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The past few years has also had Solar continuing to decrease in price so its increasingly going to be the primary choice. On top of that battery prices have bee

The past few years has also had Solar continuing to decrease in price so its increasingly going to be the primary choice. On top of that battery prices have been plummeting too so that now Solar + battery is cheaper than other options like Nuclear and especially Gas. Most of the EU will be running on Wind and Solar in the coming years, its a change that is now rapidly occuring based entirely on the rare economics. Solar and Wind are half the price of anything else.

happosai 5mo ago
Not most of EU but geographically large and diverse and low-latitude countries will. Spain has winds from three different sea areas and is known sunny, so they are in a good position.
- joe_mamba 5mo ago
  Well that' doesn't always scan. Austria has a lot of wind, sun and hydro so its energy prices should be in line with Sweden, Norway, Denmark amongst the cheapest in Europe, and yet it's routinely amongst the more expensive in the EU.
  - ZeroGravitas 5mo ago
    Trading across borders seems to be a part of this story. If your local price is high you can import, if it's low you can export. If you're at the end of a grid and/or your transmission capacity is limited your price has the possibility to go higher or lower without that damping mechanism. Electricitymaps has a pricing layer which seems to show central Europe moving in sync when I randomly check it: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes?signal=electricity-price https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes?sig...
    - joe_mamba 5mo ago
      So energy in Spain is cheap because they produce a lot but can't sell a lot easily, and Austria/Central Europe is expensive because they sell their domestic energy too easily? If this is what you meant, then it sounds like an argument against free trade, if it means you keep ending up with the short stick.
      - ZeroGravitas 5mo ago
        Economists would say that the money coming in outweighs the higher costs and therefore you could redistribute that money and everyone comes out ahead. Whether that happens in real life is a different question.
        joe_mamba 5mo ago
        >Economists would say that the money coming in Does that money go directly into my pocket so I can afford the more expensive energy? Or does it go into the pocket of private energy companies? Because I feel like there's some faults with this "free market", which is mostly just socializing losses and privatizing profits.
        HPsquared 5mo ago
        And what if the energy companies are owned by foreign investors?
        joe_mamba 5mo ago
        That would be economic colonialism with extra steps. But for the end user, whether you're being ripped off by a local or a foreign energy oligarch, it doesn't really matter, people just want to pay less.
      - HPsquared 5mo ago
        Free trade doesn't always benefit everyone equally, only a net benefit overall. It's a bit like how people often misinterpret the second law of thermodynamics "but the entropy decreased when the ice froze!"
    - tonfa 5mo ago
      And the counter intuitive thing is that people in countries with lots of renewables and not so many external links (e.g. Scandinavia with hydro) might be against adding more links since it will increase electricity prices.
  - happosai 5mo ago
    Austria could be there but they would need to build oversupply of solar, wind and (pumped) hydro to saturate the export grid lines. And currently Austria isn't building renewables at scale. I think there is a strong NIMBY movement so the best places to build wind and pumped hydro are blocked...
    - joe_mamba 5mo ago
      >Austria could be there but they would need to build oversupply of solar, wind and (pumped) hydro to saturate the export grid lines Or, you could reduce the export grid lines. Both have the same effect on supply/demand.
pydry 5mo ago
1/5th the price of nuclear. Probably when combined with batteries it is half the price. There are some colder areas in northern europe especially where solar doesnt work as well but they also tend to be better served for hydro (which can also store power).
- distances 5mo ago
  Solar works also in the north, except in the winter of course, and it complements wind pretty well. So solar does make economic sense and is actively built in the north too.
  - laurencerowe 5mo ago
    The UK hit a record of 42% peak solar generation around midday one day last month. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/24/uk-solar-generation-hits-record-15-gw-as-gas-falls-to-historic-low/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/24/uk-solar-generation-h...
- badpun 5mo ago
  How much would it cost to build out batteries which cover entire continent's electricy needs for say three weeks (as there can be 2-3 week lulls of no wind and no sun in Europe in the winter)? Cause that sounds like a lot of batteries. Not to mention, if a freak 4 week lull occurs, we'll go back to Middle Ages for a week.
  - gpm 5mo ago
