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Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?
- dacohenii 7y agoNPR's Planet Money podcast recently had a relevant episode on Germany's feed-in tariff. https://www.npr.org/2020/01/17/797322305/episode-965-das-green-old-deal https://www.npr.org/2020/01/17/797322305/episode-965-das-gre...
- fishmaster 7y agoI don't heat because I want it cold. It's hot enough in summer, in winter it's finally cool.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y agoThe article is about energy politics, not personal preferences.
- devmunchies 7y agoThere was an article I read on that solar powered website that's been shared on HN a few times that changed by view on heating. https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/02/heating-people-not-spaces.html https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/02/heating-people-not... Basically, just wear a sweater and long pants in the house in the winter so you don't have to heat it so much. And if you need to, put a heat source near you, but there's no need to heat the whole house.
- jimmaswell 7y agoStill not comfortable having skin exposed to the cold, and texting gloves never seem to work that great for me.
- docflabby 7y agoHypothesis I would like to test one day - does the increase in calories (and therefore additional energy used to produce food) to heat your body offset the energy saved by reduced heating. Start by assuming person living alone. Then could take it a step further increase number of people and take into account the body heat of each person (people produce alot of heat + water)
- rvp-x 7y agoThis comment is making me feel poor. I regularly wear a winter coat (and more) indoors instead of heating.
- ficklepickle 7y agoAssuming you live somewhere where the pipes won't freeze. That makes one heck of a mess.
- nottorp 7y agoYou're going to pay for that in home repair bills in the long run though. Unless you're living in an area that never goes below zero, which is not the case in most of Europe.
- kaybe 7y agoMhm, sounds good. But when your walls are too cold and your humidity too high (cooking, showering, breathing, plants...) you run into mold issues fast, so it's not that easy.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- tssva 7y agoGermans are heating their homes just not with electricity. A better title for the article would be, "Germans won't heat their homes with electricity even when it is free."
- tau255 7y agoWhy not capture carbon from air with surplus energy? Build few capture plants and buy energy to keep price positive, then sell carbon cerificates on european market.
- kasey_junk 7y agoIt would be more efficient for Germans to pay for new energy production in their neighbors. Poland for example has lots of coal that makes it untenable to do green energy. [edit] though frankly it’s probably even easier for Germans to just pay their domestic coal producers not to produce.
- skybrian 7y agoYou'd have to do the math, but it might be because the surplus doesn't last long enough to pay for the equipment. Even if the prices were low enough for half the year, this means the equipment sits idle half the time. Most energy surpluses are shorter than that.
- tau255 7y agoYes, probably it would not be making enough money to sustain operation. But I still think that we (as a world) should start capture carbon actively during this decade. Last summer in Europe was hottest yet and with such hot winter we are for even hotter summer this year. Keeping energy prices up would be just added benefit.
- Scarblac 7y agoFor the coming decades it must be far far cheaper to start emitting less.
- buzzkillington 7y agoBecause this is pure greenwashing.
- Tepix 7y agoThere isn't a industrial scale process for doing it and there isn't enough surplus energy either.
- duxup 7y ago"Only turbines built in 2016 or later take even a small hit to their revenues if prices go below zero, and more than 75 % of the production capacity was built before that." That seems like a recipe for folks just building endlessly regardless of demand, pulling money from government... and an eventual mess when you fix it and nobody is making money suddenly...
- inetknght 7y agoMess? Turn that around into an opportunity: charge for clean-energy-powered carbon capture.
- duxup 7y agoI'm not sure I follow, charge ... who for what?
- haser_au 7y ago1) Implement a carbon tax (price on carbon) 2) Build a CCS Plant [1] 3) Run CCS plant using renewable energy. Charge your customers (people who need to offset their carbon footprint by buying carbon credits, such as big industry). 4) Profit [1] http://www.ccsassociation.org/what-is-ccs/ http://www.ccsassociation.org/what-is-ccs/
- duxup 7y agoConsidering the price is 0 at times, does that make sense? More capacity?
- inetknght 7y agoI'm sorry I thought I was clear. Let me try to make it clearer: > That seems like a recipe for folks just building endlessly regardless of demand In some ways, yes. If so, it definite could create a problem wherein there's more supply than demand. > pulling money from government... The ethics of government capture aside, this sounds to me like that's rather the _point_ of a government subsidy on something: to build more supply of that something. > and an eventual mess when you fix it and nobody is making money suddenly... Fix what? The idea that there's too much electricity and so nobody makes money? Then come up with another way to use the electricity. Charge money to use the excess electricity for something useful. For example: capturing carbon.
