3 ms·

i call BS: in Germany we're paying more than twice per kw than we were 3.5 years ago (it literally doubled in late 2022, from some 22c to 40-odd cents), and it

by sgbeal 7mo ago

i call BS: in Germany we're paying more than twice per kw than we were 3.5 years ago (it literally doubled in late 2022, from some 22c to 40-odd cents), and it just went up again in February 2026. Lots and lots of talk about lower energy prices, but _nobody_ "on the ground" is seeing it. (Edit: unless, perhaps, they're installing their own solar arrays, which many single-family and duplex homes do, but not the apartment buildings most of us live in.)

wongarsu 7mo ago
Solar on the balcony railing is very popular right now, mostly amongst apartment renters
- sgbeal 7mo ago
  > Solar on the balcony railing is very popular right now, mostly amongst apartment renters i have yet to see a single solar panel on an apartment building in Brandenburg, Germany, whereas a large portion (perhaps even a majority) of single-family and duplex units here have them. Perhaps they're more common in the richer parts of the country where a profit can be more readily turned, but not up here.
  - Suckseh 7mo ago
    [dead]
  - nixass 7mo ago
    > Perhaps they're more common in the richer parts of the country where a profit can be more readily turned, but not up here. These cost about 300-400 euros in local Aldi or Lidl (yes they sell them occasionally) with inverter, ready to plug-in (800W limit). At these prices they're accessible to everyone
    - sgbeal 7mo ago
      > At these prices they're accessible to everyone It's inaccurate to assume that "300-400" is readily within anyone's reach. 300-400 is virtually a king's ransom for some of us.
      - Rebelgecko 7mo ago
        How much is your rent?
      - thelastgallon 7mo ago
        It sounds like German citizens are poorer than Pakistani and sub-saharan citizens. Sorry to hear the fall, Germany used to have first world per capita income.
  - lpcvoid 7mo ago
    That's maybe a problem of east Germany in particular. I see Balkonkraftwerke (small balcony solar arrays, 1-4 modules with a microinverter plugged directly into an outlet) everywhere when I drive through major west German cities, even on rental apartment balconies.
    - toraway 7mo ago
      > 1-4 modules with a microinverter plugged directly into an outlet Interesting, is it really that simple and legal/up to code/safe? My naive assumption is that feeding back to mains would be more complex/costly that that but very cool if not.
      - Rebelgecko 7mo ago
        These sorts of inverters are grid-tied so they turn themselves off when theres no grid to sync to (eg during an outage). My understanding is that's the main safety issue, and backfeeding while the grid is up is mostly a regulatory concern (as long as you have a modern meter that can tell the difference between electricity going in vs out)
      - wongarsu 7mo ago
        As long as the inverter feeds at most 800W. That's about 4A, on a circuit designed for 16A. You need a new meter, but the old analog meters can run backwards and you can continue using it until you power company replaces it. You do have to register the setup, but that seems to be a quick process. And if you lose power the inverter turns off
      - officeplant 7mo ago
        Perfectly fine (at least here in the US) as long as your power meter is new enough to not double charge you for feeding back into the grid if your home draw drops low enough. Micro inverters are starting to really take off in modern solar installs to cut down on wiring distances since you can feed it into nearby AC circuits.
sheikhnbake 7mo ago
I'm not sure how German power utilities work, but the US being the US, personal solar can drive up our utility costs here. Less people buying power from the utilities means they increase prices on the remaining customers.
- sgbeal 7mo ago
  > Less people buying power from the utilities means they increase prices on the remaining customers. Ergo... claims of lower electricity costs are BS, in that electricity's not getting cheaper per unit but is getting more expensive per unit for those without the ability to supplement their residence with solar/geothermal/household nuclear reactor/whatever.
  - wat10000 7mo ago
    No, it's just your typical distorted market. This happens in places that do net metering, where each joule you send to the grid pays for one joule drawn from the grid. This effectively vastly over-pays for local production, because it doesn't account for the costs of maintaining generating capacity or transmission. Those costs then have to be borne by the other customers instead. Utilities wouldn't offer this voluntarily. Where it exists, it's because it's legally mandated as a way of driving adoption of home solar. The economically sensible way to do it is to pay individual produces for their power at the same rates they'd get if they were a "real" provider. This would be substantially less, so you'd have to provide much more than one joule to the grid to offset each joule consumed from it. With this, someone feeding their home solar power into the grid is still paying their share for transmission and generation, and there's no undue burden on other customers.