    > (as there can be 2-3 week lulls of no wind and no sun in Europe in the winter) This is simply entirely untrue. Europe's a big place, there's not a single day ever where there is no sun in it.
  - energy123 5mo ago
    Australia's CSIRO studied this for Australia, renewables were half the cost of nuclear, factoring in storage and transmission for both renewables and nuclear (yes, nuclear also needs storage because energy demand varies with time). Australia is uniquely endowed with sun and land, so other countries/regions may arrive at different results.
mhh__ 5mo ago
You have to think about these things as a portfolio rather than just by minimum price. If you have a steel mill for example you need to be able to basically guarantee a certain level of energy production to run it viably because the risk of there not being any power during adverse weather is enough to make it unviable (you can't just turn these things off). This is the reason why gas and nuclear probably aren't going away (or at least shouldn't).
- ViewTrick1002 5mo ago
  If you need predictable price buy futures. If they increase in price then firm production is stimulated to build to meet the gap. https://www.next-kraftwerke.com/knowledge/futures-market https://www.next-kraftwerke.com/knowledge/futures-market
  - mhh__ 5mo ago
    If the grid balance is dominated by bursty renewables then you can potentially price the stable / on-demand generation out of the market (or lead to a massive contango to incentivise said producers)
scythe 5mo ago
>On top of that battery prices have been plummeting too so that now Solar + battery is cheaper than other options like Nuclear and especially Gas. I'm a little bit sad that pumped hydro doesn't get more attention in the discussion. It might be too late for it to matter, with improvements in battery prices and ongoing lithium discoveries. But that only underscores the fact that it should have been allowed to matter twenty years ago. Utilities have slow-walked solar all around the world because of concerns about the grid stability, which has been well within the reach of pumped hydropower to fix since many years ago. In fact major pumped hydropower projects were mostly carried out in the United States during the nuclear power optimism era. It is a little destructive to construct pumped hydro reservoirs. But it generally isn't as damaging as a conventional hydroelectric dam. The reason lies in the source of the water. In a conventional dam, you need a lot of water flowing in from up high, so you dam a major river near its lower cataracts. This disrupts the migration of fish and animals along the river and impacts the whole ecosystem of the rather large drainage basin upstream, and disrupts the migration of fish. But when a closed-loop pumped storage reservoir is created above an existing lake, usually a much less important stream is selected. Its immediate valley is still inundated, but the area of effect is much less. It does tend to prolong the use of the existing dam, but we are already preserving basically all existing dams. It might still be appropriate in some places where imports are less affordable like Latin America or it might appeal to protectionists in the West. In general, hydro is usually cheap.
- XorNot 5mo ago
  Pumped hydro is objectively worse then batteries. Anyone can install batteries anywhere at a fairly minimal local fire risk. A dam is a major mechanical structure which if it fails will straight up obliterate downstream towns, and as such requires a numerous specialized engineering designs and on going maintenance to retain basic safety.
  - jcrben 5mo ago
    The depreciation of a dam versus batteries can can weigh the benefits towards dams.
  - 5mo ago
gregorygoc 5mo ago
Don’t underestimate the corrupt politics of some countries, especially Germany. There are individuals actively working against the global cost curve and trying to misallocate the capital to gas at the large scale. Katherine Reiche is the primary example. She’s pushing for building as much capacity for gas plants as possible, instead of choosing battery storage as the cheapest option.
- zejn 5mo ago
  Ha, yes, a lot of deniers/delayers are going on about how Germany "wasted" billion on renewables, when in fact they had a booming solar industry, which got nuked by politicians, who changed the policies, as can be seen in 39C3 video "Recharge your batteries with us". Was the subsidy system which was in effect in 2010's unsustainable? I think so, yeah. But the changed policies resulted in companies producing solar going bust, and the Chinese firms, which were doing fine, were able to buy out the patents and know how. So, did Germany waste billions? Yes, but by letting the solar producers go bust.
  - mbid 5mo ago
    Solar panel production is extremely energy intensive. Germany has one of the highest energy costs in the world. So there was no way for Germany to maintain a competitive solar panel industry.
    - AndrewDucker 5mo ago
      If only they'd been able to build enough solar power to bring down the energy costs to the point where they could build solar.
      - zejn 5mo ago
        They could also just split the Germany into multiple bidding zones, then north parts of Germany would have a lot of cheap wind power, similar as in Sweden.

