7 ms·

Germany set to overhaul subsidy regime for renewable energy

38 points by thelastgallon 2y ago

cbmuser 2y ago
Germany currently pays 20 billion Euros per year for subsidizing renewables. Yet, after doing this so-called energy transition for almost 25 years now and spending hundreds of billions of Euros on it, the country still has more than 130 coal-fired power plants while France has only two with one actually being decommissioned. Despite these facts, there are still plenty of people here on HN and other platforms that are convinced that wind and solar are the way to go instead of nuclear. I will never understand that!
- stavros 2y ago
  Both are the way to go. Let's stop this "either solar or nuclear" mentality.
  - teractiveodular 2y ago
    Nuclear was a great choice in the 1970s, when France started seriously investing in it, but solar & wind have come a long way since then.
    - Mo3 2y ago
      Nuclear is still by the far the best in any kind of metric
      - coldtea 2y ago
        If one doesn't count the ever-present possibility of freak accidents, the externalities, or the endless heaps of subsidies for nuclear (some covert in the way of colonial arrangements and other ways, others open), yes.
        ta1243 2y ago
        Is it really? The cost per MWh generated seems far higher
      - derriz 2y ago
        Could you name these metrics? Because, nuclear loses according to all of these metrics, for a start: 1. the cost of energy produced. 2. operational flexibility (ability to follow demand). 3. operational cost (the average nuclear plant in the US employs 750). 4. project risk Pretty much everything beats nuclear on 1, 3 and 4 while gas turbines, batteries and hydro beat nuclear on 2. It doesn't even win on the fuel cost metric, given wind turbines and solar PV have zero costs in this regard.
      - adrianN 2y ago
        Except cost, construction time, and public acceptance.
    - stavros 2y ago
      They have. So has nuclear.
      - j-pb 2y ago
        You mean by becoming more expensive over time[0]? 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
        stavros 2y ago
        Bread has become more expensive over time too. I still buy it.
        j-pb 2y ago
        It seems that you haven't checked out the reference, because during the same time renewables became 2x cheaper than Nuclear at it's best, and 4x cheaper than Nuclear is right now. If you still buy the same brand of 4$ bread made from exotic imported ingredients and a non-bio-degradable packaging that needs to be stored for thousands of years and can only be bought in 2 Ton Loafs from a government-owned centralized bakery that hasn't baked bread in years, and requires a nuclear physics degree to be sliced. Instead of buying the 1$ Bread that is currently produced in high quantities, can be bought from your lokal bakery, has bio-degradable packaging, mostly local incredients, can be baked by any engineer and bought and cut by private individuals. Then I think that could be called nostalgic at best. It certainly doesn't speak of economic literacy.
        stavros 2y ago
        If I can only buy the $1 bread during the day, that's an issue, as I might also be hungry at night.
        j-pb 2y ago
        At night most people sleep so you don't need as much bread, and in case you do get hungry you can just eat the other brand that costs 1$. The "Dunkelflaute" is extremely rare [0]. 0: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute
  - lousken 2y ago
    The issue is that you need both - a stable source of power like nuclear for solar or wind to work
    - stavros 2y ago
      I feel like that's exactly what I said.
  - senectus1 2y ago
    the problem is, every time the sun shines and the wind blows it makes the investment in nuclear a sinking ship.. you cant throttle nuclear power plants like that, so they keep producing energy you cant charge for. They keep producing waste, they keep chewing up fuel and they continue being a saftey issue. What needs to happen is baseload storage, batteries, pumped hydro, hydrogen/ammonia.
    - zozbot234 2y ago
      Nuclear power can be dispatched/throttled. The reason why it's not done in practice is because it's uneconomic - the cost of nuclear power is almost all in building the plant and in the subsequent decommissioning, the power itself is almost free once you account for that. So you're better off producing, even under very unfavorable conditions. (Negative prices for power due to excess production can theoretically happen, but they will be solved if storage can be expanded and demand response can be deployed at scale. And renewables are even less capable of throttling in case of negative prices.)
    - defrost 2y ago
      I'm 100% on the renewable energy arc and have been for decades. However .. > and they continue being a saftey issue. this just gets tedious. I'm been in exploration geophysics and resource estimation, modelling, resource processing, etc for decades and batteries, hydrogen | ammonia aren't going to be any safer than existing nuclear reactors. eg: South Korea battery maker apologises for deadly fire but says it complied with safety rules following a massive factory fire that killed 23 workers https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-korea-begins-search-answers-after-battery-plant-fire-kills-22-2024-06-25/ https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-korea-begin... and there's not much of a renewables industry without seperated rare earth products https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynas https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/malaysia-allow-lynas-import-raw-materials-containing-radioactive-material-2023-10-24/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/malaysia-allow-l... this comes with radioactive waste storage requirements that rival the nuclear inustry.
- h0l0cube 2y ago
  Building new nuclear night have been a worthwhile proposition 10-15 years ago, but if you build one now, the exponential growth of grid storage will render it useless by all measures once it is finally in operation. Definitely decommissioning existing nuclear makes no sense for the next decade or two.
  - bgnn 2y ago
    Is there data about this exponential growth of grid storage? Here in the Netherlands grid is over-capacity and cannot be expandee easily because it should have been planned 10-15 years ago. Grid storage is in a worse state than the grid itself. A related report: https://www2.deloitte.com/nl/nl/pages/energy-resources-industrials/articles/energy-storage-development-of-the-market.html https://www2.deloitte.com/nl/nl/pages/energy-resources-indus...
    - h0l0cube 2y ago
