- Plan was to increase wind/solar electricity by massive amounts while phasing out old nuclear power stations over twenty years
- Plan was hampered by various political parties and lots of nimby's (one conservative state basically outlawed new wind power stations)
- Hence basically nowhere close enough new green electricity generation, while still phasing out nuclear over the last twenty years.
- Prices were shifted around so that private persons had to directly pay for the small amount of subsidies for green electricity, while subsidies for coal/gas were kept the same and paid for via general taxes
- This cost was not paid by companies, hence the total amount was put on the shoulders of private persons
- This all lead to this year where gas/fuel prices went up massively everywhere, so electricity prices went up as well. This isnt a uniquely German problem. This is the case in the whole of Europe.
Simplified version: - Everyone lists how much power they can produce at which marginal price (Renewables = 0c/kWh, Nuclear/Lignite = 4-8c/kWh, Gas peaker = very much based on the current gas prices) - Offers get sorted by marginal price. - Buyers put in the amount of power they want to buy. - The transaction (which is always a 1h timeslot) is resolved by adding up all buyers and take all offers from the list, till demand is fulfilled. - The price of the last kWh bought, will determine the price for everyone.
So, as soon as a single gas power plant is required to fulfill demand, the whole market price is going up. With the extreme rise in gas-prices, due to Russia playing games with the gas-market, The average market prices have gone up. Especially Nuclear and Lignite plants are very happy about the current situation, as they make much more money due to market mechanisms.
While lots of renewables drive the prices down (as they are usually valued at zero due to feed-in tariff regulations).
Another issue is, France has multiple nuclear reactors in unplanned maintenance due to failures. Their fleet is missing more than 10% of their capacity, while most of France is heating with direct electricity heating (not even heat pumps).
Result: The electricity market is in a massive crunch right now in Europe, electricity prices are driven by natural gas prices. And there we've got a huge dependency on Russia. .... And Russia is arguing that all Europe needs to do is certifying their new pipeline (Nordstream2), which comes with massive geopolitical problems attached to it.
See this electricity map for realtime overview of production, consumption and export/imports. https://app.electricitymap.org/
This Norwegian article show historical average for Europe and current prices picture. https://e24.no/olje-og-energi/i/nWbMBo/nord-norge-hadde-bill...
Sweden is moving to greener energy and is currently exporting electricity to Germany and Poland. How come it works here but not down there?
Because bad planing, political sabotage and a whole lot of NIMBY.
Hydro is maxed out basically everywhere already and nuclear is being shut down in Germany, it doesn't take a genius to see it can't work. We can't keep increasing our demand while killing the only large/cheap/on demand energy source to rely on intermittent ones. It might work if we decreased our consumption by a lot but this doesn't seem to be the plan
Sweden has 3.5x more hydro than wind energy (in TWh produced). Germany has 7x less hydro than wind. Sweden can easily use their large hydro reserves to balance out the fluctuations in wind power output.
Also there have been a lot of astroturf groups spawning up over the years. From hard climate change denial, blackout FUD-spreader and false claims about health impacts. They feed a huge load of BS to the locals, as soon as a developer wants to create a new windpark.
NIMBY for wind is expected behavior, they should really not base future electricity market predictions on ideal scenario's. The opposition was there from the start and it would of course increase once the easy locations have wind installed on them.
[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottcarpenter/2020/01/11/costs...
When you lose 25% of your 2011 energy producing capacity by closing many nuclear power plants, it’d be strange if there was no effect. The pollution increase is even more worrying after many new studies since then found negative effects on human health that we didn't know about earlier: https://www.heinz.cmu.edu/media/2020/January/study-examines-...
- the "green" party "Miljöpartiet" ("Party for the environment") has forced the premature closure of half of the nuclear power plants, going so far as to replace the leadership of the state-owned power consortium "Vattenfall" when they refused to fall in line. They actually boast about closing those nuclear power plants, indicating the disconnect between their party's name and its goals.
- Sweden has increased its exchange with other European power distribution networks which caused the higher prices on the European market to have a larger influence on local pricing. The country is divided into 4 pricing zones, the northernmost 2 of which have lower prices - closer to the price paid by all Swedes before deregulation and the introduction of the controlled market "Nord Pool" - than the rest.
Have a look at the "control room" site for information on current pricing, electricity flows, power sources and more:
https://www.svk.se/om-kraftsystemet/kontrollrummet/Moreover to blame the current price hikes on the nuclear shutdown is dishonest at best 8 of the 17 nuclear reactors in Germany were shut down in 2011 (and IIRC all of the were 40 years and older) without this causing a big price hike. Of the remaining only the last 3 were shut down in 2021 (the youngest being 31 year, with IIRC original permits being 40 years). It is also false to say that Germany replaced nuclear with coal, because coal reduced significantly as well during the same time, while renewables raised rapidly.
