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
[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...
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.
(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.)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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...
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.
Price graph 2015 - 2025: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Maybe something happened, like... a war.
If you are paying a lot more, consider changing the provider.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(she worked and lobbied for the gas sector before joining the current government)
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.
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.
toomuchtodo•2h ago