Here is an analysis from Germany: Quarter-hourly spot prices compared to the share of renewable energy generation in total generation. A higher share of renewables puts massive downward pressure on the spot market electricity price.
Since price elasticity for electricity is very high, the market cap decreases by approximately €150,000 for every additional GWh of renewable energy production. A single additional offshore wind turbine with an annual output of 60 GWh reduces the combined revenue of all electricity producers by about €9 million per year that it is in operation.
Blocking wind power and solar projects only serves to secure the profits of monopolists and oligopolists in the electricity market, but causes massive harm to the economy.
No amount of solar panels will generate electricity without sun light. Also the amount sun light can shrink quite a lot in winter months at high latitudes and under cloud cover.
No amount of wind turbines will generate electricity without wind, or to be more precise:
Cut-in speed: 3–4 m/s (12–15 km/h) to begin spinning and producing power.
Cut-out / Stop speed: Above 25 m/s (90 km/h) where brakes are applied to prevent mechanical damage
Germany has to have backups, currently quite expensive, for all this times of missing renewables production.
The apparent volatility of electricity generation from a single wind turbine is negligible, because what counts is the wind and PV output over large areas. Due to regular weather fronts, electricity output from wind and PV in Europe is surprisingly stable; when there is less sunshine, there is more wind.
In 2025, for example, the weekly electricity output from wind and solar PV was 14.0 TWh, with no week falling below 10.5 TWh. If more wind power were installed in Eastern Europe, the curves would flatten out even further.
Yes, single wind turbine is negligible, what counts is the wind and PV output over extremely large areas because weather fronts are correlated over hundreds of km. Of course night/day cycle is correlated over whole Europe with few hours shift.
So in 100% renewables Europe scenario, you have build multiples of renewable production in each region.
You build enough renewables in Western Europe to power the whole Europe, you build enough renewables in Central Europe to power the whole Europe and you build enough renewables in Eastern Europe to power the whole Europe and build electric grid to transfer 2/3s of electricity produced in each region into other regions.
Can it be done? Yes, but it will be very expensive.
Many renewable energy modelers often ignore realities and costs of physical electric grid and model whole continent as copper plate which can transfer infinite amount of electricity from each to point to any other point.
For more realistic scenarios German government is looking into power-to-gas energy storage systems, where you convert renewable electricity to hydrogen, ammonia or ethanol and store it underground. There are also plans to import large part of these gases/liquids from other countries, so no energy independence in the future.
Thats exactly how you build for resiliency. You probably aren't familiar with running workloads on the cloud. There are multiple levels of redundancy, Availability Zones, multiple regions, etc. At least 4X redundancy if you are running anything important.
The peaker natural gas plants are not running at 100%, they mostly run a few hours for peak production. Any critical infrastructure is built for peak utilization and there will always be some idling.
The good thing with electricity is excess production can be used to charge cars, pump water, produce green hydrogen or green ammonia. People are creative, they will figure out what to use excess production for.
"Reliability: Five-nines availability (99.999%, under 6 minutes downtime annually), typically achieved by combining high grid reliability with backup generation."
I wrote software for monitoring and controling electric grids on country level and later software for controling nuclear power plants, I know a little bit about resiliency.
Physicaly, you can do 3X redundancy in electric generation and electric grid, as there are no physical laws against it, but such large infrastructure is expensive and you have to pay the CAPEX even if the infrastructure is almost never utilized. Also transporting electricity over large distances is really expensive, therefor only relative small amount of electricity can be transport in europe and future targets are modest.
"The EU has set an interconnection target of at least 15% by 2030 to encourage EU countries to interconnect their installed electricity production capacity. This means that each country should have electricity infrastructure in place that would allow it to import, from its neighbouring EU countries, an equivalent of at least 15% of the electricity production capacity on its territory."
Someone has to pay for this, either customers or tax payers (through goverment subsidies) and Europe already has high electricity prices (when compared with China and US).
"The energy sector is one of the largest and most important sectors of the world economy. Accounting for 8%–10% of world GDP, it is second only to health care in size and is equally pervasive in scope"
I think you are trying to say something, but I'm not sure what it is. It is not clear what you are advocating for. More nuclear?
Resiliency requires redundancy and that means excess production capacity. It is now mostly peaker gas plants that run only a few hours a day at most. Instead, solar panels are dirt cheap and you can have lots of redundancy pretty cheap. There are many uses for excess energy, it can be used for green hydrogen (industrial heat) and green ammonia (fertilizer) or pump water back if there is hydro. Most importantly, Europe has ~460 million vehicles, all of these can be EVs and have flexible demand. People are creative and they will find many uses with time-of-use pricing.
As a civilization, we're only just getting started on solar. So far, its been horizontal panels to capture when the Sun is brightest. The next phase is vertical solar. It requires zero land and can be deployed anywhere, think of all the fences and walls and tall buildings. It can be deployed in cities, close to consumption, without requiring new transmission infrastructure. Vertical solar will add 4 hours solar production. And Europe is geographically a large area, ~3400 miles wide, which means with grid interconnect, you can add 4 more hours excess production, ship to the other countries and get paid.
Or you can do what Romania does and install Solar with batteries: https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Solar-Energy/Solar-P.... If a poor Eastern European country can figure out how to build renewables, I'm sure its not a hard task for Western Europe?
> I wrote software for monitoring and controling electric grids on country level and later software for controling nuclear power plants, I know a little bit about resiliency.
You have a fixed worldview, the grid is an unchangeable fixed structure, and it can never be changed because you wrote a bit of software in COBOL 50 years back. What happened in your 20s is the best and ideal grid and it should never change. In your age of fossil fuel, production was far away, needed transmission infrastructure to bring power to the cities. Because coal is extremely polluting, hydro is geo-fixed and nuclear needs to be far (nobody will allow it). None of those assumptions are true anymore.
I think the point is, if you can decide when to consume electricity then you will do it when it's the cheapest, so let's put the cheapest when the low carbon sources are available. So the website is taking into account that renewables are not always available, that's exactly its point.
And the backup source for Germany is the nuclear electricity from France. The grid is at the European scale.
This is interesting, but now explain why Germany has both the highest electricity prices in Europe as well as a relatively high CO2 footprint from electricity? Germany is buying not only nuclear but also coal energy from neighbouring countries.
Will this be fixed at some point or is the German model not actually as good as you imply?
The main reason why electricity is expensive in Germany is because it's taxed to oblivion. Even when wholesale prices are negative, electricity costs about three times as much as gas.
Now you might ask why electricity is taxed to oblivion. Some don't like nuclear or coal. Some prefer oil or gas. In the end, there's a majority that wants electricity to be expensive.
I was under the impression that the taxes are going into infrastructure and grants for renewable energies, meaning those energy prices are maybe way higher than advertised. Funny thing is we are constantly being told how cheap reneweables are to produce but apparently there are other costs involved.
