Germany has still one of the highest electricity and energy prices among developed nations which tremendously hurts its industrial base. That has to change too unless this cannot really be called a success I think.
In the political reality of Germany there is literally 0 chance that these tax cuts won’t be extended. Low investment by BASF has many reasons, but their inability to get politicians to extend that tax cut isn’t one of them.
Energy may well be cheap in the US but you have been paying for that for decades through military misadventures in the middle east.
Texas is probably our national leader in terms of deploying solar and wind power, which feels ironic but is totally rational and logical.
80% of solar panels/batteries/windmills are made in China. We wouldn't even be able to make them without fossil fuels in the first place. Not even talking about the electronics that is needed
This is in stark contrast to fossil fuels, where it's infeasible to stockpile more than a few months of usage, and if suppliers turn off the tap, you're at their mercy almost instantly.
If China stopped supplying solar panels or batteries, it'd spark a frenzy of activity and demand for locally produced replacements, and there would be enough time for those to come online.
Wind power is an incredibly cheap form of power.
Your point about rare earths is more or less covered by my previous comment about solar panels and batteries.
Besides, rare earths is actually a supply chain that's being rapidly de-risked from China as we speak anyways.
Now you're just being funny. The reason Chinese solar outcompeted European solar is because China can produce at a lower cost. Yeah, Germany could theoretically produce solar panels in required quantities. However, the price is going to be higher. Which means electricity is going to be more expensive. And expensive electricity is one of the problems for the German industry. Let's not forget that many enterprises will simply not survive while the solar production is ramping up.
They took over the solar market from Germany after Germany foolishly stopped subsidizing it and almsot overnight killed the thriving domestic solar industry.
Chinas solar panels are almost surely being sold internationally for less than they cost to make. If China stopped selling them and domestic producers sprang back up using techniques they've learned from the ongoing solar panel 'recycling' programs, the domestic solar panels would surely be a lot more expensive than Chinese panels, but they'd also almost certainly be cheaper than fossil fuels, and would find a place in the market.
Besides, the cost of panels isn't even the expensive part of solar installations anymore. The expensive part is the land, grid connections, and installation labour.
Throughout the winter, wind is a bit more random but causes spells of high prices and spells of low prices.
The main thing causing electrical usage prices to be high in Germany is grid charges for the gigantic grid infrastructure buildout.
Germany's electrical grid is one of the most resilient and interconnected in the world, and it's rapidly being upgraded to accommodate the huge build-out of wind, solar, and batteries that is underway. I agree that the government should probably shoulder more of these grid-costs to take some burden off of major industrial users.
I do agree though, that even just having 'normal' energy prices for a developed nation makes it very hard to be an industrial powerhouse.
IMO the only way forward is for Germany to build more energy infrastructure. Most importantly, we need more solar wind and batteries, but we also need upgrades to gas peaker plants, and more long-distance HVDC connections to neighbouring countries to better smooth out variations in weather that are inherent to intermittent renewables.
Doubling down on fossil fuels won't bring down Germany's energy costs.
Germany burns the lowest grade coal known to man to make up for the loss of its nuclear fleet. Germany has one of the dirtiest grids in the world and the dirtiest grid in the developed world. And for reference, a single NPP makes roughly 600 GW hours of power a month. Germany closed down about 15 NPPs which would make several times as much power as the solar PV in the article. More than enough to power everyone's ACs.
It'd be even worse if the nukes would be shut down due to lack of cooling water.
> Germany burns the lowest grade coal known to man to make up for the loss of its nuclear fleet.
Renewables are replacing coal and nuclear simultaneously. Coal usage was consistently dropping before and has continued to consistently drop after the nuclear phase out.
I agree if coal was banned before nuclear, the new renewable capacity added could have done more to replace a huge source of emissions faster. It was a failure of education, media, and political will that Germany phased out nuclear before coal.
> Germany has one of the dirtiest grids in the world and the dirtiest grid in the developed world.
Germany's grid is on average cleaner than the USA, Japan, South Korea and Australia's grids. It's only dirty by western european standards, not by the standards of developed countries. Certainly not by world standards.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/all/yearly
Germany is also on a better decarbonization trajectory than any of those countries other than Australia.
> And for reference, a single NPP makes roughly 600 GW hours of power a month. Germany closed down about 15 NPPs which would make several times as much power as the solar PV in the article. More than enough to power everyone's ACs.
Those 15 NPPs were not putting out anywhere near your claimed number.
July 2017: 5.3 TWh
July 2018: 6.1 TWh
Julu 2019: 5.4 TWh
July 2020: 4.2 TWh
July 2021: 5.5 TWh
July 2022: 2.9 TWh
Calculated using API data from https://www.energy-charts.info which gives the electricity mix on any given time or day as it evolves every 15 minute interval.
> Also, your claims about the German grid are non-sense. Germany produces several times as much CO2 per watt generated as the US and about 7x more CO2 per watt as France.
I never said anything about France. It does indeed have way cleaner electricity than Germany. The USA does not have cleaner electricity than Germany anymore though according to the source I linked you. Do you have another source you'd like to share?
Some of them are worth keeping but also some of them actually should go. Close to where I used to live in Düsseldorf there was a plastic bottle factory that employed 500 some people and it only continued to be open because it was apparently impossible to let anyone go, the entire thing was long uneconomic.
Mind you even here in Germany our economy is 70% services, the bulk of the employment happens in the Mittelstand. The number of highly energy intensive companies is quite small. Reducing energy prices is good for consumers but more important are structural reforms. We have to good an education and too high a wage level to keep people working in plastic bottle factories. It actually made sense that some of those jobs left the US 30 years ago.
PL: ~21ct/kWh
LX: ~20ct/kWh
AT: ~19ct/kWh
NL: ~19ct/kWh
BE: ~17ct/kWh
FR: ~16ct/kWh
DK: ~9ct/kWh
Germany: 23ct/kWh (or: about 25% higher than the EU average)[0]
Of course Germany "is mostly in line" if your ideology depends on it.
[0] https://cubeconcepts.de/en/europes-industrial-electricity-pr...
If Germany's neighbours don't want to buy cheap or negatively priced electricity, they don't have to.
Either, you are not from Germany or your example is a clear MBA-101-Bobo-Textbook example :-D
Unless there's a revolution in this pricing mechanism the only way for Germany to lower its electricity prices is through renewables build out to push away the more expensive sources.
"Green" supporters prefer renewable energy, because it allows you to build a resilient and distributed network of production, distribution and storage that can't be easily disrupted by any one shock event at the fraction of the cost of nuclear (if you count subsidies and government financed research, not even considering the socialization of insurance against accidents).
Germany has extremely high renewable penetration, and has one of the most stable grids (if not the most) in the world.
By the way: the number of power cuts I have experienced in the past 10 years is 1, because some idiot rammed a powerpole somewhere. The number of times I read about a power cut in the USA somewhere is more or less daily.