Solar Generation Surge Sends European Power Prices Below Zero
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Note that "absorbing surpluses" does NOT require energy storage in the form of batteries, which is expensive and not necessarily green. Another option is grid-interactive buildings, that can harness energy surpluses in near-real-time when they arise [0]. Hopefully we seem more of these buildings.
I hope that we can have enough vehicle chargers at workplaces that help absorb excess supply too.
It won't be long until during seasonal peaks we will have multiples of demand available to be dispatched on the grid, during the sunny hours.
I've been trying to think of applications that will benefit from this coming future for about a decade, but have not yet hit upon the sort of application where capex is low enough that this sort of big swing is easy to use.
China’s Batteries Are Now Cheap Enough to Power Huge Shifts - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-07-09/china-... | https://archive.today/DklaA - July 9, 2024
China Already Makes as Many Batteries as the Entire World Wants - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-04-12/china-... | https://archive.today/8Dy4D - April 12, 2024
Off grid users have this problem currently when building solar+battery systems. They can pretty reasonably afford to install enough battery to cover a couple of cloudy days in winter, but if you think about two weeks of solid cloud cover the battery planner goes nuts. The solution is to install a sane amount of battery, enough for 2 to 3 cloudy days, and a small backup fuel generator for those few days a year when the solar falls short.
Does this solution scale to the grid? It involves a fuel plant that sits idle for the vast majority of the year which is not great for paying off its construction costs. It would almost certainly have to be subsidized by the ratepayers, but since they're otherwise getting almost free solar power maybe this can still work. It's also bad news for the fossil fuel extraction industry. There isn't much need to drill baby drill when you're only burning fuel for like two weeks out of the year.
You can if it's solar panels! You can just turn the inverter off! The surplus is not in itself a problem, only the dark winter months.
There will be spikes for demand and supply, and the grid is a real time market. There are already spikes and drops in usage as humans wake and sleep.
Rooftop solar power plants are physically able to stop producing, this requires some firmware changes so that they stop putting power into grid when someone orders them to. But there is no market or political will for such solution.
Regarding nuclear power: it is a great technology for the base load (edit: I mean firm power), but there's always going to be fluctuations in consumption, which needs to be met with fluctuations in generation. Grid interactive buildings can help mitigate this fluctuation.
As shown by nuclear plants bidding negative so they don’t have to shut down.
Baseload is about the electrical demand, not the generation. The minimum demand across a period of time.
Which is why I said ”traditional baseload”. In other words: our need for 100% uptime coal or nuclear plants.
We can. Solar panels can be disconnected. Wind turbines can be stopped. Dams can be stopped and dump water without energy production.
This is so wrong I can't resist ... I turn off the electricity pipe multiple times a day with a light switch, and as far as I can tell in my 6 decades of existence the electricity has stopped flowing every time with no ill effects.
What are are perhaps trying to say is you can't just shut of some sorts of power generation - like coal and nuclear. But as another poster pointed out, that's a limitation of those technologies. Wind, solar, gas and even diesel generators can be turned of near instantaneously.
The nuclear that random posters here believe in is magical and mysterious and not at all related to the nuclear plants that exist in the real world.
"And today, to give you the exact numbers, we manage close to 400,000 devices in real time. That's about 1.6 gigawatt of power that can be turned up or down at any moment in time and space. And that's where consumer devices become really powerful." [1]
1. https://www.volts.wtf/p/making-sure-smart-devices-can-talk
If we don't build our systems to take advantage of the cheap prices, we are leaving tons of money on the table. Or rather, we are shoving money into the pockets of utilities unnecessarily.
Negative prices come from lots of places: bad predictions fo fossil fuel operators that can't adjust their thermal plants in time, subsidies that incentivize solar prices up to that subsidy price, congestion on the grid driving some of these poor decisions, etc. But zero-marginal-cost power sources like solar and wind will change the market for the better.
Prices are continuing to fall, and we will see where sodium batteries end up on the cost/safety side too as they start to be scaled up over the next few years.
Last century's energy tech is pretty much fully baked and complete; but solar and storage are like computer tech in their cost behavior and always getting cheaper. Places in the developing world will build microgrids that are cheaper than possible with natural gas and big transmission grids.
When the sun is not shining and wind is not blowing and your country invested heavily into renewables (like United Kingdom) then you have basically two options. Build a lot of gas power plants, as only they have sufficiently quick cold start time (about 1h) or buy electricity paying (very high) spot prices.
Building gas power plants sounds good, but it costs money and you need a lot of them, plus, they emit CO2, defeating the whole purpose of this green transformation. So UK went with the second option, that's why they have the greenest energy on the World... and the most expensive one.