- Scoundreller 7y agoI feel like the issue is that a lot of consumers get stuck paying a fixed per kWh delivery/transmission fee. IMO: this doesn’t make sense. Transmission and distribution costs are largely the amortization of the cost of building the system peak carrying capacity. There’s no shame in charging higher D&T rates during peak times and near-zero rates at 3AM. Could also make electricity taxes a percentage instead of a fixed $ per kWh. Germany could encourage domestic consumption of its overproduction, which would further encourage demand smoothing, but instead exports it.
- lnsp 7y agoAbout encourage domestic consumption: the local power infrastructure does not have enough capacity to distribute all the energy produced by wind turbines (in the north) across the country.
- Scoundreller 7y agoPossibly true, but I have a doubt that their local D&T rates in that area reflect that.
- MauranKilom 7y agoFWIW, there are systems/installations in Germany for having different electricity prices at day and at night (source: my home). There used to be a large difference (like 10 vs 20 cent/kWh according to landlords), but now it's pretty insignificant with 23 vs 25 cent/kWh.
- Mvandenbergh 7y agoIn the UK, heavy users do pay T&D charges based on time of use.
- binichgross 7y agoTradition! Tradition!
- rini17 7y agoHere in a central european country, end-user price for Russian natural gas is about 4 eurocents/kWh. Electricity is 12 cents/kWh, in Germany even more iirc. I have no idea about wholesale spot prices, but I don't see any incentive to switch to electricity as the price isn't going below 4 cents so often.
- robocat 7y ago“ An Air Source Heat Pump (ASHP) will typically produce around 3kW thermal energy for every 1kW of electrical energy consumed” i.e. modern electric heating might cost you 4¢ per kWh of heating. Comparing kWh for natural gas (some loss up flue) with a heat pump in your case it seems they cost roughly the same marginally (although you might have grossly different installation costs, risks of outages, and CO2 impact depending on your individual circumstances).
- akvadrako 7y agoHeat pumps vary widely in efficiency based on temperature and you don’t mention what you are using. It isn’t just efficiency but size. A heat pump that can work on the occasional very cold day is impractical.
- serpix 7y agoModern air pumps work with good efficiency even down to around -15c which is a rare temperature for post global warming world.
- allendoerfer 7y agoUsing electricity to heat buildings should be one of the last steps to take, after almost everything else using energy is renewable. Electricity is a precious form of energy, while heat is primitive. Converting in both directions is not lossless, so you want to keep the precious form. The author makes it seem like that the negative prices are constant, which is not the case. Germany also does not have 100% renewable energy. Once you have an electric heater at your home, you will be using electric energy generated by burning coal to heat your home. It also does not solve the problem of the German electricity market, which is mostly that renewable energy is not steady. Power is not distributed evenly across space and time. So you need to store the energy and move it from North to South. But storage and transmission lines are lacking to say the least. One intermediate strategy you could take, would be to convert abundant electric energy to hydrogen, which you can feed into the already existing natural gas pipes and burn inside the already existing gas heaters, the author is criticizing. This way you would solve both problems (missing network and missing storage) at the same time.
- nostromo 7y agoI couldn't disagree more. Electric heating via heat pump is ridiculously efficient and has a much bigger bang for your carbon-reducing buck than anything else a homeowner can do.
- endorphone 7y agoBizarre that you were downvoted, when your point is spot on. Yes, heating with a big electric radiator is wasteful. Heating with a heat pump, on the other hand, is fantastically efficient.
- Gibbon1 7y agoYes if you analyze it thermodynamically heating via natural gas is terrible. You're taking a high quality source of energy (a flame at 3500 degF) and turning it into the thermodynamic equivalent of garbage (hot air at 70 degF). All the work it could have done (say generating electricity) is tossed.
- nostromo 7y agoThis is why identifying unintended consequences beforehand is so important. "We want green energy -- let's subsidize green energy by taxing electricity." Seems fair enough... fast forward several years and: 1. People burn fossil fuels for heating because electricity is too expensive, increasing their carbon footprint. 2. Poorer people in apartments and cities pay out the nose to fund rebates to wealthier suburban homeowners with solar roofs.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- somerandomness 7y agoCan somebody explain why electricity rates would go negative? That blows my mind. Edit: also why don’t they just mine some coins?
