Germany set to overhaul subsidy regime for renewable energy
reuters.com
reuters.com
In any case, most of these support contracts have a "contract for difference" structure with a price established by competitive auction. In the early years, the prices were high as there were fewer bidders and large (unjustified) profits were made. But as time has gone on, increasing competition has pushed the prices lower and lower. On a net project-lifetime basis, it's probably now a wash whether you operate a wind farm under a CFD regime/contract or you just compete in the regular market. CFDs require you to reimburse the state when you get paid more than the strike price and so many (particularly wind) producers in the west/north of Europe were hit with large rebate bills in 2022 and 2023 as wholesale prices often exceeded the strike prices after the energy crisis caused by Russia's attack on Ukraine.
At least in the UK and Ireland, some renewable energy companies are opting out of the renewables-subsidy scheme completely. For example, the owners/promotors of the large Oriel off-shore wind project in Ireland are skipping all the bureaucracy and delays associated with the renewable auction process and will build the wind farm to compete directly in the day-ahead wholesale markets.
Of course there is a large benefit to being protected from the volatility of wholesale electricity markets but it seems like we've passed the point where the financial value of such a contract is required to make a renewables project viable.
I believe that politics could get much better results if compromises about the particularities of distribution were always discussed with an open scale factor shared across the entire range of a particular kind of spending (e.g. renewables subsidy), and then the scale factor was decided upon in a separate discussion/compromise.
For non-household consumers, prices are more in line with the rest of the EU: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/images/a/... - and I suspect that statistic mixes small commercial consumers that pay residential rates and industrial ones, because to my knowledge, this subsidy is paid mostly by small consumers while industry and export are exempt...
https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/152973/umfrag... shows that 2014-2021 over six cents per kWh were going to the renewable energy subsidy scheme, and this is directly attributable, not some kind of hand-waving. I believe this was more than the wholesale cost of the electricity (without grid fees and taxes) in many of these years, and I think you also have to add another 19% of VAT on top of that.
In 2022 the subsidy started to be paid from taxes instead, and it was lower because market-based electricity prices went up (reducing the amount of subsidy necessary to reach the guaranteed prices).
It's not ideal if it slows adoption of EVs and Heat pumps because politics prevents you properly pricing the fossil alternatives to thise, but the ideal solution would be for those to be taxed based on their emissions too.
Well that's a fun little quote. If renewables are already a cheaper alternative to power generation, why would you need government funding and safeguards to convince banks to invest in a project?
If the numbers work and a bank can see a clear psth to being paid back they will invest. There's clearly information being glossed over here that would explain why banks aren't willing to invest without government safeguards.
That's obviously not to say we can only have industries that work as an open market, but I'd argue that if they don't then the government might as well run the industry rather than fund these half-in half-out companies that appear to be private corporations but only actually exist because the government blessed them.
Moving away from per kWh production subsidies/guaranteed minimum prices/contract for difference is considered good by energy wonks because it means the renewables developer needs to think about how to sell into a market with lots of renewables. A solar project that only producing during the day at will at some point earn very little in midsummer due to price competition from all the other solar, so guaranteeing them a minimum price is sub optimal. Though already contracts usually have clauses about not paying out if there are hours of zero prices.
The second article is about a mis-estimate of how much money they needed to put aside from government budgets this year because they assumed the Ukraine situation would keep gas prices higher for longer.
So good news for everyone that it's lower, except the government that had to top up renewables developers not getting the agreed rate on electricity sales. If they pay out an extra 9 Billion then the German economy has saved a multiple of that in lower electricity prices, and probably a larger multiple again on gas for non electrical needs.
This means the budget has to be good this time, before they have holes left and right.
PS: The reuters article comes late. Apparently this was already in the news about 10 days ago. E.g., https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/germanys-9bn-...
However, this doesn't get rid of the need for subsidizing energy storage, which is starting to take off thanks to sodium batteries.
Yet, after doing this so-called energy transition for almost 25 years now and spending hundreds of billions of Euros on it, the country still has more than 130 coal-fired power plants while France has only two with one actually being decommissioned.
Despite these facts, there are still plenty of people here on HN and other platforms that are convinced that wind and solar are the way to go instead of nuclear.
I will never understand that!