As a result, outside areas with predictable weather (that is deserts) it is much better to simply use technology that came into use 70 years ago (indeed in June this year it will be exactly 70 years) with great success: nuclear power plants.
And be done with all the paradoxes.
It is still not operational. Nuclear is too slow. As well as not especially cheap either.
There's also a lot of market stupidity in the UK: the marginal price for the most expensive generation sets the price for all generation. In some cases this results in weird situations like wind farms paying back the government because the electricity price was too high for their CFD.
The key is to not design each reactor as a unique snowflake.
Russia's Rosatomexport is building roughly similar VVER-1200 power plants within about ~6 years from the first concrete. E.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooppur_Nuclear_Power_Plant
They are indeed "nothing special" plants.
How many nuclear power plants has china built during a similar period? How many did France when they were building out their grid?
This isn't a technical problem.
Their latest plant is 7x over budget and 13 years late on a 5 year construction schedule.
The EPR2 program is continuously being delayed, with the most recent news being a absolutely massive subsidy program and hopefully final investment decision in mid 2026. With the current target date being the first reactor finished by 2038.
China is also massively scaling back their nuclear power ambitions. Since 2020 they have been averaging 4-5 construction starts a year leading to something like a 3% nuclear share of the grid at saturation.
Compare with 15 years ago when they were targeting a French like 70%.
About 1/40th of the amount of renewables they built in the same period.
It feels quite strange to base our data on half a century old data because you don’t like the recent data experience.
Shin-Hanul (Korea): 12 years.
Olkiluoto (Finland): 18 years.
Flamanville (France): 17 years.
I did not even need to cherry pick those. Your estimates are wildly unrealistic.
Also note: Those times are from begin of construction, not start of planning (!!).
I have not yet met an advocate that will talk about the real, existing, challenges to nuclear the same way that renewable energy advocates talk about the challenges. Go and listen to a podcast on renewables, and it's all about what's not working, what's working, where the opportunities are, and what needs to be changed with the tech. Go listen to a nuclear energy podcast and all you get is wishful thinking, rose-colored glasses, and papering over the real problems that face the real projects.
Edit: for example of the podcasts, here's Jigar Shah on Decouple https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwN1MCtBkVk giving the hosts a dose of reality. And Shah is far more optimistic than nearly any realistic person on nuclear, the Liftoff plan (https://liftoff.energy.gov/advanced-nuclear-2/) that his department produced starts from an unrealistic current position and then assumes massive gains somehow to get to a competitive position. It's rose-colored glasses in itself, but at least it shows a plan of how to make nuclear realistic.
There are lots of wind and solar advocates completely glossing over the difference between nameplate generation capacity (maximum capacity) and intermittency and the value of an intermittent source in the market (marginal rate payment schemes vastly overvalue intermittent sources). That doesn't make it ok for nuclear advocates to do the same, but your portrayal of nuclear advocates as uniquely biased is inaccurate.
I agree with you that Jigar Shah knows what he's talking about and is worth listening to, but disagree that he is some magical thinker wishful optimist about nuclear in particular. He would say that basically, by the time you include the cost of additional gas generation (which is like, fully supply-chain constrained through 2030+) and battery storage, everything costs more than $100/MWh and nuclear looks competitive, even at Vogtle 3/4 prices and especially with some experience curve effects.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
At the same time storage is absolutely plummeting in price with the latest auctions in China landing on $63/kWh serviced for 20 years.
Then we have comprehensive grid modeling:
See the recent study on Denmark which found that nuclear power needs to come down 85% in cost to be competitive with renewables when looking into total system costs for a fully decarbonized grid, due to both options requiring flexibility to meet the grid load.
> Focusing on the case of Denmark, this article investigates a future fully sector-coupled energy system in a carbon-neutral society and compares the operation and costs of renewables and nuclear-based energy systems.
> The study finds that investments in flexibility in the electricity supply are needed in both systems due to the constant production pattern of nuclear and the variability of renewable energy sources.
> However, the scenario with high nuclear implementation is 1.2 billion EUR more expensive annually compared to a scenario only based on renewables, with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour.
> For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved, which is substantially below any cost projection for nuclear power.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...
Or the same for Australia if you went a more sunny locale finding that renewables ends up with a grid costing less than half of "best case nth of a kind nuclear power":
https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost/GenCost2024-25Co...
Meaning the advocacy is not driven by best-effort current estimates of efficiency/cost/benefits-- its the other way around, leading to such a high number of overoptimistic takes on it.
But in fact early reactors (e.g. Marcoule, or Tricastin) got built faster than the later ones (=> possibly because Chernobyl happened, and everyone reevaluated risk). So that hypothesis is clearly wrong.
