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No, you are not wrong. Gas is only a small part of German electricity production. It is a larger part in the US, but the US has a lot of gas available from frac
by _ph_ 4y ago
No, you are not wrong. Gas is only a small part of German electricity production. It is a larger part in the US, but the US has a lot of gas available from fracking. Yes, if there were plentiful of cheap gas, it is much better to use that instead of coal and oil, but electricity production isn't the bottle neck. Switching home heating to heat pumps alone could reduce the gas consumption considerably.
- doikor 4y agoThe % of actual gas used does not matter much as the price is set by the most expensive form of production at that moment. Most of the time this is a peaker gas (or oil) plants if it is required to run one. So if you normally need to run the last 1% of your production with peaker plants that used to cost X but now due to external reasons their costs are 10X then your electricity price for the moment they are on is 10 times more.
- _ph_ 4y agoGas wouldn't cost 10x more, if it were not scarce.
- doikor 4y agoAnd? Europe consumes more gas then it produces and thus it has no real control over the price of it.
- _ph_ 4y agoSure, but the current gas price on the international markets comes from demand exceeding available production. If Europe would half its gas usage, the price would plummet. It is already going down as gas supply is stabilizing despite Russia no longer providing gas to Europe.