[PaulKeeble]

The past few years has also had Solar continuing to decrease in price so its increasingly going to be the primary choice. On top of that battery prices have been plummeting too so that now Solar + battery is cheaper than other options like Nuclear and especially Gas. Most of the EU will be running on Wind and Solar in the coming years, its a change that is now rapidly occuring based entirely on the rare economics. Solar and Wind are half the price of anything else.

[gregorygoc]

Don’t underestimate the corrupt politics of some countries, especially Germany. There are individuals actively working against the global cost curve and trying to misallocate the capital to gas at the large scale. Katherine Reiche is the primary example. She’s pushing for building as much capacity for gas plants as possible, instead of choosing battery storage as the cheapest option.

[zejn]

Ha, yes, a lot of deniers/delayers are going on about how Germany "wasted" billion on renewables, when in fact they had a booming solar industry, which got nuked by politicians, who changed the policies, as can be seen in 39C3 video "Recharge your batteries with us".

Was the subsidy system which was in effect in 2010's unsustainable? I think so, yeah. But the changed policies resulted in companies producing solar going bust, and the Chinese firms, which were doing fine, were able to buy out the patents and know how.

So, did Germany waste billions? Yes, but by letting the solar producers go bust.

[leonidasrup]

The billion spend on renewables in Germany were not "wasted", there were spend on the primary goal of the German Energiewende, to allow Germany exit nuclear electricity power production.

The 39C3 video "Recharge your batteries with us" is an emotional call to action "We Can Do It!" solar panels everywhere, without showing the other backbone of the German electric grid: the German gas and coal power plants.

I would recommend other CCC video:

"Deaths per TWh" The Price of Energy and Reducing CO2 Emissions

https://media.ccc.de/v/Camp2019-10193-deaths_per_twh

[mbid]

Solar panel production is extremely energy intensive. Germany has one of the highest energy costs in the world. So there was no way for Germany to maintain a competitive solar panel industry.

[AndrewDucker]

If only they'd been able to build enough solar power to bring down the energy costs to the point where they could build solar.

[zejn]

They could also just split the Germany into multiple bidding zones, then north parts of Germany would have a lot of cheap wind power, similar as in Sweden.

[ahartmetz]

Over the figurative dead body of Bavaria. They want cheap energy for their industry, they don't want wind power because it's ugly and bad for tourism, they will maybe accept a little well-hidden solar power, they don't want overland cables because they are ugly, and they don't want underground cables because they heat and dry out the ground. There is also some market distortion because energy is traded as if transfer capacity was unlimited, but when Bavaria buys cheap wind power that can't be moved, they still pay the cheap price but the energy is locally "replicated" at e.g. gas power stations, which is paid by... OK, I forgot, but it's a terrible system.

These "they" are different Bavarian persons and groups depending on topic, but the net effect is that Bavaria is Germany's energy bully.

Fortunately, several gigawatt-class HVDC lines are coming online this year. These somehow happened despite the protests, it's a minor miracle.

[mbid]

> similar as in Sweden

Sweden's electricity is ~40% hydro, ~27% nuclear and ~23% wind. How is this in any way comparable to Northern Germany?

[mbid]

Not sure if you're serious, but this was not viable in the 2010s, or even today in Germany at all because of Germany's high latitude: No matter how efficient solar panels become, they will always be more economical to operate closer to the equator. Anyway, the Chinese factories for the most energy intensive parts of solar panel production mostly run on coal power.

[ben_w]

> Anyway, the Chinese factories for the most energy intensive parts of solar panel production mostly run on coal power.

That's because China itself is mostly coal, not because of anything magical about particular sources. However, coal is now in decline even in China: https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china

Before someone (accurately!) says the decline in coal is tiny and one year doesn't make a trend: This is likely to continue until there is no more coal for the same reason the UK also completely stopped generating electricity from coal: cost.

PV's absurdly cheap. China has a lot of land, doesn't need to care about optimal use of the Gobi desert.

[zejn]

Don't tell the UK they aren't supposed to be getting >15% of grid power via solar panels, because it's more efficient if the panels are in Spain.

[gregorygoc]

Germany has high energy costs, but back in 2010s they didn’t because they had access to cheap Russian gas.

[leonidasrup]

As much as we could discuss the independence of Katherine Reiche from gas industry, how much new gas power plants could be replaced by battery storage? Not much. The new gas power plants will be the backup of the electric production after Germany shuts down coal power plants. This backup, or call it insurance, is for weeks long times when wind and solar don't deliver enough, the famous German Dunkerflaute. There are research projects for long duration energy storage systems, but building using current battery storage technology for week long Dunkerflaute that occurs once a decade event would be extremely expensive.