And even if build times of under a decade were a realistic target for US/Europe (which I see no indication for)-- how many plants would we need to build first to hit those improvements, in your opinion? If we needed just a single full planning/construction iteration, then we could expect those miraculous 5-year-on-budget-reactors to come online in like 2050. Thats basically the best case scenario (!!). Might as well wait for fusion reactors then (that was sarcasm; fusion reactors are gonna be irrelevant in fighting climate change for exactly the same reasons; too much complexity, too expensive, too slow).
No. At $160/MWh? Maybe competitive with renewable costs 15 years ago. Most certainly not with renewable cost now (and those still trend down).
> build times are vastly better than the 25 year timeline you're calling a "best case scenario" here
That timeline is for finishing one plant at currently speed, and then planning and finishing a ton of new reactors within 5 year buildtimes directly after. But I see zero confidence that this is actually realistic, not even from the the companies that just finished building Vogtle...
If you order the bids low to high then pay the highest bid then a) you encourage honest (i.e. lower) priced bids and drive expensive/inefficient plants out the market while encouraging new low price entrants who can guarantee they'll get used (because low bid) and make money, driving the market price lower.
The problem is the expensive gas caused by Russian invasions and planning a market pricing mechanism around such events is kind of silly when you can just windfall tax to fix the problem quickly and easily if the energy companies aren't all run by your mates from private school.
But also generation ain't the whole cost, there's the grid fees and taxes. The latter made sense when burning coal and now are looking likely to be shifted to gas.
Collar prices on wind farms are actually a genius bit of financial engineering, guaranteeing minimum funding in a volatile market at low cost by capping the profits.
A better answer is to deploy more storage technology, such as better and distributed batteries, in communities. In addition to sucking up the excess power from the solar wind, it also makes local grids more resilient because the power is held near where it is needed and not dependent on a centralized power plant.
2. Nuclear power plants can load-follow. Unlike renewables.
Building nuclear plants to then operate them in load following mode is just stupid. If the things can't even compete economically when you build them at pre-existing sites and run them at >90% capacity factor, how would you ever justify building new ones as basically glorified peakers plants, that run barely half the time!? Why would anyone pay for that?
First, the fact that there absolutely is base load is completely independent of how you supply that load. Now you can try to supply it with intermittent renewables, but you will fail, and you will fail with huge costs.
"While the LFSCOE-95 are only slightly lower than the LFSCOE for dispatchable technologies, they are about 50% lower for intermittent sources, which challenges the economic sanity of 100% intermittent renewable targets."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605...
Also, the cost of intermittent renewables isn't zero. The price becomes zero and even negative (and that makes it clear that it's the price, not the cost, because cost can't go negative like that), because the electricity becomes worthless or downright harmful.
Cost is going to continue to go up as you require ever more overcapacity that cannibalizes itself more and more. And it cannibalizes itself even more than it cannibalizes reliable suppliers.
Anyway: just look at what the vast majority of industrial nations are doing. They are combining nuclear for reliable and controllable base-load with intermittent renewables for variable load.
Or look at the DOE's "liftoff" documents: nuclear lowers the cost of decarbonization.
https://liftoff.energy.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/LIFTOF...
Yes going "full solar" or "full wind" is expensive, but thats a strawman; the "obvious" solution in my view is a bunch of storage capacity, a lot of gas turbines (in GW, but run at very low capacity factor) and a sprinkle of better grid connectivity on top. Let the market figure out the best ratio (thats what it is best at).
> Anyway: just look at what the vast majority of industrial nations are doing. They are combining nuclear for reliable and controllable base-load with intermittent renewables for variable load.
My perspective is almost everyone who tried nuclear recently basically failed except China (think Olkiluoto, Vogtle, Flamanville, Hinkley C), and in China its ~5% of the grid, they lately install literally 5 times as much renewable power per year (which is already assuming a 20% capacity factor, so extremely conservative estimate) and no trend reversal in sight.
PS: That liftoff document is comically biased:
That page 1 comparison table contains a proxy for "dispatchability" where nuclear is ahead of gas, a column for "direct heat application" where nuclear is ahead of geothermal (and coal/gas), and the maintenance/operating costs are "concentrated local economic benefits" instead. Admittedly had to chuckle at that.
Economically, they only get to be bad for nuclear power economics if you put silly laws in place that unreasonably favor the intermittents. There is nothing inherent about this. The fix is easy: don't put silly laws in place. If you have them, remove them.
Pretty much the entire world is doing nuclear + (intermittent) renewables.
Are you seriously claiming that all of them haven't figured out the economics of this?
Your "perspective" on new build nuclear is noted, but it does not have much perspective. Myopic would be more accurate. All the projects you mention except one were EPRs. The EPR that its manufacturer discontinued, because it was too difficult to build. Hmm...
