables without nuclear or fossils, you can use demand response, batteries, hydro storage, and compressed air storage to store very cheap electricity.

TheSpiceIsLife• 6 years ago

Not everywhere has sites that are good for pumped-hydro storage, typically requiring an existing hydro electric dam.

Compressed air is very inefficient.

But the general argument is: we need to consider what is happening now, not what could be possible under some idealised hypothetical scenario. And right now more renewables, without more, or maintaining existing, nuclear means more base-load coal and more load-following gas.

The problems aren't really technical, they're political. Politics appears to be ill-equipped to deal with these problems.

throwawaylolx• 6 years ago

This is just the typical diversion rhetoric. According to all IPCC reports I've seen, you can't accomplish with renewables without nuclear what you can accomplish with renewables and nuclear, yet all political bodies promote renewables and fossil fuels while pretending it's just renewables.

archgoon• 6 years ago

But even Macron wants to reduce nuclear % in power production of France.

What? Why?

jakub_g3• 6 years ago

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Macron-clarifies...

lispm25• 6 years ago

Because the nuclear power plants are old and new nuclear power plants are more expensive than new renewable.

Brakenshire2• 6 years ago

Because old nuclear power stations are coming to end of life, and new nuclear power stations appear to be ruinously expensive. See Flamanville which was supposed to be finished about 10 years and €10bn ago.

The real idiocy in Germany was retiring the nuclear plants before EOL. If you’re trying to work out whether to replace old nuclear with new it’s much less easy to come to a clear answer. Britain has had the same issue, most people are quite enthusiastic about new nuclear but it’s just really expensive.

It’s the issue with most of these small-n construction projects. Perhaps modular nuclear can be a solution.

LordHeini• 6 years ago

Because there are serious problems with the disposal of highly radioactive waste.

As of now there is no proper solution in Europe for the disposal of that stuff. There are a few, work in progress, storage facilities like Asse in Germany which are blocked by local politics.

Lots of the stuff just circles around on the European rail network on its way from temporary storage to temporary storage.

On top these French and especially the Belgian nuclear reactors are in a horrible state. Just have a look at Thiange and you would never want to be near that thing.

And did I say the Belgians have no idea what to do whith the waste too.

tick_tock_tick• 6 years ago

The German government and the EU as a whole is often much more focused on optics than data based solutions.

tonyedgecombe2• 6 years ago

All governments are like that, it isn't just Germany or the EU.

ChuckNorris89• 6 years ago

x1000 this! Lots of EU and German government decisions seem to be made for PR reasons rather than for the benefit of their citizens.

lispm25• 6 years ago

Basically the effect of going away from nuclear is increasing CO2 emissions

Germany has been reducing CO2 emissions. Last year German CO2 emissions were shrinking by 7%.

Macron wants to reduce nuclear % in power production of France. Which means more CO2.

When they increase renewables instead?

buzzkillington5• 6 years ago

Am I missing something or this is total madness?

You're not missing anything. This is madness.

Renewables will never be competitive in a market that they dominate because they are intermittent and you can't just turn a city off because it's cloudy and calm.

Nuclear power is the only solution but decades of delusion have made it impossible to build anywhere. In short industrial civilization will be non-viable in the tropics by the 2050s and world wide by the 2100s.

codemac• 6 years ago

Nuclear power is the only solution.

How much energy storage do we need to not need nuclear? That seems to be an assumption you're making that I'm not actually familiar with.

diegocg• 6 years ago

It is not delusion, but simple economics what makes it impossible to build new nuclear plants. The Obama administration granted permissions to build new plants, but few people were interested because fracking made gas cheaper - but even the ones that were built required loan guarantees from the government. The private sector wasn't able to find a solution by itself.

A nuclear power plant requires billions in up front costs, which take a long period of time to recover, a time which can not be calculated reliably because nobody can predict the future and nobody knows how technology may evolve during that time and how will it affect power prices, how future wars will affect supply, how much demand developing nations will bring to the markets, etc. Even if nuclear power is cheap, the margins are not static and betting billions without knowing when you will get them back is not something everyone wants to do.

Nuclear is going to need a lot of government subsidies if it wants to have a renaissance.

nl8• 6 years ago

Renewables will never be competitive in a market that they dominate because they are intermittent and you can't just turn a city off because it's cloudy and calm. Nuclear power is the only solution but decades of delusion have made it impossible to build anywhere.

This is simply wrong.

Firstly, renewables plus transmission reduce the intermittentcy problem enormously. China has multiple 2000km+ transmission lines already working, and preliminary work has started on a 3800km transmission line from Australia to Singapore[1].

Combine that with comparatively small amounts of short term storage (eg, batteries), as much long term storage (eg pump hydro) as possible and fill the rest with gas generation (around 30% of the CO2 output of coal or oil) and you have a generation mix that is very quick to build, competitive with coal on price and dramatically cheaper than nuclear.

[1] https://www.afr.com/companies/energy/singapore-power-retaile...

econcon• 6 years ago

Nuclear power is the only solution but decades of delusion have made it impossible to build anywhere. In short industrial civilization will be non-viable in the tropics by the 2050s and world wide by the 2100s.

I wonder why they don't find a location on planet which is most stable, away from human settlement.

Then create a nuclear reactor large enough to meet all the world requirement for electricity and supply it to all the world.

pergadad• 6 years ago

Nuclear is subsidised by billions of dollars, starting from the ongoing research to buying land to construction to security to the massive grid investments needed for any new power plant, to security and contingency measures to finally the eventually externalised costs of (unlikely but possible) incidents and most importantly long-term storage and decommissioning.

Huge huge tax payer subsidies are put into all stages of nuclear, which never show up on the energy company's balance sheets or the 'operating costs'.

I'm not against nuclear but saying renewables are not competitive with this is incredibly naive and blatantly wrong - the subsidies and funds directly or indirectly provided for nuclear are on an entirely different scale than for renewables, which have mainly some research funding, grid extension and development subsidies behind them.