      Grid storage additions 2017-2022: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/annual-grid-scale-battery-storage-additions-2017-2022 https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/annual-grid-s... It’s exponential growth, very similar to the growth curve of solar and wind. What’s different is the curve is even more explosive than either, to the point that it will surpass daily renewable consumption in little over a decade.
  - zozbot234 2y ago
    The only grid storage that matters at scale is pumped hydro. Everything else is literally a drop in the bucket. And you can't practically scale pumped hydro beyond what's there now.
    - energy123 2y ago
      There's more pumped hydro only because pumped hydro used to be the only option. But it's no longer the only option, so that state of affairs will change soon.
    - h0l0cube 2y ago
- nilsherzig 2y ago
  Disclaimer I haven't researched the two points I'm going to make, they are just things I've heard from people around me. 1. Nuclear power also never produced a profit in Germany / had to be subsidized the entire time. 2. France has some weird agreements with their former colonies in africa allowing them to basically steal the resources needed to make atomic energy at their scale viable. Booth points might be partly wrong, but could be worth looking into
  - vladvasiliu 2y ago
    I don't know about your first point, but the second doesn't seem correct. Here's a Le Monde article with details on where the Uranium comes from: https://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2023/08/03/a-quel-point-la-france-est-elle-dependante-de-l-uranium-nigerien_6184374_4355770.html https://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2023/08/03/a-qu... It's in French, but thre's a graph showing the distribution which should be legible. TLDR: a good chunk (~20%) comes from a former colony (Niger), but it's not the largest. Other main suppliers have not been French colonies.
- coldtea 2y ago
  Perhaps they are people who understand that the failure mode or nuclear, whether it's an accident at the station or regarding the long term byproducts storage (and also transfer), is not that good of a bet. Or the kind of people who don't buy the assurances (from players, scientists working in the industry, and fanboys) Or the kind of people who are not convinced by statistics about the "low" past impact of accidents and leaks, because they can see how they're downplayed and under-measured by governments trying to save face or promote further nuclear plans, but more importantly, because it just takes one grave accident to kill tons of people, doesn't matter if 200 previous accidents were "tame" enough.
  - GaggiX 2y ago
    Dams have killed tens of thousands of people, the latest incident 10 months ago killed 10000-20000 people, yet I always see people bring up how dangerous nuclear is.
    - coldtea 2y ago
      Well, the dam that killed those people was built to prevent flooding, and help with water for irrigation. It's was a neccessary preventive structure to avoid people dying in the first place - that failed after 15 years of lack of government, civil war, and related non-maintenance. Not something they've built despite having other options. At least it wasn't a nuclear factory that could fall into the hands of ISIS (also operating there), and whose materials could be used for bringing havoc all over the globe.
- j-pb 2y ago
  I'll never understand how people can have easy access to the latest price metrics [0], which clearly shows that renewables are miles ahead of nuclear, and still largue against them. 20 billion Euros would only give you a SINGLE nuclear power plant at best [1]. If the conservative government we had for the 10 years prior hadn't sabotaged the Energiewende we could have hit 100% renewables by now, instead we had the "Altmaier-Delle" [3][4]. France build Nuclear instead of Coal from the get go, if we could turn back time and do the same in Germany too, great. But unless we invent a time machine, the next best thing is investing into the cheapest CO2-Free technology we have right now, and that's renewables. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source 1: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/edfs-nuclear-project-britain-pushed-back-2029-may-cost-up-34-bln-2024-01-23/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/edfs-nuclear-project... 2: https://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/bundestagswahl/truebe-bilanz-von-peter-altmaier-wirtschaftsminister-ohne-plan-wie-schlecht-war-altmaier-wirklich-eine-abrechnung_id_24342042.html https://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/bundestagswahl/true... 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpmceuO02uI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpmceuO02uI
  - zozbot234 2y ago
    Renewables are not truly CO2-free because sometimes the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing. And then renewable fans have to rely on peaker natgas plants, that emit CO2 (though less of it on a kWh basis than oil or especially coal).
    - j-pb 2y ago
      Dunkelflaute is extremely rare if you have a sufficiently large grid [0]. That's the beauty of european collaboration, you can have german and spanish renewable jump in for each other, norwegian pumped hydro in the super rare case that neither have wind or sun, and french nuclear, should that happen while the storage is empty and you don't feel like reducing steel production for the day (which is btw also a totally valid way to balance the grid). 0: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute
- GaggiX 2y ago
  >HN and other platforms that are convinced that wind and solar are the way to go instead of nuclear. Wind and solar with nuclear is the way to go, in my opinion the perfect balance.
- imtringued 2y ago
  Those subsidies are the result of getting rid of the EEG surcharge. Before that, the EEG surcharge funded the entirety of the feed in tarrifs. When you consider the fact that the CO2 price was introduced a few years ago, it means that the government merely shifted the burden away from electricity consumers to CO2 polluters, but it also reclassifies the payments as a subsidy that has to be paid through taxes rather than surcharges.
- anovikov 2y ago
  Well, Germany is now at around 65% of renewable power and is set to go coal-free in a few years. These concerns are outdated.
  - bamboozled 2y ago
    Coal-free, but how much gas?
    - anovikov 2y ago
      Maybe to the tune of 15% or so, for now. With very gradual reduction to zero through 2050.
    - svara 2y ago
      If Germany gets this right, then, very little gas. The role of gas peaker plants in a system dominated by PV and wind is as a dispatchable backup for weather patterns in which storage is insufficient. By building out storage, load shifting and long distance transmission, you can squeeze out gas almost completely. You still need it for those very low probability situations that would be disproportionately expensive to also cover with storage (since storage becomes exponentially more expensive the more you build, since it needs to be used exponentially less). At some point, it'll hopefully be possible to eliminate carbon emissions from gas plants entirely with CCS or by burning synthetic gas.
