Has electricity decoupled from natural gas prices in Germany?

https://has-electricity-decoupled-yet.strommarktberatung.de

by konschubert • 4 months ago

146 212 4 months ago

has-electricity-decoupled-yet.strommarktberatung.de

anovikov3• 4 months ago

Nice! This is the first time i see anyone providing a quantitative answer to this. When the effect becomes more pronounced, it will hopefully remove political barriers for renewable electricity.

konschubert12• 4 months ago

Yes!

A widening gap between electricity cost and gas cost (and fuel cost) will be THE main driver of electrification! Installing a heat pump will be a no-brainer, driving an electric car will be a no brainer.

This can only happen once electricity decouples from gas prices - but that requires lots of renewables in the mix!

anovikov3• 4 months ago

Quite frankly, Germany already has a lot of renewables in the mix. Why did it take so long for the effect to appear and why is it still so modest? What should be renewables share be (vs ~60% today), for complete decoupling?

jacquesm• 4 months ago

That's more of a political and tax decision than anything else.

hobofan2• 4 months ago

I'm not deep into electricity pricing dynamics, but based on my intuition, shouldn't that rather have a dampening effect on electrification, as the gap widens?

High gas prices + gap is small -> Big opportunity to undercut via cheaper methods like solar -> attractive investment -> more new builds

High gas prices + gap is wide and widening -> Smaller and smaller opportunity to invest in solar, as the market is already dominated by solar prices -> less attractive investment -> less new builds

Am I missing something here?

senko2• 4 months ago

Heat pump prices + cost of installation was so high the last time I looked 2years ago, that it wasn't worth it even with free electricity (rooftop solar).

Have the costs dropped for that as well?

chopin4• 4 months ago

Heat pump installations are far too expensive in Germany to make any sense economically.

wongarsu3• 4 months ago

Note that "gas" in this context means natural gas, not gasoline

As noted in the methodology below, they are measuring the gas-implied level as the marginal running costs of a combined-cycle gas turbine plant: the price of the natural gas necessary to generate a given amount of electricity, plus the cost of the necessary carbon credits to burn that natural gas. Then they compare that to the actual electricity price

lxgr7• 4 months ago

Note that "gas" in this context means natural gas, not gasoline

Of course it does, why would anybody say "gas" when they are talking about a liquid? :p

IshKebab2• 4 months ago

Don't tell this guy about LNG!

(But yeah gas is a terrible name for petrol.)

embedding-shape4• 4 months ago

Note that "gas" in this context means natural gas, not gasoline

What's up with Americans consistently calling things "wrong" like this? "Gas" isn't even the right state of matter for the subject, nor is "football" actually a sport where the ball is mostly for the foot, almost like things are intentionally named bad.

vrganj2• 4 months ago

Did you know that "Danishes" were... Austrian?

SAI_Peregrinus• 4 months ago

What's up with the British calling refined gasoline "petrol"? It's not even an abbreviation for the word, it's a totally different material? You don't go calling refined aluminium "bauxite", but you do call gasoline "petrol".

We're both wrong. It's a liquid at room temperature, and it's called not petroleum.

xigoi• 4 months ago

Also, they drive on a parkway and park on a driveway.

triceratops3• 4 months ago

"Gas" is short for "gasoline" which means "gas oil". That is a perfectly cromulent name for a liquid.

"Football" is a different game in the US because it arrived there from England in the 19th century when carrying the ball was allowed. In England the sport eventually split into distinct sports: association football (aka soccer) and rugby. In America they evolved the game independently but didn't change the name.

Hope that clears it up.

happymellon• 4 months ago

nor is "football" actually a sport where the ball is mostly for the foot

This is untrue.

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

There are lots of countries where Association isn't the "football" for the region.

dang• 4 months ago

Ok, we've made the gas natural in the title above. Thanks!

snehk2• 4 months ago

Has this benefitted the regular/average consumer?

Nope. They pay more than they were with the "old" energy mix of more gas and nuclear.

Telling people it could be worse isn't really something to be proud of.

I personally now have solar panels on the roof and a heat pump so we only use electricity and don't rely on gas. Germany's strategy is really beneficial to households like my own. Unless you're relatively well off or on benefits, you're losing big time. The costs are constantly increasing with people telling others to just take money (you don't have) to install some solar panels on the house (you don't own) or buy an electric car (you can't afford).

erispoe• 4 months ago

I have dynamic pricing in Germany and the cost of electricity when to literally zero for a few hours today.

mullingitover• 4 months ago

Seems like the regular consumers you refer to would be paying even higher rates for gas and petrol if others weren’t electrifying.

onli2• 4 months ago

If my electricity prices are no longer linked to gas prices, I can have cheaper electricity - my provider only produces green energy. But in the past raising gas prices would have also raised my prices, regardless. So yes, regular consumers can profit from this.

snehk2• 4 months ago

my provider only produces green energy. But in the past raising gas prices would have also raised my prices, regardless. So yes, regular consumers can profit from this.