- nostromo 7y agoBecause the German government is paying for renewables, via a tax on electricity, even when there is no additional demand. They can't turn off power plants, because the renewables are ephemeral.
- gsich 7y agoYou have too much energy and you need to get rid off it.
- diroussel 7y agoThis happens when the electricity supply is higher than the demand. It only affects the wholesale rate, not consumer rates (at least in Uk and US) Normally supply and demand need to be matched to obtain a balance. If the supply is not enough for demand then the frequency drops below 50Hz, if it drops too low bad things happen.
- cameronh90 7y agoActually there's at least one provider (octopus) that occasionally passes the negative rate onto the consumer with their dynamic plan.
- olau 7y agoWhile subsidies are one cause, another cause is demand response problems: Imagine you have a greenhouse factory producing strawberries. The strawberries come out of the factory on a conveyor belt. Now, you can't just turn off this factory easily since it might take a week to get it up running again and you don't have any storage, so what happens when nobody wants your strawberries for a day? You pay someone to take them. And yes, it happens to physical products too, e.g. household electronics - you need to pay someone to scrap them.
- Zenst 7y agoI'm somewhat shocked that they do they not load those subsidies onto the electricity charge on consumers as a tax and mean those that use more, pay more. That's what they do in the UK, though alas they loaded it onto the standing charge that is a flat rate per day for having a supply. Idealy it should be like personal TAX, you have a certain amount you get without being taxed, then after that you pay X amount until you use another threshold and then the tax upon the unit rate of energy is taxed more. That would be the ideal fair way of doing energy. Certainly would be a socially more acceptable way. Of course you can allocate people a higher initial rate they can use without paying tax upon the charge for things like disabilities, health needs etc. Again, be no simple solution, but working on something that sees it paid for fairly always works out best for all as above all, people love fairness. At least, that is how I'd like things done. But do remember, Germany recently went thru an anti nuclear phase and that forced many coal reactors to carry on longer, so they did need to compensate and a push on solar and wind power was a logical move. How that was subsidies and paid for was and is perhaps an avenue they need to address. All that said, much respect to the people of Germany for responsibly using energy. That has probably done way more than anything to help.
- usrusr 7y ago> alas they loaded it onto the standing charge that is a flat rate per day for having a supply. Not true, source: my electricity bill. A standing charge exists, but the vast majority of what we pay is per kWh. The part that you misunderstood, I think, is that the EEG is fixed per kWh and not per euro paid (just like most of our fuel taxes, even if crude doubles or halves in price our price at the pump only shifts a little). The article was quite misunderstable, bordering on wrong even, in that part because it reads as if market rate had any influence on German electricity bills and only the EEG charge was fixed. In reality, it's impossible for a households to get a contract that follows market rate, you always pay the same per kWh no matter if it's Sunday or Monday, windy or calm. The electricity spot market price is only relevant for utilities and for a few heavy industrial users with special contracts (the kind of heavy use where you'd be mandated to give the utility a heads up before increasing or dropping the load). This will have to change eventually, because load shift is so much mow efficient than storage, but it's difficult to implement because you can't really have both constant rate and variable rate in parallel due to an abundance of bad actors who would have both and ruin the pricing models by opportunistically switching between them.
- jakub_g 7y agoI'm rather a noob in the topic, but I've been reading in recent months about energy market and it seems like a collective insanity in the light of the climate crisis. - In most(whole?) Europe, electricity used by trains is taxed higher than jet fuel used by planes (legacy measure from decades ago which was meant to boost air market; of course now it's hugely difficult to change it) - Germany went strongly into renewables which is laudable, but CO2 footprint barely changed, because... - Going away from nuclear and into renewables is in theory good, but the open secret is that you can never reach 100% renewables. So you need a backup, which is either gas or coal. In fact Germany even recently invested in new coal powered plants. - Basically the effect of going away from nuclear is increasing CO2 emissions, and this is the last thing that we want at this time. But even Macron wants to reduce nuclear % in power production of France. Which means more CO2. Am I missing something or this is total madness?
- bulkan 7y ago> In fact Germany even recently invested in new coal powered plants. Any sources on this? In Australia in the past few weeks Germany is given as an ideal example of a country decommissioning all of its coal mines and power plants.