Well, that impression is wrong. The german word for "Taxes" is "Steuer". And they go to one of the 3 levels of our government: Federal level, the 16 states, municipalities / communes.
And yes, we pay VAT (19%) and electricty tax (0.0205 € / kWh).
But we also pay other things, like Konzessionsabgabe, KWKG-Umlage, AbN and Offshore-Netzumlage. They have various reasons:
AbN is used to make electricity artificially cheaper for ecenomically important companies that have a high usage of electricity. So this doesn't go to government, it's no tax.
KWKG (Kraft-Wärme-Kopplungs-Gesetz) is payed to keep the oil and gas power plants in operation. We now have so much renewable energy, they it wouldn't be economically feasible to operate them -- they have quite low duty cycles these days. They are however important for the quality of the whole network. So this doesn't go to government, it's no tax.
Konzessionsabgabe could perhaps counted as tax. The lines of the electric grid go over public property. Or they use the area below the pedestrian sidewalks. And so they have to pay for it. So this doesn't go to government, it's no tax, more a rent.
Offshore-Netzumlage is because we have sooooo much electric wind power in the north and baltic sea, but most bigger industry is in the south. It is used to pay for the new electric trasses. So this doesn't go to government, it's no tax.
Also, electric power in Germany is both cheap and expensive. The internal price is often cheap. But the price to end-customers is often expensive. One part of that is that many end-customers don't switch their electricity power. In history, we had local power distributors, often in the hand of the city or the county. But since perhaps 20 years one can now just select anyone, whoever has the lowest price. However, the majority of the germans stay (due to lazyness?) with their local providers. Which are usually on the more costly side.
Also we should not forget that Germany has one of the best electric grids in Germany. We can take the SAIDI and compare electric grids of regions or countries. And in Europe, Germany has the lowest SAIDI of all large industrial countries. Some have a lower SAIDI, but they are tiny-states.
So, what is SAIDI? The System Average Interuption Duration Index --- or how long per year and customer the power is out. And here we're better than e.g. Austria, France, Belgium, Sweden ... but also MUCH better than the USA, which seem to have exceptional shaggy electric grids.
So price is one thing... but that you can depend on the electric power in Germany, but maybe not abroad, is another thing.
Source for SAIDI: Germany and english language Wikipedia, Bundesnetzagentur
Good to point out the difference between taxes and other tariffs, but I have a hard time understanding why you have to call what I said "wrong"? What you went to explain in detail is exactly what I alluded to, that also matches the previous posters "electricity [...] taxed into oblivion".
Another point: 3.3% of federal tax income, or 1.7% of all taxes paid by citizens, goes directly into "Klima- und Transformationsfonds" i.e. gets pumped into energy transformation. And the state even pumps more money into that, by means of "Sondervermögen" (taking additional debts). Measured as a percentage of federal state tax income, seems like Germany is pumping more than 7% total into energy transformation. Quite a lot I think, and even if this is not directly a tariff on electricity, it's easy to imagine how this can result in general price inflation.
All of Germany's neighbours, from which it buys electricity, are decarbonising so yes obviously it inevitably gets "fixed at some point".
Germany's wholesale prices are similar to many other European countries, the worst is easily Ireland because of their geography, small, northern, coastal, they often need to import power, and that import has to come from Britain, which is between them and the continent, so their prices will almost always be higher than Britain's already not-great prices - we're obviously not going to sell the Irish £89 per MWh electricity and then charge our own users £119 per MWh for the same product.
What I am saying is that those spot prices may not represent all of the reneweables' marginal costs. Question is, will the end consumer prices ever go down, and by how much?
> Question is, will the end consumer prices ever go down, and by how much?
No, electricity is not likely to become a deflationary product. It hasn't been in my lifetime and I don't see that changing. Products which do that are weird and they don't tend to do it for very long.
There was a period (last century, more than fifty years ago) when Oil was deflationary in the US, as the very easily extracted Saudi Oil came online and US import bans ended - you'd pay the same dollar price to fill a car with gasoline in one year as the next and of course wages continued to grow so that oil is getting cheaper in real terms. But that's a long time ago, a time when gasoline was 30 cents per gallon.
Solar PV is just straight up cheaper than any fossil power. Solar Farms the UK agreed to subsidise in 2022 came online early last year and even in those more normal times (before Trump started a war in the Middle East) the "subsidy" amounts they were paying us totalled a few million quid a year because the fossil power was so expensive. Once Trump got into it, we were being paid like £3-4M per month in "subsidy" because of course the fossil fuel costs more now but sunlight is still free.
But that does not translate into lower prices for consumers, at most it means their prices might not rise as quickly.
The prices of so many things have gone down with times due to increased efficiencies. Why not electricity? If solar PV is cheaper than fossils, I would, naive as I am, expect prices to go down.
(I acknowledge fossils have been going up for various reasons, and have become more scarce, and energy demands are rising)
There's a situation like with Amdahl's law here, which I'm guessing you're familiar with since this is HN but if not then I'm sure you can read about it. Consumer prices - the thing you're experiencing - have multiple inputs, and wholesale price is the only one that's subject to this change by generation technology so that dilutes the consequence of any such change for consumers.
If you're paying 25 cents per kWh and and the wholesale price was $100 per MWh then 10 of those 25 cents were for wholesale electricity, but you're paying 15 cents per kWh for "other things". Maybe a huge improvement to generation technology reduces that wholesale price to $90 per MWh, amazing, but alas general inflation increases your suppliers other costs to 16 cents per kWh and so you pay... 25 cents still.
If that wholesale price somehow halved and it was all passed on (good luck with that) your 25 cents per kWh goes to 20 cents, only a 20% drop.
The learning curve for solar is shallowing, and while it's steeper for offshore wind and especially floating offshore wind, those are both way more expensive than solar, so you'd need much more price decrease for them to be cheaper than say, coal.
This is kind of a stupid preposition. the cheapest hour should be the cheapest with carbon externalities priced in. There are lots of times where it is both logical and good for the cheapeat hour to not be the lowest carbon (i.e minimum run times on foasil fuel plantspushing should hours very cheap because they are needed for the peak hours or forecast renewable drop off.) If the market isnt pricing the carbon externalities that is a seperate issue.
further the grid price only represents variable costs, congestion, and bidding strategies of gen to try and also recoup fixed costs and make a profit. This may translate to cheaper when lower carbon because variable cost is zero for many renewables but making it explicitly happen breaks the market price finding mexhanism and is probably an even larger aubsidy to renewables, which in itself is stupid vs just pricing the carbon externalities and letting the market decide.
Mine is just flat pricing but I do try to align it.
UK has big variations in carbon intensity depending on how solar & wind is doing, so easy enough to make a small effort to align discretionary things like washing machine with that
There is also a very nice dashboard for UK grid that shows clearly what's going on at any point in time.
That dashboard is great. The UK is probably the best case for this in Europe.