      - zozbot234 2y ago
        How can you realistically build out storage when the bulk of current storage is pumped hydro, which can't realistically be scaled up and is not obviously enough for the possibility of lengthy, geographically vast "cold snaps" of renewables-hostile weather. Is this about feasible, proven technology or just sci-fi speculation?
        anovikov 2y ago
        Just add batteries. It's cheap. Fleet of installed grid batteries will exceed pumped hydro in maybe 2-3 years and will keep expanding at a crazy rate after. Storage is solved. In general, renewable electricity is solved. Energy transition problems is now about marine and air transport for which no applicable solution exists yet (ammonia is too problematic from too many angles and hydrogen stubbornly refuses to really take off).
- coffeeri 2y ago
  That comparison lacks as France heavily subsidizes nuclear energy as well. At the same time having to demolish and rebuild multiple reactors. Nuclear energy was never cheap. I don’t have the numbers but I doubt that France made the better net-deal.
  - Tade0 2y ago
    I think a good indicator here is that EDF, after several years of partial privatisation, became an essentially (92%) state owned company again - partly because they've lost €19bln when it suffered nuclear power plant outages along with scheduled maintenance. France doesn't really seem to have a plan for when their current fleet of nuclear reactors reaches decommissioning age. There's no schedule for replacing them, much less expanding generation capacity.
- energy123 2y ago
  Solar and wind were too expensive twenty years ago. Nuclear was the only option back then. Everyone should have done nuclear but they didn't. But it's not twenty years ago right now. France is the way France is because of decisions they made decades ago. Given none of us have access to a time machine, the best decision is to pursue the most cost effective and fastest to deploy technology today, which is solar and wind.
  - tass 2y ago
    Were the nuclear plants shut down in a way which prevents them from being restarted? Restarting them could be faster and more cost effective than burning coal while waiting for new solar and wind installations.
    - energy123 2y ago
      Early closure of nuclear plants is climate arson. There's no reason for it aside from ideology and hysteria. I'm not in favour of new nuclear for most countries (excepting those that have a track record of building plants quickly and cheaply, or due to seasonal instability of solar) because the capex makes it uncompetitive with solar and wind, but existing nuclear should be kept online for as long as possible.
    - adrianN 2y ago
      Not doing nonessential maintenance for twenty years because you know that your plant will be shut down is really not good if you want to eventually restart it.
    - ZeroGravitas 2y ago
      Renewables are competitive with just running a nuclear plant in some places. Lazard is US focused but they put running a nuclear plant at 32 dollars and the cheapest wind at $27 and cheapest solar at $29. That's not including any refurbishment costs. I think France publishes some numbers recently for the cost of their refurbishment program and I don't remember them being particularly great for nuclear, even if they met their cost projections.
- svara 2y ago
  Photovoltaics and batteries have been on a multi-decade exponential decline in cost. The world is installing about twice as much PV capacity every day in 2024 as it did in all of 2004. (1) The dynamics are so crazy, anything you've read or learnt about this 2 years ago is already outdated. Extrapolating this another 2 decades into the future, all of the world's primary energy consumption will be covered by PV. Those subsidies, in particular those in Germany, have had an important role in enabling this. Now, what Germany did with nuclear is still insane, and it's not all smooth sailing to a carbon free 2045, but I think that should pretty clearly help you understand why people think that way. (1) https://www.economist.com/interactive/essay/2024/06/20/solar-power-is-going-to-be-huge https://www.economist.com/interactive/essay/2024/06/20/solar...
- adrianN 2y ago
  The number of coal fired power plants is a lot less interesting than the amount of carbon per kWh, which has come down continuously in Germany, thanks to more and more renewable capacity: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electricity?tab=chart&country=~DEU https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...
mk89 2y ago
Some more context here that helped me understand better the Reuters article: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/lower-electricity-prices-leave-german-government-short-eu87-bln-renewables-funding https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/lower-electricity-price...
- _heimdall 2y ago
  > She stressed that the difficulties in funding did not alter the fact that power generation costs for renewables are cheaper than fossil or nuclear energy. “Many projects nevertheless need financial safeguards for the banks to make investments available,” Peter argued Well that's a fun little quote. If renewables are already a cheaper alternative to power generation, why would you need government funding and safeguards to convince banks to invest in a project? If the numbers work and a bank can see a clear psth to being paid back they will invest. There's clearly information being glossed over here that would explain why banks aren't willing to invest without government safeguards.
  - ibeff 2y ago
    Banks don't care if it's "cheaper than" some other form of power generation, they care that profitability is safe over a very long time span. If power prices crash 5 or 10 years from now because of renewables overcapacity (which is already happening regionally on sunny days with solar), profitability is gone.
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      If its not a sustainable, profitable business why should a bank invest in it? Banks aren't meant to promote the moral or ethical good. They exist to take money from depositors, replace it with IOUs, and invest the money in ways that are the most likely to be paid back with interest. That's obviously not to say we can only have industries that work as an open market, but I'd argue that if they don't then the government might as well run the industry rather than fund these half-in half-out companies that appear to be private corporations but only actually exist because the government blessed them.
- 2y ago
