This is a very uneducated take. Wind absolutely makes sense in plenty of locations.

I myself am located on the west coast of Scotland and we get most of our energy from wind. Solar panels make much less sense here we tend to get much less light than most places in the world.

What's with the utterly uninformed takes on energy on HN?

Wind makes extremely good sense and has been making good sense for 30 years or more now depending on where on the globe you are looking. There is a ton of FUD about it but it is practical, affordable, available and relatively fast to deploy. Moreover there is readily financing available to take care of the capex.

There are 7 MW turbines deployed regularly

https://www.enercon.de/en/turbines/e-175-ep5

And there are 10 MW turbines and higher on the drawing board. Offshore and onshore options are available.

I mean, you didn't address what I said, you just looped back to what you originally said.

Which mostly comes from very high taxes to promote efficiency gains.

The interesting question is: What is the wholesale cost + subsidies?

Subsidies which now are being phased out for new production, or in some cases even lead to companies having to bid to get the privilege to build.

End consumer prices are utterly unusable to determine success or failure of the Energiewende. They are also utterly useless to compare across nations, as they are made up of very different components - e.g. in Germany only 40% is determined by market factors, in France the price is held artificially low by massive subsidies https://www.lemonde.fr/en/energies/article/2023/04/21/france... and so on.

This. Germany has been strong arming policies around electricity in the EU for quite a while. Forcing their neighbors to sell their electricity for cheap when it is the most expensive in the market while assuming none of the costs and risks.

And they are disrupting neighbors' energy production economics when they offload their overproduction precisely when nobody wants it.

That's German superiority complex in all it's "glory".

The problem of meeting demand is in industrial use and residential heating, both of which aren’t typically electrified in Germany. The problem has more to do with an active war and an industrial sector built on cheap Russian gas.

That is largely due to the war in Ukraine and Russian gas/oil being a big no-no in Europe right now.

Continuing to burn fossil fuel is simply not an option. Not if we want to comfortable keep living on this planet.

None of the European countries meat their energy demands by themselves. All of them regularly import and export electricity from/to their neighbors. That's a good thing and is driving down electricity prices not up.

The reason countries buy electricity from their neighbors is because it's cheaper not because they couldn't meat the demands themselves.

Now Germany is by no means perfect, heating is largely gas based which increases emissions. Ironically the law that was trying to change this, had a big counter campaign that likely contributed to the change of government.

So while the greens energiewende are often blamed for Germanys dependency on gas (although the dependency had been going for much longer), it's the conservatives who likely had a much bigger impact on Germany sticking with gas by preventing to move heating to electricity.

It's a huge success considering where they would have been if not for doing that, and then energy prices would have been higher still.

First: This whole reneable thing was done to reduce negative externalities from pollution and CO2 emissions that were simply not paid for previously.

Arguing that "the economy would be better of without pollution/emission limits" is a bit like arguing that dumping trash in the next river is cheaper than proper disposal: Sure, your industrialists are gonna save a few bucks right now, but someone will have to pick up the bill regardless-- with interest.