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.
- 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.