Germany's Solar Boom Eases Power Costs as Gas Price Jumps

Posted by toomuchtodo 15 hours ago

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Comment by qalmakka 14 hours ago

It's a paramount imperative for Europe to wean itself from fossil fuels, regardless of environmental arguments (which are extremely relevant still). Getting a safe, unfettered provider of fossil fuels is getting a basically unsolvable problem. China is trying to build as much solar and nuclear capacity as humanly possible; we should do the same too. We've been having these energy shocks since the Yom Kippur war basically, it's like a broken cycle of instability and crisis we can't leave behind. There's no shale to be found in Europe, we just have wind, sun and nuclear to save our backs. And maybe geothermal pretty soon?

Comment by WarmWash 14 hours ago

I don't understand leadership thinking. Surely spending €250B on a continental scale renewable energy project would have a relatively short payoff time (on country scale) given the instability of relying on foreign energy sources. I mean how long does oil have to sit above $100/barrel before it costs everyone that much anyway?

Comment by pjc50 14 hours ago

> spending €250B on a continental scale renewable energy project

Let me stop you there: the EU budget for 2026 was €193B. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/budget/www/index-en.htm

Basically Europe doesn't have political leadership, nor does the EU itself have a budget larger than the member states like the US Federal budget. In return, the EU, primarily Germany, has imposed "fiscal discipline" which prevents running a short term large deficit in order to make this kind of capital investment.

Also, two hundred billion Euro is a lot of money for anyone who isn't an AI startup.

Comment by WarmWash 14 hours ago

What is the value of the EU if's it not coordinating multi-national scale efforts?

This would need to be a joint venture as some places are really good for wind, and some places are really good for solar, but not every country on their own has access to those locations. The budget for the EU doesn't matter, because this project would be a separate line item with it's own funding.

Energy independence is extremely valuable. Way way way more valuable then $250B or even $500 or $750B for that matter. Society runs on energy, and if it's not fully yours, you are always a rug pull away from social collapse.

If 2022 was a cold winter, and America had a cold leader, this project probably would have breezed through the bureaucracy in a week.

Comment by ben_w 11 hours ago

> What is the value of the EU if's it not coordinating multi-national scale efforts?

Remember the EU is just a fancy self-updating free trade agreement, not a nation.

The coordination that the member states have thus far allowed the EU to take responsibility for is ~ "make all our rules be equivalent so everyone's degrees are accepted everywhere, everyone's food is accepted everywhere, we all agree what counts as a safe consumer product, limited range for tax shenanigans, etc."

(And for this, they get denounced as "complex" and "bureaucratic").

Actual direct investments do also exist, I just missed out on one for startups 20 years back apparently due to a rules change, but it's peanuts compared to what member state governments do directly.

Comment by ponector 8 hours ago

>> Energy independence is extremely valuable.

Not if your top politicians are on putin's payrol like Orban and Merkel.

Comment by seydor 14 hours ago

The EU is not funding projects directly, it's setting the rules. Individual governments pay the bill

Comment by thibaut_barrere 14 hours ago

This is not entirely correct. The EU actually does both — it sets regulatory frameworks and funds projects directly through several mechanisms.

Comment by toomuchtodo 14 hours ago

Is this perhaps changing with Macron indicating Europe will keep the €300B Europe has been investing in the US annually in Europe?

Macron says €300B in EU savings sent to the US every year will be invested in EU - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46722594 - January 2026 (207 comments)

Europe can go fast when it wants to.

How Europe Ditched Russian Fossil Fuels With Spectacular Speed - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/ukraine-n... | https://archive.today/yxGp2 - February 21st, 2023

> But what the past year has shown is that it’s possible to go harder and faster in deploying solar panels and batteries, reducing energy use, and permanently swapping out entrenched sources of fossil fuel.

> Solar installations across Europe increased by a record 40-gigawatts last year, up 35% compared with 2021, just shy of the most optimistic scenario from researchers at BloombergNEF. That jump was driven primarily by consumers who saw cheap solar panels as a way to cut their own energy bills. It essentially pushed the solar rollout ahead by a few years, hitting a level that will be sustained by EU policies.

Comment by ZeroGravitas 12 hours ago

The recent "Offshore Wind Investment Pact" announcement was aiming for 1 Trillion euro of investment into North Sea wind by 2040.