- earthnail 7y agoWe are decommissioning them. The plan was quite badly executed. Basically, in order to set a deadline, politicians decided to compensate power plant owners for their losses. Problem is: suddenly, all power plant owners came up with very optimistic plans on how long they would’ve kept each plant running. This would’ve been acceptable to a certain degree if the plan to shut down plants was aggressive to begin with. However, the phase-out plan is largely in line with the plant’s lifespans anyway, so we’re not actually shutting anything off very early. Reactions have been very mixed, to say the least. On the bright side, it does close the discussion around coal energy once and for all, but for an unnecessarily high price.
- imtringued 7y agoSome shut downs were motivated by the recent increase of the CO2 certificate prices. Three years ago it was at 5€/ton. Now it is at 25€/ton.
- dekhn 7y agoI recall talking to some europeans and they said they like their driers, which only half dry clothes (they put them up on a line to finish) but use less energy. It's some sort of virtue thing, I guess.
- jsjddbbwj 7y agoIt's not a virtue thing. Energy is just very expensive in Europe compared to for example the US.
- dekhn 7y agoI'd still pay the cost, because energy is cheaper than my free time.
- lm28469 7y agoIt takes like 2 minutes to hang a full load of laundry.
- asveikau 7y agoIf you are "synchronously" doing laundry, ie. waiting for the load to dry, then we must admit it's slower, though this may vary with the seasons and climate of your location. But if you set it aside in the morning or evening, then go out and start your day as you normally would, you're OK. In some cases this might mean you plan your laundry better. Eg. you start laundry when you have at least 1 set of clothes to wear for the next day, instead of when you have 0 clean clothes to wear.
- dekhn 7y agoI do the laundry for the house; it's about 4 loads a week for 4 people, which I mainly batch up because if I'm not paying attention to the wet laundry, it can sit in the washer and get stale. It would take more like 5 minutes to hang a load- do I hang it inside, or out of my crowded home (it's in the 4-10C range outside now), so you're talking about 20 minutes, spread throughout a day. Alternatively, I can just dump the washer load into the dryer, and come back when the dryer finishes. For a busy professional, this is huge.
- pazimzadeh 7y agoSomething something mine bitcoin?
- undersuit 7y agoCryto-mining with excess energy is only effective when you have excess computing power too. Maybe a gamer with a GPU could get the opportunity to use all the excess resources for a little bit of profit, but the payoff rate for buying a GPU needs 24/7 mining to even make a profit over a year.
- pazimzadeh 7y agoThat's the case even when electricity is free?
- undersuit 7y agoIt's not always free. What's the prices when it's not free? Do you just take a bath on profitability every time you have to pay higher prices when there is demand? Do you not mine when it's not free?
- lispm 7y agoThe households are not heating with electricity, because electricity for household consumers is expensive and not free. The share of electricity for renewable energy is currently at 42%. There is not a large surplus of electricity from renewable energy for heating.
- epicgiga 7y agoSo would it be a legit business model to just run a 1billion gigawatt heater to profit from those negative rates?
- omgtehlion 7y agoFirst, they killed nuclear, which prompted more coal production. Now they skewed wind so much that burning gas is cheaper than using green energy. It seems no matter what Germany does, it only promotes fossil fuel usage. Quite opposite of what they wanted...
- cm2187 7y agoWhat I don't get is how renewable energy are supposed to be cheaper though they still need massive subsidies.
- rangibaby 7y agoSubsidize it until the cost per unit is cheaper than fossil fuels due to economies of scale, then the subsidies are no longer necessary
- Radle 7y agoDo renewables need massive subsidies to sustain themselves or do politics offer massive subsidies because they want to have even more renewable energy?
- probably_wrong 7y ago> On Monday 10th February 2020 something historical happened. For the first time, the market price of electricity fell below zero in Finland.(...) While this single day was a very windy one... I feel I should point out that "a very windy day" is a big understatement. February 10, 2020 was the day when storm Sabine arrived in northern Europe. In Germany, all medium and long distance trains stopped (electric trains, btw), and plenty of people stayed inside. Lots of closed schools, too. I don't necessarily disagree with the article's central points. But picking up the one outlier in which there's ridiculous amounts of wind and entire countries are working at half capacity seems naive at best.
- marcosscriven 7y agoWe called it storm Ciara in the UK. I wonder why we don’t unify names.
- ysr23 7y agobrexit means brexit /s In seriousness, wasn't Storm Ciara named by Met Éireann ? that was certainly my impression, given that most people in the UK struggled to pronounce it. So there is some unification between The Met offices of Ireland and the UK with regard to naming.
