Germany's electrical prices are mostly in line with it's neighbours, not super high. If a company makes good usage of batteries, they could actually have quite low prices since the electrical price undergoes huge swings throughout the day. All spring through fall the spot price goes to or near zero at midday almost daily.

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.

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umpalumpaaa a day ago | parent | next [-]

Even if prices were in line with Germanys neighbors, that does not mean a lot. Germanys industry is notoriously energy hungry. Germany is home of the biggest chemical companies in the world and they need easy access to gas, oil, electricity etc. Also the car industry is obviously still big. And so on. Most countries in the world lost their industrial base during the last 20-40 years but Germany kept it for the most part because of several factors. But this means that the average company in Germany needs easier and cheaper access to energy and raw materials than other average companies in other countries

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eigenspace a day ago | parent | next [-]

I was just pointing out that the claim that it has abnormally high energy prices among developed nations isn't quite true.

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.

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hunterpayne a day ago | parent [-]

How is closing your nuclear plants working out for you?

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.

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bryanlarsen a day ago | parent | next [-]

15 * 600 GWh < 12B KWh.

It'd be even worse if the nukes would be shut down due to lack of cooling water.

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eigenspace a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Wow, impressive velocity of bullshit claims, but I guess one has to grade on a curve, this is Hacker News of course.

> 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.

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uecker a day ago | parent | next [-]

This seems too low by an order of magnitude. In 2021, nuclear power produced 69 TWh in Germany. For comparison, renewables produced 240 TWh in 2021 and 292 TWh in 2025. But I agree with your general point.

	▲	eigenspace a day ago \| parent [-]
		The numbers I gave were only for the month of July, not the entire year since the commenter was comparing to the article's numbers for July and claiming that it would have dwarfed the power produced by solar.

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hunterpayne a day ago | parent | prev [-]

By 2017, only 3 German NPPs were online. So multiply those NPP numbers by 5x. 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. You seriously don't even know enough to calculate these numbers correctly.

	▲	eigenspace a day ago \| parent [-]
		By 2017 Germany had 8 NPPs online. German nuclear power generation was never at 5x that level. Back in 2010, it was around 2x that level though. > 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?

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Barrin92 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>Germany is home of the biggest chemical companies in the world

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.

	▲	umpalumpaaa a day ago \| parent [-]
		The number of big companies in that energy hungry sector is big compared to other countries. And it’s good that Germany managed to keep this industry going. Also those big companies fuel much of what the Mittelstand does. Please lookup biggest chemical companies in the world and you will see that Germany is well represented. It’s just unnecessary to let that industry “go”. If it dies in Germany and flourishes in let’s say China the climate has not won anything but Germany lost an entire industry. This mix (big industrial companies, lots of smaller mittelstand companies paired with a big services sector) is what makes Germany so uniquely resilient. This is the biggest potential problem for Germany. Reducing resilience, giving up stability

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a day ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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KellyCriterion a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

-- If a company makes good usage of batteries, they could actually have quite low prices since the electrical price undergoes huge swings throughout the day --

Either, you are not from Germany or your example is a clear MBA-101-Bobo-Textbook example :-D

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woodpanel a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> Germany's electrical prices are mostly in line with it's neighbours

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...

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hunterpayne a day ago | parent [-]

For reference, that's about 4x the worldwide average electricity price.

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woodpanel a day ago | parent [-]

Exactly. I'm starting to wonder how much higher our neighbors' prices are thanks to our excessive excess-energy emergency-dumping during green-energy peaks. How much of that "EU average" is "Germany as a cost externality for its neighbouring energy grids"?

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uecker a day ago | parent | next [-]

How does "emergency-dumping" create cost to neighbors? But what you miss is that most of the EU now has a lot of renewables.

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woodpanel 9 hours ago | parent [-]

dude. you need infrastructure to have your grid deal with the sudden spikes and sudden drops for it to not go up in flames. why do you think those German excess energy dumps regulary end up having negative prices? Because Germany at some point willingly pays its neighbors for not having its own grid black out.

	▲	eigenspace 8 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Germany has the ability to curtail renewables when there's no buyers available for it. They offer low or even negative prices though specifically because it's better for just about everyone than production curtailment. If Germany's neighbours don't want to buy cheap or negatively priced electricity, they don't have to.
	▲	uecker 8 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Your understanding of this is poor. First, the same is true with neighbors putting renewables on the grid, it is not just Germany having renewables anymore. But the issue is not that the "grid goes up in flames". In Germany it is mostly that renewables have priority, so are not turned off. This is also not really bad, because it encourages investments into storage.

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mono442 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Electricity is expensive in the EU because of the EU ETS.