Was the subsidy system which was in effect in 2010's unsustainable? I think so, yeah. But the changed policies resulted in companies producing solar going bust, and the Chinese firms, which were doing fine, were able to buy out the patents and know how.
So, did Germany waste billions? Yes, but by letting the solar producers go bust.
These "they" are different Bavarian persons and groups depending on topic, but the net effect is that Bavaria is Germany's energy bully.
Fortunately, several gigawatt-class HVDC lines are coming online this year. These somehow happened despite the protests, it's a minor miracle.
Sweden's electricity is ~40% hydro, ~27% nuclear and ~23% wind. How is this in any way comparable to Northern Germany?
-- which has 4 bidding zones.
Sweden has lots of potential for long-term energy storage as hydro power, which makes wind power viable. Northern Germany is mostly flat and there's not even close to enough storage capacity (on the order of ~weeks) to make a wind powered grid economically competitive.
There has been a long standing request to split Germany into multiple price zones[1], because Germany as a single zone does not adequately match the underlying network transmission limitations and there have been multiple occasions where power flowed through neighboring zones, which in turn required both network upgrades[2] in the zones neighboring Germany and expensive redispatch[3] in the south Germany. Industry in the south of Germany fights this back as this would mean the energy prices in the south would rise (and drop in the north), as when the transmission lines are congested, the prices start to diverge.
Keeping Germany a single zone is essentially a subsidy to Bavarian industry. The industry fights this so hard that it has basically become an energy insider joke.
[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/grid-operators-recommen...
[2] https://www.pse.pl/web/pse-eng/news/news/-/asset_publisher/6...
[3] https://www.ffe.de/en/projects/potential-for-reducing-redisp...
That's because China itself is mostly coal, not because of anything magical about particular sources. However, coal is now in decline even in China: https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china
Before someone (accurately!) says the decline in coal is tiny and one year doesn't make a trend: This is likely to continue until there is no more coal for the same reason the UK also completely stopped generating electricity from coal: cost.
PV's absurdly cheap. China has a lot of land, doesn't need to care about optimal use of the Gobi desert.
The 39C3 video "Recharge your batteries with us" is an emotional call to action "We Can Do It!" solar panels everywhere, without showing the other backbone of the German electric grid: the German gas and coal power plants.
I would recommend other CCC video:
"Deaths per TWh" The Price of Energy and Reducing CO2 Emissions
You have to have a backup, the devastating effects of week long electric blackout in winter in a future Germany heating homes with heat pumps, would be comparable with a major war.
Will there by push, after the new gas power plants will be build, to use them not only as backup, but as gas peakers? Probably yes, but this dependents on future CO2 emission costs and natural gas costs.
Even the previous government was planing expansions of gas power plants.
https://www.ingenieur.de/technik/fachbereiche/energie/12-gw-...
Personally, I think Germany should have not exit nuclear energy production but expand it, but this error was made in 2000s and Germany has to live with the consequences.
If your local price is high you can import, if it's low you can export.
If you're at the end of a grid and/or your transmission capacity is limited your price has the possibility to go higher or lower without that damping mechanism.
Electricitymaps has a pricing layer which seems to show central Europe moving in sync when I randomly check it:
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes?sig...
If this is what you meant, then it sounds like an argument against free trade, if it means you keep ending up with the short stick.
Whether that happens in real life is a different question.
Does that money go directly into my pocket so I can afford the more expensive energy? Or does it go into the pocket of private energy companies?
Because I feel like there's some faults with this "free market", which is mostly just socializing losses and privatizing profits.
But for the end user, whether you're being ripped off by a local or a foreign energy oligarch, it doesn't really matter, people just want to pay less.
Yeah but everyone has an equal right to vote. If they don;'t benefit, why would they agree to get screwed for the "net benefit" of others?
We’re right in the middle of the transition with maximum volatility swinging between extremely cheap renewables and expensive fossil plants.
Or, you could reduce the export grid lines. Both have the same effect on supply/demand.
Probably when combined with batteries it is half the price.
There are some colder areas in northern europe especially where solar doesnt work as well but they also tend to be better served for hydro (which can also store power).
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/24/uk-solar-generation-h...
This is simply entirely untrue. Europe's a big place, there's not a single day ever where there is no sun in it.
(for Australia it is 5, for other countries it might be 8)
Once you get to that "nice to have" problem of what to do about the remaining 3% of power needs it would probably make most sense to synthesize and store gas (methane/hydrogen) from electricity when solar and wind is overproducing. Gas can be stored cheaply for long durations. The roundtrip efficiency is poor but it's still cheaper than nuclear power on the windiest sunniest day.