Plus there's lots of other stuff happening. Also lots of pushback from those clinging to fossil fuels.

Comment by PurpleRamen 13 hours ago

It's a mix between decades of brainwashing, fossil-lobby having the bigger paychecks, unstable times, and all leaders fear to invest in something new and uncertain. In every industry/organization there is the old saying that nobody ever gets fired for supporting/using the established solutions. This is the same situation, there is more motivation for staying with the known paths, especially after there is strong propaganda against the new paths.

Comment by onlyrealcuzzo 14 hours ago

The problem is that 30-50% of voters would just look at that and say:

Why are you spending €250B on corporate subsidies instead of giving us €250B?!

Comment by pjc50 14 hours ago

I think the lesson of the UK winter fuel subsidy payment is that while it feels great in year one, it doesn't actually solve any of the problems, and then the voters get incredibly mad if you try to take it away again.

Comment by baq 14 hours ago

everything of importance ever done in EU was in response to a major crisis, in no small part because these exact voter emotions are dampened in such times.

Comment by supertrope 9 hours ago

This can be viewed as a feature not a bug. The defining feature of a republic is stability. Orderly and lawful transfers of power. Not rocking the boat. Deliberative processes. If the people are enjoying prosperity and peace why make drastic changes? So yes when the situation is extreme that's when big shifts in policy happen.

Comment by toomuchtodo 14 hours ago

"Never let a good crisis go to waste."

Comment by joe_mamba 14 hours ago

>The problem is that 30-50% of voters would just look at that and say: Why are you spending €250B on corporate subsidies instead of giving us €250B?!

Why is it a "problem" for voters (aka the taxpayers) to ask such questions to their leaders to justify on how their tax money is being spent? To me this feels like basic transparency that keeps democracy in check.

To me it's the problem if politicians don't have or don't want to answer those questions because then, either they're grifting or they're incompetent.

It's not like we don't have a laundry list of mismanagement, couch corruption cough, of governments spending money on bullshit with nothing to show for, while stuff healthcare keeps being underfunded.

So yeah, if you spend my money, you better have an answer.

Comment by leonidasrup 13 hours ago

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Comment by nxm 13 hours ago

China is also building a ton of coal power plants to give itself a competitive edge and take away even more industry away from Europe

Comment by triceratops 8 hours ago

You've been told multiple times that this is a lie by omission. Why do you persist with it?

Comment by nixass 14 hours ago

I love how these articles pop up only after we exited couple of months long depressing, cloudy, rainy and snowy season into full blast sunshine for last two weeks or so.

Comment by lostlogin 13 hours ago

Seasons do change, yes.

Comment by belorn 2 hours ago

Yes, this is why you get on average single digit output from solar in Sweden during the worst winter months while consumption doubles. The math comes down that on average, the expected amount of solar that can be used for consumption is around 25% for an 100% capacity installation. The period with highest production is the period of lowest consumption. Average grid prices also follow this trend, with the highest point being winter and the lowest point being summer.

Germany has slightly better numbers from being a bit more south, and they also primarily use gas for heating rather than electricity, which reduces seasons effects on consumption.

Comment by nixass 8 hours ago

Correct, and the author of that piece should be aware of that fact

Comment by nickserv 10 hours ago

Every spring the numbers go up compared to the year before. That's interesting, no?

Comment by nixass 8 hours ago

It's not interesting, it's expected.

Comment by storus 14 hours ago

Aren't power prices determined by the most expensive power source (i.e. gas) regardless of the prices of all other power sources? Otherwise nuclear/hydroelectric would be sold for pennies, no?

Comment by saltybytes 10 hours ago

That's right! It's called "merit order" [0]. Best scenario would be to either decouple the gas price from the price of electricity or get rid of the merit order system altogether. The gas price jacks up the price of kWh by so much that alternative energy providers (wind, hydro, solar,...) are making fortunes! The EU is not interested to change that although Spain and Portugal swolled the penalty for suspending the merit order system. Something I find to be long overdue in other EU countries as well since the elevated price for electricity drives inflation. A lot. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merit_order [1] https://www.eurelectric.org/in-detail/electricity_prices_exp...

Comment by pjc50 14 hours ago

Generally, yes. There's a simple reason why: it stops producers trying to "holdout" in order to drive prices up. Various countries are thinking of changing this to modified auction systems in order to deal with greater and greater disparities between prices.