    - thelastgallon 7mo ago
      And also pay the local producer for the costs of (not building) transmission and distribution network, because they are producing where its needed and not thousands of miles away which requires transmission and distribution systems as well all the equipment and people that go with it. Also pay extra for creating the most resilient grid: no single point of failure, just tens of millions of producers. Also pay them at the peak rate, because most of the cost is for the peaker gas plants that only run a few hours/day, and overproduction will flatten the peak, encourage energy storage and all the good stuff.
Suckseh 7mo ago
[dead]
pjc50 7mo ago
https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/electricity-price https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/electricity-price chart is extremely noisy, and is quoting wholesale rather than retail, but to my eyes that actually looks flat over the period from before the Ukraine war. It seems to have started that spike in late 2021, before the war in February 2022 (which of course shoots it upwards, that's the "doubling in late 2022" you mention).
- sgbeal 7mo ago
  > (which of course shoots it upwards, that's the "doubling in late 2022" you mention). i guaranty you that my electricity costs were 22c in mid-2022, jumped to 47c in either late 2022 or January 2023, and just went up from 47c to i don't know what in February (i got the notification of an increase but didn't bother logging in to see the new prices).
  - Sweepi 7mo ago
    Sounds like you didnt sign a contract with an electricity provider and therefore are put in a fallback ("Grundversorgung") contract with the grid provider, which in 95% of cases is a bad deal for normal consumers. You are free to make this choice, but if it bothers you enough to complain about it, it should bother you enough to invest 30 minutes and sign a contract: https://www.verivox.de/stromvergleich/ https://www.verivox.de/stromvergleich/
lpcvoid 7mo ago
German here. I pay around 24c/kWh. It's much cheaper than it was in late 2022 with the energy price shock due to russia attempting to blackout Europe. I cannot imagine how much worse we would be off, would our Power generation stem from fossil or nuclear fuel. More renewables is the answer. We need to build so much that power becomes almost free (already the case in the summer at high noon, see [1]). [1] https://energy-charts.info/charts/price_spot_market/chart.htm?l=de&c=DE&minuteInterval=empty&zoom=plus&timezone=user https://energy-charts.info/charts/price_spot_market/chart.ht...
- throwway120385 7mo ago
  If it's almost free, then even electrically cracking molecules to make hydrocarbons and ammonia compounds is cost-competitive if you can quickly start and stop production, which would be really interesting. Those processes don't have to be very energy efficient if the capital and operating costs are relatively low. That last sentence does a lot of work though.
  - NortySpock 7mo ago
    https://terraformindustries.com/ https://terraformindustries.com/ Terraform is working on that - burstable synthetic methane generation using cheap catalysts that you can afford to idle, only generating methane when electricity is cheap.
  - mrguyorama 7mo ago
    This is my dream. I think we should solve the "It's cloudy sometimes" problem with state built, extreme oversupply. Also giant solar farms in the southwest and large HVDC power lines to send that everywhere. There's zero reason why "We make more power than we use most of the time" ever has to be a "problem". I think we should have so much unused power that it makes sense to suck CO2 out of the air to make fuel and chemical feedstocks. Air capture at that scale would be an insane engineering and manufacturing problem though. You probably shouldn't vote for me though. I have dumber ideas too. But the "Lets do Solarpunk for real" one is probably not harmful to anyone. Except for a bunch of rich families in Texas.
Sweepi 7mo ago
Seems like the prices skyrocketed in all of the EU in late 2021/early 2022. Price graph 2015 - 2025: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Electricity_price_statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... Maybe something happened, like... a war.
heythere22 7mo ago
I call BS on that. The average price per kWh is just some cents more expensive than before COVID. See e.g. https://strom-report.com/strompreisentwicklung/ https://strom-report.com/strompreisentwicklung/ or https://www.verivox.de/strom/strompreisentwicklung/ https://www.verivox.de/strom/strompreisentwicklung/ If you are paying a lot more, consider changing the provider.
distances 7mo ago
It's not 40+c/kWh, the market end-user rate is around 26-30 now. And includes transmission and taxes -- worth noting as some countries talk of price before transmission & tax.
PurpleRamen 7mo ago
> and it just went up again in February 2026. It actually went down, unless you are with a scam-company or had a time-limited offer run out. > but _nobody_ "on the ground" is seeing it. Everyone who cares is seeing it. You have to change your contract, that's how the market works. Too many people seem to not understand this aspect.

