261–270 of 397 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Germany is at about 30 cents/kWh.
I think he talks about the market price and not the end user price with taxes infrastructure etc.
It seems you can make a nice deal when you are an electricity intermediary in Germany?
Here in a central european country, end-user price for Russian natural gas is about 4 eurocents/kWh. Electricity is 12 cents/kWh, in Germany even more iirc. I have no idea about wholesale spot prices, but I don't see any incentive to switch to electricity as the price isn't going below 4 cents so often.
That’s crazy. I use Griddy in Texas and my price has been generally below $0.02c/kWh the past two months.
I'm guessing it really can't mean 0.02 cents.
See also: Verizon Math :-)
I feel this article is missing the forest for the trees: > German electricity consumers paid 80 million euros in tariffs to get 8 million euros worth of wind power to the market. > There is simply no point to make any market-driven investments in Germany; the tariffs are simply too large compared to the market value of electricity. > (...) > This might not be a problem if “getting more renewables” is the end-goal one…
In the first half of last year a total of 35 new wind turbines were added across Germany[0], the lowest rate for 19 years.
If German government policies are supposed to encourage the creation of new renewable energy production then they don't appear to be working particularly well.
[0] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/windenergie-die-g...
Using electricity to heat buildings should be one of the last steps to take, after almost everything else using energy is renewable. Electricity is a precious form of energy, while heat is primitive. Converting in both directions is not lossless, so you want to keep the precious form. The author makes it seem like that the negative prices are constant, which is not the case. Germany also does not have 100% renewable…
I don't know why you are downvoted because this is pretty correct. Electricity is the most valuable form of energy that currently should only be used for heating in exceptional cases if no alternatives are present.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The ground ends up close to the average temperature of the local environment which in your case is a long way from -15c. Excluding of course hot springs etc, but that’s a separate and very localized solution. Further, if you’re that far south a solar hot water heater system is still cheaper to build + operate and in terms of energy costs. People dealing with permafrost both directly are stuck with lower temperatures…
Only about 35 million people in the entire world are dealing with permafrost.
My point is solar hot water heaters are generally the better solution, even if they don’t work in the very far north. But, if you’re that far north heat pumps also fail.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder why we even name storms in the first place. All it does is feed the 24 hour news monster
The article linked above explains it https://www.countryliving.com/uk/news/a28924357/met-office-s... To 'raise awareness' of weather events, as if one might not notice them otherwise. To be less cynical, people might pay more attention to weather warnings if they are named storms? Not sure how long that effect will stick if we have a named storm twice a month! I think you might not be far wrong saying it's about grab…
> On Monday 10th February 2020 something historical happened. For the first time, the market price of electricity fell below zero in Finland.(...) While this single day was a very windy one... I feel I should point out that "a very windy day" is a big understatement. February 10, 2020 was the day when storm Sabine arrived in northern Europe. In Germany, all medium and long distance trains stopped (electric trains, bt…
I don't actually have a clue about this stuff but I think wind turbines actually won't produce any power when the wind is too strong because they might break or something.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> nuclear power is green and just better than renewable and coal How do you arrive at that conclusion? Better in what regard? AFAIK nuclear power has all sorts of problems, the main one being that nobody knows what to do about the waste. Building nuclear power plants isn’t exactly carbon emission free either.
The waste is a non-problem, especially when you compare with co2 over decades. Nuclear energy emits less co2 than renewables: it requires less metals (especially if you store electricity with batteries or other means), and renewables are not baseload energies, meaning you need to burn either coal or gas when there's no sun or wind. Wind mills require a lot of metals, and installing them is complicated. Solar panels r…
Also you worded it like you don’t need mining to produce nuclear energy, it’s not complicated to handle and reactors don’t fall apart over time.
I feel this article is missing the forest for the trees: > German electricity consumers paid 80 million euros in tariffs to get 8 million euros worth of wind power to the market. > There is simply no point to make any market-driven investments in Germany; the tariffs are simply too large compared to the market value of electricity. > (...) > This might not be a problem if “getting more renewables” is the end-goal one…
The point the article is making is that because of the way the renewable industry is being funded (from taxes on electricity consumption), consumers are opting to continue burning fossil fuels rather then use electricity.
This means that the supply of electricity is greater than demand for it, and prices go below zero.
This has two knock-on effects:
1. Investment in electricity production is guided by government policy goals and support, rather than actual demand. The only source of revenue is government redistribution of energy taxes, and that can change quickly depending on government policy. This is not sustainable, there is no incentive here to produce efficient, long-lasting energy production infrastructure. There is only an incentive to maximise government subsidy payouts in the short term.
2. Germany is producing more energy than it needs, and producing energy (from any source) has a negative environmental impact. These policies that were intended to preserve the environment and reduce fossil fuel use are actually causing more environmental damage and preserving fossil fuel use.
Of course, this only considers domestic consumption, and specifically heating. It may be that the policies do better in other areas.