One could just as well argue that it's Frances fault for not investing in renewables at all (growth of renewables is tiny in France compared to Germany). Also of note is that nuclear relies just as much on gas peakers as renewables.
It's also funny that you blame the greens for the 12/2020 ringhals shutdown, because it was shut down by vattenfall due to low profitability[1]. This was one of two shutdowns the other was in 2019, so both also had very little to do with current prices.
[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/sweden-nuclear-power-split/
Mortality rate in deaths per trillion kWh
0.1 - US nuclear
5 - US hydro
90 - nuclear
150 - wind
440 - solar
1400 - hydro
4000 - natural gas
10000 - US coal
24000 - biofuel and biomass
36000 - oil
100000 - coal
170000 - China coal
Another thing, I related to the shutdown of Swedish nuclear power, not German nuclear power so why did you bring up those numbers on Germany? It is very clear that the closure of those Swedish nuclear power plants - which could have run until 2036 without problems, by which time replacements would have been in place - has made the electricity supply in Sweden less reliable and the price swings more frequent and intense. The oil-fired peak power plant in Karlshamn would normally only be fired up in the cold of winter but last year it was used in the middle of summer to avoid a brown-out in Stockholm.
Regarding the plant shutdown, you nicely ignored the fact that contrary to your assertion it was just down for economic reasons. Sure Vattenfall could have kept it running and made losses and now that demand increased they would have stopped prices going up (likely not because the big winners of the price hikes are the nuclear power plant operators). They could have also build windfarms for that money that likely would have taken prices down.
Haha det är så kul med kärnkraftshögermän som låtsas att vi i MP motarbetat kärnkraft ”i smyg” för att sen skylla på marknaden. Löjligt. Jag tar hemskt gärna cred för nedlagd kärnkraft. Utan MP hade nog flera av de nedslängda reaktorerna rullat vidare.
...which translates to:
Haha it's so much fun with nuclear right-wingers who pretend that we in the MP ("Miljöpartiet") opposed nuclear power "secretly" and then blame the market. Ridiculous. I'm terribly happy to take credit for discontinued nuclear power. Without MP, several of the closed ("nedslängda" means "dropped", I guess he meant to write "nedstängda" which means "closed") reactors would probably have rolled on.
So, no. Not "the market" but politics pushing that market in a certain direction.
[1] https://twitter.com/LorentzTovatt/status/1478049881487032328
These two claims aren't contradictions though.
It is both possible that nuclear tech has improved a lot, and that newer reactors would be better, but the alternative of "no reactors at all" is much worse than even running the existing ones beyond their design lifetime.
Even after closing some reactors (plus one more currently down due to some accident) Sweden is still producing 15% more than it needs. The price increase is due to increased international prices thanks to Germany, and Russia.
Increase from a low of 17.05 Euros per megawatt hour in April 2020 to 128.34 in October 2021:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1267541/germany-monthly-...
Even if you go with a more conservative average before the increase of 40 Euro, its an increase of 220%!
If you are stuck behind paywall: https://imgur.com/a/HfpD2Pp
Previous prices were around 31 €ct/kWh on average (seen them as low as 26 €ct/kWh).
People that have ongoing contracts are the lucky ones currently.
If I were to sign a new contract right now in Finland I’d pay 8 cents per kWh. Including transfer fees and taxes that comes to less than 15 cents all in.
And prices are extremely high right now over here. Normally you’d pay under 10 cents all in.
Right now for new contracts some pay like 80c/kwh.
Do you think Finnish electricity prices are so much cheaper because of ample nuclear power?
Our newest nuclear power plant won’t be in production until summer, but once that comes online the nuclear share will go up.
Imports are mainly Russian nuclear and Scandinavian hydro.
Hydro and nuclear definitely help, as well as the low dependency on fossil fuels.
Less than 1.400 kWh / year
Price
30,27 ct / kWh
Base price
89,28 € / year
Online-Bonus
10,00 € / year
Price
27,92 ct / kWh
Base price
122,52 € / year
Online-Bonus
20,00 € / year
For the generally curious, you can go to https://www.verivox.de/ click on "Strom" (= electricity), type in a german postcode (grab one off google maps, 5-digit number), and type in a kWh / year number. (The "number of persons" is just a fill-in aid for the kWh/yr.)
That said, these numbers are entirely useless for discussions around a hoster like Hetzner — they're end user prices.
As from the latest newsletter I've got they are 100% sustainable and source everything themself without anything to buy in from nuclear, coal, and gas. That's the reason why they don't offer anymore the ecofriendly tariff, because they are 100% anyhow.