It's one single grid. You get coal, nuclear, wind, solar, and everything else. If you buy from a provider, you get that mix.

konschubert12• 4 months ago

The whole point of this website is to show that the price of electricity is year-to-date 22% cheaper than it would be in a gas-dominated grid without renewables.

So I don't know where you're getting the "No" from?

You could argue that maybe investing all those subsidies into nuclear would have been cheaper, but that would have had a lot of path dependencies that simply did not pan out in Europe.

mono4424• 4 months ago

Electricity generation from natural gas is intentionally made more expensive by the EU ETS. It could be cheaper if politicians wanted it to be.

Tbh coal definitely should be restarted and used more, there's more reliable supply for coal than for lng.

adjejmxbdjdn• 4 months ago

Clearly it has relative to what prices would have been if it was gas powered only.

Do you have any reason to believe the methodology in the linked page is wrong?

vrganj2• 4 months ago

What if the whole point of the strategy was to incentivize households to become more like yours?

An energy transition isn't just some big centralized state planned enterprise. It's also the sum of people putting up their own solar (on the balcony if they're renters!) etc.

An 800W plug-in solar system for your balcony can be had for 200 euros these days, breakeven is super quick.

azan_2• 4 months ago

I wonder what prices would they have if they did not implement sunsetting of nuclear energy. Has to be the worst energy policy decision ever.

onli2• 4 months ago

No. Nuclear energy was at the same time very expensive and only a very small percentage of the energy production. Sunsetting the old plants had no negative impact at all on electricity prices, to the contrary, insofar as it made space for more green energy.

azan_2• 4 months ago

Compare emissions between France and Germany during dunkelflaute. Germany is frequently at the Polish levels of emissions and Poland is famous for huge emissions. Sunsetting would make sense if they could already generate enough green electricity even in bad conditions, which was not and is not the case. It was purely political decision - Germany wanted to be European hub for distributing gas from Russia (that's why tried to convince others than gas is somehow green energy).

exe34• 4 months ago

How much solar/wind can you really install in the area covered by a nuclear station?

bhelkey2• 4 months ago

Nuclear energy was at the same time very expensive and only a very small percentage of the energy production

The Guardian reports that Nuclear power produced ~20% of Germany's electricity in 2011.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/nuclear-pow...

fundatus2• 4 months ago

Levelized Cost of Energy for Germany's existing nuclear fleet was roughly 13ct/kwh.[1] The averaged costs (YTD) from the linked article currently stands at 9.71 ct/kwh. So nuclear in the mix would have increased the costs.

[1] https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/877586/4e4dce913c3d88...

BenoitP• 4 months ago

LCOE is good for marginal cost (eg: one more solar panel), but fails dramatically at evaluating systemic costs.

A nuclear reactor moves the entire market down, including the costs to the consumer when he buys solar energy.

Here is a UN document explaining it: https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2025-09/GECES-21_2025_...

belorn• 4 months ago

The average electricity price for German households is approximately 32.5 to 34 cents per kWh.

We are not doing an apple to apple comparison if we are not actually looking at what people are paying. The cost of energy is to have the a stable supply of energy delivered at the time that the consumer wants to buy it. The cost of energy production is thus not just the price of producing one unit of energy in isolation, but to have it transmitted in a stable grid at a date and time specified by the consumer. Nuclear energy and solar energy both produce units of energy, but consumers need for transmission, grid stability and time aspects are completely different depending if they buy nuclear energy or solar energy. They are not interchangeable on those aspects.

The 9.71 ct/kwh is the levelized cost of producing electricity from solar. It is not the same as the average cost of consuming energy. Adding nuclear to the mix would not necessary increase costs of consuming energy, even if the average cost of producing energy would go up.

To make a very simplified illustration of this. A energy broker would happily trade 10 units for energy for 1 unit of energy, assuming that they can dictate when and where each unit get transmitted.

riedel2• 4 months ago

Those cost don't even include the full lifecycle societal cost of nuclear energy [0] (25-39 cent by some studies). Sure the renewables also have lifecycle cost we might not pay yet, but in Germany even more important we do not even have a societal and research concesus what to do with the waste (might be much better in other countries)

[0] https://green-planet-energy.de/fileadmin/images/presse/2020-...

kccqzy• 4 months ago

Although nuclear energy produces no carbon emissions, it is simply not price competitive with solar and wind in the western world. A culture of safety above all else made nuclear not price competitive. And it would be political suicide for regulators to relax safety given how accidents like Chernobyl or Three Mile Island are etched into the public mind.

brazzy• 4 months ago

And that is very much a good thing.

