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Comment by boshomi | Hacker News Reader

Here is an analysis from Germany: Quarter-hourly spot prices compared to the share of renewable energy generation in total generation. A higher share of renewables puts massive downward pressure on the spot market electricity price.

https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/price_scatter/chart.ht...

Since price elasticity for electricity is very high, the market cap decreases by approximately €150,000 for every additional GWh of renewable energy production. A single additional offshore wind turbine with an annual output of 60 GWh reduces the combined revenue of all electricity producers by about €9 million per year that it is in operation.

Blocking wind power and solar projects only serves to secure the profits of monopolists and oligopolists in the electricity market, but causes massive harm to the economy.

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Good link. Germany is the case where it works cleanly — more renewables, lower price, lower carbon, all moving the same direction.

No amount of solar panels will generate electricity without sun light. Also the amount sun light can shrink quite a lot in winter months at high latitudes and under cloud cover.

No amount of wind turbines will generate electricity without wind, or to be more precise:

Cut-in speed: 3–4 m/s (12–15 km/h) to begin spinning and producing power.

Cut-out / Stop speed: Above 25 m/s (90 km/h) where brakes are applied to prevent mechanical damage

Germany has to have backups, currently quite expensive, for all this times of missing renewables production.

The apparent volatility of electricity generation from a single wind turbine is negligible, because what counts is the wind and PV output over large areas. Due to regular weather fronts, electricity output from wind and PV in Europe is surprisingly stable; when there is less sunshine, there is more wind. In 2025, for example, the weekly electricity output from wind and solar PV was 14.0 TWh, with no week falling below 10.5 TWh. If more wind power were installed in Eastern Europe, the curves would flatten out even further.

https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=de&...

Yes, single wind turbine is negligible, what counts is the wind and PV output over extremely large areas because weather fronts are correlated over hundreds of km. Of course night/day cycle is correlated over whole Europe with few hours shift.

So in 100% renewables Europe scenario, you have build multiples of renewable production in each region.

You build enough renewables in Western Europe to power the whole Europe, you build enough renewables in Central Europe to power the whole Europe and you build enough renewables in Eastern Europe to power the whole Europe and build electric grid to transfer 2/3s of electricity produced in each region into other regions.

Can it be done? Yes, but it will be very expensive.

Many renewable energy modelers often ignore realities and costs of physical electric grid and model whole continent as copper plate which can transfer infinite amount of electricity from each to point to any other point.

For more realistic scenarios German government is looking into power-to-gas energy storage systems, where you convert renewable electricity to hydrogen, ammonia or ethanol and store it underground. There are also plans to import large part of these gases/liquids from other countries, so no energy independence in the future.

https://www.bundeswirtschaftsministerium.de/Redaktion/EN/Pre...

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-revise-hydrogen...

Thats exactly how you build for resiliency. You probably aren't familiar with running workloads on the cloud. There are multiple levels of redundancy, Availability Zones, multiple regions, etc. At least 4X redundancy if you are running anything important.

The peaker natural gas plants are not running at 100%, they mostly run a few hours for peak production. Any critical infrastructure is built for peak utilization and there will always be some idling.

The good thing with electricity is excess production can be used to charge cars, pump water, produce green hydrogen or green ammonia. People are creative, they will figure out what to use excess production for.

"Reliability: Five-nines availability (99.999%, under 6 minutes downtime annually), typically achieved by combining high grid reliability with backup generation."

https://speed2power.epri.com/demand-characteristics.html

I wrote software for monitoring and controling electric grids on country level and later software for controling nuclear power plants, I know a little bit about resiliency.

Physicaly, you can do 3X redundancy in electric generation and electric grid, as there are no physical laws against it, but such large infrastructure is expensive and you have to pay the CAPEX even if the infrastructure is almost never utilized. Also transporting electricity over large distances is really expensive, therefor only relative small amount of electricity can be transport in europe and future targets are modest.

"The EU has set an interconnection target of at least 15% by 2030 to encourage EU countries to interconnect their installed electricity production capacity. This means that each country should have electricity infrastructure in place that would allow it to import, from its neighbouring EU countries, an equivalent of at least 15% of the electricity production capacity on its territory."

https://energy.ec.europa.eu/topics/infrastructure/electricit...

https://pubs.rsc.org/ee/article-abstract/11/3/469/565531/Rel...

Someone has to pay for this, either customers or tax payers (through goverment subsidies) and Europe already has high electricity prices (when compared with China and US).

"The energy sector is one of the largest and most important sectors of the world economy. Accounting for 8%–10% of world GDP, it is second only to health care in size and is equally pervasive in scope"

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/energy-...