20 billion Euros would only give you a SINGLE nuclear power plant at best [1].
If the conservative government we had for the 10 years prior hadn't sabotaged the Energiewende we could have hit 100% renewables by now, instead we had the "Altmaier-Delle" [3][4].
France build Nuclear instead of Coal from the get go, if we could turn back time and do the same in Germany too, great. But unless we invent a time machine, the next best thing is investing into the cheapest CO2-Free technology we have right now, and that's renewables.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
1: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/edfs-nuclear-project...
2: https://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/bundestagswahl/true...
As a percentage of total generation nuclear in Germany was never as high as France, but couldn’t they skip the 20 billion euro cost of a new plant and simply restart an existing one?
Also to put things into perspective, Germany deployed as much solar in the last 3 years[1] as it had in total combined nuclear capacity ever (if you sum up every reactor ever build)[2].
0: https://www.bmuv.de/fileadmin/Daten_BMU/Download_PDF/Nuklear...
1: https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/aktuelles/ausbau-erne...
2: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
This is clearly not true. Perhaps you a confusing the nominal capacity of solar plants to real electricity production?
Your source says "The total output of all solar plants rose to 82.2GW" / "Die Gesamtleistung aller Solaranlagen stieg auf 82,2 GW". Whereas in year 2000, Germany produced 170 TWh of electricity with nuclear power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany#...
170 TWh / 1 year is an average of 19.41 GW: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=170%20TWh%2F1%20year
This output is a bit less than the PV capacity installed in Germany over the last 3 years, which is something like 27 GW depending on how accurate the estimates are for 2023.
However, the capacity factor of German PV is about 10%, so the energy produced in 2022 by PV in Germany from 67 GW of capacity was just under 60 TWh delivered. It's probably going to have been around 85 TWh by the end of this year, based on forecasts for installation.
Maybe this will shed some light: https://greennuclear.online/@collectifission/112588204256628...
By own admission of the same guy who said "it can't be done" 2 years ago.
They could have kept nuclear reactors open for way longer. But ... well, go and tell your green voters... It's much better to burn coal.
Nobody in the german government, except for the Pro-Russian bootlickers of AFD and BSW would buy new Uranium from Russia.
If you actually watch the interview you'll also notice that Merz of the conservatives also doesn't want to restart the nuclear reactors[1].
0: https://www.bmuv.de/fileadmin/Daten_BMU/Download_PDF/Nuklear...
1: https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/politik/deutschland/illner-ha...
But in practice as long as you have Greens in the government you'll never be able to do it.
It was the konservative CDU/CSU that set the final decommission date after Fukushima [2].
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xznqbpv0QE
1: https://www.bmuv.de/fileadmin/Daten_BMU/Download_PDF/Nuklear...
2: https://www.sueddeutsche.de/bayern/atomstreit-in-der-koaliti...
I still remember the discussions - they were literally the only ones not wanting to do it - they set hard conditions, red lines etc. Obviously this went against their political program - thus the resistance.
It was FDP that pushed for additional extensions. [0]
They even proposed to buy new fuel (and further extend) but no, of course not.[1]
PS: CDU/CSU did what unfortunately was hyped on TV - fear of 3 headed monsters etc. Greens, on the other hand, don't understand that we have an energy issue right now and extending nuclear reactors for another 5 years would buy us some time. The ideology won. The sad irony is that because of this ideological choice, they had to burn more coal....!!!!
EDIT: just found this [2]. What's more to add. They are admitting they could have kept the reactors open for another 15 years.
EDIT: according to Habeck, it was the chancellor that pushed for the extension. [3] confirmed also here. [4]
So all the Greens actually did was resistance.
[0]: https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/ger...
[1]: https://www.dw.com/en/german-greens-lay-out-nuclear-power-po...
[2]: https://greennuclear.online/@collectifission/112588204256628...
[3]: https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2024-06/robert-habeck-akten-a...
[4]: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-chancellor-decid...
> The chancellor’s decision came only two days after Habeck’s Green Party at a party convention officially accepted a runtime extension only for the two plants in southern Germany.
lol
Getting new fuel for them doesn't make any economic sense.
Your entire argument is an emotional appeal.