You have to have a backup, the devastating effects of week long electric blackout in winter in a future Germany heating homes with heat pumps, would be comparable with a major war.

Will there by push, after the new gas power plants will be build, to use them not only as backup, but as gas peakers? Probably yes, but this dependents on future CO2 emission costs and natural gas costs.

Even the previous government was planing expansions of gas power plants.

https://www.ingenieur.de/technik/fachbereiche/energie/12-gw-...

Personally, I think Germany should have not exit nuclear energy production but expand it, but this error was made in 2000s and Germany has to live with the consequences.

[happosai]

Not most of EU but geographically large and diverse and low-latitude countries will. Spain has winds from three different sea areas and is known sunny, so they are in a good position.

[joe_mamba]

Well that' doesn't always scan. Austria has a lot of wind, sun and hydro so its energy prices should be in line with Sweden, Norway, Denmark amongst the cheapest in Europe, and yet it's routinely amongst the more expensive in the EU.

[ZeroGravitas]

Trading across borders seems to be a part of this story.

If your local price is high you can import, if it's low you can export.

If you're at the end of a grid and/or your transmission capacity is limited your price has the possibility to go higher or lower without that damping mechanism.

Electricitymaps has a pricing layer which seems to show central Europe moving in sync when I randomly check it:

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes?sig...

[tonfa]

And the counter intuitive thing is that people in countries with lots of renewables and not so many external links (e.g. Scandinavia with hydro) might be against adding more links since it will increase electricity prices.

[joe_mamba]

So energy in Spain is cheap because they produce a lot but can't sell a lot easily, and Austria/Central Europe is expensive because they sell their domestic energy too easily?

If this is what you meant, then it sounds like an argument against free trade, if it means you keep ending up with the short stick.

[HPsquared]

Free trade doesn't always benefit everyone equally, only a net benefit overall. It's a bit like how people often misinterpret the second law of thermodynamics "but the entropy decreased when the ice froze!"

[joe_mamba]

>Free trade doesn't always benefit everyone equally, only a net benefit overall.

Yeah but everyone has an equal right to vote. If they don;'t benefit, why would they agree to get screwed for the "net benefit" of others?

[ZeroGravitas]

Economists would say that the money coming in outweighs the higher costs and therefore you could redistribute that money and everyone comes out ahead.

Whether that happens in real life is a different question.

[joe_mamba]

>Economists would say that the money coming in

Does that money go directly into my pocket so I can afford the more expensive energy? Or does it go into the pocket of private energy companies?

Because I feel like there's some faults with this "free market", which is mostly just socializing losses and privatizing profits.

[ViewTrick1002]

Electricity is expensive in Central Europe because the ETS system (carbon trading) has made fossil based production expensive.

We’re right in the middle of the transition with maximum volatility swinging between extremely cheap renewables and expensive fossil plants.

[MakersF]

I checked and it looks like ETS are increasing prices of gas produced electricity 20-30€/MWh. So not little (although peaks are around 140€/MWh). But these are taxes that can be used to reduce the reliance on gas (actually, it's mandatory to use them for transition projects).

[happosai]

Austria could be there but they would need to build oversupply of solar, wind and (pumped) hydro to saturate the export grid lines. And currently Austria isn't building renewables at scale. I think there is a strong NIMBY movement so the best places to build wind and pumped hydro are blocked...

[joe_mamba]

>Austria could be there but they would need to build oversupply of solar, wind and (pumped) hydro to saturate the export grid lines

Or, you could reduce the export grid lines. Both have the same effect on supply/demand.

[pydry]

1/5th the price of nuclear.

Probably when combined with batteries it is half the price.

There are some colder areas in northern europe especially where solar doesnt work as well but they also tend to be better served for hydro (which can also store power).

[hn_throwaway_99]

Northern locales though have a much greater energy need for heating in the winter. So the "battery" solutions can often just be cheap heat batteries because there is not so much a thing as "waste heat" - that heat can be used directly without worrying as much about efficiency losses in conversion.

There are already a bunch of examples of Northern locales using these heat batteries - just heat up a big block of something when energy is cheap and solar/wind are overproducing, then use a network of insulated pipes to distribute that heated water.

[distances]

Solar works also in the north, except in the winter of course, and it complements wind pretty well. So solar does make economic sense and is actively built in the north too.