by sgbeal 7mo ago

wongarsu 7mo ago

Solar on the balcony railing is very popular right now, mostly amongst apartment renters

sgbeal 7mo ago
> Solar on the balcony railing is very popular right now, mostly amongst apartment renters i have yet to see a single solar panel on an apartment building in Brandenburg, Germany, whereas a large portion (perhaps even a majority) of single-family and duplex units here have them. Perhaps they're more common in the richer parts of the country where a profit can be more readily turned, but not up here.
- Suckseh 7mo ago
  [dead]
- nixass 7mo ago
  > Perhaps they're more common in the richer parts of the country where a profit can be more readily turned, but not up here. These cost about 300-400 euros in local Aldi or Lidl (yes they sell them occasionally) with inverter, ready to plug-in (800W limit). At these prices they're accessible to everyone
  - sgbeal 7mo ago
    > At these prices they're accessible to everyone It's inaccurate to assume that "300-400" is readily within anyone's reach. 300-400 is virtually a king's ransom for some of us.
    - Rebelgecko 7mo ago
      How much is your rent?
    - thelastgallon 7mo ago
      It sounds like German citizens are poorer than Pakistani and sub-saharan citizens. Sorry to hear the fall, Germany used to have first world per capita income.
- lpcvoid 7mo ago
  That's maybe a problem of east Germany in particular. I see Balkonkraftwerke (small balcony solar arrays, 1-4 modules with a microinverter plugged directly into an outlet) everywhere when I drive through major west German cities, even on rental apartment balconies.
  - toraway 7mo ago
    > 1-4 modules with a microinverter plugged directly into an outlet Interesting, is it really that simple and legal/up to code/safe? My naive assumption is that feeding back to mains would be more complex/costly that that but very cool if not.
    - Rebelgecko 7mo ago
      These sorts of inverters are grid-tied so they turn themselves off when theres no grid to sync to (eg during an outage). My understanding is that's the main safety issue, and backfeeding while the grid is up is mostly a regulatory concern (as long as you have a modern meter that can tell the difference between electricity going in vs out)
    - wongarsu 7mo ago
      As long as the inverter feeds at most 800W. That's about 4A, on a circuit designed for 16A. You need a new meter, but the old analog meters can run backwards and you can continue using it until you power company replaces it. You do have to register the setup, but that seems to be a quick process. And if you lose power the inverter turns off
    - officeplant 7mo ago
      Perfectly fine (at least here in the US) as long as your power meter is new enough to not double charge you for feeding back into the grid if your home draw drops low enough. Micro inverters are starting to really take off in modern solar installs to cut down on wiring distances since you can feed it into nearby AC circuits.

sheikhnbake 7mo ago

I'm not sure how German power utilities work, but the US being the US, personal solar can drive up our utility costs here. Less people buying power from the utilities means they increase prices on the remaining customers.

sgbeal 7mo ago
> Less people buying power from the utilities means they increase prices on the remaining customers. Ergo... claims of lower electricity costs are BS, in that electricity's not getting cheaper per unit but is getting more expensive per unit for those without the ability to supplement their residence with solar/geothermal/household nuclear reactor/whatever.
- wat10000 7mo ago
  No, it's just your typical distorted market. This happens in places that do net metering, where each joule you send to the grid pays for one joule drawn from the grid. This effectively vastly over-pays for local production, because it doesn't account for the costs of maintaining generating capacity or transmission. Those costs then have to be borne by the other customers instead. Utilities wouldn't offer this voluntarily. Where it exists, it's because it's legally mandated as a way of driving adoption of home solar. The economically sensible way to do it is to pay individual produces for their power at the same rates they'd get if they were a "real" provider. This would be substantially less, so you'd have to provide much more than one joule to the grid to offset each joule consumed from it. With this, someone feeding their home solar power into the grid is still paying their share for transmission and generation, and there's no undue burden on other customers.
  - thelastgallon 7mo ago
    And also pay the local producer for the costs of (not building) transmission and distribution network, because they are producing where its needed and not thousands of miles away which requires transmission and distribution systems as well all the equipment and people that go with it. Also pay extra for creating the most resilient grid: no single point of failure, just tens of millions of producers. Also pay them at the peak rate, because most of the cost is for the peaker gas plants that only run a few hours/day, and overproduction will flatten the peak, encourage energy storage and all the good stuff.