Krasnol• 6 years ago

Nuclear is and never was a solution for Germany:

there is a nice read on it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/emc2ne/quelle_surprise_...

Here is one for the base load myth: https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=374

Many reasons for the slow fall are based in politics (coal industry is a job machine especially in the troubled eastern parts) and nimbys (hindering wind development) and politicians helping them out (ridiculous policies governing the distance to "settlements").

derefr• 6 years ago

you can never reach 100% renewables. So you need a backup, which is either gas or coal.

Why isn't nuclear the backup? "90% renewable, 10% nuclear" sounds politically-viable; it's still "moving away from nuclear."

anoncake4• 6 years ago

No, a power source as insanely dangerous as nuclear is fortunately not politically viable at all here in the long term.

anoncake4• 6 years ago

you can never reach 100% renewables

Bullshit. You need storage, obviously.

Am I missing something

Yes.

cameronh902• 6 years ago

Or alternatively/in combination with dynamic demand, smart grids, wide area transmission and overprovisioning.

I don't really get why the nuclear "base load" generation even helps. If nuclear generates 70% of our peak load, and our peak load happens on a windless, dark day - what then? We still need storage and likely CCGT as backup of last resort.

woodandsteel• 6 years ago

- Going away from nuclear and into renewables is in theory good, but the open secret is that you can never reach 100% renewables. So you need a backup, which is either gas or coal.

I am not really opposed to nuclear. But on the renewable side, for the intermittency problem, you have overprovisioning, regional transmission, short range storage with batteries, and long term storage with hydro and hydrogen gas produced from renewables. And both batteries and hydrogen gas are steadily getting cheaper.

That means when a utility is deciding to spend 10 billion or so on a nuclear plant, and it is trying to figure out future rates for the next 30 years to pay that back, it needs to take into account all these future developments, instead of assuming they will stay the same.

I have read a lot of comments from nuclear supporters, but I can't recall one that covers all that. They all seem to assume the situation for storage and interconnection will not improve in the future.

solarkraft• 6 years ago

the open secret is that you can never reach 100% renewables

What, why?

_ph_2• 6 years ago

The German CO2 footprint for electricity production decreased quite a bit in recent years, in 2019 46% of all electricity was produced by renewables. The progress is compensated by the traffic sector increasing fuel consumption at the same time.

France has the problem, that they are not able to build enough new reactors (cost, construction time) to replace the aging operating reactors. So ramping up renewables is the logical conclusion and besides having quite a lot of hydro power already installed, France has great potential of wind (very windy coasts at 3 sides of the country) and solar (sunny south).

Aaaaahhhh2• 6 years ago

You are ignoring the nuclear waste. We are just burying it in caves which is not really a solution.

raxxorrax4• 6 years ago

Nuclear wouldn't have been a feasible solution in Germany in the long run, because it is just too expensive. You may argue that the shut down of running plants was premature, but nuclear subsidies eclipsed those of renewables by quite a margin. Building new reactors isn't easy, France is struggling with it for example, although I don't think their strategy is bad.

you can never reach 100% renewables

partly true, partly wrong, depending on your infrastructure and topology, but there are other options to satisfy a CO2 neutral base load than nuclear.

CO2 emission are actually dropping, although far too slow to call it healthy.

The per capita output is somewhere in the middle of industrial first world countries. Sometimes better than countries employing nuclear power, sometimes not. I think the effect is sometimes overestimated. It may be better than coal, but it should be noted that newer coal plants replace older ones that are more inefficient.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

imtringued7• 6 years ago

- Basically the effect of going away from nuclear is increasing CO2 emissions

Phasing out nuclear delays the phase out of coal. It doesn't add any new coal. The problem is stagnation instead of an increase in emissions.

dekhn5• 6 years ago

I recall talking to some europeans and they said they like their driers, which only half dry clothes (they put them up on a line to finish) but use less energy. It's some sort of virtue thing, I guess.

jsjddbbwj• 6 years ago

It's not a virtue thing. Energy is just very expensive in Europe compared to for example the US.

dekhn5• 6 years ago

I'd still pay the cost, because energy is cheaper than my free time.

xnyan5• 6 years ago

One of the things I missed the most living in Europe without a dryer (this was the norm in my experience, at least when/where I lived) was a warm fluffy cotton towel fresh from the dryer. I pay 8-9 US cents per kW/h which with a 240V 20A dryer (little known fact even to people who live here, almost every house in the US has both ~240V and ~120V service) pulling 3000W in service runs me about 25-35 cents a load or closer to $1 in Germany. Worth it.

shazow• 6 years ago

Overdrying clothes damages them. Hang-drying clothes increases the clothes' longevity.

saber6• 6 years ago

This guy launders!

(Joking aside yes this is completely correct.)

dekhn5• 6 years ago

My collection of 20+ year old T-shirts does not support this hypothesis. my experience has been the agitator in the washer is what causes the most damage.

PeterStuer4• 6 years ago

Damage of clothes through the washing/drying cycle is mostly the result of the kinetic energy they are exposed to in the process. Keeping a lower net weight load, and reducing the rpms in the spin cycle can have a large impact on longevity.

reaperducer• 6 years ago

The irony is that dryer sheets promise "spring breeze" scent and have pictures of clothing hanging on a line outside.

unishark• 6 years ago

Nature provides both the ideal outcome (great weather and lovely-smelling laundry on the clothesline) but also a lot of much-worse scenarios that drive the use of technological solutions. Like a long humid rainy season where hang-dried clothes does not come out smelling nice at all.

lispm25• 6 years ago

my Miele drier does not half-dry clothes.

hocuspocus• 6 years ago

This makes zero sense. I hang dry most of my laundry because, why not? But the few things that go into my tumble dryer had better get out completely dry, what would be the point otherwise? Recent dryers with heat-pumps take longer but consume less energy.

asveikau2• 6 years ago

I have had quite a few shirts ruined by dryers over the years. These days I just hang them up.