Moving the washing machine is basically what my model assumes, except it assumes everyone does it every day. NESO publishes a carbon intensity API, so the UK is an easy one to add. On the list.
The harder question is probably whether dynamic pricing changes behavior without mostly becoming a penalty for people who have less flexibility in when they use electricity
There should be a penalty for having less flexibility in consuming electricity. That’s how the market incentivizes us to figure out how to be flexible in our consumption.
We should probably also subsidize the conversion, for people who look at the incentives, want to become more flexible, but don’t have the money.
And we might have to handle some special cases—maybe hospitals, for example—where reliable power is an important social good. But these should be rare.
For households in Europe, there are some incentives to switch to heat pumps for heating... for best efficiency (and longevity), usually a heat pump needs to run at lower power constantly without switching off much.
And since the heat pump will be the biggest total consumer in a household (in winter), there is not a huge opportunity for flexibility.
This seems like a sort of complex trade-off (taking your word for it that they do run more efficiently when run continuously). We’d still probably prefer to run them on renewable energy and defer them when running on non-renewables, because the inefficiently consuming a plentiful resource that is not very damaging to produce, is better than efficiently consuming one that is destructive to produce.
But if we have multiple tasks with multiple levels of defer-ability (either due to efficiency benefits or due to people just wanting to run their dishwashers at a time convenient to them), it could be more complicated. But working out trade offs like this is what the market is for, right?
I've long thought there should be a standard mechanism for back pressure for loads that can defer their usage.
For example dishwashers, overnight battery charging, car charging, etc should be able to receive scheduling data from the grid to determine the best time to run.
Users could of course be given a choice whether to use grid scheduling in exchange for lower prices or not.
This sort of thing was called “smartgrid” but it doesn’t seem to have caught on. Maybe we could lean into modern buzzwords.
The electricity distribution system is a big sparse graph. If they are allowed to pass signals back and forth, don’t look too close, and maybe we can call it an AI enhanced grid. Then we can call this sort of ability to schedule appliances based on those signals “closed loop AI enhanced green appliances” or something similarly buzzwordy.
In my country (for people with a so called "dynamic pricing" contract) the price of electricity already drops significantly when we have a load of green energy (wind, solar). I guess this is just a side effect of not having a well-balanced grid. But still that's already kind of a CO2-based pricing - although not directly
On grids where pricing declines due to more low carbon generation generating, there is no extra value. On grids where pricing declines due to more fossil generation running, that is the signal you want to avoid loads during those time windows.
At the moment, lower prices are not necessarily a guarantee of lower emissions. And so, if you want to orchestrate loads to move them to the lowest emission time windows (perhaps not prioritizing cost), carbon signal is the way to do so.
Mostly yes, but it works the other direction as well: a fossil power station may not want to completely shut down because it expects more demand later in the day, and offer a few hours of low cost electricity to stay in the merit order.
My electricity provider has a near real-time graph of energy generation by source (wind, solar, coal, etc.) and I use this during off-peak times to decide when to use or avoid certain loads. For example I love charging batteries when solar is producing more energy than is being used by customers.
The idea is interesting but unfortunately most of the people don't know the electricity price even now without this mechanism.
This should be displayed on top of every washing machine everywhere to make it works
In many places it is usual for the machine to have a small element so that it can heat its own water, none of the machines I've every owned had a hot water line, although one did have instructions for a variant model with such a feature.
In practice having the machine heat the water is usually a good choice because the machine already wants to take a set amount of water and heat it to a specific temperature (based on your chosen programme, silk knickers obviously do not want the hot water you use to clean cotton bedsheets after your youngest didn't wake up in time) whereas your hot water boiler just makes arbitrarily hot water forever.
I think the only reason that you would need to heat your water up is because you have a front load washer and I’ve heard they get disgusting if you don’t use hot water once in a while this is not a problem with the top load washer, mines run for 20 years on cold water and it’s fine nothing has ever come out of the washing machine dirty. I suppose you all have front loaders because you need them to spin really fast to dry your clothes cause you don’t actually have a dryer. Europeans are weird
Sure, but I don't think the two ideas are really in conflict. A low-carbon grid should absolutely be the end goal, but even a mostly clean grid has hours that are cleaner than others
These approaches always measure the wrong thing though - the average carbon cost of electricity.
What you need to know is the marginal carbon cost, which will be much less variable as almost all dispatchable generation is fossil.
So yes, you should avoiding adding load when there is a severe supply crunch and the marginal power is generated by gas peaker plants (often gas turbine based), and use power when renewable generation is otherwise being curtailed, but most of the time the grid is firmly in the middle regime with a fairly average marginal cost.
They are in conflict, because you can spend the same Euro only once. You could build a lot of batteries, solar panels and wind turbines for the cost of one nuclear plant
French nuclear supply chain atrophied quite lot in the last 30 years. Don't forget that even in France, president Hollande promised in 2014 to the voters to slash nuclear's contribution of power generation by 2025.
It was only when Russia started invasion in 2022, that the politicians in France started to change their opinion.
If you want build a nuclear power plant you go to nuclear supplier with uninterrupted experience in building nuclear power plants, like South Korea, China or Russia.
The South Koreans build Barakah nuclear power plant 5600 MWe for $32bn.
> French nuclear supply chain atrophied quite lot in the last 30 years.
Because today it makes no economic sense. Supply chain for horse carts is also very atrophied.
>The South Koreans build Barakah nuclear power plant 5600 MWe for $32bn.
Still very expensive. Flamanville is an extreme when things go really bad, but 175 MWe for 1 bn is also very high. 1 bn buys ~1 GW of solar, ~1 GW of onshore wind, or ~3 GW of battery capacity. You should only build new nuclear either to get a better mix in the grid (up to 5% is the nuclear lobby recommendation), or because you have no sun and no wind.
What would you need to replace a 1 GW nuclear power plant with 98% capacity factor?
Probably 1 GW solar power plant, together with 1 GW onshore wind and 1 GW of gas power plant. Then you have to also pay the natural gas to compensate for times of low solar + wind production. You can build battery storage to decrease the natural gas consumption, but how much battery storage do you have to build and how much can you reduce the natural gas consumption strongly depends latitude and local weather patterns.
Not really. Nuclear power requires massive subsidies. In Germany, the "De Height" wind farm was completed in August. Sixty-four 15-MW turbines generate about 4 TWh of electricity annually, which is sold entirely on the open market without any EEG funding.
The market for baseload electricity has disappeared in Germany, as renewables push the residual load to zero or below for almost the entire year:
Yes, but then when the wind doesn't blow, you miss upto 960MW of capacity, you can choose how to fill that; solar, coal, gas, waterpower, diesel, nuclear.
And the question is, are those wind turbines without subsidy?
Here in the Netherlands some big energy users like Aldel already have stopped, those big users are also good in up and down scaling energy usage on demand, and also those products have to come from somewhere else now, so in the end the question is about energy and availability.