imtringued 2y ago
The feed in tarrifs have been falling every year and now the feed in tarrifs are barely a cent or two higher per kWh than the average spot price on the electricity exchange. Meanwhile there are weird edge cases such as negative prices where the feed in tarrif is paid anyway. The government is forced to pay the difference. The current subsidies unfairly disadvantage investments into energy storage so the simplest solution is to just get rid of them. However, this doesn't get rid of the need for subsidizing energy storage, which is starting to take off thanks to sodium batteries.
derriz 2y ago
It's been clear for quite a number of years that renewables in Europe no longer need any sort of government support. In any case, most of these support contracts have a "contract for difference" structure with a price established by competitive auction. In the early years, the prices were high as there were fewer bidders and large (unjustified) profits were made. But as time has gone on, increasing competition has pushed the prices lower and lower. On a net project-lifetime basis, it's probably now a wash whether you operate a wind farm under a CFD regime/contract or you just compete in the regular market. CFDs require you to reimburse the state when you get paid more than the strike price and so many (particularly wind) producers in the west/north of Europe were hit with large rebate bills in 2022 and 2023 as wholesale prices often exceeded the strike prices after the energy crisis caused by Russia's attack on Ukraine. At least in the UK and Ireland, some renewable energy companies are opting out of the renewables-subsidy scheme completely. For example, the owners/promotors of the large Oriel off-shore wind project in Ireland are skipping all the bureaucracy and delays associated with the renewable auction process and will build the wind farm to compete directly in the day-ahead wholesale markets. Of course there is a large benefit to being protected from the volatility of wholesale electricity markets but it seems like we've passed the point where the financial value of such a contract is required to make a renewables project viable.
aaron695 2y ago
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tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
As a result of primarily this subsidy regime (with a small assist from very high taxes on electricity), consumer electricity prices in Germany are the second-highest in the EU: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/images/a/a9/Electricity_prices_for_household_consumers%2C_second_half_2023_V_2.png https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/images/a/... For non-household consumers, prices are more in line with the rest of the EU: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/images/a/a0/Electricity_prices_for_non-household_consumers%2C_second_half_2023_V2.png https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/images/a/... - and I suspect that statistic mixes small commercial consumers that pay residential rates and industrial ones, because to my knowledge, this subsidy is paid mostly by small consumers while industry and export are exempt...
- Hugsun 2y ago
  This is a little off topic but why did you end your comment with ellipsis? What do you mean with its usage?
  - armada651 2y ago
    It's showing that they're at a loss for words from the fact that industry is exempt.
    - tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
      exactly
- coffeeri 2y ago
  It is the result of an energy dependence on Russia that has been built up over years, not due to any specific subsidiaries.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
    That could explain it if prices were high in general (i.e. also for industry). https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/152973/umfrage/eeg-umlage-entwicklung-der-strompreise-in-deutschland-seit-2000/ https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/152973/umfrag... shows that 2014-2021 over six cents per kWh were going to the renewable energy subsidy scheme, and this is directly attributable, not some kind of hand-waving. I believe this was more than the wholesale cost of the electricity (without grid fees and taxes) in many of these years, and I think you also have to add another 19% of VAT on top of that. In 2022 the subsidy started to be paid from taxes instead, and it was lower because market-based electricity prices went up (reducing the amount of subsidy necessary to reach the guaranteed prices).
usrusr 2y ago
Long overdue: I'm all for subsidizing renewables, let's down them in money. But the way it's currently done in Germany erases all incentive to tap low hanging fruit in dispatchability. Which has lead to the ubiquitous biogas setups (capture methane that's created in the agricultural refuse>fertilizer cycle anyways and burn it for heat and electricity) all getting designed for continuously burning exactly the amount produced, instead of adding a little overcapacity in conversion throughput and the little short term gas storage that would be required to follow the intraday cycle. This would be easy enough, but the reality is that those biogas systems in Germany now run baseload with even less dispatchability than nuclear.
- anovikov 2y ago
  Indeed. Biogas has to be used to balance wind and solar. Not to be used as a carbon-free replacement for coal. This is ridiculous.
- usrusr 2y ago
  Adding to my old post, I suspect that those broken incentives were the result of mixing "how" and "how much" in political decisionmaking. That's a process problem I see repeated over and over again: the "how much" is not isolated from the "how" and then you get compromises that are too generous in some parts and too frugal in other parts. It's as if compromises in salary negotiation went "yeah, we could agree on 10% more each month, if in turn we skip payment in December". I believe that politics could get much better results if compromises about the particularities of distribution were always discussed with an open scale factor shared across the entire range of a particular kind of spending (e.g. renewables subsidy), and then the scale factor was decided upon in a separate discussion/compromise.
ThatMedicIsASpy 2y ago
November 2023: 18600€, 6.4kW solar, 8.7kW battery, inverter, installation, new electrical cabinet. The subsidy is the 19% VAT is free Germany near NL. Current energy price 0.25cents/kWh. Sunny days gives 40kWh of production with 50% of it being used. Current rate is 0.807cents/kWh when feeding back to the grid.
- OptionOfT 2y ago
  Do I read it correct that you pay 0.0025€ / kWh? And that you get paid 0.00807€ / kWh sent back, which is more than what you pay to consume?
kkfx 2y ago
Of course the support is only for enterprises, state aid to them, nothing to the people who have or want renewables...