Australia's free electricity: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3NTlKEd5IIY

This is how the modern grid shifts demand.

What is the average electricity price in Australia?

Australia has still lot of work to do in decarbonization of economy, as on only 8% of primary energy is from low-carbon energy sources.

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/australia#how-much...

Even China has currently higher share of energy from low-carbon sources. 12 % in 2025.

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china#how-much-of-...

Comparison between China, Australia, Europe, France.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-mix?tab=line&count...

I think you are trying to say something, but I'm not sure what it is. It is not clear what you are advocating for. More nuclear?

Resiliency requires redundancy and that means excess production capacity. It is now mostly peaker gas plants that run only a few hours a day at most. Instead, solar panels are dirt cheap and you can have lots of redundancy pretty cheap. There are many uses for excess energy, it can be used for green hydrogen (industrial heat) and green ammonia (fertilizer) or pump water back if there is hydro. Most importantly, Europe has ~460 million vehicles, all of these can be EVs and have flexible demand. People are creative and they will find many uses with time-of-use pricing.

As a civilization, we're only just getting started on solar. So far, its been horizontal panels to capture when the Sun is brightest. The next phase is vertical solar. It requires zero land and can be deployed anywhere, think of all the fences and walls and tall buildings. It can be deployed in cities, close to consumption, without requiring new transmission infrastructure. Vertical solar will add 4 hours solar production. And Europe is geographically a large area, ~3400 miles wide, which means with grid interconnect, you can add 4 more hours excess production, ship to the other countries and get paid.

Or you can do what Romania does and install Solar with batteries: https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Solar-Energy/Solar-P.... If a poor Eastern European country can figure out how to build renewables, I'm sure its not a hard task for Western Europe?

> I wrote software for monitoring and controling electric grids on country level and later software for controling nuclear power plants, I know a little bit about resiliency.

You have a fixed worldview, the grid is an unchangeable fixed structure, and it can never be changed because you wrote a bit of software in COBOL 50 years back. What happened in your 20s is the best and ideal grid and it should never change. In your age of fossil fuel, production was far away, needed transmission infrastructure to bring power to the cities. Because coal is extremely polluting, hydro is geo-fixed and nuclear needs to be far (nobody will allow it). None of those assumptions are true anymore.

I'm advocating for more nuclear, for deep decarbonization (removing 99% of CO2 output) and removing of all uses of fossil fuels. And as humanity we failing, because CO2 output is still rising.

https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2026/co2-em...

I think the best option would be a world wide CO2 tax, because we already see carbon leakage, competitive advantage of economies with more CO2 production, but cheaper energy and cheaper products. (China, US over Europe)

> Resiliency requires redundancy and that means excess production capacity.

Redundancy is good and desirable, but someone has to pay for the infrastructure even when it's not fully utilized or is used to full extend only few times a year (Dunkelflaute). Overbuilding electricity production and overbuilding electric grid is expensive. In the past get to high reliability countries had only about 5 - 10% spare electric production capacity, not a spare coal power plant for each running coal power plant.

"Of course, the probability of Dunkelflaute is higher in winter, with peaks in November and January. Here, on average, there are 50-100 hours of Dunkelflaute per month, and as many as 150 hours in Sweden."

https://www.kraftblock.com/blog/bringing-light-into-dunkelfl...

When more solar/wind is installed on grid the necessary builds of backup peaker gas plants, expansion of electric grids to balance out the weather caused variations in production is no calculated in the LCOE of the solar/wind power plant. LCOE for solar PV plus battery storage is better indicator, but even then doesn't include the backup peaker gas plants and expansion of electric grids. (China builds backup coal power plants for solar).

> solar panels are dirt cheap

Solar panels are dirt cheap, because they are made in China. Polysilicon production is very energy intensive and China has a lot cheap electricity. Lot of production in Inner Mongolia, lot of sunshine and lot of coal.

https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2025/12/china-takes-9-...

> excess energy, it can be used for green hydrogen

How to do it economically is a open research problem, because Alkaline water electrolysis has problems with fluctuating solar power supply (battery storage and solar overbuilding may be necessary) and Proton exchange membrane electrolysis is expensive (uses expensive metal because of corrosion).

https://raw-science.org/iridium-pem-electrolysers/

https://www.solas.capital/hydrogen-vs-energy-efficiency-inve...

Isn't the Romania Romania battery storage system buildout enabled by subsidies (tax payers money) ?

https://cop31tr.com/romania-shifts-solar-subsidies-toward-ba...