[laurencerowe]

The UK hit a record of 42% peak solar generation around midday one day last month.

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/24/uk-solar-generation-h...

[empiricus]

So sad we could not apply economy of scale for nuclear... The main reason solar and batteries are so cheap is economy of scale.

[tonyedgecombe]

I don’t think we have really tried. At least not in the last couple of decades.

[laurencerowe]

The problem is that nuclear reactors are huge so you're never going to build that many of them compared to wind turbines (thousands) or solar panels (millions).

France plans to build a series of six reactors for its EPR2 programme with each reactor scheduled for completion 1-2 years apart, but that is only expected to reduce costs by 30% compared to the (hugely expensive) EPR.

Small modular reactors hope to improve things but it's far from clear they will end up any cheaper. Historically making reactors bigger makes them more efficient. The Rolls Royce SMR is just under 1/3rd of the size of the EPR so even if successful any cost reductions are not likely to be dramatic.

[pydry]

Small modular mass produced reactors have been tried for about 30-40 years without any real progress on making them cheap.

This isnt for a lack of investment either.

[empiricus]

Europe was spending 200 billions / year on gas from russia. I imagine they could try to build 100 reactors for that price, but it would take a couple of years I imagine...

[pydry]

Gas is dispatchable. You can treat it like a huge battery. Nuclear power not only isnt a substitute for gas, it needs gas as a backup and to mediate supply and demand.

Gas is also waaaay cheaper than equivalent amounts of nuclear power - like 3x cheaper.

[empiricus]

I suspect that you can modulate nuclear power too, but why do it? after you started the reactor it runs practically for free? (the fuel cost is so small; or it costs the same to run full power of half power). disclaimer: I did not read actual details about nuclear power plants designs in the past 20 years, so i'm vibing from first principles and bad memory

[badpun]

How much would it cost to build out batteries which cover entire continent's electricy needs for say three weeks (as there can be 2-3 week lulls of no wind and no sun in Europe in the winter)? Cause that sounds like a lot of batteries. Not to mention, if a freak 4 week lull occurs, we'll go back to Middle Ages for a week.

[pydry]

You would likely get to 97% green energy first with 5-8 hours of storage: https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...

(for Australia it is 5, for other countries it might be 8)

Once you get to that "nice to have" problem of what to do about the remaining 3% of power needs it would probably make most sense to synthesize and store gas (methane/hydrogen) from electricity when solar and wind is overproducing. Gas can be stored cheaply for long durations. The roundtrip efficiency is poor but it's still cheaper than nuclear power on the windiest sunniest day.

The nuclear + carbon lobbies would of course prefer to model green energy transitions by pretending that the wind and sun simultaneously turn off for 2 weeks at a time every year and that electricity can only be stored in very expensive batteries. This is not realistic.

[laurencerowe]

It might not be quite that good in less sunny countries. Similar modest overbuilding of wind and solar in Denmark is simulated to get to about 90% with 12h of storage. This is still good enough though.

https://xcancel.com/enn_nafnlaus/status/1565923581246091264

[energy123]

Australia's CSIRO studied this for Australia, renewables were half the cost of nuclear, factoring in storage and transmission for both renewables and nuclear (yes, nuclear also needs storage because energy demand varies with time). Australia is uniquely endowed with sun and land, so other countries/regions may arrive at different results.

[blitzar]

If you live in Australia, have a house and roof, you're a bloody idiot if you didnt install solar.

[bot403]

You don't even need a roof. If you have enough land then a ground mount system is more convenient and easier to maintain.

[pibaker]

I think by having a roof GP meant lives in a house instead of an apartment. If you don't have your own roof you probably don't have land either.

[leonidasrup]

Australia is also well endowed with coal and no carbon pricing, so for Australia the cheapest form of electricity production is a mix of solar + battery + coal.

[ricardobayes]

Solar still produces even in overcast conditions, during the day. If it's light/medium overcast, most of which Germany usually is it still produces 50-80% of nominal. It only really doesn't produce anything at night or when it snows.

[bot403]

Yes this is one thing that surprised me owning solar. Some days its pretty cloudy and I can still get 2kw or so from my 7kw max.

[crote]

"But what if thing thing that never happens were to happen?"

We'd probably go deep into hydro, fire up every gas peaker plant, and through skyrocketing prices incentivize everyone to switch to emergency diesel generators where possible.

You're talking about a once-in-100+-years event. We'll deal with it the same way we dealt with the various oil crises.