The nuclear + carbon lobbies would of course prefer to model green energy transitions by pretending that the wind and sun simultaneously turn off for 2 weeks at a time every year and that electricity can only be stored in very expensive batteries. This is not realistic.
We'd probably go deep into hydro, fire up every gas peaker plant, and through skyrocketing prices incentivize everyone to switch to emergency diesel generators where possible.
You're talking about a once-in-100+-years event. We'll deal with it the same way we dealt with the various oil crises.
Who's going to build and run them? They'd be enormously expensive because they'd almost never sell power.
(Of course the answer is if you build 3 weeks of battery storage you can pretty obviously build 4).
For example a short event in US with duration 2 hours–4 days, depending on location, affecting 55 million people.
Deaths: Almost 100
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
The Economic Impacts of the August 2003 Blackout
"Based on the much-studied 1977 New York City blackout. ICF Consulting estimated the total economic cost of the August 2003 blackout to be between $7 and $10 billion"
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ml1113/ml111300584.pdf
Short blackout: 2025 Iberian Peninsula blackout
"The employers' organization CEOE estimated that the outage resulted in economic losses valued at €1.6 billion."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackou...
Well what are we doing if the straight of hormuz isn't hormuzing?
Demand will adapt via price signals. Same story as in every market.
France plans to build a series of six reactors for its EPR2 programme with each reactor scheduled for completion 1-2 years apart, but that is only expected to reduce costs by 30% compared to the (hugely expensive) EPR.
Small modular reactors hope to improve things but it's far from clear they will end up any cheaper. Historically making reactors bigger makes them more efficient. The Rolls Royce SMR is just under 1/3rd of the size of the EPR so even if successful any cost reductions are not likely to be dramatic.
This isnt for a lack of investment either.
Gas is also waaaay cheaper than equivalent amounts of nuclear power - like 3x cheaper.
There are already a bunch of examples of Northern locales using these heat batteries - just heat up a big block of something when energy is cheap and solar/wind are overproducing, then use a network of insulated pipes to distribute that heated water.
I'm a little bit sad that pumped hydro doesn't get more attention in the discussion. It might be too late for it to matter, with improvements in battery prices and ongoing lithium discoveries. But that only underscores the fact that it should have been allowed to matter twenty years ago. Utilities have slow-walked solar all around the world because of concerns about the grid stability, which has been well within the reach of pumped hydropower to fix since many years ago. In fact major pumped hydropower projects were mostly carried out in the United States during the nuclear power optimism era.
It is a little destructive to construct pumped hydro reservoirs. But it generally isn't as damaging as a conventional hydroelectric dam. The reason lies in the source of the water. In a conventional dam, you need a lot of water flowing in from up high, so you dam a major river near its lower cataracts. This disrupts the migration of fish and animals along the river and impacts the whole ecosystem of the rather large drainage basin upstream, and disrupts the migration of fish. But when a closed-loop pumped storage reservoir is created above an existing lake, usually a much less important stream is selected. Its immediate valley is still inundated, but the area of effect is much less. It does tend to prolong the use of the existing dam, but we are already preserving basically all existing dams.
It might still be appropriate in some places where imports are less affordable like Latin America or it might appeal to protectionists in the West. In general, hydro is usually cheap.
Anyone can install batteries anywhere at a fairly minimal local fire risk.
A dam is a major mechanical structure which if it fails will straight up obliterate downstream towns, and as such requires a numerous specialized engineering designs and on going maintenance to retain basic safety.
A pumped-storage dam also doesn't increase the area subject to flooding. If the upper dam fails, it flows into the lower lake. This can potentially be a design consideration. It's not like a greenfield hydropower dam.
If you want to play the rare catastrophic risk card, battery fires can release highly toxic hydrogen fluoride. But the damage of climate change is far greater than the very small risk from either dams or batteries, which is preventable in both cases with proper maintenance and monitoring. I think the tail risk question is moot, honestly.
Which is the point: any retained body of water like this is a significant geotechnical engineering project.
If you have a steel mill for example you need to be able to basically guarantee a certain level of energy production to run it viably because the risk of there not being any power during adverse weather is enough to make it unviable (you can't just turn these things off). This is the reason why gas and nuclear probably aren't going away (or at least shouldn't).
If they increase in price then firm production is stimulated to build to meet the gap.