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This is the framing chosen by state propagandists.
Remember when it was leaders from communist countries believing the US supermarkets were fake?
I think it would be more productive to dissect the particular nuances of this issue, as other comments have
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It seems ridiculous to pay such high prices and have high coal emissions. Someone's stealing something.
It is just that renewable forces you to have redundant power generation, massive grid infrastructure, and because they started to early had to pay a massive premium without having the luxury of having developed domestics champions for solar due to the irregular incentives and smaller market than china.
The renewable fraction in both cases is just over 30%, but the UK has managed to phase out coal in favour of lower-carbon gas. UK prices average around €0.14 per kWh. Maybe the difference is made up by wind, but there Germany has a huge domestic champion: Siemens.
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You are correct that if you use your energy before it gets on the grid you are fine. But that is quite hard for most people to accomplish, most people are not at home during daytime when the panels generate most. The time my washing machine actually consumes energy warming up the water is relatively short. The largest part of the power consumption of my home owners association is spent on lighting, the other part on…
Silicon Valley is coincidentally a place where home-time and solar-peak kind of coincide. My brother's solar panels peak in the late afternoon all summer, when he's programmed the air conditioning to come on.
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Charging an EV sounds like the best way of taking advantage of that.
Too bad the grid is too dumb to let end-users actually get these prices. And the distribution and transmission prices are usually fixed. But I think they should float with supply and demand too: the drivers of upgrades and failures are the peak-time users of capacity. That’s what we do with data, don’t know why we don’t do it with electrons.
https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2017/02/contr...
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Germany already has extremely high energy prices (~0,29€/kwh) of which nearly 0,07€ is just for renewable energy subsidies. More investments will not increase jobs, because China produces solar panels at way lower costs. While I agree that coal needs to be phased out, it's not so much about the 20k jobs but more so about base-load. You either need massive storage (which comes at massive cost) or some other form, i.e.…
It seems ridiculous to pay such high prices and have high coal emissions. Someone's stealing something.
They dominate the market, have Germany split up amongst them and are crying and threatening with job losses at the slightest sign of change.
Interesting fact (taken from the linked Wiki article): Those big four had less than 10% market share in renewables in 2013. Not sure about now, but numbers might not look much better.
They are the ones that operate coal and nuclear power plants and are not interested in any change whatsoever.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_gro%C3%9Fen_Vier_(Energiev...
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Installing solar panels has become more and more uninteresting, at least in Germany. In former times there were generous subsidies for installing solar panels: You got, I think, a fixed amount per kWh that you installed on your roof and you also got a better price for the electricity that you put back into the grid. In Germany it's called "Einspeisevergütung" if I remember correctly. This program was limited though,…
Germany doesn't have a high enough renewable share for storage to make sense. The fundamental problem with Germany is that it doesn't deploy enough renewables. It's barely hitting 75% renewables on record days. Where exactly is all that excess energy supposed to come from?
Building renewable energy sources doesn't pay off at the moment, so nobody is interested in doing so. If that gets fixed, the amount of renewable energy sources will rise.
I'm looking at the same problem with my parents' house at the moment. Just putting some panels on the roof won't help with anything. You need a concept for the whole house and making that is just lots of work. If people could just spend X Euro and be sure to have the money back in 5 years because they can sell the electricity or whatever, lots of people would be in, I'm sure.
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I don't know specifically about Caliornia, but in several places that uses to offer "pay back" plans for injecting power into the grid, the problem was that solar power generates power when it is not in the highest demand and varies too much. I still think there are some adaptations that could be done to mitigate that problem, but the grid seems simply not correctly set up to efficiently use the energy produced by mi…
I guess this is where giant Tesla powerwalls or flow batteries come into the picture. A way to efficiently store the energy for when its needed.
Yes, it will be complicated, but these providers also think we all care about itemization of generation, transmission, distribution, power factor, grid line loss and debt retirement charges. I don’t, all I care about is fixed cost and variable cost.
Maybe let people overpay through some hedging contract if they prefer to pay an average price.
For me, I want my dryer, A/C, water heater, etc. to throttle up and down based on price to lower my bill overall without reducing quality of life.
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It seems ridiculous to pay such high prices and have high coal emissions. Someone's stealing something.
This is just politics from the four big energy companies [1]: E.ON, RWE, EnBW and Vattenfall They dominate the market, have Germany split up amongst them and are crying and threatening with job losses at the slightest sign of change. Interesting fact (taken from the linked Wiki article): Those big four had less than 10% market share in renewables in 2013. Not sure about now, but numbers might not look much better. Th…
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Too bad the grid is too dumb to let end-users actually get these prices. And the distribution and transmission prices are usually fixed. But I think they should float with supply and demand too: the drivers of upgrades and failures are the peak-time users of capacity. That’s what we do with data, don’t know why we don’t do it with electrons.
Some EV manufacturers are ahead of the game. https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2017/02/contr...
Why yes, my intelligent electricity agent would like my dryer to book 2 kWh at 4AM-5AM with a 4cent penalty to me if you cancel.
Most of my loads are thermal, and I have lots of thermal banking available. If electricity prices are negative, run my A/C full tilt.
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Some EV manufacturers are ahead of the game. https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2017/02/contr...
My fear is some grid will sign an exclusive deal with XYZ company when they should really just expose the prices and markets to end-users. Why yes, my intelligent electricity agent would like my dryer to book 2 kWh at 4AM-5AM with a 4cent penalty to me if you cancel. Most of my loads are thermal, and I have lots of thermal banking available. If electricity prices are negative, run my A/C full tilt.