Show me the numbers that show that nuclear is cheaper than renewables and I'll change my mind, but until then it doesn't make economic sense, and would only be the "ideological descision making" that you accuse the green of.
It completely ignores the political dimension which is extremely complicated even if you ignore the Greens. For example the fuel elements are sourced from Russia.
Sure, the whole issue is that a reliable grid has to cope with "extremely rare" events too. So having nuclear plants to provide baseload power in such circumstances can be important.
The dynamics are so crazy, anything you've read or learnt about this 2 years ago is already outdated.
Extrapolating this another 2 decades into the future, all of the world's primary energy consumption will be covered by PV.
Those subsidies, in particular those in Germany, have had an important role in enabling this.
Now, what Germany did with nuclear is still insane, and it's not all smooth sailing to a carbon free 2045, but I think that should pretty clearly help you understand why people think that way.
(1) https://www.economist.com/interactive/essay/2024/06/20/solar...
Restarting them could be faster and more cost effective than burning coal while waiting for new solar and wind installations.
Lazard is US focused but they put running a nuclear plant at 32 dollars and the cheapest wind at $27 and cheapest solar at $29.
That's not including any refurbishment costs. I think France publishes some numbers recently for the cost of their refurbishment program and I don't remember them being particularly great for nuclear, even if they met their cost projections.
1. Nuclear power also never produced a profit in Germany / had to be subsidized the entire time.
2. France has some weird agreements with their former colonies in africa allowing them to basically steal the resources needed to make atomic energy at their scale viable.
Booth points might be partly wrong, but could be worth looking into
It's in French, but thre's a graph showing the distribution which should be legible.
TLDR: a good chunk (~20%) comes from a former colony (Niger), but it's not the largest. Other main suppliers have not been French colonies.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
If you still buy the same brand of 4$ bread made from exotic imported ingredients and a non-bio-degradable packaging that needs to be stored for thousands of years and can only be bought in 2 Ton Loafs from a government-owned centralized bakery that hasn't baked bread in years, and requires a nuclear physics degree to be sliced.
Instead of buying the 1$ Bread that is currently produced in high quantities, can be bought from your lokal bakery, has bio-degradable packaging, mostly local incredients, can be baked by any engineer and bought and cut by private individuals.
Then I think that could be called nostalgic at best. It certainly doesn't speak of economic literacy.
The "Dunkelflaute" is extremely rare [0].
Just look at the data: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by...
My top comment was "we need both" and the reply literally two messages down is "no. Nuclear bad." I give up.
Because, nuclear loses according to all of these metrics, for a start:
1. the cost of energy produced.
2. operational flexibility (ability to follow demand).
3. operational cost (the average nuclear plant in the US employs 750).
4. project risk
Pretty much everything beats nuclear on 1, 3 and 4 while gas turbines, batteries and hydro beat nuclear on 2.
It doesn't even win on the fuel cost metric, given wind turbines and solar PV have zero costs in this regard.
What needs to happen is baseload storage, batteries, pumped hydro, hydrogen/ammonia.
> and they continue being a saftey issue.
this just gets tedious. I'm been in exploration geophysics and resource estimation, modelling, resource processing, etc for decades and batteries, hydrogen | ammonia aren't going to be any safer than existing nuclear reactors.
eg:
South Korea battery maker apologises for deadly fire but says it complied with safety rules
following a massive factory fire that killed 23 workers
and there's not much of a renewables industry without seperated rare earth products
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynas
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/malaysia-allow-l...
this comes with radioactive waste storage requirements that rival the nuclear inustry.
Here in the Netherlands grid is over-capacity and cannot be expandee easily because it should have been planned 10-15 years ago. Grid storage is in a worse state than the grid itself.
A related report: https://www2.deloitte.com/nl/nl/pages/energy-resources-indus...
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/annual-grid-s...
It’s exponential growth, very similar to the growth curve of solar and wind. What’s different is the curve is even more explosive than either, to the point that it will surpass daily renewable consumption in little over a decade.
^ And crucially, grid storage doesn’t care so much for mobility or gravimetric density, so it can look very different to energy storage in an EV for example
† note "capacity" has a sometimes misinterpreted meaning here. It means instantaneous generation and/or the opposite how many watts can be taken off the grid for later. Pumped Hydro can discharge for longer, but in a world of cheap intermittent generation, this isn't particularly helpful.