All of these projects were FOAK builds, aka "prototypes". FOAK builds are well known to be more difficult to build than regular NOAK builds. Because they are prototypes. With the Vogtles, they started building before some of the plans were fully finished and it turned out those plans weren't actually buildable. Ooops. This is obviously not going the happen on the 2nd build. Because you now have something that actually was built, so it is very obviously buildable.
Furthermore, all of these reactors were (or are being) built in countries that had not built nuclear reactors for some time and thus had little to no institutional knowledge, skilled personnel, or experience.
And no, these projects did not "fail". Finnland is very satisfied with its new reactor, which has already lowered electricity prices and achieved 88% capacity factor in its first year. (Although IMHO it is a bit too large for such a small country).
The EPR as a design has failed. China, for example, has also built two of them, and decided against building more units of the type, opting instead to standardize on a variant of the Westinghouse AP-1000 and a home-grown type, the Hualong One. Again, EDF itself has also discontinued the model, opting instead for the vastly simplified EPR2 for future builds.
The Vogtles are now producing electricity. The prices had to be raised in Georgia to pay for these problematic builds. To now just below 15 cents / kWh. Which is still less than half of the price of electricity in California at over 30 cents / kWh.
(See: https://poweroutage.us/electricity-rates )
Note: the worst-run nuclear projects are still better than the best renewable projects.
And the Vogtles went so "badly" that they are now looking to finish the VC Summer plant that was abandoned (two more AP-1000s). Poland is also building AP-1000s, as is Ukraine.
And yes, China now does a pretty good job of building. Because they have experience. Their first two AP-1000 reactors also took around 10 years, not that much better than the Vogtles. But now they have learned how to do it and are building their adapted and up-rated CAP-1400 in 5 years for $3.5 billion. Same modern, passively safe reactors. And the red-tape is apparently worse than in the West.
And of course, when Germany was still actually building reactors, it built them in the same sort of time-frame, for similar amount of money. The clue is to build a proven design, build a bunch of them and overlap the builds.
We know how to build nuclear reactors quickly and cheaply. We just have to start doing it again.
And no, the liftoff document is quite accurate. "Comically biased" just means that Reality™ does not conform to your prejudices.
Why don't you interpret it from the perspective of companies (which need to buy energy to do stuff) and consumers (who need to buy energy to be comfortable)? These are the actual buyers.
Then you'll see why solar and batteries win all, and utilities, with their badly potholed power highways with massive tolls to consumers, slowly reduce in importance.
Now cut this at worst case to 10-30 that is purely storing power in summer for winter. And you really start to need very very very cheap per unit storage. Even multiply couple a times and it is still very tough.
Remember we are talking about cents per kwh here. Margin just isn't big.
Forcing new built nuclear power on the ratepayers would today lead to a self inflicted energy crisis.
The question is also how do you match said nuclear plant with the grid load?
In California it swings between 15 GW and 50 GW over a year.
Or do you suggest that we build peaking nuclear plants?
£92.50/MWh 2012 prices = 153 EUR/MWh in 2024 prices and current GBP/EUR exchange rate. If Sizewell C goes ahead then this reduces to under 150 EUR/MWh.
Transmission costs will be less than for renewables given the line's higher utilisation and proximity to load, unlike offshore wind up in Scotland.
> The question is also how do you match said nuclear plant with the grid load?
The UK wholesale market, BETTA, allows bilateral trades. EDF will sell the electricity to their retail arm and will just bypass the wholesale market. A similar arrangement will probably be made for Sizewell C and British Gas, for instance.
> Or do you suggest that we build peaking nuclear plants?
Perhaps the cheap renewables can be curtailed instead.
I see a whole lot of talk about how to force the consumers to pat for it.
Why do you want everyone’s energy bills to massively rise to fund horrifically expensive nuclear power?
It will simply become a race where everyone tries to the utmost degree to decouple themselves from your nuclear grid and you leave the poor to shoulder the cost.
It seems like you are working backwards from having decided that we must build horrifically expensive new built nuclear power and now are diving into one more insane argument steer the other trying to justify it.
Rather than starting from the problem: we need cheap power to decarbonize society.
I don't see a whole lot of talk about how consumers are being forced to pay for solar and wind. For instance, Hornsea is attracting £194.31/MWh = $252.70/MWh. https://register.lowcarboncontracts.uk/INV-HOR-001/
> It will simply become a race where everyone tries to the utmost degree to decouple themselves from your nuclear grid and you leave the poor to shoulder the cost.
Strangely that is the game being played with solar panels on houses. Self consume and then feed into the grid as much as possible on sunny days to try and offset the expense of long winter nights. Let the poor who don't own their own house or can not afford panels shoulder the cost.
> we need cheap power to decarbonize society
Agreed, but where is the evidence that wind and solar leads to cheap power in the winter? When times are easy prices may be low, but when wind and solar don't produce the system falls back on natural gas.