Comment by wat10000 14 hours ago

It's not a constant, because you don't always need the most expensive sources. If you have a sunny afternoon where there's enough solar power to cover demand without gas plants, then you don't have to pay gas rates for that time.

Comment by mono442 11 hours ago

That's true and on top of that the EU heavily taxes CO2 emissions which makes the problem even worse. If not for the EU ETS, they could just go back to burning coal for electricity which is cheap and abundant everywhere.

Comment by alpineman 14 hours ago

Beautiful. How could someone be against renewable energy? It's incredible, and we should be investing a lot more into it.

Comment by PurpleRamen 13 hours ago

If your paycheck depends on fossils, then you will wholeheartedly sabotage renewables as much as you can.

Comment by AlexandrB 14 hours ago

How indeed. Yet Germany got rid of its nuclear energy capacity a few years ago.

Comment by wongarsu 14 hours ago

Signed into law in 2002, with the last reactor going offline in 2023. Depending on how you count we got rid of it a quarter-century ago.

Not the best decision, and a major reason why Germany uses so much coal and gas today. But outside some special circumstances nuclear isn't cost competitive with other renewables anymore, so for future plans it doesn't really matter

Comment by _aavaa_ 13 hours ago

Germany uses less coal and gas today then in the past and it has been a straight decline both before and after the nuclear phase out [0]. They are currently committed to phasing it out by 2038. We can argue that it may have gotten faster if nuclear was still there but that’s a counter factual that would have to be proved.

[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...

Comment by toomuchtodo 14 hours ago

~58.5% of Germany electricity came from renewables in 2025, the last of the fossil generation will be pushed out with more renewables and batteries. They deploy ~2GW/month of solar PV.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/12mo/monthly

As other comments mentioned, in a more perfect world, they would've run those nuclear generators longer to avoid emissions. Alas, we live in an imperfect world. Keeping grinding towards net zero.

Comment by sidpatil 13 hours ago

Is nuclear energy considered renewable?

Comment by leonidasrup 12 hours ago

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Comment by WarmWash 14 hours ago

Chernobyl is almost conspiracy worthy with how much money it ultimately directed to Russian oil and gas coffers.

Comment by leonidasrup 13 hours ago

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Comment by toomuchtodo 15 hours ago

https://archive.today/O4JPX

Comment by 3012846 13 hours ago

Trump already talks about the war being done and phones with Putin. Why? Do they discuss that the stupid Europeans are now under the LNG thumb of the US and Putin can have Ukraine and Trump can have Greenland?

Any solar energy is welcome, but energy prices are ruining households anyway. Especially those that were told by the government 30 years ago that natural gas is the future.

The EU cannot leave energy policy to Trump and Putin and hope for the best. Gas is not only needed for heating. It is needed for producing fertilizer. The whole policy of letting Russia hoard its resources and be the last country with the highly valuable raw material for the chemical industry is insane. Especially for those countries that fear Russia.

Comment by jmyeet 13 hours ago

Let me explain why fossil fuels are so politcally sticky in general.

If you build oil wells that produce say 1Mbpd (million barrels per day) in oil then, depending on what area of the world you're in, the production declines. In the Permian Basin (fracking in the US), that decline rate is 15-20%. So, in a year you need to build 150-200kbpd of new wells just to maintain your current production.

So why does this make fossil sticks politically sticky? Jobs.

If you build a wind or solar farm it requires almost no maintenance and has no decline. Windmills need some maintenance. Power lines need some maintenance. Solar panels need to be cleaned. The last one can mostly be automated. But all of this requires a whole lot less work than drilling a bunch of new wells.

And why is nuclear so politically problematic? Because of failure modes. And it's super-expensive. HNers like to wave away the worst disasters and pretend with basically no evidence that Chernobyl or Fukushima can't happen again. Fewer than 700 nuclear power plants have ever been built. Not one has been built without government subsidies. Nuclear defenders will focus on operationg costs and brush over capital costs for this reason.

As a reminder, Chernobyl's absolute exclusion zone 40 years later is still 1000 square miles and Fukushima's clean up is likely to take a century and the cost will likely exceed $1 trillion. For one incident.

I'm sorry but nuclear is not going anywhere. The future is solar.

Comment by LargoLasskhyfv 10 hours ago

There is another model to consider, both cost- and operations-wise, when you zoom out.