Ringz7• 4 months ago

Nuclear power plants produce CO₂ emissions. The only point at which they do not emit CO₂ is the electricity generation itself. Everything that happens before and after produces CO₂. The amount of CO₂ is debatable, even the major meta-studies (UNECE 2022) point out that across all collected studies, parts of the lifecycle emissions are consistently missing because, drumroll, the nuclear power industry is so non-transparent. Important factors include the mining of uranium ore. If the concentration of uranium ore in the rock is low and the more nuclear power plants are built and the more ore is needed, the sooner such deposits will have to be tapped, mining becomes increasingly CO₂-intensive. The same applies to enrichment. Both processes would greatly benefit if renewable energy were expanded to the point where uranium mining and enrichment could be operated with lower CO₂ emissions.

sod• 4 months ago

In a pieceful world, sure. But then there is this [1]. Don't blame the player, blame the game.

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant_...>

GaggiX• 4 months ago

Much better idea to just buy oil and gas from Russia /s

wewxjfq• 4 months ago

Merit order pricing and the fact that you need fossil peakers will make the price effect completely negligible to consumers. You are comparing the MWh price of slightly more efficient fossil power plants to slightly less efficient fossil power plants.

shafyy2• 4 months ago

It's widely accepted that sunsetting nuclear energy had a positive impact on the deployment of renewables, and consequently on the longer term energy prices. It was one of the better energy policy (and environmental, and security) decisions Germany has made in the recent past.

croes3• 4 months ago

You know that nuclear energy was heavily subsidized?

And they still don’t have a long term storage but therefore rotting barrels with nuclear waste in the interim storage facility Asse which have to be retrieved. Cost estimate around 14 billion Euros.

vmchale• 4 months ago

"long term storage" for CO2 is to spew it into the air where it remains forever... free for Germany, not so much Australia, California, Florida, etc.

LinXitoW• 4 months ago

Do you mean the nuclear power that the free market companies very explicitly said wasn't worth doing? That one? Why are we pleading the government to use a horrendously expensive technology that even the free market hates?

yanis_t• 4 months ago

I suppose you can just compare it to France https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/3mo/daily?signal=electri...

cycomanic• 4 months ago

Higher

nmehner• 4 months ago

Nuclear in 2006 was 160TWh. Coal in 2025 was 93TWh. So a big portion of nuclear would have been replaced by renewables by now anyways (natural gas has a different role in the grid and cannot be replaced bu nuclear).

https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...

Also a lot of coal plants have been / are used in district heating in addition to electricity. Replacing them is much harder and takes longer than nuclear which is electricity only. Shutting those down was never a short term option.

Calling it the worst decision ever is really funny, when it really is just a question of the order of the transition to renewables. And much of that order was dictated by technical needs.

Ringz7• 4 months ago

Maybe 1-4% lower.

qubex• 4 months ago

My quant mind is sprained by the implied volatility around the mean.

konschubert12• 4 months ago

sorry, can you elaborate? I am happy to fix it or add a caveat comment to the methodology section.

wongarsu3• 4 months ago

It is incredibly volatile. Spot prices in the day-ahead auction for tomorrow are between -39€/MWh and 201€/MWh. And that's a pretty normal amount of volatility for this time of year

https://energy-charts.info/charts/price_spot_market/chart.ht...

konschubert12• 4 months ago

We need more batteries for sure.

pjc504• 4 months ago

Would be good to have more than a one sentence explanation of what you mean, but this is a result of low storage. In the oil market, if prices are too volatile you just stick it in a tank until they stabilize. You only get negative prices if all the storage is full, which happened to WTI once.

ozlikethewizard• 4 months ago

Good for the Germans, in the UK we use marginal cost pricing, so consumers pay for the highest costing output regardless of how much if any they use. Means even if we get gas down to 1% well still be paying gas prices.

shafyy2• 4 months ago

My understanding is that it's the same here in Germany. From the website

What does "decoupled" mean? In a gas-dominated electricity market, the marginal generator setting the price is almost always a gas-fired power plant (CCGT). That means electricity prices are structurally linked to gas prices — when gas rises, electricity rises with it. Decoupling happens when enough zero-marginal-cost renewable generation (wind, solar) pushes gas off the margin for enough hours that the annual average electricity price no longer tracks gas.

konschubert12• 4 months ago

It's the same in Germany.