- Freak_NL 7y agoIt would have been called Ciara even if the storm was named by the Met Office. The names are unified and a list is published every September: https://www.countryliving.com/uk/news/a28924357/met-office-storm-names-winter-2019-2020/ https://www.countryliving.com/uk/news/a28924357/met-office-s... > The names are a mix of British, Irish and Dutch monikers.
- lexa1979 7y agot'was called Ciara in Belgium also.
- newqer 7y ago
- Radle 7y agoI worked in the Utility Software area for a while. Everything related to energy in Germany looks like corruption if you look to closely. Everyone is buddies with someone in politics, otherwise screw your career. Laws are mainly pre written by the industry which is afraid of the risks associated with tackling the challenges involved in climate change. But also afraid of doing nothing, since this would make them clear targets for disruption through voters. So when they do change something it is always in extremely small steps, limited in scope, without changes to the wider system. While politics give a clear sense of direction regarding renewable energy, the whole thing seems to be to complex for politicians to fully grasp.
- fsloth 7y ago"Laws are mainly pre written by the industry which is afraid..." That's actually how lots of laws are written. Because when politicians write new laws, they listen to expert opinion. And the best experts come - of course - from the relative industry. Sometimes this makes sense, and sometimes to inane protection of incumbent interests like happened with digital content (it's illegal to copy the DVD you've purchased etc).
- gambiting 7y agoHere in UK on certain tariffs (Octopus Agile) price of electricity regularly falls below zero at night. If you have an electric car set to only charge when price of electricity is below zero, you're getting paid to charge your car.
- webignition 7y agoBeing in the UK myself, I'm curious about this. Does Octopus provide the price of electricity at the current moment? I had a quick look at their website but couldn't see anything obvious.
- corint 7y agoThey do, they expose it via an API, so you can use IFTTT (or anything you make that's similar to this) to optimise when you use power. This website does some analysis on the pricing: https://www.energy-stats.uk/octopus-agile/ https://www.energy-stats.uk/octopus-agile/ The useful part is that, if a user of the tariff is sufficiently engaged, not only do they save money, but by shifting their demand to follow supply it helps with the increasing adoption of renewable sources.
- jnsaff2 7y agohttps://www.nordpoolgroup.com/Market-data1/#/n2ex/table https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/Market-data1/#/n2ex/table this is the market price you need to find out the margin + transmission costs yourself.
- gambiting 7y agoYes, you get an app and you can see the current and historical prices, in 30 minute increments. Looks like this: https://imgur.com/a/zva2yby https://imgur.com/a/zva2yby But if you want, you can also export all of the data as an excel spreadsheet. Some car chargers(OHME for example) can read this data in real time and only start charging when the price per kWh falls below a pre-set level.
- dusted 7y agoInteresting, I live in Denmark, and we pay a premium for electricity.. Average consumer price is 0,33 USD per KW/h, almost three times the US average.
- KingOfCoders 7y agoWe use the most expensive power provider in Germany (Greenpeace Energy) and it's also 0,33 USD per KW/h.
- marcosscriven 7y agoDo I understand correctly from the article, that these negative prices are so that the suppliers can still claim their subsidy for supplying you. They are effectively giving you a cut of the subsidy?
- jevgeni 7y agoI think it's mostly due to the structure of the market: you can't sensibly reduce supply of power when demand drops like with commodities like oil. So the price is the only free variable left.
- onetimemanytime 7y agoget up get up...lets wash our clothes right now, free, and then some, electricity. I always wondered what happened if there was 100units of energy in the system and only 90 were used in that minute/hour. I imagined a place where they offloaded it to the ground, much like lightning.
- martin_a 7y agoSee... If politics hadn't fucked up for the last decades, and bowed down to the four large energy companies in Germany, we could have a wide variety of storage options to do something useful with all that excess energy...
- jevgeni 7y agoA bit of off-topic, but I love the elegance of gravitational energy storage, like what the Swiss are doing: https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surprisingly-efficient-way-to-store-energy/ https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surpris...
- martin_a 7y agoAnything is better than just wasting the energy or "selling" it for a negative price to somebody who dumps it somewhere.
