This seems highly doubtful. If solar saves money, why does Germany (with a lot of solar) have higher rather than lower energy prices?
This is "by design" in the sense that it offers big subsidies to more solar generation to come online, but you won't see the biggest price cuts until the last expensive sources are pushed off the grid entirely. Because Germany's marginal source is coal, they pay way more than countries whose marginal source is gas or nuclear.
Spain opted out of this system and is now enjoying cheap wholesale electricity, which is fueling an industrial revival.
... and solar is heavily subsidized, which could outweigh this effect. So this doesn't explain the high energy prices.
> partly because of the way electricity auctions work in most of Europe, namely every participant sells at the price offered by the highest bidder.
This doesn't explain why Germany has so high electricity prices.
It's the main thing which does.
Say you have two energy sources, Alice Electric can deliver at €0.03/kWh but only up to 10% of your demand, while Bob Energy can deliver 200% of your demand but all units will cost €0.5/kWh.
The net result of the electricity auction, as described, is that the consumers pay Alice and Bob €0.5/kWh each, which gives Alice a €0.47/kWh profit margin and therefore lot of money to expand operations if she wants to, but until she can actually supply 100% of demand, it's priced by what Bob charges.
Bob is not one single concrete thing, it's the abstract concept, anthropomorphised.
Germany's energy is expensive because the marginal generator is so expensive.
It's one of the industry standard metrics.
> Solar during overcast days is extremely and at night infinitely expensive by itself.
1. Note pink line's name: https://assets.bbhub.io/image/v1/resize?width=auto&type=webp...
(from article: https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-energy/battery-storage...)
2. Literally everybody knows this. 2006 wants their memes back. Why do people bring this up without realising that demand is lower at night, with shops and factories being closed etc.? Even the duck curve thing is solved with just 1-2 hours of storage.
A quick DDG search says that other nearby countries with higher % of specifically solar (e.g. Luxembourg, Hungary, Netherlands), have lower consumer electricity prices than Germany, ergo solar itself isn't what's causing the high consumer prices in Germany.
And it's not like batteries are even expensive any more, at least not when bought in bulk.
> You can't just take some average,
Sure you can.
Consider a consumer with a constant demand (to make the maths easier, still works if not):
Option 1: use only the thing which works 24/7, but costs €1/kWh
Option 2: use the thing which works 50% of the time and while working costs €0.05/kWh, and the rest of the time go back to option 1.
Option 1 costs €24/day
Option 2 costs (50% * €1/kWh * 24h) + (50% * €0.05/kWh * 24h) = €12.6/day, or €0.525/kWh.
(PV is of course weirder than that, because it's shaped more like "Over the next 35 years it will emit X joules for your initial investment of Y money", so you're pre-paying for something, and also it's immune to any inflation, and there's a long side-discussion about financing here I'll skip as you seem to be refusing to accept even the fundamentals).
> stable energy source like nuclear or coal which doesn't need these backups.
They absolutely do need backups, their downtime is higher than you may expect.
This is, in fact, why even coal rich countries don't only use coal. Why nuclear-happy France doesn't only use nuclear. Etc.
Dismissing the cost benefits of renewables "because they need some kind of backup" is like dismissing the travel benefits of planes because the airspace around them gets closed every night, or like refusing to use a bike ever because sometimes you need to buy a new fridge and that won't fit on a bike trailer.
Or dismissing oil because of the two stupid wars currently going on, and how much they impact oil.
Electricity prices in Germany are lower than last year.
https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/energiemonitor-strompreis-gas...
Wholesale prices:
- Germany ~€0.089/kWh - Factor 2.94 to consumer Price
- France ~€0.061/kWh - Factor 2.92 to consumer price
- Spain. ~€0.065/kWh - Factor 2.82 to consumer price
The reason seems to be that this price is driven by the tech that is used to fill the gaps what demand is high.
And coal/gas make this expensive.
- Germany needs a lot of coal/gas at some times
- France has nuclear so less coal/gas is needed
- Spain just has a lot of renewables and needs way less coal/gas to compensate
So France is better off because of nuclear... But Spain is doing nearly as well with renewables.
Once you've determined you need new electricity generation, the cheapest source tends to get built. Right now that's solar; that's an objective fact.
You can't really blame solar for phasing out nuclear. That was a political decision. Uranium mostly comes from Russia and China too, so it's not like it was geopolitically "safer" than gas.
> The old nuclear and coal plants would have been cheaper than replacing them with solar and gas.
Gas's share of electricity generation has not meaningfully changed in Germany since 2015. [1] It's ranged from 80 to 95 TWh. Last year it was 82 TWh.
That data also shows coal's share of generation reducing since 2022. If coal is really cheaper than solar and wind, why is Germany using less of it?
> Possibly because solar is extremely expensive during the night or on overcast days
Today gas power plants cover the shortage. As I've already showed you, Germany isn't using meaningfully more gas than it used to even during nuclear's heyday (which was in 2006, when nuclear generated 167 TWh and 74.6TWh came from gas).
Solar and batteries are already cheaper than gas in sunny climes. [2] It's only a matter of time before they're the cheapest source of nighttime power in Germany.
You're operating on information from 3 years ago and haven't changed your mind since then.
1. https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...
2. https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2025/06/Ember-24-Hour-S...
You can't say solar "saves" Germany money when this is apparently not the case. You can't just selectively count the cases where solar replaced an energy source which happens to be more expensive than solar. Solar saves you money if and only if its implementation, including backups, is less expensive than what was used previously, whatever it was.
> Gas's share of electricity generation has not meaningfully changed in Germany since 2015. [1] It's ranged from 80 to 95 TWh. Last year it was 82 TWh.
What then explains Germany's high electricity prices?
> That data also shows coal's share of generation reducing since 2022. If coal is really cheaper than solar and wind, why is Germany using less of it?
Because the Greens and other environmentalists pushed for using less coal. Just like they pushed heavily against nuclear. And in favor of heavy subsidies for solar. It was a political decision, not an economical one.
> Solar and batteries are already cheaper than gas in sunny climes. [2] It's only a matter of time before they're the cheapest source of nighttime power in Germany.
Even if that report is correct (Ember is a solar energy company so that information could be heavily biased) that doesn't mean they would be cheaper than nuclear and coal would have been during the night in the past, or that switching from nuclear and coal to solar and backups didn't increase, rather than decrease, energy prices.
The higher prices are partly artificial: surcharges for offshore wind and special-grid-use surcharge, subsidies for 'co-generation of electricity and heat and to compensate for the burden caused by the Combined Heat and Power Act' , the concession fee, VAT. Except for the offshore wind surcharge, all the others would exist no matter the fuel you use. Together with 43% procurement charges - which would also exist independent of the fuel used, all of these explain your bill. Substituting the renewables with coal or nuclear would only marginally lower your prices.
Maybe if they would cut their $5.9B subsidies for coal, which are also in your bill, prices could go down a little more.
Edit: the numbers for subsidies in fossile fuels were wrong, not 1.9 but 5.9
https://www.diw.de/de/diw_01.c.827737.de/nachrichten/schluss...
Wait so you're admitting nuclear actually was more expensive than solar?
> What then explains Germany's high electricity prices?
You've already been given an explanation in this comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48462996 which you chose not to accept.
> Because the Greens and other environmentalists pushed for using less coal. Just like they pushed heavily against nuclear
I'm supposed to believe the plucky brave environmentalists actually won against money? Please. When has that ever happened?
> Ember is a solar energy company
It's a non-profit think tank, so wrong on both counts.