> You have a fixed worldview, the grid is an unchangeable fixed structure, and it can never be changed because you wrote a bit of software in COBOL 50 years back. What happened in your 20s is the best and ideal grid and it should never change. In your age of fossil fuel, production was far away, needed transmission infrastructure to bring power to the cities. Because coal is extremely polluting, hydro is geo-fixed and nuclear needs to be far (nobody will allow it). None of those assumptions are true anymore.

I didn't see any COBOL code, oldest code was Pascal, but was been replaced because Sun stopped official support of Pascal compiler on Solaris.

Coal burning is terrible, lot of particulate matter (depending on the filtering system of the coal plant), sulfur, toxic heavy metals (lead, arsenic, cadmium), radioactive elements (uranium, thorium and decay products) (under normal situation coal power plant outputs more radioactive material then nuclear power plant into air). Gas is much cleaner, but still some methane leakage and lot of CO2.

> nuclear needs to be far (nobody will allow it)

We scared the people to death in 1970s, 1980s, 1990s with nuclear fear mongering. Movies: China syndrome, Dr. Strangelove, and other. Nuclear power production has been made equal with nuclear weapons. Activists presented each nuclear powerplant as ticking nuclear bomb.

Chernobyl was a big Soviet failure, but probably smaller then the 1984 Bhopal chemical disaster.

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

Took your link, changed de to en, reduced granularity weekly to daily. It looks way more spiky:

https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&...

Also, both wind and solar (especially solar) change vastly under a sub-daily aggregation.

I think the point is, if you can decide when to consume electricity then you will do it when it's the cheapest, so let's put the cheapest when the low carbon sources are available. So the website is taking into account that renewables are not always available, that's exactly its point.

And the backup source for Germany is the nuclear electricity from France. The grid is at the European scale.

This is interesting, but now explain why Germany has both the highest electricity prices in Europe as well as a relatively high CO2 footprint from electricity? Germany is buying not only nuclear but also coal energy from neighbouring countries.

Will this be fixed at some point or is the German model not actually as good as you imply?

The main reason why electricity is expensive in Germany is because it's taxed to oblivion. Even when wholesale prices are negative, electricity costs about three times as much as gas.

Now you might ask why electricity is taxed to oblivion. Some don't like nuclear or coal. Some prefer oil or gas. In the end, there's a majority that wants electricity to be expensive.

I was under the impression that the taxes are going into infrastructure and grants for renewable energies, meaning those energy prices are maybe way higher than advertised. Funny thing is we are constantly being told how cheap reneweables are to produce but apparently there are other costs involved.

FTR and for the inevitable downvoters, I am not a fan of fossil energy. I am merely a fan of well presented arguments, and downvotes aren't that.

Well, that impression is wrong. The german word for "Taxes" is "Steuer". And they go to one of the 3 levels of our government: Federal level, the 16 states, municipalities / communes.

And yes, we pay VAT (19%) and electricty tax (0.0205 € / kWh).

But we also pay other things, like Konzessionsabgabe, KWKG-Umlage, AbN and Offshore-Netzumlage. They have various reasons:

AbN is used to make electricity artificially cheaper for ecenomically important companies that have a high usage of electricity. So this doesn't go to government, it's no tax.

KWKG (Kraft-Wärme-Kopplungs-Gesetz) is payed to keep the oil and gas power plants in operation. We now have so much renewable energy, they it wouldn't be economically feasible to operate them -- they have quite low duty cycles these days. They are however important for the quality of the whole network. So this doesn't go to government, it's no tax.

Konzessionsabgabe could perhaps counted as tax. The lines of the electric grid go over public property. Or they use the area below the pedestrian sidewalks. And so they have to pay for it. So this doesn't go to government, it's no tax, more a rent.

Offshore-Netzumlage is because we have sooooo much electric wind power in the north and baltic sea, but most bigger industry is in the south. It is used to pay for the new electric trasses. So this doesn't go to government, it's no tax.

Also, electric power in Germany is both cheap and expensive. The internal price is often cheap. But the price to end-customers is often expensive. One part of that is that many end-customers don't switch their electricity power. In history, we had local power distributors, often in the hand of the city or the county. But since perhaps 20 years one can now just select anyone, whoever has the lowest price. However, the majority of the germans stay (due to lazyness?) with their local providers. Which are usually on the more costly side.

Source so far: https://strom-report.com/strompreis-zusammensetzung/

Also we should not forget that Germany has one of the best electric grids in Germany. We can take the SAIDI and compare electric grids of regions or countries. And in Europe, Germany has the lowest SAIDI of all large industrial countries. Some have a lower SAIDI, but they are tiny-states.