38 points by thelastgallon 2y ago

Germany currently pays 20 billion Euros per year for subsidizing renewables. Yet, after doing this so-called energy transition for almost 25 years now and spending hundreds of billions of Euros on it, the country still has more than 130 coal-fired power plants while France has only two with one actually being decommissioned. Despite these facts, there are still plenty of people here on HN and other platforms that are convinced that wind and solar are the way to go instead of nuclear. I will never understand that!

stavros 2y ago
Both are the way to go. Let's stop this "either solar or nuclear" mentality.
- teractiveodular 2y ago
  Nuclear was a great choice in the 1970s, when France started seriously investing in it, but solar & wind have come a long way since then.
  - Mo3 2y ago
    Nuclear is still by the far the best in any kind of metric
    - coldtea 2y ago
      If one doesn't count the ever-present possibility of freak accidents, the externalities, or the endless heaps of subsidies for nuclear (some covert in the way of colonial arrangements and other ways, others open), yes.
      - ta1243 2y ago
        Is it really? The cost per MWh generated seems far higher
    - derriz 2y ago
      Could you name these metrics? Because, nuclear loses according to all of these metrics, for a start: 1. the cost of energy produced. 2. operational flexibility (ability to follow demand). 3. operational cost (the average nuclear plant in the US employs 750). 4. project risk Pretty much everything beats nuclear on 1, 3 and 4 while gas turbines, batteries and hydro beat nuclear on 2. It doesn't even win on the fuel cost metric, given wind turbines and solar PV have zero costs in this regard.
    - adrianN 2y ago
      Except cost, construction time, and public acceptance.
  - stavros 2y ago
    They have. So has nuclear.
    - j-pb 2y ago
      You mean by becoming more expensive over time[0]? 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
      - stavros 2y ago
        Bread has become more expensive over time too. I still buy it.
        j-pb 2y ago
        It seems that you haven't checked out the reference, because during the same time renewables became 2x cheaper than Nuclear at it's best, and 4x cheaper than Nuclear is right now. If you still buy the same brand of 4$ bread made from exotic imported ingredients and a non-bio-degradable packaging that needs to be stored for thousands of years and can only be bought in 2 Ton Loafs from a government-owned centralized bakery that hasn't baked bread in years, and requires a nuclear physics degree to be sliced. Instead of buying the 1$ Bread that is currently produced in high quantities, can be bought from your lokal bakery, has bio-degradable packaging, mostly local incredients, can be baked by any engineer and bought and cut by private individuals. Then I think that could be called nostalgic at best. It certainly doesn't speak of economic literacy.
        stavros 2y ago
        If I can only buy the $1 bread during the day, that's an issue, as I might also be hungry at night.
        j-pb 2y ago
        At night most people sleep so you don't need as much bread, and in case you do get hungry you can just eat the other brand that costs 1$. The "Dunkelflaute" is extremely rare [0]. 0: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute
- lousken 2y ago
  The issue is that you need both - a stable source of power like nuclear for solar or wind to work
  - stavros 2y ago
    I feel like that's exactly what I said.
- senectus1 2y ago
  the problem is, every time the sun shines and the wind blows it makes the investment in nuclear a sinking ship.. you cant throttle nuclear power plants like that, so they keep producing energy you cant charge for. They keep producing waste, they keep chewing up fuel and they continue being a saftey issue. What needs to happen is baseload storage, batteries, pumped hydro, hydrogen/ammonia.
  - zozbot234 2y ago
    Nuclear power can be dispatched/throttled. The reason why it's not done in practice is because it's uneconomic - the cost of nuclear power is almost all in building the plant and in the subsequent decommissioning, the power itself is almost free once you account for that. So you're better off producing, even under very unfavorable conditions. (Negative prices for power due to excess production can theoretically happen, but they will be solved if storage can be expanded and demand response can be deployed at scale. And renewables are even less capable of throttling in case of negative prices.)
  - defrost 2y ago
    I'm 100% on the renewable energy arc and have been for decades. However .. > and they continue being a saftey issue. this just gets tedious. I'm been in exploration geophysics and resource estimation, modelling, resource processing, etc for decades and batteries, hydrogen | ammonia aren't going to be any safer than existing nuclear reactors. eg: South Korea battery maker apologises for deadly fire but says it complied with safety rules following a massive factory fire that killed 23 workers https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-korea-begins-search-answers-after-battery-plant-fire-kills-22-2024-06-25/ https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-korea-begin... and there's not much of a renewables industry without seperated rare earth products https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynas https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/malaysia-allow-lynas-import-raw-materials-containing-radioactive-material-2023-10-24/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/malaysia-allow-l... this comes with radioactive waste storage requirements that rival the nuclear inustry.
h0l0cube 2y ago
Building new nuclear night have been a worthwhile proposition 10-15 years ago, but if you build one now, the exponential growth of grid storage will render it useless by all measures once it is finally in operation. Definitely decommissioning existing nuclear makes no sense for the next decade or two.
- bgnn 2y ago
  Is there data about this exponential growth of grid storage? Here in the Netherlands grid is over-capacity and cannot be expandee easily because it should have been planned 10-15 years ago. Grid storage is in a worse state than the grid itself. A related report: https://www2.deloitte.com/nl/nl/pages/energy-resources-industrials/articles/energy-storage-development-of-the-market.html https://www2.deloitte.com/nl/nl/pages/energy-resources-indus...
  - h0l0cube 2y ago
    Grid storage additions 2017-2022: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/annual-grid-scale-battery-storage-additions-2017-2022 https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/annual-grid-s... It’s exponential growth, very similar to the growth curve of solar and wind. What’s different is the curve is even more explosive than either, to the point that it will surpass daily renewable consumption in little over a decade.
- zozbot234 2y ago
  The only grid storage that matters at scale is pumped hydro. Everything else is literally a drop in the bucket. And you can't practically scale pumped hydro beyond what's there now.
  - energy123 2y ago
    There's more pumped hydro only because pumped hydro used to be the only option. But it's no longer the only option, so that state of affairs will change soon.
  - h0l0cube 2y ago
nilsherzig 2y ago
Disclaimer I haven't researched the two points I'm going to make, they are just things I've heard from people around me. 1. Nuclear power also never produced a profit in Germany / had to be subsidized the entire time. 2. France has some weird agreements with their former colonies in africa allowing them to basically steal the resources needed to make atomic energy at their scale viable. Booth points might be partly wrong, but could be worth looking into
- vladvasiliu 2y ago
  I don't know about your first point, but the second doesn't seem correct. Here's a Le Monde article with details on where the Uranium comes from: https://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2023/08/03/a-quel-point-la-france-est-elle-dependante-de-l-uranium-nigerien_6184374_4355770.html https://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2023/08/03/a-qu... It's in French, but thre's a graph showing the distribution which should be legible. TLDR: a good chunk (~20%) comes from a former colony (Niger), but it's not the largest. Other main suppliers have not been French colonies.
coldtea 2y ago
Perhaps they are people who understand that the failure mode or nuclear, whether it's an accident at the station or regarding the long term byproducts storage (and also transfer), is not that good of a bet. Or the kind of people who don't buy the assurances (from players, scientists working in the industry, and fanboys) Or the kind of people who are not convinced by statistics about the "low" past impact of accidents and leaks, because they can see how they're downplayed and under-measured by governments trying to save face or promote further nuclear plans, but more importantly, because it just takes one grave accident to kill tons of people, doesn't matter if 200 previous accidents were "tame" enough.