Aaaaahhhh2• 6 years ago

I am European. I don't have a drier and I don't know why I should buy one. For me diers are just a waste of space and energy.

DoreenMichele4• 6 years ago

I'm curious: How do you handle clothes washing and drying?

usrusr4• 6 years ago

Advertising is far ahead of you: the driers have a feature to keep the clothes just damp enough for perfect ironing. The same driers have A+++ energy ratings, because progress. They carefully avoid hinting at a connection between these two because the virtuous ones are not in the market for a drier.

PeterStuer4• 6 years ago

And most appliances reach their A+++ rating by including a special "Eco" setting(s) that in practice many users opt not to use in their daily routines.

PeterStuer4• 6 years ago

Also, most (all?) dryers over here will have multiple settings to select ending the drying cycle at different sensed humidity points, from 'maximum' dry to 'cupboard' dry to 'ready for ironing' dry etc. These programs are more convenient and used much more commonly than setting a timer for the cycle.

marmaduke• 6 years ago

Not virtue, but space probably. A small apartment doesn't dedicate space to a dryer, and the washer typically spins at 1400 rpm, at which point clothes are half dry (like 15 minutes in the dryer).

Only really cold & rainy days is this a problem

Tepix4• 6 years ago

Talking about dryers: Buy less clothes made out of fleece. If you wash them, you create microplastics that land in the oceans.

throwaway0234212• 6 years ago

"some sort of virtue thing" sounds like cynical way to describe ethical values.

Yes, most people I know don't want to waste electricity on driers even when it's cheap.

pazimzadeh2• 6 years ago

Something something mine bitcoin?

undersuit2• 6 years ago

Cryto-mining with excess energy is only effective when you have excess computing power too. Maybe a gamer with a GPU could get the opportunity to use all the excess resources for a little bit of profit, but the payoff rate for buying a GPU needs 24/7 mining to even make a profit over a year.

pazimzadeh2• 6 years ago

That's the case even when electricity is free?

lispm25• 6 years ago

The households are not heating with electricity, because electricity for household consumers is expensive and not free.

The share of electricity for renewable energy is currently at 42%. There is not a large surplus of electricity from renewable energy for heating.

epicgiga2• 6 years ago

So would it be a legit business model to just run a 1billion gigawatt heater to profit from those negative rates?

TeMPOraL• 6 years ago

Run a Bitcoin miner, and you can double-dip.

epicgiga2• 6 years ago

Genius...

omgtehlion• 6 years ago

First, they killed nuclear, which prompted more coal production. Now they skewed wind so much that burning gas is cheaper than using green energy.

It seems no matter what Germany does, it only promotes fossil fuel usage. Quite opposite of what they wanted...

cm2187• 6 years ago

What I don't get is how renewable energy are supposed to be cheaper though they still need massive subsidies.

rangibaby• 6 years ago

Subsidize it until the cost per unit is cheaper than fossil fuels due to economies of scale, then the subsidies are no longer necessary

Radle2• 6 years ago

Do renewables need massive subsidies to sustain themselves or do politics offer massive subsidies because they want to have even more renewable energy?

probably_wrong• 6 years ago

On Monday 10th February 2020 something historical happened. For the first time, the market price of electricity fell below zero in Finland.(...) While this single day was a very windy one...

I feel I should point out that "a very windy day" is a big understatement. February 10, 2020 was the day when storm Sabine arrived in northern Europe. In Germany, all medium and long distance trains stopped (electric trains, btw), and plenty of people stayed inside. Lots of closed schools, too.

I don't necessarily disagree with the article's central points. But picking up the one outlier in which there's ridiculous amounts of wind and entire countries are working at half capacity seems naive at best.

marcosscriven2• 6 years ago

We called it storm Ciara in the UK. I wonder why we don’t unify names.

ysr23• 6 years ago

brexit means brexit /s

In seriousness, wasn't Storm Ciara named by Met Éireann ? that was certainly my impression, given that most people in the UK struggled to pronounce it. So there is some unification between The Met offices of Ireland and the UK with regard to naming.

lexa1979• 6 years ago

t'was called Ciara in Belgium also.

Freak_NL2• 6 years ago

Names are being unified actually. The Dutch meteorological institute now cooperates with the British and Irish institutes for naming via the EUMETNET system.

There are now two regions in Europe where names are decided in cooperation: West, and Southwest.

West is Ireland, United Kingdom, Netherlands, and Belgium, where storms tend to originate in the West.

Southwest is the Iberian peninsula and France.

A third region (Southeast) is being set up for the Mediterranean.

Every region has its own list of names, but when a storm is first named in one region, the other regions will use that name instead of assigning their own (if the storm crosses regions).

This means that everyone called this storm Ciara, except for the Germans. Germany is an exception, and has its own (commercial) naming system at the moment.

Source: https://www.knmi.nl/kennis-en-datacentrum/uitleg/naamgeving-... (Dutch)

_glass• 6 years ago

germans sold the naming off to sponsor students. so germany is the outlier here.

mlang23• 6 years ago

Well, the UK is apparently not very interested in unifying things, nor in being part of the EU...

louthy• 6 years ago

I wonder why we even name storms in the first place. All it does is feed the 24 hour news monster

read_if_gay_• 6 years ago

I don't actually have a clue about this stuff but I think wind turbines actually won't produce any power when the wind is too strong because they might break or something.

rob74• 6 years ago

True, but if you look at an entire country like Germany, only about 10% of the turbines will be in an area where the wind is too strong as the storm passes through, the others will still produce...

concerned_user• 6 years ago

Some probably has to do as blades/axis could break due to stress, which there are videos of turbines with malfunctioning brakes spinning out of control and breaking.

Mostly wind turbines have issues with frequency as you don't want to change/adjust frequency too much (adds to cost) to that of the main grid they only generate when within acceptable frequency ranges and internal equipment is able to compensate.

dubbel• 6 years ago

Modern wind turbines can angle their wings in a way that they can produce in conditions that would have required a shutdown 15 years ago.