A single wind turbine or a single PV module obviously provides only variable amounts of electricity. However, this is not the case for many PV modules and wind turbines spread across the entire continent. Wind and PV complement each other very well in Europe because of regular weather fronts; when there is little wind, there is more sunshine.
In Europe, the average weekly electricity generation in 2025 was 14.0 TWh, and no week fell below 10.2 TWh.
In 2026, the average output was about 15.5 TWh, and so far, no week has fallen below 12.5 TWh.
Of course, batteries are needed for short-term storage, but with the creation of excess capacity in wind and solar power, the troughs below the load curve become narrower and shallower, drastically reducing the need for storage.
Or they could get with the times and build a ton of battery like California. Down to 25% fossil in 2026 due to the massive success of shifting solar into the night with batteries.
the answers exist, euro states just can’t get out of their own way and actually build things
It is not even an "idea". Is the consequence of nuclear power being so difficult to modulate to consumption. You give it for free by night, hoping that at least some people consumes, because the country is sleeping.
Solar energy aligns so much better, peaking its production when the consumption is high, going to zero when the consumption gets low, except for the diner time. In Spain we get really low prices (sometimes near 0) in the middle of the day, you don't have to plan or incentivize night consumption.
Germany is currently operating the world biggest permanent storage for dangerous waste UTD Herfa-Neurode. Contains at least 690,000 tons of waste containing dioxins and furans, 220,000 tons of waste containing mercury, 127,000 tons of waste containing cyanide, and 83,000 tons of toxic waste containing arsenic. Nuclear waste is currently excluded, but I think it would not make a difference, especially because after about 400 years most dangerous fission products (Caesium-137, Strontium-90, and Iodine-131) decay away and only Plutonium and minor actinides stays. Mercury, arsenic, dioxins and furans stay forever.
We learned quite lot about underground migration of plutonium over millennia because we studied the remnants of the natural nuclear fission reactor which nature run about approximately 1.7 billion years ago in Oklo, Gabon.
"Plutonium has moved less than ten feet from where it was formed almost two billion years ago contained in the sedimentary rocks that kept them from being dissolved or spread by groundwater."
I’ve been thinking about this the CO₂ usage could be part of the price. I had toyed with having a two dimensional price, the price alongside the CO₂ usage, but I guess that way madness lies.
Hey guys,
A small site that checks, every day, whether making electricity cheaper when the grid is clean would actually cut CO₂.
It reads yesterday's generation mix from ENTSO-E and the EIA, works out the carbon intensity hour by hour, and compares a normal tariff against two carbon-aware ones.
It started for Switzerland, which turned out to be a good place to start for an odd reason. Swiss electricity is already very clean — about 34 gCO₂/kWh — and yet it's one of the best grids in the set at 2.4%, because it imports from dirtier neighbours and its carbon intensity swings through the day. Louisville, at 741 g/kWh, gets 0.01%: it burns coal at the same rate around the clock, so there's no cleaner hour to move into.
Across 38 grids, the correlation between the saving and how dirty a grid is comes out slightly negative. With how much it varies, it's 0.91. Being dirty doesn't help at all — being uneven is the whole thing.
Fair warning: the demand response is a model rather than measured behaviour, and it uses average carbon intensity, not marginal. Happy to hear your thoughts.
Proportional decrease is not as useful in a climate change sense than actual decrease in co2 emissions. A grid that is highly sustainable with lots of wind and solar, but fossil peaker plants will have a lot more potential co2 savings in this model. It essentially makes dirty grids look cleaner.
Is it assumed that the total consumption remains the same (i.e there is an increase in consumption in clean energy when there is a decrease in less clean ones)?
Otherwise, there would be an obvious solution which is to increase the price all the time to reduce demand and thus reduce CO2 consumption, but it is impractical politically.
I had the same question but about price (and its related impact on consumption, which is your question) -- are we assuming total spent / total consumed are held constant?
It wasn't stated in the website and I didn't see anything about it from skimming the github. I didn't read the thesis, though :D
Nice. On Octopus Agile in GB the price already tracks the mix (roughly 2.2x day-ahead wholesale), so the carbon-aware tariff exists in the wild.
What bounds the response is not willingness but plumbing: which import/export products the supplier lets you pair, and the export limit on a single-phase connection (about 3.7 kW). I reconstructed a 200 kWh home battery on the published half-hourly rates for June to August: the exact optimum moves 50 to 60 kWh a day, and the connection is a bigger lever than the software by a factor of two to three.
Here is an analysis from Germany: Quarter-hourly spot prices compared to the share of renewable energy generation in total generation. A higher share of renewables puts massive downward pressure on the spot market electricity price.
https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/price_scatter/chart.ht...
Since price elasticity for electricity is very high, the market cap decreases by approximately €150,000 for every additional GWh of renewable energy production. A single additional offshore wind turbine with an annual output of 60 GWh reduces the combined revenue of all electricity producers by about €9 million per year that it is in operation.
Blocking wind power and solar projects only serves to secure the profits of monopolists and oligopolists in the electricity market, but causes massive harm to the economy.
Good link. Germany is the case where it works cleanly — more renewables, lower price, lower carbon, all moving the same direction.
No amount of solar panels will generate electricity without sun light. Also the amount sun light can shrink quite a lot in winter months at high latitudes and under cloud cover.
No amount of wind turbines will generate electricity without wind, or to be more precise:
Cut-in speed: 3–4 m/s (12–15 km/h) to begin spinning and producing power.
Cut-out / Stop speed: Above 25 m/s (90 km/h) where brakes are applied to prevent mechanical damage
Germany has to have backups, currently quite expensive, for all this times of missing renewables production.
The apparent volatility of electricity generation from a single wind turbine is negligible, because what counts is the wind and PV output over large areas. Due to regular weather fronts, electricity output from wind and PV in Europe is surprisingly stable; when there is less sunshine, there is more wind. In 2025, for example, the weekly electricity output from wind and solar PV was 14.0 TWh, with no week falling below 10.5 TWh. If more wind power were installed in Eastern Europe, the curves would flatten out even further.
https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=de&...
Yes, single wind turbine is negligible, what counts is the wind and PV output over extremely large areas because weather fronts are correlated over hundreds of km. Of course night/day cycle is correlated over whole Europe with few hours shift.
So in 100% renewables Europe scenario, you have build multiples of renewable production in each region.
You build enough renewables in Western Europe to power the whole Europe, you build enough renewables in Central Europe to power the whole Europe and you build enough renewables in Eastern Europe to power the whole Europe and build electric grid to transfer 2/3s of electricity produced in each region into other regions.
Can it be done? Yes, but it will be very expensive.
Many renewable energy modelers often ignore realities and costs of physical electric grid and model whole continent as copper plate which can transfer infinite amount of electricity from each to point to any other point.