The reason why power prices can still decouple: Because there are more and more quarter-hours where gas plants are NOT setting the price and the marginal cost is set by renewables.

The same is happening in the UK.

, so consumers pay for the highest costing output regardless of how much if any they use.

No, if no Gas is needed (!) for power production in any quarter-hour, the price is not set by gas.

PS: Emphasis on needed. Gas plants may still be running at a loss for whatever reason (heat coupling, special contracts), but if they are not needed to provide the power, they will have to bid at a loss, and then they will not be able to drive the price.

tialaramex6• 4 months ago

Gas plants may still be running at a loss for whatever reason

My assumption, given how the UK numbers look when there are negative prices but still a little bit of gas running, is that shut down/ start up for a CCGT is so undesirable (expensive maybe?) that a 100MW plant which can say throttle to 5MW would rather pay to give you 5MW of electricity for the next half hour than switch off the plant and provide nothing then need to start it back up in a few hours.

I don't know what "throttling" looks like for this equipment. It seems implausible that these units have no ability to control their fuel usage/ power output at all, just binary on or off, but on the other hand presumably in practice it's far from infinitely variable.

paulhallett• 4 months ago

The irony is at the time of me writing this; gas is down to 4.6%[^1] and renewables are a whopping 88.5% and yep - the cost is based on the 4.6% of gas.

^1 https://grid.iamkate.com/

konschubert12• 4 months ago

In Germany, the price for the 17:00 product today is about 11 Euro, which is NOT the price implied by gas. No gas plant can run at this price.

pjc504• 4 months ago

The price of gas is −£9.26/MWh? (from that link!)

happosai5• 4 months ago

Marginal pricing is not specific to electricity in UK, that's just how commodities end up priced.

Saudis pump oil at cost of $10 per barrel. Will they sell it to you at $10? Nope. The average oil price? Nope.

Saudis will sell the barrel at the highest price people are willing to pay - the marginal price. So if the most expensive oil needed to match the global oil demand is some super expensive arctic oil project, the oil will be priced according the marginal cost of that project even if only 1% is needed.

konschubert12• 4 months ago

Yea. The merit order bidding method just reflects the natural pricing of any commodity market.

NoLinkToMe4• 4 months ago

Indeed. For others who may wonder why this is the case, a simple example will explain it:

Suppose Saudi can produce 100 barrels at $10 (cost+profit) each, and Brazil can produce 100 barrels at a price of $50 (cost+profit) each, and John wants to buy 120 barrels.

- John will pay what is necessary for his Oil, but seeks out the cheapest price available. - Sellers Brazil and Saudi will accept a sale of their own production if their minimum price of $50 and $10 is met respectively, but will sell to the highest bidder for their supply.

You'd think John will go to to Brazil to buy 100 barrels at $50, and then buy 20 barrels in Saudi at $10.

But guess what, Brazil could simply go to Saudi and buy their 100 barrels for $10, and then sell them to you for $50.

So now Saudi has demand from both John and Brazil at a $10 price. Who gets to buy? Well whoever decides to bid more to convince Saudi to sell their oil.

If John increases his bid to $15, Saudi will prefer that to Brazil's $10 bid. But Brazil would then increase its bid to $20, knowing they can sell it to John for $50.

This bidding keeps going up until the $50 point. For Brazil there is no longer any profit in buying Saudi Oil at $50, and selling it to John for the same price. For John there is no point in bidding more than $50 for Saudi Oil, because he can get a $50 price from Brazil.

Any point below $50 means a bidding war starts between John and Brazil, because at less than $50, Brazil has a cheaper source of oil (Saudi) than their own production cost.

And this is true for every commodity in a free market. It's not some 'UK system', it's just the consequence of free trade.

Of course in reality it's trading intermediaries that do the bidding, it's not Brazil buying from Saudi, but traders jumping in to arbitrage. But this is a simplified example.

NoLinkToMe4• 4 months ago

Same as in Germany actually.

It's true that even 2% of usage being gas, means 100% of the demand pays the gas price.

But (!) that's only true for the spot market at that particular point in the day. And that changes all the time.

Example: if you use zero gas for 80% of the day, and use just 10% gas for remaining 20% of the day, then that day gas was just 2% of total demand, like we said earlier. But it's not true that gas prices dictated 100% of the price that day.

After all, gas prices dictated only 20% of the day's prices. The remaining part of the day there was no gas demand, and thus it did not dictate the price. And that happens more and more often.