With this storm control the turbines lineally increase the resistance and are only shut down when the wind speed reaches more than 34 m/s as a 10 minute average. That's 122km/h. [0] The recent storm reached these levels at times, but didn't sustain them for longer periods over larger areas.

[0] https://www.enercon.de/en/technology/wec-features/ I'm sure other producers have similar technology.

Faark3• 6 years ago

We don't really have to speculate, since energy production data is available [0]. There certainly was a lot of energy produced by wind turbines. About the same as last week (also quite windy). But the "entire countries are working at half capacity" doesn't seem to be valid, at last I don't see a dip in power consumption.

[0] https://energy-charts.de/power.htm?source=all-sources&year=2...

hokkos• 6 years ago

This is not ridiculous at all to point that, those kind of event will be common as more intermittent renewable come into power, because they are all correlated in Europe.

Radle2• 6 years ago

I worked in the Utility Software area for a while. Everything related to energy in Germany looks like corruption if you look to closely.

Everyone is buddies with someone in politics, otherwise screw your career.

Laws are mainly pre written by the industry which is afraid of the risks associated with tackling the challenges involved in climate change. But also afraid of doing nothing, since this would make them clear targets for disruption through voters. So when they do change something it is always in extremely small steps, limited in scope, without changes to the wider system.

While politics give a clear sense of direction regarding renewable energy, the whole thing seems to be to complex for politicians to fully grasp.

fsloth• 6 years ago

"Laws are mainly pre written by the industry which is afraid..." That's actually how lots of laws are written. Because when politicians write new laws, they listen to expert opinion. And the best experts come - of course - from the relative industry.

Sometimes this makes sense, and sometimes to inane protection of incumbent interests like happened with digital content (it's illegal to copy the DVD you've purchased etc).

gambiting2• 6 years ago

Here in UK on certain tariffs (Octopus Agile) price of electricity regularly falls below zero at night. If you have an electric car set to only charge when price of electricity is below zero, you're getting paid to charge your car.

webignition• 6 years ago

Being in the UK myself, I'm curious about this.

Does Octopus provide the price of electricity at the current moment?

I had a quick look at their website but couldn't see anything obvious.

corint• 6 years ago

They do, they expose it via an API, so you can use IFTTT (or anything you make that's similar to this) to optimise when you use power.

This website does some analysis on the pricing: https://www.energy-stats.uk/octopus-agile/

The useful part is that, if a user of the tariff is sufficiently engaged, not only do they save money, but by shifting their demand to follow supply it helps with the increasing adoption of renewable sources.

jnsaff2• 6 years ago

https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/Market-data1/#/n2ex/table this is the market price you need to find out the margin + transmission costs yourself.

gambiting2• 6 years ago

Yes, you get an app and you can see the current and historical prices, in 30 minute increments.

Looks like this:

https://imgur.com/a/zva2yby

But if you want, you can also export all of the data as an excel spreadsheet.

Some car chargers(OHME for example) can read this data in real time and only start charging when the price per kWh falls below a pre-set level.

dusted3• 6 years ago

Interesting, I live in Denmark, and we pay a premium for electricity.. Average consumer price is 0,33 USD per KW/h, almost three times the US average.

KingOfCoders• 6 years ago

We use the most expensive power provider in Germany (Greenpeace Energy) and it's also 0,33 USD per KW/h.

marcosscriven2• 6 years ago

Do I understand correctly from the article, that these negative prices are so that the suppliers can still claim their subsidy for supplying you. They are effectively giving you a cut of the subsidy?

jevgeni2• 6 years ago

I think it's mostly due to the structure of the market: you can't sensibly reduce supply of power when demand drops like with commodities like oil. So the price is the only free variable left.

onetimemanytime• 6 years ago

get up get up...lets wash our clothes right now, free, and then some, electricity.

I always wondered what happened if there was 100units of energy in the system and only 90 were used in that minute/hour. I imagined a place where they offloaded it to the ground, much like lightning.

turbinerneiter3• 6 years ago

I believe it's rather about making sure the power gets drawn and it's more about the power from the slow plants, like coal.

Basically:

strong wind -> a lot of wind power -> coal plant can't lower its output -> excess energy -> pay somebody for allowing you to dump your power in their system

But whether you see this as a problem of coal not being able to power down quick enough or wind not being a steady power source is dependent on whether you think CO2 emissions are bad or not.

sputr2• 6 years ago

I love the slightly dishonest comments like this one.

Wind power caused the instability but you fault the coal for not being able to compensate for it. What happens when you have 100 wind/solar and too much energy... Who do you fault then?

Coal is bad, obviously. But don't use that fact to scapegoat it so you can ignore the glaring problem with renewables that all electro engineers in Europe are screaming about: critically increasing instability of the grid due to improper rollout of renewables.

jillesvangurp• 6 years ago

Interestingly, most of Finland heats with electricity. I used to live there before I moved to Germany. Unlike Germany, Finland does not use a lot of natural gas.

So, Germans subsidizing Finnish heating with clean energy is not necessarily a bad deal for Finland. I'd say it's a better deal for the planet than Russia subsidizing gas usage in e.g. Belarus, which is currently negotiating a new deal for this with Russia (in exchange for becoming part of Russia). Finland is in any case not great for wind power.

The article is correct that bureaucratic inertia and taxing practices in Germany don't make much sense and are very counter productive (and not just for the energy market). I live there. German ineptness and inefficiency is cringe-worthy. It's a political problem; the current government seems paralyzed waiting for their term to run out and not getting much done at all.

That does not mean clean energy is a no go but it does mean that pressure on politicians to fix things will increase over time. Also, the rest of Europe gets a sweet deal on energy. E.g. the Netherlands where I'm from is far ahead in EV deployments and despite being a gas producer is already implementing a policy of decommissioning gas usage by households over the next decades (this is a big deal in NL). Germany has no such plans in place. Heating oil disappeared a long time ago from my country as well and apparently is still a thing in Germany. Even coal heating was still a thing when I moved to Berlin 11 years ago (you could smell it in the winter). That's a lot more rare now.