Why didn’t you bring the most recent allocation from the same area?
Because you would have to accept £47/MWh as the viable price in 2025?
https://register.lowcarboncontracts.uk/AR4-HRN-010/
I love that instead of having cheap prices almost all year around and falling back to backups a few days or weeks a year we should instead have horrifically expensive nuclear power filling the grid at the height of summer. Logic or prices be dammed.
Pure insanity.
This is the same Hornsea 3 which got a price increase for 3 * 360MW chunks of this power station up to £54.23/MWh 2012 = £75.46/MWh = 97.84 USD/MWh. These are due to be delivered in another 3 years.
https://register.lowcarboncontracts.uk/AR6-HPT-010/ https://register.lowcarboncontracts.uk/AR6-HPR-010/ https://register.lowcarboncontracts.uk/AR6-HOP-010/
The AR6 strike price for new wind farms is £58.87/MWh (2012 prices) or £81.92/MWh or 106.24 USD/MWh current prices, which are due to be connected in 2030.
> falling back to backups a few days or weeks a year ... Logic or prices be dammed.
The devil is in the details. How much backup is needed depends on how much the wind/solar is overbuilt ... overbuilding leads to cannibalisation and eventually curtailment. Out-of-wholesale-market capacity payments are needed to keep the backup gas plants from shutting down.
And UK off-shore wind projects are being offered at £150/MWh even now.
And of course you don't prioritize the variable/random suppliers over the ones that can provide stable base load. Speaking of California: highest electricity prices in the continental United States. Georgia, where those "catastrophic" Vogtle-3/4 reactors were built has less than half that. Including the rate increase for the Vogtles.
Same story in Europe: Germany has the highest electricity prices in the EU. And that's without the extra subsidy that used to be paid for via the electricity price and is now paid for via taxation. (Fun exercise: form the intersection of the set of taxpayers and the set of electricity users)
Note: the absolutely worst, most catastrophic nuclear power builds (which for some reason the only ones anti-nuclear lobbyists ever cite) are more effective than the best renewables.
Because you would have to accept £47/MWh as the viable price for offshore wind in 2025?
https://register.lowcarboncontracts.uk/AR4-HRN-010/
And there we are seeing solar contracts at $10-30/MWh depending on labor costs.
But of course. The solution is of course horrifically expensive nuclear power coming online in the 2040s to fix this massive problems you say we have today. Logic be damned.
The UK's problem is not too much green energy. It is the insufficient integration of the European power grid and less than ideal investments into green energy on the part of other European governments.
Even if you ignore safety concerns and political resistance, nuclear will always loose on the economics.
You are against gas peaker plants (for renewables) because they are expensive/produce CO2, but as a solution you suggest building nuclear reactors (which are much more expensive) and then ALSO need the very same peaker plants on top (or buying electricity, or massively overprovisioning nuclear power, which would be ruinous)?!
Running gas turbines on H2 is absolutely possible (there are already operational plants made to run it), and thats a perfectly viable longer term contingency in case the battery approach stops improving.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE/72h/hourly
Wind and solar combined are barely above 50% for an hour in Poland
A smaller system (i.e. 3kwp, no storage) will break even within 10 years for basically everyone, if you can buy panels at usual market rates and have energy prices in excess of 25 Cents/kwh. But in Germany basically no new residential building is built without at least 8 kwp rooftop solar due to quite generous subsidies for capital costs and feed in tariffs.
But yes in Germany I think even pure grid batteries should pay for themselves with variable price tariffs. If you would only pay for the battery. But that only holds if you need to have an electrician there anyhow. That also explains why every _new_ building gets solar (not sure about the frequency of batteries)
I did the calculation for another discussion yesterday. For larger battery systems you can get 10kWh for about 2.4kEUR and with that 240EUR/kWh the battery would amortise itself quite quickly (6 years, ignoring interest [0]). But the Balkonkraftwerk batteries are more 1.6kWh (+ 1000W panels) + transformer for 1kEUR. The solar generation changes the calculation a bit [1], but if I ignore that then we are at 625 EUR/kWh, which would at least double, maybe triple the payback period (and then ignoring interest becomes much more relevant).