[leonidasrup]

Those once-in-100+-years events are called crises because they have large impact on economy and loss of human life.

For example a short event in US with duration 2 hours–4 days, depending on location, affecting 55 million people.

Deaths: Almost 100

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

The Economic Impacts of the August 2003 Blackout

"Based on the much-studied 1977 New York City blackout. ICF Consulting estimated the total economic cost of the August 2003 blackout to be between $7 and $10 billion"

https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ml1113/ml111300584.pdf

Short blackout: 2025 Iberian Peninsula blackout

"The employers' organization CEOE estimated that the outage resulted in economic losses valued at €1.6 billion."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackou...

[XorNot]

You can't fire up capacity you don't have. Your scenario implies a massive idle stock of power plants.

Who's going to build and run them? They'd be enormously expensive because they'd almost never sell power.

(Of course the answer is if you build 3 weeks of battery storage you can pretty obviously build 4).

[oezi]

But what do we do when the sun isn't shining?

Well what are we doing if the straight of hormuz isn't hormuzing?

Demand will adapt via price signals. Same story as in every market.

[gpm]

> (as there can be 2-3 week lulls of no wind and no sun in Europe in the winter)

This is simply entirely untrue. Europe's a big place, there's not a single day ever where there is no sun in it.

[scythe]

>On top of that battery prices have been plummeting too so that now Solar + battery is cheaper than other options like Nuclear and especially Gas.

I'm a little bit sad that pumped hydro doesn't get more attention in the discussion. It might be too late for it to matter, with improvements in battery prices and ongoing lithium discoveries. But that only underscores the fact that it should have been allowed to matter twenty years ago. Utilities have slow-walked solar all around the world because of concerns about the grid stability, which has been well within the reach of pumped hydropower to fix since many years ago. In fact major pumped hydropower projects were mostly carried out in the United States during the nuclear power optimism era.

It is a little destructive to construct pumped hydro reservoirs. But it generally isn't as damaging as a conventional hydroelectric dam. The reason lies in the source of the water. In a conventional dam, you need a lot of water flowing in from up high, so you dam a major river near its lower cataracts. This disrupts the migration of fish and animals along the river and impacts the whole ecosystem of the rather large drainage basin upstream, and disrupts the migration of fish. But when a closed-loop pumped storage reservoir is created above an existing lake, usually a much less important stream is selected. Its immediate valley is still inundated, but the area of effect is much less. It does tend to prolong the use of the existing dam, but we are already preserving basically all existing dams.

It might still be appropriate in some places where imports are less affordable like Latin America or it might appeal to protectionists in the West. In general, hydro is usually cheap.

[XorNot]

Pumped hydro is objectively worse then batteries.

Anyone can install batteries anywhere at a fairly minimal local fire risk.

A dam is a major mechanical structure which if it fails will straight up obliterate downstream towns, and as such requires a numerous specialized engineering designs and on going maintenance to retain basic safety.

[scythe]

There have been two hydroelectric power plant failures in the United States in the last fifty years, and one near miss. This is among hundreds of dams many of which have operated for more than a century.

A pumped-storage dam also doesn't increase the area subject to flooding. If the upper dam fails, it flows into the lower lake. This can potentially be a design consideration. It's not like a greenfield hydropower dam.

If you want to play the rare catastrophic risk card, battery fires can release highly toxic hydrogen fluoride. But the damage of climate change is far greater than the very small risk from either dams or batteries, which is preventable in both cases with proper maintenance and monitoring. I think the tail risk question is moot, honestly.

[XorNot]

There have been considerably more dam failures though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Dam_failures_in_the_U...

Which is the point: any retained body of water like this is a significant geotechnical engineering project.

[jcrben]

The depreciation of a dam versus batteries can can weigh the benefits towards dams.

[mhh__]

You have to think about these things as a portfolio rather than just by minimum price.

If you have a steel mill for example you need to be able to basically guarantee a certain level of energy production to run it viably because the risk of there not being any power during adverse weather is enough to make it unviable (you can't just turn these things off). This is the reason why gas and nuclear probably aren't going away (or at least shouldn't).

[ViewTrick1002]

If you need predictable price buy futures.

If they increase in price then firm production is stimulated to build to meet the gap.

https://www.next-kraftwerke.com/knowledge/futures-market

[mhh__]

If the grid balance is dominated by bursty renewables then you can potentially price the stable / on-demand generation out of the market (or lead to a massive contango to incentivise said producers)