Fundamentally, selling excess clean energy at negative rates is a sign of desperation. It should be a very valuable commodity. The problem is that we subsidize production but tax/penalize consumption. It should be the other way around. That would drive demand up and the cheapest way to meet that demand would be clean energy. With plenty of EVs hitting the market at tens of thousands per month across the EU, there should be no shortage of new demand.

That's why Texas pumps and refines oil using lots of solar and wind power. It's an economic no-brainer for them. Most of the clean energy capacity in that state (and it is world leading on that front) is actually consumed by their industry.

dharma14• 6 years ago

The best way to heat homes IMHO is geothermal energy. It is clean and renewable. There is an element of electricity consumption, but far less than with direct electric heating.

There is a shift in Finland to geothermal, chosen for most new builds now, and district heating systems are exploring deep geothermal for heating whole towns and cities.

systemtest5• 6 years ago

By geothermal, do you mean digging 30 meters into the ground for heat/cold? I've read that it doesn't work in densily populated areas where every system is very close to each other. Unless you have one installation per street.

We also have heat exchangers for warming your home but then you have a noisy box outside your house or on your balcony.

raverbashing• 6 years ago

Geothermal is very geography dependent.

If you have it available, great! Otherwise, it is not viable.

wokkel• 6 years ago

It's clean but renewable not so much in two ways: they are planning one here at a depth of 2.5 to 3km. They expect it to last 30 years before the underground has cooled to much to be of use. Regenerating that heat (i.e. spreading the other heat to this area) will take a few hundred years they expect. And secondly: there is a limited amount of heat available in the earth. It's a lot of heat, but there is no meaningful amount of new heat coming in so it's just as renewable as our current oil supply.

swebs• 6 years ago

I don't know about the countryside, but Helsinki is heated by district heating using cogeneration from the coal power plants within the city.

systemtest5• 6 years ago

Phasing out gas heating is going to be a very, very big job in the Netherlands. Replacing an energy source is easy, just place a nuclear power plant / solar field down and phase out the coal power station. Done.

However, almost all homes in the Netherlands are heated by gas directly from the source. The gas is used to heat up water in the home and pump it through radiators on the wall or in the floor. A highly efficient system. But we can't import the gas from other countries because of the calorific properties so we need to pump our own gas. Switching to electric systems in the home will double the cost for most home owners because it's not very efficient and electricity is expensive (though the government can lower taxes on it). It also means that home owners will have to convert their current system in the home and pay the price for this. But it should be a plug and play option.

An ever bigger project is switching to government provided hot water heating. That means that you have to dig up every single street in the country, get rid of all existing infrastructure (fiber, coax, power, gas, water, sewer), lay down a big water pipe in the middle, put the existing infrastructure back and repave the street. Have the hot water enter every home, redo the plumbing of the home and change the water systems. The downside to this is that instead of heating the home with 70 degrees water like we do now, it will only be around 50 degrees. You can't heat a home in the winter like that so you also need to isolate every home. And you are tied to a single provider for your heating, unlike the current system where you can occasionally switch energy provider to get a better price. People I know with this system pay more than I do with gas.

The second system is a gigantic job but somewhat cheaper overall and highly efficient. The only problem is heating the water in a central location. Near an industrial zone you can use waste water from cooling systems but if nothing is around you need a lot of electricity. Or geothermal. They are still trying to find a good way to do this.

dgacmu• 6 years ago

Heating with an electric heat pump is quite efficient in most environments. Electric resistance heat is inefficient.

pr0nin• 6 years ago

You can't heat a home in the winter like that so you also need to isolate every home.

Yes you do or just pay for inefficiency.

I've spent 2 years in Netherlands moving from Ukraine. I was shocked how (some) Dutch people ignorant to save warmth of their houses and schools in winter. Only way to change that make it expensive. As it should be.

It's apparent to me as Ukraine has turned away from Russia subsidised (cheap) gas at 2014. So most of Ukrainians now know that there are no such thing as free energy. Someone has to pay in one way or another.

2wrist• 6 years ago

here in the UK there was the whisper of using the gas system to deliver hydrogen (or a variation). I heard last year that one of the big gas mains in Yorkshire was being converted to supply hydrogen.

I guess if you replace the boiler on the other end with a fuel cell based system that was still 'wet' so the radiators and water heating in the house stayed the same the there may be less change needed?

garaetjjte• 6 years ago

The downside to this is that instead of heating the home with 70 degrees water like we do now, it will only be around 50 degrees. You can't heat a home in the winter like that

Well you can, you just need bigger radiator surface area. Modern gas heating also runs no hotter than ~50°C because condensing boilers are more efficient.

throw0101a• 6 years ago

However, almost all homes in the Netherlands are heated by gas directly from the source.

Given the climate of NL is relatively mild, averaging between 0 to 25C,[1] would something like a heat pump be ideal for the area? There are units that can operating down to -20C.

There seems to be a desire to move off of gas:

* https://energypost.eu/a-revolution-the-netherlands-kisses-ga...

Not everyone is enthusiastic about the idea:

* https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2018/03/heat-pump-installation...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netherlands#Climate

OliverJones2• 6 years ago

There's a peculiarity in Texas's electricity market, for what it's worth. Their grid does not export any power to other states, so the spot price of electricity often falls very low. If they exported northward, or into the Rocky Mountain states, they would have larger demand.

eukgoekoko• 6 years ago

I'd say it's a better deal for the planet than Russia subsidizing gas usage in e.g. Belarus

Finland itself is heavily dependent on energy imports from Russia. So Finnish heating is not exactly carbon neutral.

csomar2• 6 years ago

Title is not really accurate: 1. Electricity is not free in Germany, it's actually expensive; and 2. Germans do heat their homes.

squiggleblaz2• 6 years ago

Your point (1) is the point of the article. If the market price of electricity is 0€/MWh, the retail price is still bloody expensive because there's a ton of taxes, most of which do not relate to source of the energy nor its cost.