- jillesvangurp 7y agoInterestingly, most of Finland heats with electricity. I used to live there before I moved to Germany. Unlike Germany, Finland does not use a lot of natural gas. So, Germans subsidizing Finnish heating with clean energy is not necessarily a bad deal for Finland. I'd say it's a better deal for the planet than Russia subsidizing gas usage in e.g. Belarus, which is currently negotiating a new deal for this with Russia (in exchange for becoming part of Russia). Finland is in any case not great for wind power. The article is correct that bureaucratic inertia and taxing practices in Germany don't make much sense and are very counter productive (and not just for the energy market). I live there. German ineptness and inefficiency is cringe-worthy. It's a political problem; the current government seems paralyzed waiting for their term to run out and not getting much done at all. That does not mean clean energy is a no go but it does mean that pressure on politicians to fix things will increase over time. Also, the rest of Europe gets a sweet deal on energy. E.g. the Netherlands where I'm from is far ahead in EV deployments and despite being a gas producer is already implementing a policy of decommissioning gas usage by households over the next decades (this is a big deal in NL). Germany has no such plans in place. Heating oil disappeared a long time ago from my country as well and apparently is still a thing in Germany. Even coal heating was still a thing when I moved to Berlin 11 years ago (you could smell it in the winter). That's a lot more rare now. Fundamentally, selling excess clean energy at negative rates is a sign of desperation. It should be a very valuable commodity. The problem is that we subsidize production but tax/penalize consumption. It should be the other way around. That would drive demand up and the cheapest way to meet that demand would be clean energy. With plenty of EVs hitting the market at tens of thousands per month across the EU, there should be no shortage of new demand. That's why Texas pumps and refines oil using lots of solar and wind power. It's an economic no-brainer for them. Most of the clean energy capacity in that state (and it is world leading on that front) is actually consumed by their industry.
- dharma1 7y agoThe best way to heat homes IMHO is geothermal energy. It is clean and renewable. There is an element of electricity consumption, but far less than with direct electric heating. There is a shift in Finland to geothermal, chosen for most new builds now, and district heating systems are exploring deep geothermal for heating whole towns and cities.
- csomar 7y agoTitle is not really accurate: 1. Electricity is not free in Germany, it's actually expensive; and 2. Germans do heat their homes.
- squiggleblaz 7y agoYour point (1) is the point of the article. If the market price of electricity is 0€/MWh, the retail price is still bloody expensive because there's a ton of taxes, most of which do not relate to source of the energy nor its cost. You claim (2) is a misunderstanding of the title. The title is intended to be interpreted as "Why Germans won't heat their homes with electricity, even if it's free". That is how I immediately interpreted it so I don't think the claim that the title is inaccurate can be maintained on this basis. The intersection of the two claims is a further point of the article. Since free electricity in Germany is too expensive to heat houses with, and since Germans are going to heat their houses (unlike, say, Australians—where a normal winter is comparable to this year's winter in Berlin—who will merely become uncomfortable and/or stay in bed when the cost of heating gets too high), we therefore have the unfortunate situation that Germans are not selecting the most abundant nor the most socially responsible forms of heating. The taxes do not act like a carbon tax when a person is encouraged to use natural gas to heat their house instead of superabundant wind power. What a terrible system.
- Tepix 7y agoThe market price does not directly correlate with the retail price even if you take into account taxes and other fees. The average market price may affect the retail prices in the long run if it goes up or down. We're seeing prices for electricity as low as 0€ (or lower) because there isn't enough storage capacity.
- squiggleblaz 7y agoWe're seeing prices for electricity as low as 0€ or less because people aren't using it efficiently. Part of that is because there is insufficient storage capacity, preventing it from being used when there's more demand and less wind. But another part of that is that retail prices don't correspond close enough to market prices, so people aren't incentivised to use the best source of energy available at a time. An electric heater isn't that expensive. An app that broadcasts the current energy price is probably a little more expensive, especially since the company that produces it will want to add as many expensive lock in features as they can. The German marketplace is remarkably inefficient. It's extremely difficult to cancel contracts here for instance — you most commonly have to do it several months in advance, or else they will automatically extend themself without the actual, legitimate consent of the client. There's many problems but most of them are caused by bugs in the German marketplace which could be fixed by regulation intended to improve efficiency. For some reason, all the regulation here is intended to reduce efficiency.