- GaggiX 2y ago
  Dams have killed tens of thousands of people, the latest incident 10 months ago killed 10000-20000 people, yet I always see people bring up how dangerous nuclear is.
  - coldtea 2y ago
    Well, the dam that killed those people was built to prevent flooding, and help with water for irrigation. It's was a neccessary preventive structure to avoid people dying in the first place - that failed after 15 years of lack of government, civil war, and related non-maintenance. Not something they've built despite having other options. At least it wasn't a nuclear factory that could fall into the hands of ISIS (also operating there), and whose materials could be used for bringing havoc all over the globe.
j-pb 2y ago
I'll never understand how people can have easy access to the latest price metrics [0], which clearly shows that renewables are miles ahead of nuclear, and still largue against them. 20 billion Euros would only give you a SINGLE nuclear power plant at best [1]. If the conservative government we had for the 10 years prior hadn't sabotaged the Energiewende we could have hit 100% renewables by now, instead we had the "Altmaier-Delle" [3][4]. France build Nuclear instead of Coal from the get go, if we could turn back time and do the same in Germany too, great. But unless we invent a time machine, the next best thing is investing into the cheapest CO2-Free technology we have right now, and that's renewables. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source 1: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/edfs-nuclear-project-britain-pushed-back-2029-may-cost-up-34-bln-2024-01-23/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/edfs-nuclear-project... 2: https://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/bundestagswahl/truebe-bilanz-von-peter-altmaier-wirtschaftsminister-ohne-plan-wie-schlecht-war-altmaier-wirklich-eine-abrechnung_id_24342042.html https://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/bundestagswahl/true... 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpmceuO02uI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpmceuO02uI
- zozbot234 2y ago
  Renewables are not truly CO2-free because sometimes the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing. And then renewable fans have to rely on peaker natgas plants, that emit CO2 (though less of it on a kWh basis than oil or especially coal).
  - j-pb 2y ago
    Dunkelflaute is extremely rare if you have a sufficiently large grid [0]. That's the beauty of european collaboration, you can have german and spanish renewable jump in for each other, norwegian pumped hydro in the super rare case that neither have wind or sun, and french nuclear, should that happen while the storage is empty and you don't feel like reducing steel production for the day (which is btw also a totally valid way to balance the grid). 0: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute
GaggiX 2y ago
>HN and other platforms that are convinced that wind and solar are the way to go instead of nuclear. Wind and solar with nuclear is the way to go, in my opinion the perfect balance.
imtringued 2y ago
Those subsidies are the result of getting rid of the EEG surcharge. Before that, the EEG surcharge funded the entirety of the feed in tarrifs. When you consider the fact that the CO2 price was introduced a few years ago, it means that the government merely shifted the burden away from electricity consumers to CO2 polluters, but it also reclassifies the payments as a subsidy that has to be paid through taxes rather than surcharges.
anovikov 2y ago
Well, Germany is now at around 65% of renewable power and is set to go coal-free in a few years. These concerns are outdated.
- bamboozled 2y ago
  Coal-free, but how much gas?
  - anovikov 2y ago
    Maybe to the tune of 15% or so, for now. With very gradual reduction to zero through 2050.
  - svara 2y ago
    If Germany gets this right, then, very little gas. The role of gas peaker plants in a system dominated by PV and wind is as a dispatchable backup for weather patterns in which storage is insufficient. By building out storage, load shifting and long distance transmission, you can squeeze out gas almost completely. You still need it for those very low probability situations that would be disproportionately expensive to also cover with storage (since storage becomes exponentially more expensive the more you build, since it needs to be used exponentially less). At some point, it'll hopefully be possible to eliminate carbon emissions from gas plants entirely with CCS or by burning synthetic gas.
    - zozbot234 2y ago
      How can you realistically build out storage when the bulk of current storage is pumped hydro, which can't realistically be scaled up and is not obviously enough for the possibility of lengthy, geographically vast "cold snaps" of renewables-hostile weather. Is this about feasible, proven technology or just sci-fi speculation?
      - anovikov 2y ago
        Just add batteries. It's cheap. Fleet of installed grid batteries will exceed pumped hydro in maybe 2-3 years and will keep expanding at a crazy rate after. Storage is solved. In general, renewable electricity is solved. Energy transition problems is now about marine and air transport for which no applicable solution exists yet (ammonia is too problematic from too many angles and hydrogen stubbornly refuses to really take off).
coffeeri 2y ago
That comparison lacks as France heavily subsidizes nuclear energy as well. At the same time having to demolish and rebuild multiple reactors. Nuclear energy was never cheap. I don’t have the numbers but I doubt that France made the better net-deal.
- Tade0 2y ago
  I think a good indicator here is that EDF, after several years of partial privatisation, became an essentially (92%) state owned company again - partly because they've lost €19bln when it suffered nuclear power plant outages along with scheduled maintenance. France doesn't really seem to have a plan for when their current fleet of nuclear reactors reaches decommissioning age. There's no schedule for replacing them, much less expanding generation capacity.
energy123 2y ago
Solar and wind were too expensive twenty years ago. Nuclear was the only option back then. Everyone should have done nuclear but they didn't. But it's not twenty years ago right now. France is the way France is because of decisions they made decades ago. Given none of us have access to a time machine, the best decision is to pursue the most cost effective and fastest to deploy technology today, which is solar and wind.
- tass 2y ago
  Were the nuclear plants shut down in a way which prevents them from being restarted? Restarting them could be faster and more cost effective than burning coal while waiting for new solar and wind installations.
  - energy123 2y ago
    Early closure of nuclear plants is climate arson. There's no reason for it aside from ideology and hysteria. I'm not in favour of new nuclear for most countries (excepting those that have a track record of building plants quickly and cheaply, or due to seasonal instability of solar) because the capex makes it uncompetitive with solar and wind, but existing nuclear should be kept online for as long as possible.
  - adrianN 2y ago
    Not doing nonessential maintenance for twenty years because you know that your plant will be shut down is really not good if you want to eventually restart it.
  - ZeroGravitas 2y ago
    Renewables are competitive with just running a nuclear plant in some places. Lazard is US focused but they put running a nuclear plant at 32 dollars and the cheapest wind at $27 and cheapest solar at $29. That's not including any refurbishment costs. I think France publishes some numbers recently for the cost of their refurbishment program and I don't remember them being particularly great for nuclear, even if they met their cost projections.
svara 2y ago
Photovoltaics and batteries have been on a multi-decade exponential decline in cost. The world is installing about twice as much PV capacity every day in 2024 as it did in all of 2004. (1) The dynamics are so crazy, anything you've read or learnt about this 2 years ago is already outdated. Extrapolating this another 2 decades into the future, all of the world's primary energy consumption will be covered by PV. Those subsidies, in particular those in Germany, have had an important role in enabling this. Now, what Germany did with nuclear is still insane, and it's not all smooth sailing to a carbon free 2045, but I think that should pretty clearly help you understand why people think that way. (1) https://www.economist.com/interactive/essay/2024/06/20/solar-power-is-going-to-be-huge https://www.economist.com/interactive/essay/2024/06/20/solar...
adrianN 2y ago
The number of coal fired power plants is a lot less interesting than the amount of carbon per kWh, which has come down continuously in Germany, thanks to more and more renewable capacity: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electricity?tab=chart&country=~DEU https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...

