Live data from Hacker News

Hetzner Price Adjustment

docs.hetzner.com

51–60 of 312 posts

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#51

Germany € 0.29/kWh € 0.45/kWh Finland € 0.12/kWh € 0.22/kWh Damn, why is electricity in Germany over twice as expensive as in Finland? I doubt Germans have twice the purchasing power as Finns.

The instantaneous market price that everyone pays is the marginal cost of the most expensive power source currently online. For nearly every country worldwide, that is gas turbines most of the time. Even if 90% of power generation is coming from solar, it's the 10% gas that sets the price (since the marginal cost of installed solar is near zero). Gas prices in Europe vary by region, but are pretty much determined by…

Not really. That’s the theoretical microeconomics approach if all kWh were “rebid” instantaneously. In fact, wholesale distributors can dampen the cost by diversifying in time (with contracts), location (by distribution) and cost (different plants).

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#52
post #48
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany shut down all their nuclear plants about 10 years ago, opting to rely on natural gas from Russia. Finland invested in nuclear and is bringing their latest plant online this fall. It doesn't take a genius to see which one would be hit harder by sanctions on Russian gas.

> Finland invested in nuclear and is bringing their latest plant online this fall. How exactly has a not yet operating reactor that is vastly over budget and time any influence on the current price though?

1. The Hetzner article is about future prices

2. Supply and demand

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#53
post #48
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany shut down all their nuclear plants about 10 years ago, opting to rely on natural gas from Russia. Finland invested in nuclear and is bringing their latest plant online this fall. It doesn't take a genius to see which one would be hit harder by sanctions on Russian gas.

> Finland invested in nuclear and is bringing their latest plant online this fall. How exactly has a not yet operating reactor that is vastly over budget and time any influence on the current price though?

It effects the futures which effects any fixed price contract they might want to try and negotiate. Going for spot price is very risky at the moment with what winter is looking like to be.

Also there are the 4 existing reactors that are running just fine at the moment. (at this moment production is over 25% nuclear)

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#54
post #7

Interesting that the colo electricity cost goes up that much, that’s a lot more expensive than what I will pay as a normal consumer, I’d have thought they’d get better discounts.

There's a more than probable markup for redundancy and management. Anyway, I believe industrial power billing is quite a trip (at least in Spain), and probably have a miriad of different prices depending on the hour of the day, and different guarantees of delivery compared to a regular user.

In many places if you as a business are willing to take intermittent power cuts (with varying warning times) you can get significant discounts.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#55
post #29

Germany € 0.29/kWh € 0.45/kWh Finland € 0.12/kWh € 0.22/kWh Damn, why is electricity in Germany over twice as expensive as in Finland? I doubt Germans have twice the purchasing power as Finns.

Germany shut down all their nuclear plants about 10 years ago, opting to rely on natural gas from Russia. Finland invested in nuclear and is bringing their latest plant online this fall. It doesn't take a genius to see which one would be hit harder by sanctions on Russian gas.

Not that I know of. We still have 3 nuclear stations in production. One of them is Isar 2 next to Munich. They will stay in operation until the end of this year.

That said, there are debates right now to prolong their operation until another few years. But that has other constraints.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#56
post #8
post #4

While the pricing is interesting, I think the fact it is driven by the input costs of electricity is even more telling. The fact that electricity costs is the dominating (edit, correction: marginal ) cost of cloud computing basically means that: 1) We're up against physical barriers to lowering the cost (and ecological impact) of our clouds. 2) Optimizing for less compute will pay multi-fold dividends over the next f…

To be fair, Hetzner is notorious for pushing down prices for everything as far down as they can by any means necessary. So this most likely makes their price point more sensitive than many other providers to any cost increase. Here is a great walk-through of one of their data centres [1] and you will see how streamlined everything is down to the hardware components. Nearly nothing goes to waste. [1]: https://yewtu.be…

For sure, and I agree, but that's underscoring my point.

The marginal cost of cloud computing isn't capex, it's opex. And of that opex, it's mostly electricity. We aren't paying for the hardware so much as we're paying for the cost of keeping it turned on and cool.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#57
post #44
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gas and oil use for electricity is very low. Electricity is over 85% renewable and nuclear with most of the rest coming as industrial or district heating by products District heating is quite often coal or oil for now but quickly changing to non carbon forms. Here is a real time view of the electricity market in Finland https://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market/power-system/ Germany on the other hand bet heavily i…

Germany already had the highest electricity prices in the world even when gas was cheap. Green energy has become an ersatz-religion here.

Green energy is in the costs of 8 cents/Wh. Coal is more expansive as gas always was. Only nuclear is calculated with 2 cents/Wh ignoring the costs of the nuclear waste as this paid for by taxes in addition.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#58
post #4

While the pricing is interesting, I think the fact it is driven by the input costs of electricity is even more telling. The fact that electricity costs is the dominating (edit, correction: marginal ) cost of cloud computing basically means that: 1) We're up against physical barriers to lowering the cost (and ecological impact) of our clouds. 2) Optimizing for less compute will pay multi-fold dividends over the next f…

Or people will separate out heavy tasks that aren’t time critical to run them when power is abundant (when there’s wind or sun) and not when it’s scarce.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#59
post #23

Germany € 0.29/kWh € 0.45/kWh Finland € 0.12/kWh € 0.22/kWh Damn, why is electricity in Germany over twice as expensive as in Finland? I doubt Germans have twice the purchasing power as Finns.

Gas and oil use for electricity is very low. Electricity is over 85% renewable and nuclear with most of the rest coming as industrial or district heating by products District heating is quite often coal or oil for now but quickly changing to non carbon forms. Here is a real time view of the electricity market in Finland https://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market/power-system/ Germany on the other hand bet heavily i…

The problem is called Merit-Price-Fixation and is the method used all over Europe to "define" the costs for energy. It is also called Windfall earnings.

I heard that in Austria it is under discussion that this method is not well suited for price fixation. I also heard the first tones here in Germany.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#60
post #4

While the pricing is interesting, I think the fact it is driven by the input costs of electricity is even more telling. The fact that electricity costs is the dominating (edit, correction: marginal ) cost of cloud computing basically means that: 1) We're up against physical barriers to lowering the cost (and ecological impact) of our clouds. 2) Optimizing for less compute will pay multi-fold dividends over the next f…

ARM on desktop => ARM for development => ARM on servers => ARM on cloud.

Apple's multi-billion contracts with AWS are ending this or next year, Apple has their own power efficient systems and will compete with AWS, as they have to maintain/increase growth.

Post reply on HN