happosai 5mo ago

Not most of EU but geographically large and diverse and low-latitude countries will. Spain has winds from three different sea areas and is known sunny, so they are in a good position.

joe_mamba 5mo ago
Well that' doesn't always scan. Austria has a lot of wind, sun and hydro so its energy prices should be in line with Sweden, Norway, Denmark amongst the cheapest in Europe, and yet it's routinely amongst the more expensive in the EU.
- ZeroGravitas 5mo ago
  Trading across borders seems to be a part of this story. If your local price is high you can import, if it's low you can export. If you're at the end of a grid and/or your transmission capacity is limited your price has the possibility to go higher or lower without that damping mechanism. Electricitymaps has a pricing layer which seems to show central Europe moving in sync when I randomly check it: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes?signal=electricity-price https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes?sig...
  - joe_mamba 5mo ago
    So energy in Spain is cheap because they produce a lot but can't sell a lot easily, and Austria/Central Europe is expensive because they sell their domestic energy too easily? If this is what you meant, then it sounds like an argument against free trade, if it means you keep ending up with the short stick.
    - ZeroGravitas 5mo ago
      Economists would say that the money coming in outweighs the higher costs and therefore you could redistribute that money and everyone comes out ahead. Whether that happens in real life is a different question.
      - joe_mamba 5mo ago
        >Economists would say that the money coming in Does that money go directly into my pocket so I can afford the more expensive energy? Or does it go into the pocket of private energy companies? Because I feel like there's some faults with this "free market", which is mostly just socializing losses and privatizing profits.
        HPsquared 5mo ago
        And what if the energy companies are owned by foreign investors?
        joe_mamba 5mo ago
        That would be economic colonialism with extra steps. But for the end user, whether you're being ripped off by a local or a foreign energy oligarch, it doesn't really matter, people just want to pay less.
    - HPsquared 5mo ago
      Free trade doesn't always benefit everyone equally, only a net benefit overall. It's a bit like how people often misinterpret the second law of thermodynamics "but the entropy decreased when the ice froze!"
  - tonfa 5mo ago
    And the counter intuitive thing is that people in countries with lots of renewables and not so many external links (e.g. Scandinavia with hydro) might be against adding more links since it will increase electricity prices.
- happosai 5mo ago
  Austria could be there but they would need to build oversupply of solar, wind and (pumped) hydro to saturate the export grid lines. And currently Austria isn't building renewables at scale. I think there is a strong NIMBY movement so the best places to build wind and pumped hydro are blocked...
  - joe_mamba 5mo ago
    >Austria could be there but they would need to build oversupply of solar, wind and (pumped) hydro to saturate the export grid lines Or, you could reduce the export grid lines. Both have the same effect on supply/demand.

pydry 5mo ago

1/5th the price of nuclear. Probably when combined with batteries it is half the price. There are some colder areas in northern europe especially where solar doesnt work as well but they also tend to be better served for hydro (which can also store power).

distances 5mo ago
Solar works also in the north, except in the winter of course, and it complements wind pretty well. So solar does make economic sense and is actively built in the north too.
- laurencerowe 5mo ago
  The UK hit a record of 42% peak solar generation around midday one day last month. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/24/uk-solar-generation-hits-record-15-gw-as-gas-falls-to-historic-low/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/24/uk-solar-generation-h...
badpun 5mo ago
How much would it cost to build out batteries which cover entire continent's electricy needs for say three weeks (as there can be 2-3 week lulls of no wind and no sun in Europe in the winter)? Cause that sounds like a lot of batteries. Not to mention, if a freak 4 week lull occurs, we'll go back to Middle Ages for a week.
- gpm 5mo ago
  > (as there can be 2-3 week lulls of no wind and no sun in Europe in the winter) This is simply entirely untrue. Europe's a big place, there's not a single day ever where there is no sun in it.
- energy123 5mo ago
  Australia's CSIRO studied this for Australia, renewables were half the cost of nuclear, factoring in storage and transmission for both renewables and nuclear (yes, nuclear also needs storage because energy demand varies with time). Australia is uniquely endowed with sun and land, so other countries/regions may arrive at different results.

mhh__ 5mo ago

You have to think about these things as a portfolio rather than just by minimum price. If you have a steel mill for example you need to be able to basically guarantee a certain level of energy production to run it viably because the risk of there not being any power during adverse weather is enough to make it unviable (you can't just turn these things off). This is the reason why gas and nuclear probably aren't going away (or at least shouldn't).