mk89 2y ago

Some more context here that helped me understand better the Reuters article: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/lower-electricity-prices-leave-german-government-short-eu87-bln-renewables-funding https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/lower-electricity-price...

_heimdall 2y ago
> She stressed that the difficulties in funding did not alter the fact that power generation costs for renewables are cheaper than fossil or nuclear energy. “Many projects nevertheless need financial safeguards for the banks to make investments available,” Peter argued Well that's a fun little quote. If renewables are already a cheaper alternative to power generation, why would you need government funding and safeguards to convince banks to invest in a project? If the numbers work and a bank can see a clear psth to being paid back they will invest. There's clearly information being glossed over here that would explain why banks aren't willing to invest without government safeguards.
- ibeff 2y ago
  Banks don't care if it's "cheaper than" some other form of power generation, they care that profitability is safe over a very long time span. If power prices crash 5 or 10 years from now because of renewables overcapacity (which is already happening regionally on sunny days with solar), profitability is gone.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    If its not a sustainable, profitable business why should a bank invest in it? Banks aren't meant to promote the moral or ethical good. They exist to take money from depositors, replace it with IOUs, and invest the money in ways that are the most likely to be paid back with interest. That's obviously not to say we can only have industries that work as an open market, but I'd argue that if they don't then the government might as well run the industry rather than fund these half-in half-out companies that appear to be private corporations but only actually exist because the government blessed them.
2y ago

imtringued 2y ago

The feed in tarrifs have been falling every year and now the feed in tarrifs are barely a cent or two higher per kWh than the average spot price on the electricity exchange. Meanwhile there are weird edge cases such as negative prices where the feed in tarrif is paid anyway. The government is forced to pay the difference. The current subsidies unfairly disadvantage investments into energy storage so the simplest solution is to just get rid of them. However, this doesn't get rid of the need for subsidizing energy storage, which is starting to take off thanks to sodium batteries.