(it's a flat daily fee you pay regardless of your gas/electricity usage)
https://mobile.twitter.com/fmbreon/status/148058947971495936...
The day I saw this twitt I passed by a large windmill farm close to Berlin and not a single one of them was spinning... so we end up buying gas from Putin
It has to be the dumbest energy long term plan I've heard about, and it's purely motivated by ideology, looks like they don't want to understand the reality of modern energy issues.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Best offer from electricity price comparison sites is 44¢/kWh, so I guess I will stay with them.
People using electricity startups / discount providers (both gas / electricity) have seen them go into insolvency. They are automatically supplied by the base providers who run the networks in their region.
New prices are up to 1€/kWh on the high end. This is less a problem due to shutting down nuclear plants or the CO2 tax, but rather due to the energy market being de-regulated to casino style capitalism (meaning many more investors / companies being allowed to make a quick buck on the end user's expense).
edit: another reason for high energy prices: the former government has decided that wind energy farms require 1km distance from the nearest settlement (compared to less than half that for a coal-driven power plant...). Also NIMBYism prevents the building of desperately needed north->south electricity lines which could transport energy from wind farms to where its needed.
my current energy provider increased it like this (prices in Euro Cents)
Energy: 27.85 ct/kWh --> 40,7 ct/kWh Gas: 5,71 ct/kWh --> 19,87 ct/kWh
I am already in the process of ugprading appliances and decided against building a second home server I was planning.
The really important thing however is geopolitics and rabid capitalism colliding badly. Basically, for a very long time it was usual business practice of utilities to go for long-term contracts for natural gas and electricity itself... but nowadays, the market has shifted towards spot price contracts, which are usually cheaper. Under "normal" conditions, that would not have been a problem... but when market conditions dramatically change, everyone on a spot contract is pretty much fucked. Additionally, dynamic capacity ("Regelenergie") exploded in price for the same reasons [1], and that dynamic capacity which is needed to balance out unstable renewables (solar/wind) has to be paid for by all the consumers, further contributing to price hikes.
We do have regulations in place to prevent consumers from being on the hook for thousands of dollars like in that Texas power crunch, but nevertheless a couple of "discounter utilities" had to cease operating and a whole lot of others were forced to rapidly hike prices. The result of that was that the local utilities, which by law have to cover for such situations ("Grundversorgung"), were hit with an onslaught of new customers that they hadn't bought supply contracts for... meaning they had to raise the prices, too.
It's an all-around clusterfuck. The fact that our government was in a transition phase until mid of December didn't help either, and expensive energy is actually what the Greens want as an incentive for people and companies to save power - whereas the Social Democrats focus on how the crisis affects poor people (pretty badly!) and the Liberal Democrats only care about the economy aka their large donors. So it's not like actual solutions are going to crop up... sigh.
[1]: https://www.next-kraftwerke.de/energie-blog/steigende-preise...
hedging is the solution. without it expect bankruptcies.
http://www.bricklebrit.com/stromboerse_leipzig.html
You have to enter the date and so on. I have done it for the Jan 20 2021 to Jan 20 2022 range and obtained this deeplink:
http://www.bricklebrit.com/cgi-bin/spotmarktpreise.pl?VONDTE...
Indeed there has been a massive explosion at the wholesale markets for energy. Up to a 10 fold increase!
This challenge put a lot of smaller energy providers into a bad situation, especially those who would obtain most of their electricity through the exchanges instead of their own infrastructure or longer term contractual arrangements. They could only sell energy at the lower prices and had to buy at extremely high prices. So they mass terminated the contracts of their customers (otherwise they would probably have went bankrupt).
In Germany, this doesn't mean that people are without electricity though, as a so called "basic provider" kicks in, who is always the electricity provider with the most customers in a given area. Per regulation, that provider has to take you as customer if they want to or not. Of course these providers are in the same buying situation as the smaller ones, so have to buy the energy at those inflated prices. To get back those costs, they have often doubled or even tripled their end customer prices, but only for new customers, that is, those customers that got dumped on them by the smaller providers and those who were the cause of having to buy new electricity.
For the electric customers this led to a market split in two: first the customers who did not get dumped, still the vast majority of people. For them, there was barely an increase. Second the customers who did get dumped and now have to pay the extremely inflated prices. Some people claim this is unfair, but at the same time, the main reason for people to switch away from the basic provider is to use cheaper prices (outside of people who want to buy "green" energy), so it's not that unfair that it's these people have to shoulder the costs if the market is directed against their favour for a while.
https://www.t-online.de/finanzen/news/unternehmen-verbrauche...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/euro-zone-consumers-...