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Comment by JanSt | Hacker News Reader

In Germany we have massive wind and solar capacity (120GW) and phased out nuclear. Energy prices have constantly risen to above 35c/kwh and our dependeny on gas grew. At the moment it‘s above 55c/kwh for new contracts. We still have very dirty electricity because so much coal and gas have to be burned

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No, the wind and solar capacity is not massive, in fact it is far too small. If it were much bigger, you would have much lower prices. Electricity in Europe is expensive at the moment because of fuel prices.

Also, I don't have the numbers nearby, but I believe gas is mostly used for heating in Germany. Your heating system is outdated - you just didn't care because of the cheap gas from the east.

Stop blaming the technologies that can actually fix this.

The Schröder Government pushed for massive reforms to install Gas heating in homes. At the time this was more efficient than nighttime electric boiler heating, wood heaters or oil boilers. A modern caloric gas oven is fairly efficient overall.

Of course, one most realize that Schröder left the office having signed Nord Stream I only days prior and then immediately proceeded to join the Gazprom Board of Directors as well as serving as Director for the Nord Stream I Ltd. company and later Nord Stream II Ltd. That might be a minor case of corruption, possibly. Who knows, courts haven't decided yet.

The Merkel cabinet I-IV never really pushed to change it, since gas was working fine for the status quo.

Gas is used to cover for wind and solar when that is not delivering. You cannot replace that by more wind and solar.

I don't know why you would call 120 GW massive. Wind (and solar to a lesser degree) have been purposefully hampered by regulation over the last decades (have a look what it takes to install a turbine if you have a big property, or how you can install solar on a house where you rent out portion of it). There are reasons why Germany who was leading in both solar and wind energy, now has hardly any left.

A good example is the plot of installed wind capacity as a function of time here https://www.wind-energie.de/english/statistics/statistics-ge...

You can see there are a couple of bursts of installed turbines and then it slumps down again. The curve very closely correlates with the party in power for the Economy ministry.

Note that's production, not capacity, so weather has an impact.

But yes, Germany didn't follow the same growth as say China because the political right managed to stifle offshore wind a decade ago. Very bad move for multiple reasons.

Wind, PV and nuclear have only a small role in Germany's gas dependency, this isbdriven by industrial and heating needs.

Expensive electricity is driven by the way Germany financed the subsidies for renewables. And those subsidies were paid for by consumers, industrial electricity prices are / used to be rather low in Germany. This pricing structure will change so, if memory serves well.

As already stated, gas isn't burned for electricity in Germany, coal is. The reason why coal is so cheap is way too cheap CO2 certificates. Generally a bad thing, because gas would be better for the climate than coal, the unintended postive side effect is a lower impact of the current gas crisis on electricity generation.

It would of course have been better for the climate to turn off the coal plants first, but it's fallacious to judge the cost of different electricity sources by the retail price of electricity.

Yeah, because we never built the grid and storage this requires to go it full way. Instead right nowadays we are shutting off wind and also biogas production again because of storage and wires lacking.. instead we killed storage projects since long. That's why we will always need dirty expensive base power while discarding cheap clean energy, and the exchanges gamble.

https://www.klimareporter.de/strom/deutschland-fackelt-gas-a...

https://www.makawind.de/index.php?show=news

https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Pumpspeicherkraftw...

No, we don't. We barely started building "massive wind and solar", then stopped at not all massive and passed lots of laws to make it difficult to add more.

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