The more renewables + storage are built out, the more time of the day that gas is displaced, not used and thus not part of the price mechanism.

Second, if the market pays at the gas price, the renewables reap all the profits (because their costs are far below the gas price). This incentivizes further renewable capacity build-out, eventually displacing gas entirely. This incentive structure pushes the market the fastest towards lowest-cost generation, which is renewable nowadays.

edit: terrific 15m explanation on spot pricing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Paun0siu67o

DoctorOetker• 3 months ago

It's the same in Belgium, and I believe for the majority if not all of Europe.

What I never understood from this arrangement: can a renewable provider legally refuse to accept the gas-price (either by charging less, or simply refunding a large chunk of the difference?

I understand growth may appear to suffer if renewables refunded the difference between gas prices and renewable prices+profit+moderate-growth-expenses; but it would also mean the public would flock massively to that provider, which may allow for faster growth under certain conditions.

Are renewable bound by law to accept the instantaneous peak-demand-electricity-prices (typically gas peaker prices)? And even if they were forced to accept that payment, are they explicitly forbidden to return a large chunk of the extortionate difference to their customers, in order to comply with acceptance of the price while reimbursing their customers?

This may sound contradictory, but if a major expense for renewables is the siting and commissioning of a renewable wind/solar farm, it may be possible to rake in more profit by growing customer base instead, and then use that money to outcompete the competitors in the siting and commissioning landscape?

A bureaucrat can dictate that x Euro's correspond to y Dollars, but the free market tends to find a price rediscovery mechanism returning closer to true rates. Do we really believe that of the huge search space of all possible policies that this pricing strategy (of forcing everyone to sell at the instantaneously most expensively generated energy) happens to be the most optimal trajectory at a fundamental level? Or do we believe some undiscovered or unused known policy could actually grow renewables faster? If the real world differs from fiat, the market will find a way to bypass fiat and unmask its weak points, at the end of the day money talks.

Furthermore the current setup may result in unintended consequences: at a certain point renewables may be disincentivized to expand capacity, as it would decrease the percentage of time the peakers are needed, and thus decrease their income! It's almost a politically introduced stranglehold, to prevent gas peakers from being displaced.

laurencerowe• 4 months ago

As others have pointed out the electricity price is only set by gas when gas is needed, but that's only part of your bill. Renewables now make up over half of UK electricity generation and they are financed through Contracts for Difference which are ultimately paid for by a supplier obligation levy on electricity bills.

When market electricity prices are lower than the strike price for a CfD, electricity users end up paying the difference through the levy and when the market price is higher it reduces the amount levied. So for the renewable portion of UK electricity generation we effectively pay the fixed strike price of the CfD whatever the market price.

ZeroGravitas3• 4 months ago

CfDs only cover about 15% of renewables, though it's increasing.

When the Ukraine invasion spiked prices one suggestion was to offer the non CfD renewables a chance to enrol for CfDs, which would reduce their short term profits but guarantee long term predictable profit. I don't think it was actually done though.

IshKebab2• 4 months ago

We don't "use" marginal cost pricing. That's just how economics works.

morphle13• 4 months ago

This energy scam has been going on for more than 30 years in Europe and the UK.

The former Economic minister and professor Yanis Varoufakis explains [1].

My Fiberhood cooperative has a solution: the Enernet smart grid where you pay $0.01 per kWh. We wire up one in three houses or more in a neighborhood with power routers. People buy and sell only solar electricity from panels in the neighborhood, from batteries and from every ev charging station on every parking spot in the neighborhood and from every parked ev. Each participating house saves $2000 to $5000 per year for 30 years or more[2]. You also get free 25 Gbps internet. You heat your house with a heatpump or cool the house with an ice storage ac powered only by solar. If the cooperative makes any money the share the profit with all the members or they vote to buy more solar panels and batteries. The cooperative gives loans to houses that can not afford their own panels.

[1] Best version with info graffics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3bo-s_OY4Q or

Longer version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NicE0-N9ux0&list=TLPQMDcwNDI... or

short version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaHepQyE37Q

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Merik-Voswinkel/publica...

pjc504• 4 months ago

Is this a thing that people can actually sign up to, or is it vaporware? Varoufakis says a lot of things that aren't necessarily true.

fiberhood4• 4 months ago

You can sign up by becoming a member of the Fiberhood cooperative for free. Send an email to Fiberhood at icloud dot com. We must have your address and map location link or Google map address code so we can draw maps and make a website for your neighborhood to sign up and form an Enernet.