You claim (2) is a misunderstanding of the title. The title is intended to be interpreted as "Why Germans won't heat their homes with electricity, even if it's free". That is how I immediately interpreted it so I don't think the claim that the title is inaccurate can be maintained on this basis.

The intersection of the two claims is a further point of the article. Since free electricity in Germany is too expensive to heat houses with, and since Germans are going to heat their houses (unlike, say, Australians—where a normal winter is comparable to this year's winter in Berlin—who will merely become uncomfortable and/or stay in bed when the cost of heating gets too high), we therefore have the unfortunate situation that Germans are not selecting the most abundant nor the most socially responsible forms of heating. The taxes do not act like a carbon tax when a person is encouraged to use natural gas to heat their house instead of superabundant wind power.

What a terrible system.

Tepix4• 6 years ago

The market price does not directly correlate with the retail price even if you take into account taxes and other fees.

The average market price may affect the retail prices in the long run if it goes up or down.

We're seeing prices for electricity as low as 0€ (or lower) because there isn't enough storage capacity.

lispm25• 6 years ago

market price of electricity is 0€/MWh,

The general market price is not 0€/MWh. That's nonsense. The price is on the short-term spot-market, which is only a small part of the larger electricity market.

Consumers who need to heat homes / buildings / etc. are not buying on the spot market, but have long term contracts.

mft_2• 6 years ago

I can see part of your point. The title is slightly awkwardly worded - maybe because the author of the article isn't a native English speaker?

Instead, perhaps:

'Why won't Germans heat their homes with free electricity?'

...or maybe all of it be rephrased a little:

'Why won't Germans heat their homes with electricity, even when it is free?'

(I think the second version best captures the two questions dealt with within the article - the German propensity to heat their homes with natural gas, and the odd taxation system meaning that 'free' electricity isn't really free.)

csomar2• 6 years ago

But the electricity is not free? More like why do germans pay too much for free electricity.

diffeomorphism3• 6 years ago

I feel this article is missing the forest for the trees:

German electricity consumers paid 80 million euros in tariffs to get 8 million euros worth of wind power to the market.
There is simply no point to make any market-driven investments in Germany; the tariffs are simply too large compared to the market value of electricity.
(...)
This might not be a problem if “getting more renewables” is the end-goal one prefers, but I think the goal should be decreasing emissions.

That is the stated end-goal. The subsidies are (overly) high so that lots of renewable energy production/infrastructure is built instead of whatever might be more profitable otherwise. While this is related to eletricity production (payout per MWh etc.), the actual building part is what is ecouraged.

You can of course argue whether that it is a good goal to pick, but to me this sounds not like an unintended "problem" but rather as the subsidies achieving exactly what they intended to.

teraku2• 6 years ago

But most subsidies are towards coal and gas. They even stopped wind subsidies, because windenergy was too flexible and pushed coal out of the market, since coal is not flexible enough. So now we have to wait until more power plants get shut down before they pick up on building more wind energy again. Until then, they are powering the existing wind energy platforms up.

The "stated end-goal" and what is actually done is very divergent in modern day Germany.

Just saying that right now you pay on average 0,25€/kWh here. Although the market price is almost naught.

diffeomorphism3• 6 years ago

But most subsidies are towards coal and gas.

Germany has/had extensive coal production (complete exit by 2038 IIRC) with lots of employment tied to it; of course that has subsidies.

They even stopped wind subsidies, because windenergy was too flexible and pushed coal out of the market, since coal is not flexible enough

That sounds more like a conspiracy theory. You don't stop stuff for being "too flexible" but because of other problem, e.g. offshore vs. onshore, transmission to the south, environmental concerns, wanting a different mix of renewables etc. .

The "stated end-goal" and what is actually done is very divergent in modern day Germany.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany

There are more and more people employed in these industries. Production capacities went up etc. . Seems to be doing what it says on the tin.

Just saying that right now you pay on average 0,25€/kWh here. Although the market price is almost naught.

Yeah, so? Consumer electricity prices were never even mentioned in the "end-goal"?

logifail2• 6 years ago

The subsidies are (overly) high so that lots of renewable energy production/infrastructure is built

In the first half of last year a total of 35 new wind turbines were added across Germany[0], the lowest rate for 19 years.

If German government policies are supposed to encourage the creation of new renewable energy production then they don't appear to be working particularly well.

[0] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/windenergie-die-g...

Faark3• 6 years ago

Keep in mind there is a difference between subsidies we have to pay now for existing installations but were promised years or decades ago when those were built (this seems to be what the article is mostly about) and those guaranteed payments to turbine owners and rules around adding capacity now (and consumers will have to pay for in the decades to come). Yes, the political "enthusiasm" for renewable energy has faded quite a bit...

diffeomorphism3• 6 years ago

As the article stresses since 2017 and for two reasons (different from what is discussed in this thread):

- Switching to an auction model in 2017 to drive prices down, which was implemented very poorly.

- Strongly incentivizing small "citizen" project to increase acceptance in the population. Which messed up larger scale deployments and lead to awful bureaucracy.

lispm25• 6 years ago

policies are supposed to encourage the creation of new renewable energy production

The government is slowing down adding wind turbines for basically two reasons:

* market price

* infrastructure catching up. We need more power lines to the south to distribute the electricity and building them takes a few years. It makes not too much sense to build wind electricity capacity in the North and not being able to transport it.

marcus_holmes5• 6 years ago

Creating more renewable energy is pointless unless it reduces/replaces the use of fossil fuels. Having more energy than we need is useless, and there's an environmental footprint to even the greenest wind farm.

The point the article is making is that because of the way the renewable industry is being funded (from taxes on electricity consumption), consumers are opting to continue burning fossil fuels rather then use electricity.

This means that the supply of electricity is greater than demand for it, and prices go below zero.