So, what is SAIDI? The System Average Interuption Duration Index --- or how long per year and customer the power is out. And here we're better than e.g. Austria, France, Belgium, Sweden ... but also MUCH better than the USA, which seem to have exceptional shaggy electric grids.

So price is one thing... but that you can depend on the electric power in Germany, but maybe not abroad, is another thing.

Source for SAIDI: Germany and english language Wikipedia, Bundesnetzagentur

Good to point out the difference between taxes and other tariffs, but I have a hard time understanding why you have to call what I said "wrong"? What you went to explain in detail is exactly what I alluded to, that also matches the previous posters "electricity [...] taxed into oblivion".

Another point: 3.3% of federal tax income, or 1.7% of all taxes paid by citizens, goes directly into "Klima- und Transformationsfonds" i.e. gets pumped into energy transformation. And the state even pumps more money into that, by means of "Sondervermögen" (taking additional debts). Measured as a percentage of federal state tax income, seems like Germany is pumping more than 7% total into energy transformation. Quite a lot I think, and even if this is not directly a tariff on electricity, it's easy to imagine how this can result in general price inflation.

All of Germany's neighbours, from which it buys electricity, are decarbonising so yes obviously it inevitably gets "fixed at some point".

Germany's wholesale prices are similar to many other European countries, the worst is easily Ireland because of their geography, small, northern, coastal, they often need to import power, and that import has to come from Britain, which is between them and the continent, so their prices will almost always be higher than Britain's already not-great prices - we're obviously not going to sell the Irish £89 per MWh electricity and then charge our own users £119 per MWh for the same product.

What I am saying is that those spot prices may not represent all of the reneweables' marginal costs. Question is, will the end consumer prices ever go down, and by how much?

> Question is, will the end consumer prices ever go down, and by how much?

No, electricity is not likely to become a deflationary product. It hasn't been in my lifetime and I don't see that changing. Products which do that are weird and they don't tend to do it for very long.

There was a period (last century, more than fifty years ago) when Oil was deflationary in the US, as the very easily extracted Saudi Oil came online and US import bans ended - you'd pay the same dollar price to fill a car with gasoline in one year as the next and of course wages continued to grow so that oil is getting cheaper in real terms. But that's a long time ago, a time when gasoline was 30 cents per gallon.

Solar PV is just straight up cheaper than any fossil power. Solar Farms the UK agreed to subsidise in 2022 came online early last year and even in those more normal times (before Trump started a war in the Middle East) the "subsidy" amounts they were paying us totalled a few million quid a year because the fossil power was so expensive. Once Trump got into it, we were being paid like £3-4M per month in "subsidy" because of course the fossil fuel costs more now but sunlight is still free.

But that does not translate into lower prices for consumers, at most it means their prices might not rise as quickly.

The prices of so many things have gone down with times due to increased efficiencies. Why not electricity? If solar PV is cheaper than fossils, I would, naive as I am, expect prices to go down.

(I acknowledge fossils have been going up for various reasons, and have become more scarce, and energy demands are rising)

There's a situation like with Amdahl's law here, which I'm guessing you're familiar with since this is HN but if not then I'm sure you can read about it. Consumer prices - the thing you're experiencing - have multiple inputs, and wholesale price is the only one that's subject to this change by generation technology so that dilutes the consequence of any such change for consumers.

If you're paying 25 cents per kWh and and the wholesale price was $100 per MWh then 10 of those 25 cents were for wholesale electricity, but you're paying 15 cents per kWh for "other things". Maybe a huge improvement to generation technology reduces that wholesale price to $90 per MWh, amazing, but alas general inflation increases your suppliers other costs to 16 cents per kWh and so you pay... 25 cents still.

If that wholesale price somehow halved and it was all passed on (good luck with that) your 25 cents per kWh goes to 20 cents, only a 20% drop.

The learning curve for solar is shallowing, and while it's steeper for offshore wind and especially floating offshore wind, those are both way more expensive than solar, so you'd need much more price decrease for them to be cheaper than say, coal.

Nuclear does not produce CO2. Nuclear energy is green energy.

Why I said not only... but also.

It'd be really great if wind turbines across Germany were producing at uncorrelated times.

Let's look at the wind right now: uniform wind across Germany:

https://earth.nullschool.net/#2026/09/04/1200Z/wind/surface/...

Let's look at the wind earlier: uniformly no wind across Germany:

https://earth.nullschool.net/#2026/09/02/0000Z/wind/surface/...

Hmmmm.

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