For more realistic scenarios German government is looking into power-to-gas energy storage systems, where you convert renewable electricity to hydrogen, ammonia or ethanol and store it underground. There are also plans to import large part of these gases/liquids from other countries, so no energy independence in the future.
https://www.bundeswirtschaftsministerium.de/Redaktion/EN/Pre...
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-revise-hydrogen...
Thats exactly how you build for resiliency. You probably aren't familiar with running workloads on the cloud. There are multiple levels of redundancy, Availability Zones, multiple regions, etc. At least 4X redundancy if you are running anything important.
The peaker natural gas plants are not running at 100%, they mostly run a few hours for peak production. Any critical infrastructure is built for peak utilization and there will always be some idling.
The good thing with electricity is excess production can be used to charge cars, pump water, produce green hydrogen or green ammonia. People are creative, they will figure out what to use excess production for.
"Reliability: Five-nines availability (99.999%, under 6 minutes downtime annually), typically achieved by combining high grid reliability with backup generation."
https://speed2power.epri.com/demand-characteristics.html
I wrote software for monitoring and controling electric grids on country level and later software for controling nuclear power plants, I know a little bit about resiliency.
Physicaly, you can do 3X redundancy in electric generation and electric grid, as there are no physical laws against it, but such large infrastructure is expensive and you have to pay the CAPEX even if the infrastructure is almost never utilized. Also transporting electricity over large distances is really expensive, therefor only relative small amount of electricity can be transport in europe and future targets are modest.
"The EU has set an interconnection target of at least 15% by 2030 to encourage EU countries to interconnect their installed electricity production capacity. This means that each country should have electricity infrastructure in place that would allow it to import, from its neighbouring EU countries, an equivalent of at least 15% of the electricity production capacity on its territory."
https://energy.ec.europa.eu/topics/infrastructure/electricit...
https://pubs.rsc.org/ee/article-abstract/11/3/469/565531/Rel...
Someone has to pay for this, either customers or tax payers (through goverment subsidies) and Europe already has high electricity prices (when compared with China and US).
"The energy sector is one of the largest and most important sectors of the world economy. Accounting for 8%–10% of world GDP, it is second only to health care in size and is equally pervasive in scope"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/energy-...
I think you are trying to say something, but I'm not sure what it is. It is not clear what you are advocating for. More nuclear?
Resiliency requires redundancy and that means excess production capacity. It is now mostly peaker gas plants that run only a few hours a day at most. Instead, solar panels are dirt cheap and you can have lots of redundancy pretty cheap. There are many uses for excess energy, it can be used for green hydrogen (industrial heat) and green ammonia (fertilizer) or pump water back if there is hydro. Most importantly, Europe has ~460 million vehicles, all of these can be EVs and have flexible demand. People are creative and they will find many uses with time-of-use pricing.
As a civilization, we're only just getting started on solar. So far, its been horizontal panels to capture when the Sun is brightest. The next phase is vertical solar. It requires zero land and can be deployed anywhere, think of all the fences and walls and tall buildings. It can be deployed in cities, close to consumption, without requiring new transmission infrastructure. Vertical solar will add 4 hours solar production. And Europe is geographically a large area, ~3400 miles wide, which means with grid interconnect, you can add 4 more hours excess production, ship to the other countries and get paid.
Or you can do what Romania does and install Solar with batteries: https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Solar-Energy/Solar-P.... If a poor Eastern European country can figure out how to build renewables, I'm sure its not a hard task for Western Europe?
> I wrote software for monitoring and controling electric grids on country level and later software for controling nuclear power plants, I know a little bit about resiliency.
You have a fixed worldview, the grid is an unchangeable fixed structure, and it can never be changed because you wrote a bit of software in COBOL 50 years back. What happened in your 20s is the best and ideal grid and it should never change. In your age of fossil fuel, production was far away, needed transmission infrastructure to bring power to the cities. Because coal is extremely polluting, hydro is geo-fixed and nuclear needs to be far (nobody will allow it). None of those assumptions are true anymore.
Took your link, changed de to en, reduced granularity weekly to daily. It looks way more spiky:
https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&...
Also, both wind and solar (especially solar) change vastly under a sub-daily aggregation.
I think the point is, if you can decide when to consume electricity then you will do it when it's the cheapest, so let's put the cheapest when the low carbon sources are available. So the website is taking into account that renewables are not always available, that's exactly its point.
And the backup source for Germany is the nuclear electricity from France. The grid is at the European scale.
This is interesting, but now explain why Germany has both the highest electricity prices in Europe as well as a relatively high CO2 footprint from electricity? Germany is buying not only nuclear but also coal energy from neighbouring countries.
Will this be fixed at some point or is the German model not actually as good as you imply?
The main reason why electricity is expensive in Germany is because it's taxed to oblivion. Even when wholesale prices are negative, electricity costs about three times as much as gas.
Now you might ask why electricity is taxed to oblivion. Some don't like nuclear or coal. Some prefer oil or gas. In the end, there's a majority that wants electricity to be expensive.
I was under the impression that the taxes are going into infrastructure and grants for renewable energies, meaning those energy prices are maybe way higher than advertised. Funny thing is we are constantly being told how cheap reneweables are to produce but apparently there are other costs involved.
FTR and for the inevitable downvoters, I am not a fan of fossil energy. I am merely a fan of well presented arguments, and downvotes aren't that.
Well, that impression is wrong. The german word for "Taxes" is "Steuer". And they go to one of the 3 levels of our government: Federal level, the 16 states, municipalities / communes.
And yes, we pay VAT (19%) and electricty tax (0.0205 € / kWh).
But we also pay other things, like Konzessionsabgabe, KWKG-Umlage, AbN and Offshore-Netzumlage. They have various reasons:
AbN is used to make electricity artificially cheaper for ecenomically important companies that have a high usage of electricity. So this doesn't go to government, it's no tax.
KWKG (Kraft-Wärme-Kopplungs-Gesetz) is payed to keep the oil and gas power plants in operation. We now have so much renewable energy, they it wouldn't be economically feasible to operate them -- they have quite low duty cycles these days. They are however important for the quality of the whole network. So this doesn't go to government, it's no tax.
Konzessionsabgabe could perhaps counted as tax. The lines of the electric grid go over public property. Or they use the area below the pedestrian sidewalks. And so they have to pay for it. So this doesn't go to government, it's no tax, more a rent.
Offshore-Netzumlage is because we have sooooo much electric wind power in the north and baltic sea, but most bigger industry is in the south. It is used to pay for the new electric trasses. So this doesn't go to government, it's no tax.
Also, electric power in Germany is both cheap and expensive. The internal price is often cheap. But the price to end-customers is often expensive. One part of that is that many end-customers don't switch their electricity power. In history, we had local power distributors, often in the hand of the city or the county. But since perhaps 20 years one can now just select anyone, whoever has the lowest price. However, the majority of the germans stay (due to lazyness?) with their local providers. Which are usually on the more costly side.