However this is largely academic as for my calculation you'd need to use more than 20kWh per day (2 cycles @ 10kWh). The cheapest battery-only normal-outlet system I could find was 900 EUR (but the AC/DC transformer is already included) for 1.6kWh, so 562 EUR/kWh. I don't think I even use the 3 kWh/day for that system... And we are talking <100 EUR/year savings. In the end (residential) electricity is just not that expensive (in terms of household budget)
[0] With a dynamic price rate you could do two cycles per day (loading in the night and at midday with lack-of-demand-cheapness and solar-cheapness) on 250 days/year and a spread of 8ct/kWh (there is some variation, but that should be somewhat conservative) you can get 500 cycles/year and about 40EUR per battery-kWh installed. [1] In the calculations above I took a rough look at the pricing data in Germany https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c... and picked numbers for reasonably simple calculations. With solar you would essentially do the Midday charging for "free" from the panels, increasing the price spread in the evening. One could also take time-of-use rates for the calculation, which (currently) typically offer a structure of -6ct, -6ct and +4ct at night, midday and evening (vs morning prices)
You can buy this Balkonkraftwerk for 1,099 Euros, it comes ready to plug in: https://solarhandel24.de/collections/balkonkraftwerke-mini-s...
If I scale down my (partially shaded) 12kwp installation, this 1.78kwp plant (which apparently is still legal under German legislation, which allows for up to 2kwp, not 0.8 kwp, as I erroneously wrote above), will generate 1.246 Mwh per year.
If installed today, you'll get 7,94 Cents per kWh that you feed into the network and buying electricity comes at about 29 Cents/kwh. If you consume half of the Balkonkraftwerk's generation directly you'll save 180 Euros. If you feed in the other half, you'll get paid almost 50 Euros.
At 230 Euros per year, you'll have recouped your investment after 4.77 years.
A battery does not make any sense on that scale. It would severely decrease return on investment because its main use case (running asynchronous high loads like heating and charging cars) are not available in this type of installation.
Pure PV installations (without any battery) are practically always profitable within 10 years in Germany, as long as you can guarantee at least 50%, better 70% direct consumption and your plant is not pointing straight north and/or is shaded completely.
Batteries are nice to play with (and ours would have a 12 year break even time at current prices) but if I'd optimize for ROI, I'd never include them and instead scale down the kwp of my solar to hit 65-75% guaranteed direct consumption.
As such, the payback time is almost entirely a decision based on local regulatory policy, unconnected to the actual cost of the systems. The US also uses fragmented regulatory policy to make our residential solar cost many multiples more than other developed countries' costs.
Australia does it right. First, they allow a global free market of panels, second they have uniform and cheap permitting, third they have consistent policy on interconnection of the panels to the grid. IIRC US residential solar is typically >$3/kw, and it's usually $1/kW or less in Australia.
You can get a ~440W panel for around 40€. Latest generation and industrial grade.
There are dozens of shops where you can pick them up after ordering.
Two factors really, cost of connecting to grid won't change, you will be more directly charged for peak load capacity. And on other hand produced power either pays little, or you could get it from grid for very cheap.
We don't have seasonal energy storage technologies, so in winter when the sun doesn't shine, the only reliable energy comes from fossil fuels.
The lack of reliable winter-time generation is now slowing down the adoption of heat pumps. I'm most familiar with the German situation, and it simply can _not_ transition to heat pumps because there's not enough generating capacity. Even though heat pumps are more efficient than just directly burning gas for heating.
So Germany had to outright _subsidize_ new natural gas power plants. But it's all fine because they pinky-swore to make them "hydrogen ready".
A better market response is to add _capacity_ markets where operators can buy committed generating capacity. This will de-incentivize adding of cheap low-quality generation, and provide a market boost to energy storage and/or nuclear.
Go look at these countries grids carbon intensities and tell me they have been ”mostly flat”.
You do know that nuclear power takes about 15-20 years from political decisions create horrifically large to an operational plant.
What problem in the 2040s are you aiming to solve? Should we just not build heat pumps until then while waiting for this nuclear power to come online?
That would be pure insanity.
If you look at Germany since 2014, the end result is not great: https://www.nowtricity.com/country/germany/
Compare that to France: https://www.nowtricity.com/country/france/
The graph goes to 2024. In Germany since 2011 coal is massively down, nuclear is down to zero fossil gas is stable. It is all replaced by renewables.
Then you go and make the amazing comparison that we should care about one instant, rather than the cumulative emissions and progress towards a decarbonized grid.
Given a blank slate with money to spend what does Germany do today to combat their current 330 gCO2/kWh?
Do they continue to invest in renewables chipping away at the problem given todays renewable costs or lock in their current emissions, which you decry, for decades while waiting for horrifically expensive nuclear power to come online?
Just show me the pathway to at least 60g/kWh CO2 footprint for Germany. I'm not asking for too much.
Otherwise, it's the same old story: "Oh, we already invested $500B in Energiewende, and it didn't deliver. But it's too late now to switch to nuclear, so we need to raise the energy prices more for more Energiewende goodness!"
> The graph goes to 2024. In Germany since 2011 coal is massively down, nuclear is down to zero fossil gas is stable.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germanys-energy-use-... - natural gas has been rising, even though the overall energy use is dropping. It's directly replacing coal.