We will do a small survey and put up a detailed map of your neighborhood (like openstreetmap, see the slide in this talk [1]). We hand out door to door flyers and organise a weekend barbeque neighborhood party where everyone can come see how the cable between neighbours goes roof-to-roof, window-to-window or garden-to-garden between power routers. See our cost price bifacial solar panels and the large batteries.

We find that within a few weeks a few hundred people signed up for the cooperative and we start installing the first 10 houses. Most people invest in solar panels and batteries at wholesale prices installed by volunteers. Others get a loan to pay for this. You wind up getting payed for the panels you bought or paying around 1 dollar cent per kWh, saving a few thousand dollars per years for decades.

In the US the Rocky Mountain Institute and its founder Amory Lovins describes this as 'grid defection' and it happens on a large scale now.

Fiberhood has cooperatives forming all around the world, both rural and urban: Ukraine, Peru (near Iquitos by the Indian tribe on the Amazon River Bank, Southern Spain, Slovenia, Finland, The Netherlands, Australia.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbqKClBwFwI&t=5574s

morphle13• 4 months ago

Please give some proof of Varoufakis lying. I always check what he claims in his books and talks and I never spotted a lie. I also check Saul Griffith and Amory Lovins talks, books and papers on factual errors and never spotten one in two decades.

konschubert12• 4 months ago

People seem to have trouble understanding how commodity markets naturally price their goods but the whole point of this website is to show that electricity prices are finally decoupling.

edit: I didn’t watch the videos, I don’t have time first watch a video and then to dissect bullshit from truth.

fiberhood4• 4 months ago

But the solar electricity is still overpriced and taxed. People pay several times more for solar electricity from the grid than what they get if they sell to the grid.

gib444• 4 months ago

We don't care. We want cheaper electric like other countries and want our politicians to make it happen

Blah blah contracts blah markets blah always an excuse in the UK for why everything is more expensive than other countries

Is there a wall in the way? Tear it down. Make it happen

God we demand so little of our politicians in reality

zoobab• 4 months ago

Plus you become indépendant from toxic decisions taken by politicians.

anovikov3• 4 months ago

But it means you are simply exploiting the "normal" electricity grid this way by using it when your solar doesn't work and batteries run dry - that is, when the cost of elecitricty in a normal grid, with the high penetration of renewables, is highest. You do the normal capitalism thing: privatise the benefits, socialise the costs... And the higher proportion of renewables in the grid is the higher is your upside.

If you want to completely stop using normal grid and rely on solar alone, you will need to overbuild your solar so massively, you won't be able to afford it (and will run out of land, too). Cost of electricity produced will be several euros per kwh, and a simple calculation shows just how massively unrealistic it is.

h3lp4• 4 months ago

They say $0.01/kWh is the target price, to be reached after some decades.

Don't get me wrong, I am excited about solar power but careful about the economics: the capital cost of solar right now is well over 1$/W (panels+inverters+installation/hookup) and even though it is falling nicely, the amortization schedule needs to be considered. A rule-of-thumb figure is 1kWh of power per year from 1W nominal installed, so the capital cost will have to be amortized over 100 years to reach $.01/kWh. The installed price has to come down by a factor of 10 for this to work out.

morphle13• 4 months ago

No, $0.01/kWh became possible in 2024 and is easy to achieve in 2026. But you have to follow the Fiberhood procedures based on our simulations and our electronics to actually achieve prices under one dollar cent per kWh. We reach this price in China, most of Europe and Australia but in the US you generally pay thrice as much (in labour cost, tarifs, etc).

You can only get an accurate cost if you create a simulation of every step of the industrial processes of manufacturing the silicon ingots, the glass, aluminum, the silver and labour that goes into making solar panels. Same for batteries, electronic components, etc. You have checks and balances in the simulation, for example you get the cost price of all the material components that you can check against the actual price for sale at the factories, the shipping cost, the wholesale prices on offer, the retail prices in different countries, the installation cost, the underlying loans and their interest rates and labour. But that simulates just the cost of the materials, you have many other factors. For example did the energy used to make the solar cells come from solar or from coal plants? Did you make thin film solar or silicon wafer solar cells. What battery chemistry. How much losses if your solar panel overheats 3 percent of the time. What latitude and longitude did the solar panels operate, at what angle to the sun? Compared with such accurate cost simulation models calibrated with actual prices paid your claim is very vague and hand-wavy.

The Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) is a metric representing the average total cost of building and operating an energy-generating asset over its lifetime, divided by the total energy output produced during that period. It serves as a, "break-even" price per unit of energy (e.g., $/MWh), allowing comparisons between different technologies.