Source so far: https://strom-report.com/strompreis-zusammensetzung/
Also we should not forget that Germany has one of the best electric grids in Germany. We can take the SAIDI and compare electric grids of regions or countries. And in Europe, Germany has the lowest SAIDI of all large industrial countries. Some have a lower SAIDI, but they are tiny-states.
So, what is SAIDI? The System Average Interuption Duration Index --- or how long per year and customer the power is out. And here we're better than e.g. Austria, France, Belgium, Sweden ... but also MUCH better than the USA, which seem to have exceptional shaggy electric grids.
So price is one thing... but that you can depend on the electric power in Germany, but maybe not abroad, is another thing.
Source for SAIDI: Germany and english language Wikipedia, Bundesnetzagentur
Good to point out the difference between taxes and other tariffs, but I have a hard time understanding why you have to call what I said "wrong"? What you went to explain in detail is exactly what I alluded to, that also matches the previous posters "electricity [...] taxed into oblivion".
Another point: 3.3% of federal tax income, or 1.7% of all taxes paid by citizens, goes directly into "Klima- und Transformationsfonds" i.e. gets pumped into energy transformation. And the state even pumps more money into that, by means of "Sondervermögen" (taking additional debts). Measured as a percentage of federal state tax income, seems like Germany is pumping more than 7% total into energy transformation. Quite a lot I think, and even if this is not directly a tariff on electricity, it's easy to imagine how this can result in general price inflation.
All of Germany's neighbours, from which it buys electricity, are decarbonising so yes obviously it inevitably gets "fixed at some point".
Germany's wholesale prices are similar to many other European countries, the worst is easily Ireland because of their geography, small, northern, coastal, they often need to import power, and that import has to come from Britain, which is between them and the continent, so their prices will almost always be higher than Britain's already not-great prices - we're obviously not going to sell the Irish £89 per MWh electricity and then charge our own users £119 per MWh for the same product.
What I am saying is that those spot prices may not represent all of the reneweables' marginal costs. Question is, will the end consumer prices ever go down, and by how much?
> Question is, will the end consumer prices ever go down, and by how much?
No, electricity is not likely to become a deflationary product. It hasn't been in my lifetime and I don't see that changing. Products which do that are weird and they don't tend to do it for very long.
There was a period (last century, more than fifty years ago) when Oil was deflationary in the US, as the very easily extracted Saudi Oil came online and US import bans ended - you'd pay the same dollar price to fill a car with gasoline in one year as the next and of course wages continued to grow so that oil is getting cheaper in real terms. But that's a long time ago, a time when gasoline was 30 cents per gallon.
Solar PV is just straight up cheaper than any fossil power. Solar Farms the UK agreed to subsidise in 2022 came online early last year and even in those more normal times (before Trump started a war in the Middle East) the "subsidy" amounts they were paying us totalled a few million quid a year because the fossil power was so expensive. Once Trump got into it, we were being paid like £3-4M per month in "subsidy" because of course the fossil fuel costs more now but sunlight is still free.
But that does not translate into lower prices for consumers, at most it means their prices might not rise as quickly.
The prices of so many things have gone down with times due to increased efficiencies. Why not electricity? If solar PV is cheaper than fossils, I would, naive as I am, expect prices to go down.
(I acknowledge fossils have been going up for various reasons, and have become more scarce, and energy demands are rising)
There's a situation like with Amdahl's law here, which I'm guessing you're familiar with since this is HN but if not then I'm sure you can read about it. Consumer prices - the thing you're experiencing - have multiple inputs, and wholesale price is the only one that's subject to this change by generation technology so that dilutes the consequence of any such change for consumers.
If you're paying 25 cents per kWh and and the wholesale price was $100 per MWh then 10 of those 25 cents were for wholesale electricity, but you're paying 15 cents per kWh for "other things". Maybe a huge improvement to generation technology reduces that wholesale price to $90 per MWh, amazing, but alas general inflation increases your suppliers other costs to 16 cents per kWh and so you pay... 25 cents still.
If that wholesale price somehow halved and it was all passed on (good luck with that) your 25 cents per kWh goes to 20 cents, only a 20% drop.
The learning curve for solar is shallowing, and while it's steeper for offshore wind and especially floating offshore wind, those are both way more expensive than solar, so you'd need much more price decrease for them to be cheaper than say, coal.
Nuclear does not produce CO2. Nuclear energy is green energy.
Why I said not only... but also.
It'd be really great if wind turbines across Germany were producing at uncorrelated times.
Let's look at the wind right now: uniform wind across Germany:
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2026/09/04/1200Z/wind/surface/...
Let's look at the wind earlier: uniformly no wind across Germany:
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2026/09/02/0000Z/wind/surface/...
Hmmmm.
This is kind of a stupid preposition. the cheapest hour should be the cheapest with carbon externalities priced in. There are lots of times where it is both logical and good for the cheapeat hour to not be the lowest carbon (i.e minimum run times on foasil fuel plantspushing should hours very cheap because they are needed for the peak hours or forecast renewable drop off.) If the market isnt pricing the carbon externalities that is a seperate issue.
further the grid price only represents variable costs, congestion, and bidding strategies of gen to try and also recoup fixed costs and make a profit. This may translate to cheaper when lower carbon because variable cost is zero for many renewables but making it explicitly happen breaks the market price finding mexhanism and is probably an even larger aubsidy to renewables, which in itself is stupid vs just pricing the carbon externalities and letting the market decide.
Mine is just flat pricing but I do try to align it.
UK has big variations in carbon intensity depending on how solar & wind is doing, so easy enough to make a small effort to align discretionary things like washing machine with that
There is also a very nice dashboard for UK grid that shows clearly what's going on at any point in time.
https://grid.iamkate.com/
There is also another website which offers more information on generation plants (planned and built) [0].
[0]: https://energydashboard.co.uk
That dashboard is great. The UK is probably the best case for this in Europe. Moving the washing machine is basically what my model assumes, except it assumes everyone does it every day. NESO publishes a carbon intensity API, so the UK is an easy one to add. On the list.
The harder question is probably whether dynamic pricing changes behavior without mostly becoming a penalty for people who have less flexibility in when they use electricity
There should be a penalty for having less flexibility in consuming electricity. That’s how the market incentivizes us to figure out how to be flexible in our consumption.
We should probably also subsidize the conversion, for people who look at the incentives, want to become more flexible, but don’t have the money.
And we might have to handle some special cases—maybe hospitals, for example—where reliable power is an important social good. But these should be rare.
For households in Europe, there are some incentives to switch to heat pumps for heating... for best efficiency (and longevity), usually a heat pump needs to run at lower power constantly without switching off much.
And since the heat pump will be the biggest total consumer in a household (in winter), there is not a huge opportunity for flexibility.