But wait! There's more! German electricity imports rose by stunning 23% compared to 2023 with net 32TWh imported, total yearly generation is 585TWh.
> Do they continue to invest in renewables chipping away
If the renewables are chipping away at the problem, then why is Germany _directly_ _subsidizing_ natural gas power plants to the tune of $20B?
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germany-agrees-subsi...
I can actually tell why. The day-ahead electricity spot price markets are getting murderous. The last year, the maximum price rose to almost $1000 per MWh: https://www.smard.de/page/home/topic-article/444/215556
And even the pinky-swear promises to be "hydrogen ready" are not enough: https://www.energyconnects.com/news/renewables/2025/january/...
The proof is in the pudding. The German "green energy" transition has reached its practical limits. We can see some variations in the CO2 intensity due to weather and business cycle effects, but it won't go down much more than the current level.
The limiting factor right now is the fact that we have about 6GW of coal (and I think about 2GW of gas) production that's always on (those plants primarily provide heat, electricity is a by-product)
We decreased coal by 25% since pre-pandemic [0] and coal is responsible for 70-80% of the total emissions [1] (I'd rather use ourworldindata but they only have data up to 2023), which corresponds closely to the 25% reduction of CO2 intensity of electricity generation. So for the 60g/kWh we are 30% of the way there (starting at 400g/kWh). We are currently _not producing_ enough renewables to do significantly more than putting coal (and gas) temporarily to 0.
> German electricity imports rose by stunning 23% compared to 2023
That's correct but also irrelevant, as we always had the generation capacity to produce the shortfall ourselves. And yes, we absolutely will need to have some fossil backup capacity. As long as we don't need it often it produces not much CO2 (it's just expensive, hence the capacity market will be required). But that is fine, that is what regulators are there for.
> The last year, the maximum price rose to almost $1000 per MWh
It was for exactly one hour. And yes, that might still be a problem, if you are on a spot-market rate. But it's also only one of 8440 hours.
> The proof is in the pudding. The German "green energy" transition has reached its practical limits.
Again: We haven't even reached the point of renewable overproduction (which is the least one would need for any storage solution to even be an option!). This year might be the first one where we will have significant amounts of time where we will have "solar+wind > load" conditions. And this year is, coincidentally, also the one when we will have significant amounts of grid-level batteries installed. And even a one-hour capacity would move your 1000EUR/MWh to 700EUR/MWh. Beyond that it's much harder to estimate, but I would be shocked if 6 hours wouldn't be enough to push that whole day below 500. Still not sure how valuable that is, it's one of 365 days.
[0] https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&... [1] https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE/all/monthly
Just barely. Germany is now dependent on France and Denmark during Dunkelflaute. It doesn't have enough generating capacity to cover for itself. The last year it happened in November: https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&... and Germany got bailed out by its neighbors: https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&...
Germany probably could have managed the last year's Dunkelflaute with the existing coal generation, barely, but it _needs_ those natgas power plants because there's NOTHING renewable that can replace coal.
> It was for exactly one hour. And yes, that might still be a problem, if you are on a spot-market rate. But it's also only one of 8440 hours.
It was not for just one hour... And even outside of these spikes, the energy is just getting crazy: https://energy-charts.info/charts/price_spot_market/chart.ht... or https://energy-charts.info/charts/price_spot_market/chart.ht... . Compare it to 2019 to be amazed.
> Again: We haven't even reached the point of renewable overproduction (which is the least one would need for any storage solution to even be an option!).
My prediction for Germany:
1. It will phase out coal and replace it 1-for-1 with natgas.
2. The emission decreases will happen almost exclusively due to coal->natgas transition. My napkin math tells me that it can't go a lot lower than 230g.
3. Germany will not be able to perform the EV or heatpump transition. It'll be quietly sabotaged by the government, because there's no way to provide enough generation.
Here are a couple of studies from 2012 and 2013, charting a way to 100% renewable energy for Germany by 2050: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/de/veroeffentlichungen/studien...
This is a study from 2024, showing 4 different scenarios to reach 100% renewable energy by 2045 (!): https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/de/veroeffentlichungen/studien...
There are dozens of similar studies from academics and think tanks across the political spectrum. Everyone who actually does more than "napkin math" and doesn't have a vested interest in fossil fuels making money comes to the same conclusion: 100% renewable energy is inherently possible for a country like Germany, especially embedded into a European grid.
Is it expensive? Yes. More expensive than using increasingly expensive fossil fuels (the infrastructure for which also has to be renewed periodically) and the consequences of climate change? No, if you believe any serious study on the subject.
Yep. I know that one. It misses a crucial requirement: tons of coke and LSD needed to drug the lawmakers to let it pass.