Nelkins2• 4 months ago

When you say "power router," what product are you referencing specifically? I'm trying to search online to find a similar product but I don't think I'm finding the right thing.

morphle13• 4 months ago

Enernet power router is the name for the hardware that my small research institute developed since 1997. You find partially similar power router designs at the Fraunhofer institute and in several scientific papers. A power router routes "packets" of electricity around (converting from low voltage DC to high voltage DC or AC and vice versa), packets of internet data and packets of matter (like hot water in a district heating system). It is a fully software defined electricity network and internet router, power meters, firewall, inverters/converters, ground vault protection, vibration measurement and electrocution prevention cable monitoring system.

I'm referencing all the prototypes I built over the years, the final mass manufactured model will be an order of magnitude cheaper because it will from only CMOS and SiC chips that we designed. Current 4x25Gbps/40kW models cost under 800 euro's (936 dollars excluding VAT and import tariff), the mass produced custom chip based model will be under 100 euro's.

A power router replaces your breaker box, your solar panel and battery inverters and obsoletes all the power supplies in your house. It starts your washing machine, dryer, fridge, freezer, heatpump and optionally runs a small datacenter in your hot water vat from which you shower or brew tea. A power router saves more than 10% electricity now lost in your power inverters. It bypasses the national grid and the laws, taxes, grid costs, profit margins and transmission losses and the price for electricity generation. It saves thousands of euro's per year on your energy use and internet bills and optionally your water and sewage bills.

A power router rewires the electricity infrastructure of the planet, energy expert Saul Griffith references it in the names of his organisations Rewire America and Rewire Australia, his youtube lectures, his books Electrify, Plug in and the Big Switch. Amory Lovins references it in his books and talks and Eben Moglen in two of his talks.

It is a bunch of chips in a network of conductors (metal cables) and optical fiber that connects buildings together in a neigborhood.

You directly connect a network of solar cells (there are between 60 and 122 solar cells in each solar panel) to mppt dc-dc inverter chips that output around 3 volts directly to a network of battery cells (that form a battery pack) and that aggregate flows into a runtime programmable first stage dc-ac-dc inverter module that than outputs (power routes) high voltage AC to legacy machines, USB-C low voltage to charge all your electronics and high voltage DC to cables to the neighborhood (a replacement of the national grid) or to the ev cars and trucks.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Merik-Voswinkel/publica...

_ink_• 4 months ago

For me personally it did not. I was a happy Tibber costumer until recently, meaning I was charged the quarterly hour spot price per kWh. The Iran War let to a significant jump in the price during the hours when renewables were low. I switched back to a traditional fixed price per kWh plan because of the high gas prices.

ExpertAdvisor012• 4 months ago

If anyone is interested here are the prices for electricity in munich (dynamic based on exchange price ). The price includes taxes & fees .

0:00-5:35 : ~ 0.32€

5:35-8:45 : ~ 0.38€

8:45-10.30 : ~ 0.30€

10:30-16:45 : ~ 0.18€

16:45-18:00 : ~ 0.31€

18:00-24:00 : ~ 0.34€

dr_kretyn• 4 months ago

In Vancouver, we have somehow reverse curve - the incentive is to use more electricity at night when there's lower demand. As I understand, our main energy source is water, and so it has mostly flat generation. Nothing new - combining the two would make it cheaper all together.

dgellow• 4 months ago

What’s the units?

throw_await• 4 months ago

It's per 1 kWh

ninja3925• 4 months ago

These are extremely high prices. In Texas, we pay 12-15c.

holgerschurig• 3 months ago

Yes, and they are higher due to 2 reasons. And both seem to work.

Number 1 reason is that power was quite highly taxed, since it is directly linked with pollution and CO2. All powers, but that also means electrical power. The effect is, that european cars are smaller and use less. And also european houses are better insulated. You can measure this, the typical german 4 person household uses less than 50% of the electric power of a 4 person US household. Before COVID I even saw a statistics that this less usage compansated the higher electricity prices, so both norm-households payed the same for electricity. Unsure if that is still true post-COVID.

The other reason is that also a good amount of money is directly invested into the grid, to make it more resilient. And you can also measure that. If you lookup the SAIDI (system average interuption duraction index) of e.g. USA and compare it to Germany, you immediately see why over there uninteruptible power supplies are hardly used except in data centers. SAIDI Germany 12.2 minutes per customer per year, USA 125.7 minutes per customer per year. That's a whopping 10x worse. Not just as number, but also for the industry.