France doesn't really seem to have a plan for when their current fleet of nuclear reactors reaches decommissioning age. There's no schedule for replacing them, much less expanding generation capacity.
Wind and solar with nuclear is the way to go, in my opinion the perfect balance.
You still need it for those very low probability situations that would be disproportionately expensive to also cover with storage (since storage becomes exponentially more expensive the more you build, since it needs to be used exponentially less).
At some point, it'll hopefully be possible to eliminate carbon emissions from gas plants entirely with CCS or by burning synthetic gas.
With a turnover of over 15.7 billion euros, and a 46 percent growth increase in comparison to 2022, the energy storage sector’s expansion in Germany continues at a fast pace ...
The toal capacity of household storage devices now has reached about 6 gigawatts, roughly equal to the capacity of Germany’s pumped hydro storage installations, the association said.
I agree that nuclear should have it's place in a modern energy grid for the time being, but the skepticism towards renewables from nuclear proponents is also not right. It may have been justified twenty years ago, but the world is different now.
The thing is that there's isn't one answer to how to smooth out renewable production, making it harder to mentally model than a simple "just build nuclear".
I'm going to just give a few ones that you need to take together:
* You don't need pumped hydro. There's a massive yearly 650 TWh of hydro in Europe, which can serve as a "virtual battery" by using it only when other renewable sources are low. The same, to a lesser extent, is true for bio-methane.
* Electricity is just about 10% of primary energy. The other 90% contain many sources of demand that are extremely amenable to load shifting. Cars, heating, to name two massive ones.
* Short term variations in renewable output (i.e, anything shorter than seasonal) can be smoothed by batteries, eventually. Not today, but, like PV, battery cost is on a staggering exponential decline.
* The EU has an integrated grid, nuclear will continue to be used in all European countries at least indirectly through imports.
From a high level economic perspective: The low and declining cost of a kWh PV provides a massive economic incentive to solve this.
You build batteries like what California is doing.
> possibility of length, geographically vast "cold snaps"
The correlation between renewables drops off literally exponentially as a function of distance, creating a diversification effect that makes this situation sufficiently rare. The bigger the land mass, the better. You also overbuild by a bit to handle droughts, and curtail in normal periods. In the circumstances that it still happens, you use natural gas as a backstop, or you use long-duration clean storage like hydrogen (which remains more hypothetical/expensive currently, but that will change).
Hydrocarbons have had centuries of process improvements and optimizations - I think it's only fair to give renewables a chance to catch up, no?
In general, renewable electricity is solved. Energy transition problems is now about marine and air transport for which no applicable solution exists yet (ammonia is too problematic from too many angles and hydrogen stubbornly refuses to really take off).
* Battery storage is minutes of electric output
Cold snaps and inversions (clouds are low, no wind, cold) are counted in days to weeks.
You're mixing up the use of batteries for grid stabilization with their use for storage.
But it might come as a shock to you, cities are taking in order of MW to GW
A typical grid-storage battery will have enough storage to dispatch power at 100% of its rated capacity for 4 hours.
Of course if you draw out the energy at less than full capacity, it will take longer to fully discharge.
The largest battery currently in the US - Moss Landing - for example is rated 750 MW/3,000 MWh - which means it can sustain 750MW of output for 4 hours and it does this daily.
This is not "20 minutes".
New solar parks often come with a couple of hours of battery storage. You numbers seem to be out of date.
Or the kind of people who don't buy the assurances (from players, scientists working in the industry, and fanboys)
Or the kind of people who are not convinced by statistics about the "low" past impact of accidents and leaks, because they can see how they're downplayed and under-measured by governments trying to save face or promote further nuclear plans, but more importantly, because it just takes one grave accident to kill tons of people, doesn't matter if 200 previous accidents were "tame" enough.
At least it wasn't a nuclear factory that could fall into the hands of ISIS (also operating there), and whose materials could be used for bringing havoc all over the globe.
Germany near NL.
Current energy price 0.25cents/kWh. Sunny days gives 40kWh of production with 50% of it being used. Current rate is 0.807cents/kWh when feeding back to the grid.
And that you get paid 0.00807€ / kWh sent back, which is more than what you pay to consume?