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.
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.
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.
If you are selling to the grid, there is probably over-supply. Prices are driven by supply and demand. If you want to avoid selling at lower prices and buying at higher, try and get a battery. Check ecoflow to get an idea of the costs.
Ecoflow is a good example of overpriced American tech. I payed $1500 for a 2 kWh battery. Our Fiberhood coop sells a 16kWh battery for $1800. Prices in China are lower still.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
Seems cromulent to me. One of the common meanings of essence is "a product of distillation" (compare e.g. essential oils - oils won through steam distillation). And gasoline is won through fancy distillation
"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.
Because changing a name that's been in use for decades is very confusing and unnecessary. A rose by another name etc.
The full names of the two rugby codes are "rugby union football" and "rugby league football". So Americans aren't alone in their cavalier use of the word "football".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Most definitely not true. Maybe enough area to cover current electric usage, but to truly decarbonize society a lot more renewable energy is needed - for transport, heating, iron industry, chemical industries, fetilizers etc. Massive amounts of electricity is needed unless you export your industries to china.
Why not? Germany's total energy consumption is estimated to be around 1-2 TWh/y. This could be generated by photovoltaics covering less than 5% of its land surface.
There are significant problems around rolling out that much capacity quickly enough, and I also don't think nuclear should have been shut down that hastily, but I don't think "only nuclear can cover long-term energy needs" is true in any way.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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
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?
You need quarter-hours where renewables set the price for power. That's only happening now that renewables have reached sufficient penetration of the market.
And it will get more as batteries come online.
In a commodity market, the price is always set by the most expensive producer that is still able to sell. That's natural - why would I sell my apples cheaper than the other farmer if you need so many apples that you have to by from both of us?
... because you may have signed a longer term contract that might in turn guarantee offtake from you rather than the other farmer?
This marginal price is only for the spot market right? So the key question is more what % of the mix is spot vs longer term. And thus what the overall impact is on total blended price.
A dependency on solar panels which needs to be replaced every 5 years is less bad then a dependency on gas which is burned every day. Having said that nuclear decommission was a huge mistake.
50 years from now when those panels produce less than 75% of nameplate capacity they'll really regret not depending on a market where the swing producer is a cartel of theocratic dictatorships.
An installed solar panel will continue producing electricity, no matter how the relationship with the country that produced it develops. Unlike natural gas, oil or uranium where the fuel itself is the actual imported good.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
Well, the electrons arriving in your home will the same as your neighbours, regardless of which supplier you choose. But by choosing a different supplier you can steer which energy sources will be used to feed that grid, so it still makes a difference, just not exactly where you live.
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.
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] Longer version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NicE0-N9ux0&list=TLPQMDcwNDI... or
short version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3bo-s_OY4Q or
short version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaHepQyE37Q
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Merik-Voswinkel/publica...
Maybe a max-capacity price would be better for household grid connections, but that doesn’t change the fact that the grid needs to be paid for.
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
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
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.
We're both wrong. It's a liquid at room temperature, and it's called not petroleum.
"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.
That's the part that don't make no sense, so no, still very unclear why Americans keeps insisting on calling things the wrong names :)
The full names of the two rugby codes are "rugby union football" and "rugby league football". So Americans aren't alone in their cavalier use of the word "football".
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_rules_football
Yeah, that never happens, not even with important national institutions or anything like that.
Of course it does, why would anybody say "gas" when they are talking about a liquid? :p
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.
^1 https://grid.iamkate.com/
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.
> 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.
[1] https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/877586/4e4dce913c3d88...
There are significant problems around rolling out that much capacity quickly enough, and I also don't think nuclear should have been shut down that hastily, but I don't think "only nuclear can cover long-term energy needs" is true in any way.
[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant_...>
We will have Chernobyl longer than dependency on Russian oil and gas
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.
https://energy-charts.info/charts/price_spot_market/chart.ht...
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!
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?
Occasional negative prices -> Invest in intermittent consuming applications.
In a commodity market, the price is always set by the most expensive producer that is still able to sell. That's natural - why would I sell my apples cheaper than the other farmer if you need so many apples that you have to by from both of us?
This marginal price is only for the spot market right? So the key question is more what % of the mix is spot vs longer term. And thus what the overall impact is on total blended price.
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).
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.
It's one single grid. You get coal, nuclear, wind, solar, and everything else. If you buy from a provider, you get that mix.
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.
Do you have any reason to believe the methodology in the linked page is wrong?