Hacker News Reader

Comment by mutlimind | Hacker News Reader

In the past 2 decades Germany has blown hundreds of billions of dollars into renewable energy. Now we have the highest electricity price in the world. It is all socialism. Zero market :-(

View on HN

> Now we have the highest electricity price in the world.

Imagine what that price would have been if the renewables hadn't been there and they bought only "green" gas plants instead.

Or "green" nuclear, but we don't talk about that in Germany anymore

Oh, but you are aware that we need to DOUBLE our installed capacity for gas by 2030 in order to be able to manage our electricity grid towards renewables, right? Page 25:

https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...

Nowhere on p 25 can I find this. Maybe you mean p 27, and I don't get what argument you are trying to make. Yes, there would be more gas capacity, but for green gas.

“Green gas”. You mean Biogas?

That isn’t really an option: https://www.capital.de/amp/wirtschaft-politik/kann-biogas-ru...

They likely mean hydrogen.

Like an unproven technology at industry scale to power 50% of Germans electricity need reliably - all within the next 7 years? We don’t even have fast internet. Yeah.

What's industry scale? We have the technology to burn hydrogen and we have megawatt-scale electrolysis. What else do you want?

Where do u get the hydrogen from and how do you transport it at the scale required is one of these “questions for starters”. Megawatt scale isn’t really gonna cut it - the largest one in Germany has 110 MW (?) so we would need almost 1000 of them to cover our need when the sun doesn’t shine or there aint no wind

You make it in one of the thousands of electrolyzers you build and transport it in the same way you transport natgas.

It's right in your own source that they are talking about hydrogen. Page 27

The price is determined by the most expensive generator. Without renewables, prices would have been even higher

Come back with "market" once the CO2 price hits the real costs. Estimates I've seen range from 200€-700€/tCO2e. Until then we're borrowing billions of Euros from the future every year to burn more fossil fuels.

The energy is traded using Direktvermarktung and that's purely a market.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com