derriz 2y ago

It's been clear for quite a number of years that renewables in Europe no longer need any sort of government support. In any case, most of these support contracts have a "contract for difference" structure with a price established by competitive auction. In the early years, the prices were high as there were fewer bidders and large (unjustified) profits were made. But as time has gone on, increasing competition has pushed the prices lower and lower. On a net project-lifetime basis, it's probably now a wash whether you operate a wind farm under a CFD regime/contract or you just compete in the regular market. CFDs require you to reimburse the state when you get paid more than the strike price and so many (particularly wind) producers in the west/north of Europe were hit with large rebate bills in 2022 and 2023 as wholesale prices often exceeded the strike prices after the energy crisis caused by Russia's attack on Ukraine. At least in the UK and Ireland, some renewable energy companies are opting out of the renewables-subsidy scheme completely. For example, the owners/promotors of the large Oriel off-shore wind project in Ireland are skipping all the bureaucracy and delays associated with the renewable auction process and will build the wind farm to compete directly in the day-ahead wholesale markets. Of course there is a large benefit to being protected from the volatility of wholesale electricity markets but it seems like we've passed the point where the financial value of such a contract is required to make a renewables project viable.

aaron695 2y ago

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tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago

As a result of primarily this subsidy regime (with a small assist from very high taxes on electricity), consumer electricity prices in Germany are the second-highest in the EU: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/images/a/a9/Electricity_prices_for_household_consumers%2C_second_half_2023_V_2.png https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/images/a/... For non-household consumers, prices are more in line with the rest of the EU: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/images/a/a0/Electricity_prices_for_non-household_consumers%2C_second_half_2023_V2.png https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/images/a/... - and I suspect that statistic mixes small commercial consumers that pay residential rates and industrial ones, because to my knowledge, this subsidy is paid mostly by small consumers while industry and export are exempt...

Hugsun 2y ago
This is a little off topic but why did you end your comment with ellipsis? What do you mean with its usage?
- armada651 2y ago
  It's showing that they're at a loss for words from the fact that industry is exempt.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
    exactly
coffeeri 2y ago
It is the result of an energy dependence on Russia that has been built up over years, not due to any specific subsidiaries.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
  That could explain it if prices were high in general (i.e. also for industry). https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/152973/umfrage/eeg-umlage-entwicklung-der-strompreise-in-deutschland-seit-2000/ https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/152973/umfrag... shows that 2014-2021 over six cents per kWh were going to the renewable energy subsidy scheme, and this is directly attributable, not some kind of hand-waving. I believe this was more than the wholesale cost of the electricity (without grid fees and taxes) in many of these years, and I think you also have to add another 19% of VAT on top of that. In 2022 the subsidy started to be paid from taxes instead, and it was lower because market-based electricity prices went up (reducing the amount of subsidy necessary to reach the guaranteed prices).

usrusr 2y ago

Long overdue: I'm all for subsidizing renewables, let's down them in money. But the way it's currently done in Germany erases all incentive to tap low hanging fruit in dispatchability. Which has lead to the ubiquitous biogas setups (capture methane that's created in the agricultural refuse>fertilizer cycle anyways and burn it for heat and electricity) all getting designed for continuously burning exactly the amount produced, instead of adding a little overcapacity in conversion throughput and the little short term gas storage that would be required to follow the intraday cycle. This would be easy enough, but the reality is that those biogas systems in Germany now run baseload with even less dispatchability than nuclear.

anovikov 2y ago
Indeed. Biogas has to be used to balance wind and solar. Not to be used as a carbon-free replacement for coal. This is ridiculous.
usrusr 2y ago
Adding to my old post, I suspect that those broken incentives were the result of mixing "how" and "how much" in political decisionmaking. That's a process problem I see repeated over and over again: the "how much" is not isolated from the "how" and then you get compromises that are too generous in some parts and too frugal in other parts. It's as if compromises in salary negotiation went "yeah, we could agree on 10% more each month, if in turn we skip payment in December". I believe that politics could get much better results if compromises about the particularities of distribution were always discussed with an open scale factor shared across the entire range of a particular kind of spending (e.g. renewables subsidy), and then the scale factor was decided upon in a separate discussion/compromise.

ThatMedicIsASpy 2y ago

November 2023: 18600€, 6.4kW solar, 8.7kW battery, inverter, installation, new electrical cabinet. The subsidy is the 19% VAT is free Germany near NL. Current energy price 0.25cents/kWh. Sunny days gives 40kWh of production with 50% of it being used. Current rate is 0.807cents/kWh when feeding back to the grid.

OptionOfT 2y ago
Do I read it correct that you pay 0.0025€ / kWh? And that you get paid 0.00807€ / kWh sent back, which is more than what you pay to consume?

kkfx 2y ago

Of course the support is only for enterprises, state aid to them, nothing to the people who have or want renewables...