Suckseh 7mo ago

[dead]

pjc50 7mo ago

https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/electricity-price https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/electricity-price chart is extremely noisy, and is quoting wholesale rather than retail, but to my eyes that actually looks flat over the period from before the Ukraine war. It seems to have started that spike in late 2021, before the war in February 2022 (which of course shoots it upwards, that's the "doubling in late 2022" you mention).

sgbeal 7mo ago
> (which of course shoots it upwards, that's the "doubling in late 2022" you mention). i guaranty you that my electricity costs were 22c in mid-2022, jumped to 47c in either late 2022 or January 2023, and just went up from 47c to i don't know what in February (i got the notification of an increase but didn't bother logging in to see the new prices).
- Sweepi 7mo ago
  Sounds like you didnt sign a contract with an electricity provider and therefore are put in a fallback ("Grundversorgung") contract with the grid provider, which in 95% of cases is a bad deal for normal consumers. You are free to make this choice, but if it bothers you enough to complain about it, it should bother you enough to invest 30 minutes and sign a contract: https://www.verivox.de/stromvergleich/ https://www.verivox.de/stromvergleich/

lpcvoid 7mo ago

German here. I pay around 24c/kWh. It's much cheaper than it was in late 2022 with the energy price shock due to russia attempting to blackout Europe. I cannot imagine how much worse we would be off, would our Power generation stem from fossil or nuclear fuel. More renewables is the answer. We need to build so much that power becomes almost free (already the case in the summer at high noon, see [1]). [1] https://energy-charts.info/charts/price_spot_market/chart.htm?l=de&c=DE&minuteInterval=empty&zoom=plus&timezone=user https://energy-charts.info/charts/price_spot_market/chart.ht...

throwway120385 7mo ago
If it's almost free, then even electrically cracking molecules to make hydrocarbons and ammonia compounds is cost-competitive if you can quickly start and stop production, which would be really interesting. Those processes don't have to be very energy efficient if the capital and operating costs are relatively low. That last sentence does a lot of work though.
- NortySpock 7mo ago
  https://terraformindustries.com/ https://terraformindustries.com/ Terraform is working on that - burstable synthetic methane generation using cheap catalysts that you can afford to idle, only generating methane when electricity is cheap.
- mrguyorama 7mo ago
  This is my dream. I think we should solve the "It's cloudy sometimes" problem with state built, extreme oversupply. Also giant solar farms in the southwest and large HVDC power lines to send that everywhere. There's zero reason why "We make more power than we use most of the time" ever has to be a "problem". I think we should have so much unused power that it makes sense to suck CO2 out of the air to make fuel and chemical feedstocks. Air capture at that scale would be an insane engineering and manufacturing problem though. You probably shouldn't vote for me though. I have dumber ideas too. But the "Lets do Solarpunk for real" one is probably not harmful to anyone. Except for a bunch of rich families in Texas.

Sweepi 7mo ago

Seems like the prices skyrocketed in all of the EU in late 2021/early 2022. Price graph 2015 - 2025: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Electricity_price_statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... Maybe something happened, like... a war.

heythere22 7mo ago

I call BS on that. The average price per kWh is just some cents more expensive than before COVID. See e.g. https://strom-report.com/strompreisentwicklung/ https://strom-report.com/strompreisentwicklung/ or https://www.verivox.de/strom/strompreisentwicklung/ https://www.verivox.de/strom/strompreisentwicklung/ If you are paying a lot more, consider changing the provider.

distances 7mo ago

It's not 40+c/kWh, the market end-user rate is around 26-30 now. And includes transmission and taxes -- worth noting as some countries talk of price before transmission & tax.

PurpleRamen 7mo ago

> and it just went up again in February 2026. It actually went down, unless you are with a scam-company or had a time-limited offer run out. > but _nobody_ "on the ground" is seeing it. Everyone who cares is seeing it. You have to change your contract, that's how the market works. Too many people seem to not understand this aspect.