This seems like a sort of complex trade-off (taking your word for it that they do run more efficiently when run continuously). We’d still probably prefer to run them on renewable energy and defer them when running on non-renewables, because the inefficiently consuming a plentiful resource that is not very damaging to produce, is better than efficiently consuming one that is destructive to produce.
But if we have multiple tasks with multiple levels of defer-ability (either due to efficiency benefits or due to people just wanting to run their dishwashers at a time convenient to them), it could be more complicated. But working out trade offs like this is what the market is for, right?
I've long thought there should be a standard mechanism for back pressure for loads that can defer their usage.
For example dishwashers, overnight battery charging, car charging, etc should be able to receive scheduling data from the grid to determine the best time to run.
Users could of course be given a choice whether to use grid scheduling in exchange for lower prices or not.
This sort of thing was called “smartgrid” but it doesn’t seem to have caught on. Maybe we could lean into modern buzzwords.
The electricity distribution system is a big sparse graph. If they are allowed to pass signals back and forth, don’t look too close, and maybe we can call it an AI enhanced grid. Then we can call this sort of ability to schedule appliances based on those signals “closed loop AI enhanced green appliances” or something similarly buzzwordy.
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In my country (for people with a so called "dynamic pricing" contract) the price of electricity already drops significantly when we have a load of green energy (wind, solar). I guess this is just a side effect of not having a well-balanced grid. But still that's already kind of a CO2-based pricing - although not directly
This is what makes me wonder how much additional benefit an explicit carbon signal actually buys you over normal dynamic pricing
On grids where pricing declines due to more low carbon generation generating, there is no extra value. On grids where pricing declines due to more fossil generation running, that is the signal you want to avoid loads during those time windows.
At the moment, lower prices are not necessarily a guarantee of lower emissions. And so, if you want to orchestrate loads to move them to the lowest emission time windows (perhaps not prioritizing cost), carbon signal is the way to do so.
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Mostly yes, but it works the other direction as well: a fossil power station may not want to completely shut down because it expects more demand later in the day, and offer a few hours of low cost electricity to stay in the merit order.
A lot of fossil power stations cant shut down for a few hours, they have to keep themselves on.
Coal mostly. This is why coal is largely being phased out for natural gas which can cycle on and off as needed.
My electricity provider has a near real-time graph of energy generation by source (wind, solar, coal, etc.) and I use this during off-peak times to decide when to use or avoid certain loads. For example I love charging batteries when solar is producing more energy than is being used by customers.
For a global map, check out Electricity Maps:
https://app.electricitymaps.com/
The idea is interesting but unfortunately most of the people don't know the electricity price even now without this mechanism. This should be displayed on top of every washing machine everywhere to make it works
Dryer? Are washing machines expensive to run?
Dryers are even worst but they are very uncommon in France where I live. Washing machines are bad because they have to warm the water.
I didn’t even hook the hot water up to my washing machine. Nobody died yet
In many places it is usual for the machine to have a small element so that it can heat its own water, none of the machines I've every owned had a hot water line, although one did have instructions for a variant model with such a feature.
In practice having the machine heat the water is usually a good choice because the machine already wants to take a set amount of water and heat it to a specific temperature (based on your chosen programme, silk knickers obviously do not want the hot water you use to clean cotton bedsheets after your youngest didn't wake up in time) whereas your hot water boiler just makes arbitrarily hot water forever.
I think the only reason that you would need to heat your water up is because you have a front load washer and I’ve heard they get disgusting if you don’t use hot water once in a while this is not a problem with the top load washer, mines run for 20 years on cold water and it’s fine nothing has ever come out of the washing machine dirty. I suppose you all have front loaders because you need them to spin really fast to dry your clothes cause you don’t actually have a dryer. Europeans are weird
On the long-term, the French option of just running a low-carbon grid remains the obvious solution.
Sure, but I don't think the two ideas are really in conflict. A low-carbon grid should absolutely be the end goal, but even a mostly clean grid has hours that are cleaner than others
These approaches always measure the wrong thing though - the average carbon cost of electricity.
What you need to know is the marginal carbon cost, which will be much less variable as almost all dispatchable generation is fossil.
So yes, you should avoiding adding load when there is a severe supply crunch and the marginal power is generated by gas peaker plants (often gas turbine based), and use power when renewable generation is otherwise being curtailed, but most of the time the grid is firmly in the middle regime with a fairly average marginal cost.
They are in conflict, because you can spend the same Euro only once. You could build a lot of batteries, solar panels and wind turbines for the cost of one nuclear plant
Money doesn't work like that.
Spending 19 billion € over 18 years to build 1.65GW Flamanville 3 is not quite obvious to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Flamanvi...
Edit: compare this with China: they added 315 GW of Solar capacity in a single year (2025; see page 34 of the PDF).
https://www.irena.org/Publications/2026/Mar/Renewable-capaci...
(You can't compare nameplate capacity directly, but it can be safely assumed that 2 orders of magnitude more is ... actually more)
French nuclear supply chain atrophied quite lot in the last 30 years. Don't forget that even in France, president Hollande promised in 2014 to the voters to slash nuclear's contribution of power generation by 2025.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/renewables-up-nuclear-down-in-fren...
It was only when Russia started invasion in 2022, that the politicians in France started to change their opinion.
If you want build a nuclear power plant you go to nuclear supplier with uninterrupted experience in building nuclear power plants, like South Korea, China or Russia.
The South Koreans build Barakah nuclear power plant 5600 MWe for $32bn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant
https://www.powermag.com/uaes-first-reactor-gets-go-ahead/
> French nuclear supply chain atrophied quite lot in the last 30 years.
Because today it makes no economic sense. Supply chain for horse carts is also very atrophied.
>The South Koreans build Barakah nuclear power plant 5600 MWe for $32bn.
Still very expensive. Flamanville is an extreme when things go really bad, but 175 MWe for 1 bn is also very high. 1 bn buys ~1 GW of solar, ~1 GW of onshore wind, or ~3 GW of battery capacity. You should only build new nuclear either to get a better mix in the grid (up to 5% is the nuclear lobby recommendation), or because you have no sun and no wind.
What would you need to replace a 1 GW nuclear power plant with 98% capacity factor?
Probably 1 GW solar power plant, together with 1 GW onshore wind and 1 GW of gas power plant. Then you have to also pay the natural gas to compensate for times of low solar + wind production. You can build battery storage to decrease the natural gas consumption, but how much battery storage do you have to build and how much can you reduce the natural gas consumption strongly depends latitude and local weather patterns.
https://solarbatteryatlas.electrotech-revolution.com/deploym...
France exports about 60TWh of electricity yearly for about 4B€.
Flamanville running at 100% generates 32TWh. It is amortized in 9 years. I'd say it's doing pretty okay even with its ballooning cost.
Not really. Nuclear power requires massive subsidies. In Germany, the "De Height" wind farm was completed in August. Sixty-four 15-MW turbines generate about 4 TWh of electricity annually, which is sold entirely on the open market without any EEG funding.
