Germany's Solar Boom Eases Power Costs as Gas Price Jumps
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Plus there's lots of other stuff happening. Also lots of pushback from those clinging to fossil fuels.
Let me stop you there: the EU budget for 2026 was €193B. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/budget/www/index-en.htm
Basically Europe doesn't have political leadership, nor does the EU itself have a budget larger than the member states like the US Federal budget. In return, the EU, primarily Germany, has imposed "fiscal discipline" which prevents running a short term large deficit in order to make this kind of capital investment.
Also, two hundred billion Euro is a lot of money for anyone who isn't an AI startup.
This would need to be a joint venture as some places are really good for wind, and some places are really good for solar, but not every country on their own has access to those locations. The budget for the EU doesn't matter, because this project would be a separate line item with it's own funding.
Energy independence is extremely valuable. Way way way more valuable then $250B or even $500 or $750B for that matter. Society runs on energy, and if it's not fully yours, you are always a rug pull away from social collapse.
If 2022 was a cold winter, and America had a cold leader, this project probably would have breezed through the bureaucracy in a week.
Remember the EU is just a fancy self-updating free trade agreement, not a nation.
The coordination that the member states have thus far allowed the EU to take responsibility for is ~ "make all our rules be equivalent so everyone's degrees are accepted everywhere, everyone's food is accepted everywhere, we all agree what counts as a safe consumer product, limited range for tax shenanigans, etc."
(And for this, they get denounced as "complex" and "bureaucratic").
Actual direct investments do also exist, I just missed out on one for startups 20 years back apparently due to a rules change, but it's peanuts compared to what member state governments do directly.
Not if your top politicians are on putin's payrol like Orban and Merkel.
Macron says €300B in EU savings sent to the US every year will be invested in EU - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46722594 - January 2026 (207 comments)
Europe can go fast when it wants to.
How Europe Ditched Russian Fossil Fuels With Spectacular Speed - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/ukraine-n... | https://archive.today/yxGp2 - February 21st, 2023
> But what the past year has shown is that it’s possible to go harder and faster in deploying solar panels and batteries, reducing energy use, and permanently swapping out entrenched sources of fossil fuel.
> Solar installations across Europe increased by a record 40-gigawatts last year, up 35% compared with 2021, just shy of the most optimistic scenario from researchers at BloombergNEF. That jump was driven primarily by consumers who saw cheap solar panels as a way to cut their own energy bills. It essentially pushed the solar rollout ahead by a few years, hitting a level that will be sustained by EU policies.
Why are you spending €250B on corporate subsidies instead of giving us €250B?!
Why is it a "problem" for voters (aka the taxpayers) to ask such questions to their leaders to justify on how their tax money is being spent? To me this feels like basic transparency that keeps democracy in check.
To me it's the problem if politicians don't have or don't want to answer those questions because then, either they're grifting or they're incompetent.
It's not like we don't have a laundry list of mismanagement, couch corruption cough, of governments spending money on bullshit with nothing to show for, while stuff healthcare keeps being underfunded.
So yeah, if you spend my money, you better have an answer.
Germany has slightly better numbers from being a bit more south, and they also primarily use gas for heating rather than electricity, which reduces seasons effects on consumption.
The period with highest production is the period of lowest consumption.
How can millions of car batteries be managed efficiently without heavy environmental damage? EVs don't scale for all even with serious infra (recycling, on spot change, fast chargers).
The only viable solution is to continue burning and burning, if we don't want to severely degrade our quality of life: now fossils, a little woodchips like Sweden and in the end biofuels, synthetic fuels and hydrogen. And let anyone use nuclear at their own taste. Solar/batteries cannot extend beyond a small window and wind is not reliable.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merit_order [1] https://www.eurelectric.org/in-detail/electricity_prices_exp...
Not the best decision, and a major reason why Germany uses so much coal and gas today. But outside some special circumstances nuclear isn't cost competitive with other renewables anymore, so for future plans it doesn't really matter
[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/12mo/monthly
As other comments mentioned, in a more perfect world, they would've run those nuclear generators longer to avoid emissions. Alas, we live in an imperfect world. Keeping grinding towards net zero.
If you build oil wells that produce say 1Mbpd (million barrels per day) in oil then, depending on what area of the world you're in, the production declines. In the Permian Basin (fracking in the US), that decline rate is 15-20%. So, in a year you need to build 150-200kbpd of new wells just to maintain your current production.
So why does this make fossil sticks politically sticky? Jobs.
If you build a wind or solar farm it requires almost no maintenance and has no decline. Windmills need some maintenance. Power lines need some maintenance. Solar panels need to be cleaned. The last one can mostly be automated. But all of this requires a whole lot less work than drilling a bunch of new wells.
And why is nuclear so politically problematic? Because of failure modes. And it's super-expensive. HNers like to wave away the worst disasters and pretend with basically no evidence that Chernobyl or Fukushima can't happen again. Fewer than 700 nuclear power plants have ever been built. Not one has been built without government subsidies. Nuclear defenders will focus on operationg costs and brush over capital costs for this reason.