This has two knock-on effects:

1. Investment in electricity production is guided by government policy goals and support, rather than actual demand. The only source of revenue is government redistribution of energy taxes, and that can change quickly depending on government policy. This is not sustainable, there is no incentive here to produce efficient, long-lasting energy production infrastructure. There is only an incentive to maximise government subsidy payouts in the short term.

2. Germany is producing more energy than it needs, and producing energy (from any source) has a negative environmental impact. These policies that were intended to preserve the environment and reduce fossil fuel use are actually causing more environmental damage and preserving fossil fuel use.

Of course, this only considers domestic consumption, and specifically heating. It may be that the policies do better in other areas.

Faark3• 6 years ago

I'm more familiar with the solar aspect of Energiewende, but a goal was to kick-start an industry to make renewable energy viable in the first place. This couldn't happen without significant amounts of installation caused by political commitment.

Yeah, I'd love for them to fix the bad power-vs-gas incentives. But I would not expect this to happen any time soon in the current political climate were no one will be willing to take the hit for something consumer will feel that directly.

lispm25• 6 years ago

Creating more renewable energy is pointless unless it reduces/replaces the use of fossil fuels.

It does.

The point the article is making is that because of the way the renewable industry is being funded (from taxes on electricity consumption), consumers are opting to continue burning fossil fuels rather then use electricity.

No, it doesn't. Renewable energy has a systematic preference and its share in electricity production has risen from 6% (in 2000) to 42% (in 2019).

Investment in electricity production is guided by government policy goals and support, rather than actual demand

That's always the case. Energy policy is a government task. No nuclear would be build without MASSIVE government support and government demand.

Germany actually created an energy market, which before did not exist, since electricity production and distribution was in the hand of 4 big companies, each having a full monopoly in a large region.

Germany is producing more energy than it needs

It doesn't. Far from. Also Germany is importing energy. Lots.

reduce fossil fuel use are actually causing more environmental damage and preserving fossil fuel use.

This is not what is happening. The goal is to have more than 85% renewable energy for electricity production in 2050.

ryder9• 6 years ago

[citation required] for a lot of these ridiculous claims

mattrp• 6 years ago

It also doesn’t state what is obvious to those of us who build infrastructure: Germany and Denmark have no way to store wind power so it has no choice but to pay others to take it. Norway is home to one of the worlds largest batteries.. its hydro power. Already cheap, but has the added benefit of being storable for sufficient duration to take german and danish wind power when it suits them (ie when they get paid). It baffles the mind why the danish and Germans don’t use some of their subsidy to invest in storage — but therein lies another catch 22. The lithium needed for that isn’t being mined in sufficient quantities in Europe and 100% of the supply from China is earmarked to autos. There are some jr mining countries spinning up in Europe but it will be awhile before any meaningful impact will be felt. One wonders if by then other storage techniques will be viable. In the meantime, they will be forced to pay the Nordics to take their green energy while supplementing with coal from Poland or succumbing to the siren call of another controversial Russian pipeline.

atoav3• 6 years ago

I recently listened to a long podcast with a German that is working on hydro-gravitational storage with water lifting a huge (multiple hundred meters in diameter) rock cylinder to store energy. He recently finished a smaller scale prototype (if I recall right 20m diameter) that tests all the insulation, the cutting techniques and power generation

mrweasel2• 6 years ago

I've not sure if has changed in the last few years, but one issue Denmark has run into is that our tariffs on CO2 actually harms the use of surplus green energy.

Most of Denmark (at least in the cities) are heats using hot water from remote heating plants, either surplus heat from power generation or garbage incineration, with auxiliary gas and coal plants. 15 years ago many of the smaller gas powered heating plants offered to install the equipment needed to convert excess electrical power to heat. The idea being that they would save money, compared to buying gas, the only caveat: They didn't want to pay the CO2 tariffs, which made sense, given that the power would mostly be from wind anyway. Paying the tariff would completely negate any cost savings, compared to buying the gas.

This solution was refused by politicians for years, so instead the heating plants would burn gas, generation CO2, and the excess wind power would be sold to Germany for almost nothing, and in many cases for free. That this point Germany wasn't closing down its nuclear power plants, so the electricity the Danish windfarms replaced was also CO2 free.

trenchgun2• 6 years ago

I don't get it. Why would they pay CO2 tariff for heating with wind powered electricity?

trenchgun2• 6 years ago

Like what is the point of the regulation?

mrweasel2• 6 years ago

Because the regulation, at the time, mandated CO2 tariff on ALL electricity, regardless of origin. That was the broken part of the regulation.

The tariff was/is calculated per kW and not actually based on CO2 emissions. It's basically just an extra tax placed on the consumers to help subsidize green energy. It just kinda backfired the cases of the heating plants, because they weren't never thought of a consumer of electricity.

jokoon6• 6 years ago

Jean Marc Jancovici is a french energy expert, and he often talks about Germany.

An important story to remember about Germany, is how Fukushima led the country to stop using nuclear power. Merkel has a PhD in physics, so naturally she understands that nuclear power is green and just better than renewable and coal.

But after Fukushima, she was forced to stop nuclear plants, because as Jancovici argued, she is an "assermented executor": if all germans want to stop nuclear energy, then there's nothing to do.

flo123456• 6 years ago

nuclear power is green and just better than renewable and coal

How do you arrive at that conclusion? Better in what regard?

AFAIK nuclear power has all sorts of problems, the main one being that nobody knows what to do about the waste. Building nuclear power plants isn’t exactly carbon emission free either.

vidarh• 6 years ago

Dealing with the waste is not a problem. Dealing with the fear around the waste is. The amount of radioactive waste from coal plants is a far bigger problem than the very minor volumes of waste from nuclear, a lot of which can be used as fuel for breeder reactors.

Once we've decommissioned all coal power plants, then it might be reasonable to assess whether or not continued investment in nuclear is worthwhile, but until then decommissioning nuclear is actively causing harm, including huge numbers of deaths, by keeping more coal plants operational.

jokoon6• 6 years ago

The waste is a non-problem, especially when you compare with co2 over decades.

