Re:Hetzner announcement: Price changes for servers ordered v...
by mschuster91 on Friday January 21, 2022 @09:08AM
(#30023640)
For one, we have had a new carbon tax since then (which also drove up the prices for petrol) and a couple old nuclear plants shut down.
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.
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...