Has electricity decoupled from natural gas prices in Germany?

We will do a small survey and put up a detailed map of your neighborhood (like openstreetmap, see the slide in this talk [1]). We hand out door to door flyers and organise a weekend barbeque neighborhood party where everyone can come see how the cable between neighbours goes roof-to-roof, window-to-window or garden-to-garden between power routers. See our cost price bifacial solar panels and the large batteries.

We find that within a few weeks a few hundred people signed up for the cooperative and we start installing the first 10 houses. Most people invest in solar panels and batteries at wholesale prices installed by volunteers. Others get a loan to pay for this. You wind up getting payed for the panels you bought or paying around 1 dollar cent per kWh, saving a few thousand dollars per years for decades.

In the US the Rocky Mountain Institute and its founder Amory Lovins describes this as 'grid defection' and it happens on a large scale now.

Fiberhood has cooperatives forming all around the world, both rural and urban: Ukraine, Peru (near Iquitos by the Indian tribe on the Amazon River Bank, Southern Spain, Slovenia, Finland, The Netherlands, Australia.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbqKClBwFwI&t=5574s

Blah blah contracts blah markets blah always an excuse in the UK for why everything is more expensive than other countries

Is there a wall in the way? Tear it down. Make it happen

God we demand so little of our politicians in reality

You can only get an accurate cost if you create a simulation of every step of the industrial processes of manufacturing the silicon ingots, the glass, aluminum, the silver and labour that goes into making solar panels. Same for batteries, electronic components, etc. You have checks and balances in the simulation, for example you get the cost price of all the material components that you can check against the actual price for sale at the factories, the shipping cost, the wholesale prices on offer, the retail prices in different countries, the installation cost, the underlying loans and their interest rates and labour. But that simulates just the cost of the materials, you have many other factors. For example did the energy used to make the solar cells come from solar or from coal plants? Did you make thin film solar or silicon wafer solar cells. What battery chemistry. How much losses if your solar panel overheats 3 percent of the time. What latitude and longitude did the solar panels operate, at what angle to the sun? Compared with such accurate cost simulation models calibrated with actual prices paid your claim is very vague and hand-wavy.

The Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) is a metric representing the average total cost of building and operating an energy-generating asset over its lifetime, divided by the total energy output produced during that period. It serves as a, "break-even" price per unit of energy (e.g., $/MWh), allowing comparisons between different technologies.

I'm referencing all the prototypes I built over the years, the final mass manufactured model will be an order of magnitude cheaper because it will from only CMOS and SiC chips that we designed. Current 4x25Gbps/40kW models cost under 800 euro's (936 dollars excluding VAT and import tariff), the mass produced custom chip based model will be under 100 euro's.

A power router replaces your breaker box, your solar panel and battery inverters and obsoletes all the power supplies in your house. It starts your washing machine, dryer, fridge, freezer, heatpump and optionally runs a small datacenter in your hot water vat from which you shower or brew tea. A power router saves more than 10% electricity now lost in your power inverters. It bypasses the national grid and the laws, taxes, grid costs, profit margins and transmission losses and the price for electricity generation. It saves thousands of euro's per year on your energy use and internet bills and optionally your water and sewage bills.

A power router rewires the electricity infrastructure of the planet, energy expert Saul Griffith references it in the names of his organisations Rewire America and Rewire Australia, his youtube lectures, his books Electrify, Plug in and the Big Switch. Amory Lovins references it in his books and talks and Eben Moglen in two of his talks.

It is a bunch of chips in a network of conductors (metal cables) and optical fiber that connects buildings together in a neigborhood.

You directly connect a network of solar cells (there are between 60 and 122 solar cells in each solar panel) to mppt dc-dc inverter chips that output around 3 volts directly to a network of battery cells (that form a battery pack) and that aggregate flows into a runtime programmable first stage dc-ac-dc inverter module that than outputs (power routes) high voltage AC to legacy machines, USB-C low voltage to charge all your electronics and high voltage DC to cables to the neighborhood (a replacement of the national grid) or to the ev cars and trucks.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Merik-Voswinkel/publica...

The Guardian reports that Nuclear power produced ~20% of Germany's electricity in 2011.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/nuclear-pow...

A nuclear reactor moves the entire market down, including the costs to the consumer when he buys solar energy.

Here is a UN document explaining it: https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2025-09/GECES-21_2025_...

We are not doing an apple to apple comparison if we are not actually looking at what people are paying. The cost of energy is to have the a stable supply of energy delivered at the time that the consumer wants to buy it. The cost of energy production is thus not just the price of producing one unit of energy in isolation, but to have it transmitted in a stable grid at a date and time specified by the consumer. Nuclear energy and solar energy both produce units of energy, but consumers need for transmission, grid stability and time aspects are completely different depending if they buy nuclear energy or solar energy. They are not interchangeable on those aspects.

The 9.71 ct/kwh is the levelized cost of producing electricity from solar. It is not the same as the average cost of consuming energy. Adding nuclear to the mix would not necessary increase costs of consuming energy, even if the average cost of producing energy would go up.

To make a very simplified illustration of this. A energy broker would happily trade 10 units for energy for 1 unit of energy, assuming that they can dictate when and where each unit get transmitted.

[0] https://green-planet-energy.de/fileadmin/images/presse/2020-...

High gas prices + gap is small -> Big opportunity to undercut via cheaper methods like solar -> attractive investment -> more new builds

High gas prices + gap is wide and widening -> Smaller and smaller opportunity to invest in solar, as the market is already dominated by solar prices -> less attractive investment -> less new builds

Am I missing something here?

Have the costs dropped for that as well?