Submarines and Carriers of the US Navy, managed "Hyman Rickover style". They may have had mishaps, but not nuclear related.

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover )

Problematic was the handling of their nuclear waste, but that got privatized at least partially, so don't do that. Let it stay military, administered and operated in the same successful "Rickover style".

Maybe have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Grid_Corporation_of_Chin... , too.

Also standardize on only a few, small modular models, and fuels.

Not making every single one a special snowflake, needing its own special fuel.

Their more compact size would also eliminate the bottleneck of forging the containment vessel, enabling shipyards to join in, for example. That's another https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale to consider.

Since being military, and well managed, they could also burn higher enriched fuel, utilising more of the precious stuff, instead of turning about 97.5% to 99% into waste.

If this is deemed essential for the functioning of a nation, why privatize that?

Why not make it military?

Comment by looperhacks 14 hours ago

Don't worry, our minister for economic affairs and energy will make sure that we will stop this solar madness and return to good old clean and green gas /s

(she worked and lobbied for the gas sector before joining the current government)

Comment by partiallypro 14 hours ago

Now just imagine if they hadn't killed their nuclear power plants.

Comment by frm88 4 minutes ago

It is 2026. Germany - as a densely populated country - still does not have a safe location to store all the radioactive waste that came from those nuclear power plants.

Why is it, some always repeat the same argument without giving a single thought to the follow-up challenges and costs?

Comment by Mashimo 14 hours ago

Now just imagine if they hadn't fucked up Asse II.

Comment by sgbeal 14 hours 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.)

Comment by lpcvoid 14 hours 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.ht...

Comment by throwway120385 14 hours 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.

Comment by NortySpock 13 hours ago

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.

Comment by mrguyorama 12 hours 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.

Comment by Sweepi 14 hours 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...

Maybe something happened, like... a war.

Comment by pjc50 14 hours ago

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).

Comment by sgbeal 14 hours 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).

Comment by Sweepi 14 hours 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/

Comment by PurpleRamen 14 hours 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.

Comment by distances 14 hours 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.

Comment by wongarsu 14 hours ago

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

Comment by sgbeal 14 hours 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.

Comment by nixass 14 hours 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

Comment by sgbeal 14 hours 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.

Comment by thelastgallon 7 hours 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.

Comment by Rebelgecko 10 hours ago

How much is your rent?

Comment by lpcvoid 14 hours 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.

Comment by toraway 11 hours 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.

Comment by Rebelgecko 10 hours 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)

Comment by officeplant 9 hours 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.

Comment by wongarsu 10 hours 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

Comment by Suckseh 14 hours ago

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Comment by heythere22 14 hours 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/ or https://www.verivox.de/strom/strompreisentwicklung/

If you are paying a lot more, consider changing the provider.

Comment by sheikhnbake 14 hours 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.

Comment by thelastgallon 7 hours ago

Only because profits of utilities (and nearly every company) are sacrosanct. Solar installations in US (for homes) are 6 - 10X costlier than other countries.

Comment by sailfast 13 hours ago

Not sure how much this happens in practice anymore - any smart utility is going to use your solar / house battery to cover their spikes and reduce overall costs so they don’t have to keep an old dormant coal plant on the books for the Super Bowl. At least, that’s what I’d expect from my utility.

Comment by Rebelgecko 10 hours ago

I think it's mostly for cases where people get 95% of the energy from solar but stay connected to the grid. The fixed costs of a house's connection to the grid are roughly constant, but historically utilities amortized it in their energy prices. We saw something similar in my area during the California droughts when people were "too good" at conserving water, but I guess a lot of the infra costs don't scale linearly with usage

Comment by cucumber3732842 14 hours ago

>Less people buying power from the utilities means they increase prices on the remaining customers.

Demand on the grid is going up.

What's driving up the cost is that all those rebates and 0% loans for solar, heat pumps, etc, etc, tax advantages for qualifying installers, etc, etc, etc, all that stuff is paid for by loading it into the transmission and distribution charges, the "cost of the wires and pipes" on your bill.

Comment by sheikhnbake 14 hours ago

And that's all before all these new data centers start piling onto the grid.

Comment by sgbeal 14 hours 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.

Comment by wat10000 14 hours 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.

Comment by thelastgallon 7 hours 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.

Comment by Suckseh 14 hours ago

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