The market for baseload electricity has disappeared in Germany, as renewables push the residual load to zero or below for almost the entire year:
https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?c=DE&l...
The base load is an imaginary line passing through the troughs of the residual load curve.
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Yes, but then when the wind doesn't blow, you miss upto 960MW of capacity, you can choose how to fill that; solar, coal, gas, waterpower, diesel, nuclear.
And the question is, are those wind turbines without subsidy?
Here in the Netherlands some big energy users like Aldel already have stopped, those big users are also good in up and down scaling energy usage on demand, and also those products have to come from somewhere else now, so in the end the question is about energy and availability.
Some (or a lot of) subsidies can be justified.
A single wind turbine or a single PV module obviously provides only variable amounts of electricity. However, this is not the case for many PV modules and wind turbines spread across the entire continent. Wind and PV complement each other very well in Europe because of regular weather fronts; when there is little wind, there is more sunshine.
https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=de&...
In Europe, the average weekly electricity generation in 2025 was 14.0 TWh, and no week fell below 10.2 TWh. In 2026, the average output was about 15.5 TWh, and so far, no week has fallen below 12.5 TWh.
Of course, batteries are needed for short-term storage, but with the creation of excess capacity in wind and solar power, the troughs below the load curve become narrower and shallower, drastically reducing the need for storage.
> when the wind doesn't blow
During day hours and with clear weather it's solar.
Currently at night in Germany it's: imports from other countries + coal power plants + gas power plants + little bit of hydro/biomass.
The plan for coming decade is to replace coal power plants with new subsidized gas power plants.
https://table.media/en/europe/news/gas-fired-power-plants-eu...
So, relying on others to fix your mess + catastrophic emissions + catastrophic but less so emissions + something pretty much at full capacity.
Or they could get with the times and build a ton of battery like California. Down to 25% fossil in 2026 due to the massive success of shifting solar into the night with batteries.
the answers exist, euro states just can’t get out of their own way and actually build things
It's expensive to build enough batteries to cover a few days with very little generation. Hydrogen and gas turbines currently look cheaper.
France has been offering lower prices at night to make the most of their nuclear since the 1960s.
Australia used similar tech to make the most of baseload coal overnight since the 1950s.
It's just a good idea, and should be used to get cheaper cleaner power in grids today too.
It is not even an "idea". Is the consequence of nuclear power being so difficult to modulate to consumption. You give it for free by night, hoping that at least some people consumes, because the country is sleeping.
Solar energy aligns so much better, peaking its production when the consumption is high, going to zero when the consumption gets low, except for the diner time. In Spain we get really low prices (sometimes near 0) in the middle of the day, you don't have to plan or incentivize night consumption.
Yep. Poisoning the planet with nuclear wast for a million years. 40,000 generations of our children will be happy and thankful.
Germany is currently operating the world biggest permanent storage for dangerous waste UTD Herfa-Neurode. Contains at least 690,000 tons of waste containing dioxins and furans, 220,000 tons of waste containing mercury, 127,000 tons of waste containing cyanide, and 83,000 tons of toxic waste containing arsenic. Nuclear waste is currently excluded, but I think it would not make a difference, especially because after about 400 years most dangerous fission products (Caesium-137, Strontium-90, and Iodine-131) decay away and only Plutonium and minor actinides stays. Mercury, arsenic, dioxins and furans stay forever.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untertagedeponie_Herfa-Neurode
https://radioactivity.eu.com/articles/radioactive_waste/acti...
We learned quite lot about underground migration of plutonium over millennia because we studied the remnants of the natural nuclear fission reactor which nature run about approximately 1.7 billion years ago in Oklo, Gabon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...
"Plutonium has moved less than ten feet from where it was formed almost two billion years ago contained in the sedimentary rocks that kept them from being dissolved or spread by groundwater."
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2018/ph241/voigt2/
I mean yeah. Nuclear waste is much safer than fossil fuel waste - deaths caused, radioactivity, etc
The EU does that since the emissions are taxed via the EU ETS and it just results in the most expensive electricity in the world.
I’ve been thinking about this the CO₂ usage could be part of the price. I had toyed with having a two dimensional price, the price alongside the CO₂ usage, but I guess that way madness lies.
Man, I am so tired of reading slop.
At this point I can tell fairly reliably from titles alone, "measured daily on 38 grids" is not the kind of thing a human would write in this context.
English is not my mother language. Yes, I polished. My prefered one was Carbon-aware electricity pricing but seemed so general.
Write it in your mother language, and then ask the AI to translate it; and post both
I'm not commenting on the word choice or phrasing, but the choice of which information to include.
Hey guys, A small site that checks, every day, whether making electricity cheaper when the grid is clean would actually cut CO₂.
It reads yesterday's generation mix from ENTSO-E and the EIA, works out the carbon intensity hour by hour, and compares a normal tariff against two carbon-aware ones.
It started for Switzerland, which turned out to be a good place to start for an odd reason. Swiss electricity is already very clean — about 34 gCO₂/kWh — and yet it's one of the best grids in the set at 2.4%, because it imports from dirtier neighbours and its carbon intensity swings through the day. Louisville, at 741 g/kWh, gets 0.01%: it burns coal at the same rate around the clock, so there's no cleaner hour to move into.
Across 38 grids, the correlation between the saving and how dirty a grid is comes out slightly negative. With how much it varies, it's 0.91. Being dirty doesn't help at all — being uneven is the whole thing.
Fair warning: the demand response is a model rather than measured behaviour, and it uses average carbon intensity, not marginal. Happy to hear your thoughts.
Proportional decrease is not as useful in a climate change sense than actual decrease in co2 emissions. A grid that is highly sustainable with lots of wind and solar, but fossil peaker plants will have a lot more potential co2 savings in this model. It essentially makes dirty grids look cleaner.
Added. Tonnes per day next to the percent. Ranks the grids differently, you were right.
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Is it assumed that the total consumption remains the same (i.e there is an increase in consumption in clean energy when there is a decrease in less clean ones)?
Otherwise, there would be an obvious solution which is to increase the price all the time to reduce demand and thus reduce CO2 consumption, but it is impractical politically.
I had the same question but about price (and its related impact on consumption, which is your question) -- are we assuming total spent / total consumed are held constant?
It wasn't stated in the website and I didn't see anything about it from skimming the github. I didn't read the thesis, though :D
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How are you modelling how demand changes in response to price changes?
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Nice. On Octopus Agile in GB the price already tracks the mix (roughly 2.2x day-ahead wholesale), so the carbon-aware tariff exists in the wild.
What bounds the response is not willingness but plumbing: which import/export products the supplier lets you pair, and the export limit on a single-phase connection (about 3.7 kW). I reconstructed a 200 kWh home battery on the published half-hourly rates for June to August: the exact optimum moves 50 to 60 kWh a day, and the connection is a bigger lever than the software by a factor of two to three.