The price tag for the _lowest_ estimate is around $1T. And it assumes that some miracles happen with power-to-gas and the transition to hydrogen.
For that price, Germany can just copy&paste enough AP1000 reactors and achieve CO2-neutrality with known technology.
> There are dozens of similar studies from academics and think tanks across the political spectrum.
And yet, Germany is planning to rely on fossil natgas until at least 2040-s.
You write this in the same week that German lawmakers actually passed almost $1 Trillion in new debt allowances for infrastructure and defense.
> Yep. I know that one.
And you conveniently ignore the dozens of other that have been published since and came to the same conclusion: a transition to renewable energy is possible and the cheaper option.
> And yet, Germany is planning to rely on fossil natgas until at least 2040-s.
Yes, to a constantly decreasing amount. That is the point of a "transition".
Well, yes. I'm honestly surprised it passed. I guess a shadow of a new war can make even the German bureaucracy move.
> And you conveniently ignore the dozens of other that have been published since and came to the same conclusion: a transition to renewable energy is possible and the cheaper option.
Your own links provide $1T as the _lowest_ option. More realistic options are more expensive. And ALL of them require the development of new technologies, which is inherently risky.
Nuclear is literally cheaper, even if we assume no savings from large-scale production. But it's not being considered, because Greenpeace wants Germany to use coal and gas.
> Yes, to a constantly decreasing amount. That is the point of a "transition".
And that's the point. The transition could have been already over, if Germany had chosen nuclear in 2000-s.
This is blatantly false. Even the cheapest conceivable nuclear (which is not realistic in Germany) is more expensive than any form of solar and wind: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/en/documents/p...
> The transition could have been already over, if Germany had chosen nuclear in 2000-s.
The finish reactor OL3 came in at 11 billion Euros and produces up to 13 twh/year. Germany currently consumes 500 twh/year. So we'd have had to build close to 40 reactors at a cost of more than 400 Billion Euros to satisfy today's demand.
By 2050, Germany's electricity demand will be around 2,000 twh/year. For that we'd have to build more than 150 OL3s at a cost of 1.7 Trillion Euros. How's that cheaper than 1 Trillion Euro for renewables and batteries?
At the same time, renewables already provide more than 50% of electricity today and could have provided more, if the Merkel administration had not been actively hostile towards their buildout. And again: per kwh produced, any form of new solar and wind (yes, even including in combination with chemical batteries) is cheaper than new nuclear.
There are certainly some (very) niche use cases where you can make the case for nuclear. Grid-wide baseload at competitive prices in a country like Germany is not one of them.
Germany's emissions are largely flat, most of the little decrease has come from reduction in total electricity production. Emissions are around 10x that of France.
Can’t you even find it good that renewables are massively decreasing grid emissions around Europe?
Here’s the data:
This doesn’t even take into account energy efficiency measures lowering total grid demand.
After more than 20 years of renewables build out, Germany still has 10 times the CO₂ emissions of France. And France achieved that in 15 years, 40 years ago. Again, we've been at it well over 20 years and have barely moved the needle.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333217852/figure/fi...
And still the 2nd or 3rd dirtiest grid in Europe.
So no, what I wrote absolutely stands.
Let me cite you:
> Germany's emissions are largely flat, most of the little decrease has come from reduction in total electricity production.
Here's the data:
That is anything but flat.
The cheap energy future will not come from seasonal storage. It will come from massive amounts of overcapacity. This is exactly what we already have now, even combined cycle gas turbines have capacity factors that are only about 50%. We will see the same for solar and wind: during the seasonal peak, not all of that free energy will be used. And during the seasonal valley of renewable generation, almost all of the renewable energy will be used.
This is going to be far cheaper than fossil fuels. And by having all the storage we're building out, we will see massive increases in electricity reliability that are simply not possible with traditional big grids and large single points of failure.
Sure but we also don't have to care. The production capacity is already there, the CO2 to build it has already been spend. It's only running it, that's adding to the badness. And if we do that for 5% of the year. Then we have gotten 95% of the way there.
But what it does is: 1) it makes fossil fuel based electricity extremely expensive (about 20x except for the fuel) and 2) it endangers secondary uses of those plants. We currently use a significant fraction of the coal-fired power plants (at least 5GW) mainly for their heat. And _those_ needs will need to be covered before we can really turn coal off. Nevertheless: Reducing fossil's capacity factor is a good thing and buys time for other bridges (e.g. power-to-heat and storage) to arrive.
It is a great sign that we get negative electricity prices in these conditions quite regularly now. It means that we actually don't need nearly as much "seasonal" storage as many people seem to think. The capability to store for days and weeks is much more relevant than the capability to store for months.
It's traditional thermal generation like natural gas, coal, and nuclear which can't be turned off in time, and they are the ones paying the negative prices.