ViewTrick1002 5mo ago
If you need predictable price buy futures. If they increase in price then firm production is stimulated to build to meet the gap. https://www.next-kraftwerke.com/knowledge/futures-market https://www.next-kraftwerke.com/knowledge/futures-market
- mhh__ 5mo ago
  If the grid balance is dominated by bursty renewables then you can potentially price the stable / on-demand generation out of the market (or lead to a massive contango to incentivise said producers)

scythe 5mo ago

>On top of that battery prices have been plummeting too so that now Solar + battery is cheaper than other options like Nuclear and especially Gas. I'm a little bit sad that pumped hydro doesn't get more attention in the discussion. It might be too late for it to matter, with improvements in battery prices and ongoing lithium discoveries. But that only underscores the fact that it should have been allowed to matter twenty years ago. Utilities have slow-walked solar all around the world because of concerns about the grid stability, which has been well within the reach of pumped hydropower to fix since many years ago. In fact major pumped hydropower projects were mostly carried out in the United States during the nuclear power optimism era. It is a little destructive to construct pumped hydro reservoirs. But it generally isn't as damaging as a conventional hydroelectric dam. The reason lies in the source of the water. In a conventional dam, you need a lot of water flowing in from up high, so you dam a major river near its lower cataracts. This disrupts the migration of fish and animals along the river and impacts the whole ecosystem of the rather large drainage basin upstream, and disrupts the migration of fish. But when a closed-loop pumped storage reservoir is created above an existing lake, usually a much less important stream is selected. Its immediate valley is still inundated, but the area of effect is much less. It does tend to prolong the use of the existing dam, but we are already preserving basically all existing dams. It might still be appropriate in some places where imports are less affordable like Latin America or it might appeal to protectionists in the West. In general, hydro is usually cheap.

XorNot 5mo ago
Pumped hydro is objectively worse then batteries. Anyone can install batteries anywhere at a fairly minimal local fire risk. A dam is a major mechanical structure which if it fails will straight up obliterate downstream towns, and as such requires a numerous specialized engineering designs and on going maintenance to retain basic safety.
- jcrben 5mo ago
  The depreciation of a dam versus batteries can can weigh the benefits towards dams.
- 5mo ago

gregorygoc 5mo ago

Don’t underestimate the corrupt politics of some countries, especially Germany. There are individuals actively working against the global cost curve and trying to misallocate the capital to gas at the large scale. Katherine Reiche is the primary example. She’s pushing for building as much capacity for gas plants as possible, instead of choosing battery storage as the cheapest option.

zejn 5mo ago
Ha, yes, a lot of deniers/delayers are going on about how Germany "wasted" billion on renewables, when in fact they had a booming solar industry, which got nuked by politicians, who changed the policies, as can be seen in 39C3 video "Recharge your batteries with us". Was the subsidy system which was in effect in 2010's unsustainable? I think so, yeah. But the changed policies resulted in companies producing solar going bust, and the Chinese firms, which were doing fine, were able to buy out the patents and know how. So, did Germany waste billions? Yes, but by letting the solar producers go bust.
- mbid 5mo ago
  Solar panel production is extremely energy intensive. Germany has one of the highest energy costs in the world. So there was no way for Germany to maintain a competitive solar panel industry.
  - AndrewDucker 5mo ago
    If only they'd been able to build enough solar power to bring down the energy costs to the point where they could build solar.
    - zejn 5mo ago
      They could also just split the Germany into multiple bidding zones, then north parts of Germany would have a lot of cheap wind power, similar as in Sweden.