Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a reason used servers are so cheap on ebay: if you run them 24/7 their electricity cost makes them unattractive compared to new hardware (often within a year).
Highly disagree. Said in another comment, my server averages around 100-200W. It's equivalent to running a gaming PC. The reason there's a lot of cheap servers on eBay is that their support contracts expired and are absolutely ridiculously expensive to maintain for a big company. It's easier to get a new server (which will likely have performance and efficiency upgrades as well) than to continue maintaining a server…
Hetzner Price Adjustment
191–200 of 312 posts
Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
The primary reason is: Winter is coming... But there is more: - They wanted to be super green so lets go with sun and wind - But, hey sun and wind are not reliable (not talking about some problems that the grid is not very good prepared to handle the peaks), especially not in winter - Let's use gas to cover that, Russia is so friendly country, and its all about business, what kind of maniac would stop natural gas, wh…
> They wanted to be super green so lets go with sun and wind This is a complete mischaracterization of why Germany invested so much into renewables. Like... 20 years ago? Germany saw the writing on the wall when it comes to how they were getting their energy which at the time was mostly coming from coal. They didn't want to go Nuclear for whatever reason so that left renewables and natural gas which wasn't preferred…
Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Pretty sure that's included.
One of the most used metrics is the so called Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE). The LCOE includes investment, maintenance and operation, fuel and "carbon" costs, as well as waste costs. However, the waste costs are only calculated for the years of operation, so it's not really a great number to look at in terms of actual total cost.
Regardless, the LCOE the German federal government uses is 4-8 cents/kWh for onshore wind, 2-6 for photovoltaic, 14-19 for nuclear.
The (former) nuclear plant operators in Germany are required to pay into a fund that is meant to be used for covering the costs of decommissioning and disposal of the plants, as well as long term storage (except not everything is covered[0]). This is not included in the LCOE. Anyway, operators are required to pay a total of 47 billion EUR into that fund[1].
The old East German plants that got shut down right after the German reunification and are in the process of slowly being deconstructed and disposed of[2] are now estimated to cost 3-7 billion EUR a piece for full disposal (but not storage). If that's any indication, even when considering "lessons learned" will lower costs for future decommissioning and deconstruction, those 47 billion EUR is very unlikely to cover the eventual costs of deconstructing those 20-odd decommissioned German nuclear facilities and store spent fuel and contaminated materials for the first few decades. Some economists from the DIW (the private German Institute of Economic Research, not exactly tree huggers) calculated the eventual cost until 2100 will be closer to 169 billion EUR in 2019s money.
There are some eco lobbying organizations - obviously not without their own bias - that make claims such as "the true cost of nuclear is 42.2 cents/kWh while wind is 8.1 cents/kWH"[3]. I have previously looked through their numbers and argument in more detail, and it sounded mostly very sound to me, however I am a layperson.
Regardless, the fact is: we do not actually know yet the total cost of nuclear power.
[0] E.g. German tax payers have spent 1.5 billion EUR just on exploring potential long term storage sites so far. Just exploring.
[1] This is still litigated a bit, as the German legislature only really had the great idea to make a law about that in 2016. That's another reason nobody historically included it or now includes it in the LCOE.
[2] E.g. the old Greifswald plant. When it operated, it employed 10,000 people. Now 32 years after it officially ceased operation in 1990, it still employs around 1,000 people. Full deconstruction and disposal is now expected to happen by 2028 and will eventually have accumulated costs of a total of 6.5 billion EUR according to the company in charge of the disposal. Not including long term storage costs. Since the operator of those things used to the East Germany, it's now the Federal Republic of Germany's full responsibility to pay for that.
[3] https://www.bund-sh.de/energie/atomkraft/hintergrund/die-wah...
Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment
#194High electricity price, and high energy cost in general, is probably the biggest regressive tax that humans face.
Not just in direct energy and gas consumption, but in the baseline increases that flow through to all the essential goods that households purchase.
New energy generation technologies must not only be cleaner, but also more efficient. It is so crucially important to raising standards of living to ensure a reliable supply of cheap energy.
Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Why "notorious" though? Isn't this a good thing for them and for customers as well? I would expect "famous", since this seems lika a feat/achievement to me.
Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's possible to pay extra for only renewable electricity.
No you can't (unless you do it yourself but the price is extremely high if you want uninterrupted power). What happens is: your provider purchase "green energy certificates" which means that some green electricity was generated on a sunny and/or windy day. When it's night and the wind don't blow, you use coal and gas as everyone else. No storage is cheap enough to store solar and wind energy on day-to-day scale, let…
Since this thread is about Germany, and not everyone on HN reads threads in scope, it's worth pointing out that this is not universal.
In most of Texas, for example, the wind blows most fiercely — and regularly — at night. Solar power contributes to the grid during the day, and wind power picks up that generation loss when the sun goes down. I once saw a graph of it from a utility regulator published in a newspaper.
Not every geography is so lucky in this manner. But because this is the global internet, it's important to point out that solar and wind aren't exclusively daytime sources on most of the planet.
What Germany needs is a source of wind that works at night. I've read that Spain imports energy from North Africa. Perhaps a more robust link in that direction is the solution.
Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's possible to pay extra for only renewable electricity.
No you can't (unless you do it yourself but the price is extremely high if you want uninterrupted power). What happens is: your provider purchase "green energy certificates" which means that some green electricity was generated on a sunny and/or windy day. When it's night and the wind don't blow, you use coal and gas as everyone else. No storage is cheap enough to store solar and wind energy on day-to-day scale, let…
The actual power from your outlet is going to be the same no matter which company you buy from, but it's still buying "green power" in a more meaningful way than a zero-sum relabeling.
Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's possible to pay extra for only renewable electricity.
I'm curious what that actually accomplishes in non marketing terms. That just means someone else is getting less renewable electricity, right?
Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don’t get 100% renewable in Germany. The mix is 50% renewables, the rest is nuclear, coal and natural gas. With nuclear being phased out for ideological reasons and natural gas being scarse due to the war in Ukraine, Germany will soon burn more coal than ever. New electricity contracts already go as high as 70 Cents/kWh thanks to the misguided energy policy in Germany.
The rush out of nuclear fission power still shocks me. It's a miracle fuel. It really is wonderful. It solves climate change almost by itself, or it would have, had Chernobyl and Fukushima not been reported so irresponsibly.
Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's possible to pay extra for only renewable electricity.
I'm curious what that actually accomplishes in non marketing terms. That just means someone else is getting less renewable electricity, right?
Of course, even a 100% renewable supplier needs to buy from the market to smooth out peaks in energy consumption for their customer base.
(disclaimer: i work for such a renewable energy supplier)