- diffeomorphism 7y agoI feel this article is missing the forest for the trees: > German electricity consumers paid 80 million euros in tariffs to get 8 million euros worth of wind power to the market. > There is simply no point to make any market-driven investments in Germany; the tariffs are simply too large compared to the market value of electricity. > (...) > This might not be a problem if “getting more renewables” is the end-goal one prefers, but I think the goal should be decreasing emissions. That is the stated end-goal. The subsidies are (overly) high so that lots of renewable energy production/infrastructure is built instead of whatever might be more profitable otherwise. While this is related to eletricity production (payout per MWh etc.), the actual building part is what is ecouraged. You can of course argue whether that it is a good goal to pick, but to me this sounds not like an unintended "problem" but rather as the subsidies achieving exactly what they intended to.
- teraku 7y agoBut most subsidies are towards coal and gas. They even stopped wind subsidies, because windenergy was too flexible and pushed coal out of the market, since coal is not flexible enough. So now we have to wait until more power plants get shut down before they pick up on building more wind energy again. Until then, they are powering the existing wind energy platforms up. The "stated end-goal" and what is actually done is very divergent in modern day Germany. Just saying that right now you pay on average 0,25€/kWh here. Although the market price is almost naught.
- diffeomorphism 7y ago> But most subsidies are towards coal and gas. Germany has/had extensive coal production (complete exit by 2038 IIRC) with lots of employment tied to it; of course that has subsidies. > They even stopped wind subsidies, because windenergy was too flexible and pushed coal out of the market, since coal is not flexible enough That sounds more like a conspiracy theory. You don't stop stuff for being "too flexible" but because of other problem, e.g. offshore vs. onshore, transmission to the south, environmental concerns, wanting a different mix of renewables etc. . > The "stated end-goal" and what is actually done is very divergent in modern day Germany. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany There are more and more people employed in these industries. Production capacities went up etc. . Seems to be doing what it says on the tin. > Just saying that right now you pay on average 0,25€/kWh here. Although the market price is almost naught. Yeah, so? Consumer electricity prices were never even mentioned in the "end-goal"?
- mrweasel 7y agoI've not sure if has changed in the last few years, but one issue Denmark has run into is that our tariffs on CO2 actually harms the use of surplus green energy. Most of Denmark (at least in the cities) are heats using hot water from remote heating plants, either surplus heat from power generation or garbage incineration, with auxiliary gas and coal plants. 15 years ago many of the smaller gas powered heating plants offered to install the equipment needed to convert excess electrical power to heat. The idea being that they would save money, compared to buying gas, the only caveat: They didn't want to pay the CO2 tariffs, which made sense, given that the power would mostly be from wind anyway. Paying the tariff would completely negate any cost savings, compared to buying the gas. This solution was refused by politicians for years, so instead the heating plants would burn gas, generation CO2, and the excess wind power would be sold to Germany for almost nothing, and in many cases for free. That this point Germany wasn't closing down its nuclear power plants, so the electricity the Danish windfarms replaced was also CO2 free.
- trenchgun 7y agoI don't get it. Why would they pay CO2 tariff for heating with wind powered electricity?
- trenchgun 7y agoLike what is the point of the regulation?
- mrweasel 7y agoBecause the regulation, at the time, mandated CO2 tariff on ALL electricity, regardless of origin. That was the broken part of the regulation. The tariff was/is calculated per kW and not actually based on CO2 emissions. It's basically just an extra tax placed on the consumers to help subsidize green energy. It just kinda backfired the cases of the heating plants, because they weren't never thought of a consumer of electricity.
- jokoon 7y agoJean Marc Jancovici is a french energy expert, and he often talks about Germany. An important story to remember about Germany, is how Fukushima led the country to stop using nuclear power. Merkel has a PhD in physics, so naturally she understands that nuclear power is green and just better than renewable and coal. But after Fukushima, she was forced to stop nuclear plants, because as Jancovici argued, she is an "assermented executor": if all germans want to stop nuclear energy, then there's nothing to do.
- flo123456 7y ago> nuclear power is green and just better than renewable and coal How do you arrive at that conclusion? Better in what regard? AFAIK nuclear power has all sorts of problems, the main one being that nobody knows what to do about the waste. Building nuclear power plants isn’t exactly carbon emission free either.
- vidarh 7y agoDealing with the waste is not a problem. Dealing with the fear around the waste is. The amount of radioactive waste from coal plants is a far bigger problem than the very minor volumes of waste from nuclear, a lot of which can be used as fuel for breeder reactors. Once we've decommissioned all coal power plants, then it might be reasonable to assess whether or not continued investment in nuclear is worthwhile, but until then decommissioning nuclear is actively causing harm, including huge numbers of deaths, by keeping more coal plants operational.