As a reminder, Chernobyl's absolute exclusion zone 40 years later is still 1000 square miles and Fukushima's clean up is likely to take a century and the cost will likely exceed $1 trillion. For one incident.
I'm sorry but nuclear is not going anywhere. The future is solar.
Submarines and Carriers of the US Navy, managed "Hyman Rickover style". They may have had mishaps, but not nuclear related.
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover )
Problematic was the handling of their nuclear waste, but that got privatized at least partially, so don't do that. Let it stay military, administered and operated in the same successful "Rickover style".
Maybe have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Grid_Corporation_of_Chin... , too.
Also standardize on only a few, small modular models, and fuels.
Not making every single one a special snowflake, needing its own special fuel.
Their more compact size would also eliminate the bottleneck of forging the containment vessel, enabling shipyards to join in, for example. That's another https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale to consider.
Since being military, and well managed, they could also burn higher enriched fuel, utilising more of the precious stuff, instead of turning about 97.5% to 99% into waste.
If this is deemed essential for the functioning of a nation, why privatize that?
Why not make it military?
Regarding nuclear, how much money did the ITER member states dump into something that is always 10 years away? That money could go into solar/batteries or fusion.
Any solar energy is welcome, but energy prices are ruining households anyway. Especially those that were told by the government 30 years ago that natural gas is the future.
The EU cannot leave energy policy to Trump and Putin and hope for the best. Gas is not only needed for heating. It is needed for producing fertilizer. The whole policy of letting Russia hoard its resources and be the last country with the highly valuable raw material for the chemical industry is insane. Especially for those countries that fear Russia.
Why is it, some always repeat the same argument without giving a single thought to the follow-up challenges and costs?
Why is it, some always repeat the same argument without giving a single thought to the follow-up challenges and costs?
I've lived in Germany, it's always so funny seeing Germans always complaining but never taking action, or a lot of "too late for that" nonsense. Always tons of excuses for bad policy.
Maybe it will help stop other countries from making the same mistake if people don't let everyone forget.
Of buying gas from Russia? Don't worry everyone's going solar now. It's cheaper than gas and nuclear.
(she worked and lobbied for the gas sector before joining the current government)
(Edit: unless, perhaps, they're installing their own solar arrays, which many single-family and duplex homes do, but not the apartment buildings most of us live in.)
More renewables is the answer. We need to build so much that power becomes almost free (already the case in the summer at high noon, see [1]).
[1] https://energy-charts.info/charts/price_spot_market/chart.ht...
I think we should solve the "It's cloudy sometimes" problem with state built, extreme oversupply. Also giant solar farms in the southwest and large HVDC power lines to send that everywhere.
There's zero reason why "We make more power than we use most of the time" ever has to be a "problem". I think we should have so much unused power that it makes sense to suck CO2 out of the air to make fuel and chemical feedstocks. Air capture at that scale would be an insane engineering and manufacturing problem though.
You probably shouldn't vote for me though. I have dumber ideas too. But the "Lets do Solarpunk for real" one is probably not harmful to anyone. Except for a bunch of rich families in Texas.
Terraform is working on that - burstable synthetic methane generation using cheap catalysts that you can afford to idle, only generating methane when electricity is cheap.
Price graph 2015 - 2025: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Maybe something happened, like... a war.
i guaranty you that my electricity costs were 22c in mid-2022, jumped to 47c in either late 2022 or January 2023, and just went up from 47c to i don't know what in February (i got the notification of an increase but didn't bother logging in to see the new prices).
It actually went down, unless you are with a scam-company or had a time-limited offer run out.
> but _nobody_ "on the ground" is seeing it.
Everyone who cares is seeing it. You have to change your contract, that's how the market works. Too many people seem to not understand this aspect.
i have yet to see a single solar panel on an apartment building in Brandenburg, Germany, whereas a large portion (perhaps even a majority) of single-family and duplex units here have them. Perhaps they're more common in the richer parts of the country where a profit can be more readily turned, but not up here.
These cost about 300-400 euros in local Aldi or Lidl (yes they sell them occasionally) with inverter, ready to plug-in (800W limit). At these prices they're accessible to everyone
It's inaccurate to assume that "300-400" is readily within anyone's reach. 300-400 is virtually a king's ransom for some of us.
> 1-4 modules with a microinverter plugged directly into an outlet
Demand on the grid is going up.
What's driving up the cost is that all those rebates and 0% loans for solar, heat pumps, etc, etc, tax advantages for qualifying installers, etc, etc, etc, all that stuff is paid for by loading it into the transmission and distribution charges, the "cost of the wires and pipes" on your bill.
Ergo... claims of lower electricity costs are BS, in that electricity's not getting cheaper per unit but is getting more expensive per unit for those without the ability to supplement their residence with solar/geothermal/household nuclear reactor/whatever.
The economically sensible way to do it is to pay individual produces for their power at the same rates they'd get if they were a "real" provider. This would be substantially less, so you'd have to provide much more than one joule to the grid to offset each joule consumed from it. With this, someone feeding their home solar power into the grid is still paying their share for transmission and generation, and there's no undue burden on other customers.
If you are paying a lot more, consider changing the provider.