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Comment by 08-15 | Hacker News Reader

Germany has the most expensive electricity in the world (excluding Diesel powered islands). Electricity in neighboring France is a third or so of the price. Is that because France gets so much more sunlight?

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Besides what the sibling pointed out: choices and subsidies, determine consumer prices. Coal subsidies still are vastly larger than renewable subsidies world wide. Compare the price of new wind and new nuclear stations.

That admittedly doesn't give you total system cost, but you need solid models for that anyways, as electrification of mobility and heating will completely change demand structure in the electricity secto.

The consumer price of electricity in Germany and France tells you absolutely nothing about any of that.

I totally forgot about coal subsidies! Those must be the reason why German electricity was cheaper 20 years ago, when we still mined hard coal in the Ruhr area.

You seem to not be very well informed and unwilling to learn.

In the UK a low carbon tax rendered coal completely uneconomical and they smoothly phased out coal without any price hikes. The guaranteed price for rendering the new Hinkley Point nuclear power station economically viable is much higher than the price of new wind/solar, and higher than the economically optimal system cost of a 100% renewable system.

Selectively citing macro facts without considering the complicated details is no way to get to an understanding of the system constraints and possibilities, or the true cost structures. You can't avoid detailed modelling of the trade-offs involved.

> You seem to not be very well informed and unwilling to learn.

Cute.

I live in Germany. Nothing you write will change the fact that I pay 30 Euro-cents per kWh. Nor will it change the fact that people in France pay much less and people in Poland pay even less than the French. Nothing that happens in the UK has any impact on that, and neither do you models of trade-off. Your models also don't change the amount of CO2 emitted per capita, which is twice higher in Germany compared to France.

7ct of that is power generation. The rest is taxes and other things.

Nuclear does massively reduce the French CO2 Footprint.

And French taxpayers will pay for storing the waste forever.

No, it is because the politicians have decided that the largest industrial consumers of electricity should be exempt from the EEG fee. Instead of subsidizing renewables the end result is that the EEG fee is primarily a heavy industry subsidy at the expense of residential consumers.

The EEG fee is anti efficient because of the exemptions. As money more is invested into renewables the market price goes down. Renewables are guaranteed a fixed payout per kWh so lower market prices mean that the EEG free has to be increased but since heavy industry doesn't have to pay it, the industrial electricity costs are trending down to 0 for them. When a large consumer is paying nothing then someone else has to cover that shortfall and residential consumers get no exemptions so they are the ones who have to pay for everything.

That’s only true for household electricity prices and is solely explained with the high taxes. Electricity prices without taxes are only a bit higher than the EU-average.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

That's vastly inaccurate. It is correct for household prices, but for energy intensive industry the difference is much smaller, something around 2 cents.

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