- jokoon 7y agoThe waste is a non-problem, especially when you compare with co2 over decades. Nuclear energy emits less co2 than renewables: it requires less metals (especially if you store electricity with batteries or other means), and renewables are not baseload energies, meaning you need to burn either coal or gas when there's no sun or wind. Wind mills require a lot of metals, and installing them is complicated. Solar panels require mining elements, and solar panels degrade over time. Nuclear energy is green. It's time to say it.
- xab19920 7y ago"And here lies the final problem. Germany taxes natural gas very lightly. " Cannot cut into the action of Putin and Gazprom Schroeder. [We can bet that this entirely correct comment will be deleted by the censors.]
- OliverJones 7y agoHooray for the energy market being disrupted. It's a sign of the success of government subsidies to renewable power. Obviously adjustments are required as the disruption proceeds. Hopefully governments and private concerns in Europe can cooperate to make workable new rules and tariffs. I'm not so hopeful in the US because our federal government is the servant of big oil. Here in Massachusetts USA I pay USD0.24 per kWh delivered to my home (generation + transmission + distribution + taxes). Our energy markets are generally mired in 19th-century ways of measuring, so it's harder to tell what natural gas costs (what is a therm???) But I believe it's about USD0.08 per kWh. I've just signed up for "community solar." A developer is building a PV farm (in the median strip of a large highway, I believe). It will save me on generation costs, but not transmission or distribution, so my rate will fall to about USD0.18 I believe. Here we have high generation costs partly because Hydro Quebec drove a hard long-term bargain ("take-or-pay" they call it) with our electric company long ago. Towns with municipal power usually pay less because they're not stuck with Hydro Quebec, but sometimes pay more. I could go on and on, but here's the thing. It's expensive for generators to participate in long-distance grids. Why? If their AC frequency drifts even a tiny amount, the grid must disconnect. How can companies maintain the AC frequency under heavy load? 1. expensive and filthy peak-load generators (diesel-powered often) spinning ready to take load. 2. big batteries. Telsa and some Australian government utilities have had great success with this. 3. excess renewable capacity. But at times of heavy demand there isn't any. 4. SMART DISTRIBUTION: the ability to quickly and selectively shed load temporarily. Space- and water- heating are perfect applications for this. So is battery charging for transportation. We aren't nearly done with the disruption yet. Now it starts to get interesting. Electricity companies are in the information business; they just don't know it yet.
- rb808 7y agoDo German households even have smart meters? To me this is the most important thing in a renewable world. I'd imagine the wholesale market electricity was free but consumers pay a fixed charge that doesn't change even on windy days. The most important thing is changing people's behaviour on the peak cold windless cloudy days when the market price is high people shouldn't be washing clothes or ironing or using electric heating.
- mtmail 7y agoIf I understand this article correctly: The 2016 law to install smart meters came into effect Feb/2020. Well for those households over 6000 kWh. It's expected that 10% of households will have those within 3 years. https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Intelligente-Stromzaehler-Startschuss-fuer-verpflichtenden-Smart-Meter-Einbau-4651422.html https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Intelligente-Stromza...
- kazinator 7y agoTL; DR: crazy taxes based off quantity rather than price make electricity cost 200 €/MWh even when the base cost is free, whereas natural gas is taxed lightly, making it cheaper to the consumer.
- ZeroGravitas 7y agoI've not checked this particular occurrence yet, so it's possible there's good news, but I've never found one of these "renewables cause negative prices" stories yet where the system was actually running on 100% renewable. Usually there's some coal or gas supply that decides for whatever reason to not turn itself off. Often because ramp downs and then up again will cost them more than the negative price. So it's all geeky accounting, but basically non renewables are being fined so they make slightly less money overall if they aren't flexible to demand.
- cardiffspaceman 7y agoThe wording of the current title is unnecessarily insulting. The point of the article is that Germans don't use electricity to heat their homes because the weird economics plus possibly some sunk costs favor natural gas or oil. Germans aren't sitting around in the cold winters wearing parkas and shaking their thrifty fists at the powers that be.
- m12k 7y agoSubsidies for those who don't pollute seems like such a backwards solution compared to taxing those who do pollute. If you want people to stop dumping trash in your backyard do you think it's saner to punish those who do or to reward everyone else in your neighborhood who gets rid of their trash in other ways? The atmosphere and its ability to contain a limited amount of carbon is a public good, and we should stop giving away the right to dump stuff in it for free.