Nuclear energy emits less co2 than renewables: it requires less metals (especially if you store electricity with batteries or other means), and renewables are not baseload energies, meaning you need to burn either coal or gas when there's no sun or wind.

Wind mills require a lot of metals, and installing them is complicated. Solar panels require mining elements, and solar panels degrade over time.

Nuclear energy is green. It's time to say it.

lm284692• 6 years ago

AFAIK nuclear power has all sorts of problems, the main one being that nobody knows what to do about the waste

You're breathing the wastes of fossil fuel based energy sources every single second of your life and it will 100% reduce your life expectancy and quality of life.

The best case scenario of fossil fuel based energy production is worst than the worst case scenario of nuclear based energy production.

mbeex• 6 years ago

But after Fukushima, she was forced to stop nuclear plants, because as Jancovici argued, she is an "assermented executor": if all germans want to stop nuclear energy, then there's nothing to do.

I live in Germany. Seems a different country from the one you describe.

jokoon6• 6 years ago

Merkel wanted to keep nuclear energy, but again, if the Germans disagree, she can't makes decisions on her own. Democracy doesn't prevent bad decisions, and it's vulnerable to misinformation and emotional opinions.

imtringued7• 6 years ago

Oh, so nuclear power plants amortize themselves in less than 10 years? I didn't know that!

jokoon6• 6 years ago

you will need energy in 50 years, so the medium term metric is useless

investors only care about short term and medium term

lispm25• 6 years ago

An important story to remember about Germany, is how Fukushima led the country to stop using nuclear power. Merkel has a PhD in physics, so naturally she understands that nuclear power is green and just better than renewable and coal.

Merkel was also the responsible minister for reactor safety. She understands the risks, too.

But after Fukushima, she was forced to stop nuclear plants

No, the exit was long before decided. The conservative government was trying to exit from the exit. But that would had created mass protests. Then Fukushima happened and basically everyone went back to the already agreed exit.

xab19920• 6 years ago

"And here lies the final problem. Germany taxes natural gas very lightly. "

Cannot cut into the action of Putin and Gazprom Schroeder.

[We can bet that this entirely correct comment will be deleted by the censors.]

OliverJones2• 6 years ago

Hooray for the energy market being disrupted. It's a sign of the success of government subsidies to renewable power. Obviously adjustments are required as the disruption proceeds. Hopefully governments and private concerns in Europe can cooperate to make workable new rules and tariffs. I'm not so hopeful in the US because our federal government is the servant of big oil.

Here in Massachusetts USA I pay USD0.24 per kWh delivered to my home (generation + transmission + distribution + taxes). Our energy markets are generally mired in 19th-century ways of measuring, so it's harder to tell what natural gas costs (what is a therm???) But I believe it's about USD0.08 per kWh.

I've just signed up for "community solar." A developer is building a PV farm (in the median strip of a large highway, I believe). It will save me on generation costs, but not transmission or distribution, so my rate will fall to about USD0.18 I believe.

Here we have high generation costs partly because Hydro Quebec drove a hard long-term bargain ("take-or-pay" they call it) with our electric company long ago. Towns with municipal power usually pay less because they're not stuck with Hydro Quebec, but sometimes pay more.

I could go on and on, but here's the thing. It's expensive for generators to participate in long-distance grids. Why? If their AC frequency drifts even a tiny amount, the grid must disconnect. How can companies maintain the AC frequency under heavy load?

1. expensive and filthy peak-load generators (diesel-powered often) spinning ready to take load.

2. big batteries. Telsa and some Australian government utilities have had great success with this.

3. excess renewable capacity. But at times of heavy demand there isn't any.

4. SMART DISTRIBUTION: the ability to quickly and selectively shed load temporarily. Space- and water- heating are perfect applications for this. So is battery charging for transportation.

We aren't nearly done with the disruption yet. Now it starts to get interesting. Electricity companies are in the information business; they just don't know it yet.

rb808• 6 years ago

Do German households even have smart meters? To me this is the most important thing in a renewable world. I'd imagine the wholesale market electricity was free but consumers pay a fixed charge that doesn't change even on windy days. The most important thing is changing people's behaviour on the peak cold windless cloudy days when the market price is high people shouldn't be washing clothes or ironing or using electric heating.

mtmail• 6 years ago

If I understand this article correctly: The 2016 law to install smart meters came into effect Feb/2020. Well for those households over 6000 kWh. It's expected that 10% of households will have those within 3 years. https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Intelligente-Stromza...

kazinator• 6 years ago

TL; DR: crazy taxes based off quantity rather than price make electricity cost 200 €/MWh even when the base cost is free, whereas natural gas is taxed lightly, making it cheaper to the consumer.

ZeroGravitas2• 6 years ago

I've not checked this particular occurrence yet, so it's possible there's good news, but I've never found one of these "renewables cause negative prices" stories yet where the system was actually running on 100% renewable.

Usually there's some coal or gas supply that decides for whatever reason to not turn itself off. Often because ramp downs and then up again will cost them more than the negative price.

So it's all geeky accounting, but basically non renewables are being fined so they make slightly less money overall if they aren't flexible to demand.

cardiffspaceman• 6 years ago

The wording of the current title is unnecessarily insulting. The point of the article is that Germans don't use electricity to heat their homes because the weird economics plus possibly some sunk costs favor natural gas or oil. Germans aren't sitting around in the cold winters wearing parkas and shaking their thrifty fists at the powers that be.

m12k• 6 years ago

Subsidies for those who don't pollute seems like such a backwards solution compared to taxing those who do pollute. If you want people to stop dumping trash in your backyard do you think it's saner to punish those who do or to reward everyone else in your neighborhood who gets rid of their trash in other ways?

The atmosphere and its ability to contain a limited amount of carbon is a public good, and we should stop giving away the right to dump stuff in it for free.

Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?

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