My assumption, given how the UK numbers look when there are negative prices but still a little bit of gas running, is that shut down/ start up for a CCGT is so undesirable (expensive maybe?) that a 100MW plant which can say throttle to 5MW would rather pay to give you 5MW of electricity for the next half hour than switch off the plant and provide nothing then need to start it back up in a few hours.

I don't know what "throttling" looks like for this equipment. It seems implausible that these units have no ability to control their fuel usage/ power output at all, just binary on or off, but on the other hand presumably in practice it's far from infinitely variable.

Suppose Saudi can produce 100 barrels at $10 (cost+profit) each, and Brazil can produce 100 barrels at a price of $50 (cost+profit) each, and John wants to buy 120 barrels.

- John will pay what is necessary for his Oil, but seeks out the cheapest price available. - Sellers Brazil and Saudi will accept a sale of their own production if their minimum price of $50 and $10 is met respectively, but will sell to the highest bidder for their supply.

You'd think John will go to to Brazil to buy 100 barrels at $50, and then buy 20 barrels in Saudi at $10.

But guess what, Brazil could simply go to Saudi and buy their 100 barrels for $10, and then sell them to you for $50.

So now Saudi has demand from both John and Brazil at a $10 price. Who gets to buy? Well whoever decides to bid more to convince Saudi to sell their oil.

If John increases his bid to $15, Saudi will prefer that to Brazil's $10 bid. But Brazil would then increase its bid to $20, knowing they can sell it to John for $50.

This bidding keeps going up until the $50 point. For Brazil there is no longer any profit in buying Saudi Oil at $50, and selling it to John for the same price. For John there is no point in bidding more than $50 for Saudi Oil, because he can get a $50 price from Brazil.

Any point below $50 means a bidding war starts between John and Brazil, because at less than $50, Brazil has a cheaper source of oil (Saudi) than their own production cost.

And this is true for every commodity in a free market. It's not some 'UK system', it's just the consequence of free trade.

Of course in reality it's trading intermediaries that do the bidding, it's not Brazil buying from Saudi, but traders jumping in to arbitrage. But this is a simplified example.

What I never understood from this arrangement: can a renewable provider legally refuse to accept the gas-price (either by charging less, or simply refunding a large chunk of the difference?

I understand growth may appear to suffer if renewables refunded the difference between gas prices and renewable prices+profit+moderate-growth-expenses; but it would also mean the public would flock massively to that provider, which may allow for faster growth under certain conditions.

Are renewable bound by law to accept the instantaneous peak-demand-electricity-prices (typically gas peaker prices)? And even if they were forced to accept that payment, are they explicitly forbidden to return a large chunk of the extortionate difference to their customers, in order to comply with acceptance of the price while reimbursing their customers?

This may sound contradictory, but if a major expense for renewables is the siting and commissioning of a renewable wind/solar farm, it may be possible to rake in more profit by growing customer base instead, and then use that money to outcompete the competitors in the siting and commissioning landscape?

A bureaucrat can dictate that x Euro's correspond to y Dollars, but the free market tends to find a price rediscovery mechanism returning closer to true rates. Do we really believe that of the huge search space of all possible policies that this pricing strategy (of forcing everyone to sell at the instantaneously most expensively generated energy) happens to be the most optimal trajectory at a fundamental level? Or do we believe some undiscovered or unused known policy could actually grow renewables faster? If the real world differs from fiat, the market will find a way to bypass fiat and unmask its weak points, at the end of the day money talks.

Furthermore the current setup may result in unintended consequences: at a certain point renewables may be disincentivized to expand capacity, as it would decrease the percentage of time the peakers are needed, and thus decrease their income! It's almost a politically introduced stranglehold, to prevent gas peakers from being displaced.

When the Ukraine invasion spiked prices one suggestion was to offer the non CfD renewables a chance to enrol for CfDs, which would reduce their short term profits but guarantee long term predictable profit. I don't think it was actually done though.

Number 1 reason is that power was quite highly taxed, since it is directly linked with pollution and CO2. All powers, but that also means electrical power. The effect is, that european cars are smaller and use less. And also european houses are better insulated. You can measure this, the typical german 4 person household uses less than 50% of the electric power of a 4 person US household. Before COVID I even saw a statistics that this less usage compansated the higher electricity prices, so both norm-households payed the same for electricity. Unsure if that is still true post-COVID.

The other reason is that also a good amount of money is directly invested into the grid, to make it more resilient. And you can also measure that. If you lookup the SAIDI (system average interuption duraction index) of e.g. USA and compare it to Germany, you immediately see why over there uninteruptible power supplies are hardly used except in data centers. SAIDI Germany 12.2 minutes per customer per year, USA 125.7 minutes per customer per year. That's a whopping 10x worse. Not just as number, but also for the industry.

And I heard that the SAIDI in Texas is even worse than the US average.

(But yeah gas is a terrible name for petrol.)

We're both wrong. It's a liquid at room temperature, and it's called not petroleum.

"Football" is a different game in the US because it arrived there from England in the 19th century when carrying the ball was allowed. In England the sport eventually split into distinct sports: association football (aka soccer) and rugby. In America they evolved the game independently but didn't change the name.

Hope that clears it up.

This is untrue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football

There are lots of countries where Association isn't the "football" for the region.

It's one single grid. You get coal, nuclear, wind, solar, and everything else. If you buy from a provider, you get that mix.

Tbh coal definitely should be restarted and used more, there's more reliable supply for coal than for lng.

Unlike modern natural gas boilers which have only a very small tank of water kept hot and use a fire to make more on demand with only a few seconds of delay (you might not even realise this is happening, but of course it isn't actually instant and so there is a small tank of very hot water) the heat pump will need a large tank because you're going to put about a day's supply of hot water in the tank and gradually, over a whole day, re-heat it as needed.