And I heard that the SAIDI in Texas is even worse than the US average.

ndoddhdudhhd• 4 months ago

State propaganda: so you mixed in renewables as FREE?

jillesvangurp• 4 months ago

Decoupling of energy prices from fossil fuel is going to be spreading around the globe. It's not that hard to grasp. If you are spending non trivial percentages of your GDP on stuff that you burn once in exchange for some twh of energy delivered, lowering that significantly will have a notable impact on your trade balance.

Recent events in the middle east will have made a few countries keenly aware of how overly dependent they are on stuff coming from that region and how easily their economies are disrupted when stuff goes wrong there.

I live in Berlin, electricity is rather expensive here and people are not treating their gas dependence with enough urgency yet. The city is surrounded by flat country side with lots of wind mills and solar installations. Yet most apartment buildings in the city are still gas heated. Mine is no exception. I have to pay into fueling the gas boiler every month to the extent of about 150ish euro per month. Down from 250ish during the worst of the aftermath of the Russian gas pipeline shut down. I'd love my building to be switched to a heat pump. That's 1800 euro down the drain every year. I'll take a 30-40% cut on that please. It's technically very feasible and measured over 10-20 years, there should be a very clear financial payoff. Done right it should pay for itself probably within a decade. The building has about 20 apartments. Monthly gas bills are 2.5K based on yearly statements. Or about 30K. All out the chimney. That's one hell of a budget to tackle a bit of energy efficiency in the building.

But this is where Germany is its own worst enemy. We're talking a lot of vested interests. Nimby's somehow blocking the notion of literally saving money (as opposed to setting it on fire and chucking it out the chimney). A lack of incentives. A lot of bureaucracy, etc. Even the decision to stop building completely new buildings without a gas connection is somehow controversial in this country where gas is expensive. It is in the middle of a years long gas crisis of its own making and it can't get the decision to stop hitting itself with the proverbial hammer actioned.

A bit of system thinking could turn this around relatively quickly though. For example starting to think of this as investments with clear ROI as opposed to just cost would change the decision making and could also open up a lot of financing. Banks love investments with predictable ROI, for example. And Germany has an excellent credit rating.

However, Germany is grid locked on an irrational fear of financing and debt. It has very little of it relative to e.g. the US or even most other EU countries. It also has huge infrastructure problems. Addressing those requires investment. Investment requires financing. Investments have ROIs which should enable said financing. But that's where penny pinching politicians seem to have a mental block confusing investments for cost and consistently opting to "save cost" rather than to invest. And generally not seeing the forest for the trees.

But the picture is pretty clear. Switch most house holds to heat pumps while at the same time investing in cables, on/off-shore wind, a bit of solar on the side. With lots of battery storage. Etc. would do wonders for the amounts of gas it has to import at great cost. The country has millions of apartment blocks like mine using about 2-3x more energy than needed for heating. Almost all of it in gas form. A program to change those buildings could be executed in 10-15 years and break even in about the same time. It would result in many billions of savings in gas imports per year. That's the few percent of GDP that makes the difference between growth or recession. Germany has been in and out of recession for the last few years. Even powering that exclusively with gas fired electricity plants would yield substantial savings. And it already is transitioning to a grid that is mostly not gas powered. This should be a no brainer. But it somehow isn't. And that's just domestic heating.

distances4• 4 months ago

I wonder how heat pumps would work for apartment building central heating systems. The circulated water has to be a lot hotter than heat pumps are capable of, as far as I've understood. Is there already a system that could viably replace gas in the existing building stock?

Another problem is that most people in Berlin/Germany are renting, so the incentives do not align. The building owner doesn't pay for the heating, so they are unlikely to do any investments where the upside is for the tenants only.

tialaramex6• 4 months ago

Heat pump hot water is very common in Europe. Just as it's possible for the pump to make a box so cold that food stays frozen despite the hot summer's day in Florida, it's also possible to heat up a tank of water this way, it just costs more energy.

Unlike modern natural gas boilers which have only a very small tank of water kept hot and use a fire to make more on demand with only a few seconds of delay (you might not even realise this is happening, but of course it isn't actually instant and so there is a small tank of very hot water) the heat pump will need a large tank because you're going to put about a day's supply of hot water in the tank and gradually, over a whole day, re-heat it as needed.

jokoon• 4 months ago

Thanks nuclear for subsidizing renewables

raincole• 4 months ago

You have to ask how much of it is subsidized, otherwise it's pointless. It's very easy to 'decouple' electricity price from natural gas if the government simply pays it with tax money (which is how it works in many asian countries where the electricity prices are less than one third of EU level.)

Has electricity decoupled from natural gas prices in Germany?

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