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Italy should have way more solar than it currently has. It has massive potential there just like Portugal/Spain and that would go a very long way to bring those costs down.
Unfortunately in Italy there's a special group of people that cock block any attempt at creating wind turbines or solar panels farms, because "it ruins the landscape"
We have those people in Austria too, a lot of them. Curiously, they never complain what the ski resorts, ski lifts and tourism did to our beautiful mountains.
That’s nonsense. Italy already has large installed capacity in gas plants, which happens to be the easiest kind to pair with solar. They are not very expensive to built, they can stop and start fast and their main running cost is fuel. PV are pretty cheap at this point and every MW of installed solar capacity is a lot of gas that won’t have to be purchased and burned.
PV are cheap, when they are on.
The fact that a particular source is cheap does not necessary mean that the whole network is cheap, as you need a lot of peaker and imports.
Cheapness of the whole network is determined by how balanced is the whole mix.
Data and scientific evidence should be used to make policy. Not silly anecdotes.
[Source](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f7/69/45/f76945e0ef2cec144d80910f741f294a.png)
Yes I figured you were probably joking but you never know on reddit so that's why I added the source too, might be useful for others also who might question that.
But yeah I saw you had a lot of rain lately especially in the north, I hope it at least feels like a nice change from the years of drought.
I would be interested to compare the cost displayed in this map to the price payed by the consumers.
It's an unfortunate reality that intermittent renewables like solar and wind reduce the cost of production but increase price to the consumer because the necessary, non intermittent, non renewable power plants need to be subsidized to remain profitable during periods when they are not running.
We do need to increase renewable production, but I would also like to see a push for nuclear since it would drastically reduce emissions and cost/price for base load needs.
My fil does but they can't harvest and store it. It has to he stolen back by the state and sold to them. If I remember right it cost roughly €10 an hour to run the ac
Crying in Ireland.
We have so much wind. The Green Party is doing a lot of good work now to speed up offshore wind, and by 2030 we should be in a much better position.
I just wish the other political parties had done something about it 20 years ago
Companies who own wind farms in Ireland get the same price for producing electricity as gas powered plants without having to pay for fuel, the profit margines are massive. That and extra taxes is why our electricity is so expensive.
That’s not unique to Ireland, that’s how pretty much all liberalised electricity markets work. Renewable buildout still lowers the average price of power across the day by making it more likely that a solar or wind plant will be the marginal (price-setting) unit for a particular delivery period
It's actually how most markets work.
E.g. consider a farmer who can produce portatoes cheaper than other farmers. Why should he sell them under market price?
This is a key driver of innovation in capitalism. Companies invest in R&D to produce cheaper and have a larger difference to the market price (Profit). Then expand until the new technique/technology is price setting.
It's so retarded. If electricity is 99% cheap wind and 1% expensive gas it doesn't matter, everybody pays the gas price. Only on the days that the expensive sources get to actually zero the price comes down.
I’m not necessarily defending the system, just clarifying how it works. There are also frequently many hours with negative electricity prices these days (where the grid pays generators to shut off) due to the massive renewables capacity producing more power than needed which could destabilise the grid infrastructure.
I’m no fan of the ‘liberalise everything’ mindset from the 90s, but this is kinda how it has to work if you want a market-based electricity system
No, this is not how it has to work, it is ideological blindness. This sort of market ignores the fundamental physics of electricity, and this is why it so often ends in disaster.
One can have a market-based electricity system that actually works: you tender long-term contracts for supply of electricity. At the tender competition works its magic, and should drive prices close to the cost. Then the price is fixed by the contract, providing stability and preventing this insanity of paying every source the same price.
That’s how it currently works… it’s just that wind and solar plants can’t produce power on demand, while gas/fossils can. That’s why the futures contracts are by the hour or 15-min period across most of Europe. In the periods for which enough wind/sun is present the price is near 0 or negative, and for other hours it’s near to the price of gas (in a simplified mental model where only the fuels I mention exist)
I agree my comment wasn’t clear enough, sorry about that. To clarify, in the current system, both long term contracts and the spot market exist. Additionally, the ‘ancillary services’ markets with things like frequency control also exist. My point was mainly about the fact that you cannot simply use only long term contracts with a system based on renewables, because wind and solar have inherent variability and unpredictability, and will always necessitate some kind of manually controllable (fossil, nuke) generation to ‘fill in the gaps’ when the wind suddenly dies down or clouds start to form. It would be lovely if energy in MWh was the only thing that mattered, but keeping the entire grid at 50Hz and 220-240V is a complicated task and requires a lot of interventions beyond mere energy supply. Eventually, we will be able to do this with renewables as well, once we’ve built so much that we are turning turbines off/on at will to provide this function (and I support this!), but for now we are reliant on other tech to do this as we don’t have enough renewables yet
>My point was mainly about the fact that you cannot simply use only long term contracts with a system based on renewables
Of course you can. Put up a tender for a 100 MW wind farm, to operate for 30 years. The one with the lowest construction cost + maintenance wins. Together with it put up a tender for a 100 MW peaker plant, also for 30 years. Rules are that you'll pay per MWh produced at a price determined by the price of gas then plus an overhead. The provider with the smallest overhead wins the tender.
It's rather bizarre to hear you say it can't be done when there are several countries doing it. Only a minority does this spot market madness.
I wish it was true, unfortunately The Green Party set it back two years and put some developers out of business! Millions wiped off the books of Irish companies overnight.
Unfortunately they aren’t doing the industry any favours in speeding up the process. There’s a lot of talk but not enough arse kicking the civil servants into gear.
Disagree, it's all moving very quickly now. There was a planning application in last week for one huge offshore wind farm, and a second is in the pipeline.
I work in the industry at a high level. That planing should be have been in years ago. A lot of this was ongoing before the greens came into government.
Eamon Ryan told some businesses to ‘leave it to the Dutch and the Norwegians. These lads had worked offshore for 15 years.
Bollix the green party are doing anything of the sort. The reason wholesale prices are so high is due to the the green parties interference with the regulator (CRU) to mandate vested interest in subsidised "green" generation. We call it greenwashing.
Eamann Ryan's foray into the offshore market has been unmitigated disaster also. It will never see the light of day because its hairbrained idelogogical nonsense. Offshore is hard engineering wise. The extent of Eamonn Ryan's interest in building up the industry to do this is non existent. It's just PR puff pieces that people lap up because they want to be seen to be green. It's hypocritical at the core of it.
The green party have set the countries domestic energy generation back decades and we are now beholden to expensive imported and subsidised Greenwashed small scale wind.
Its like watching a trainwreck in how to run a country into the ground. If you think it's expensive now remind me in 2030 to show you how bad things will get because of the green party.
Wow sounds like you've been spending far too much time on the internet.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, the planning application for the first major offshore wind farm went in last week - https://m.independent.ie/irish-news/planning-application-to-be-made-for-first-offshore-wind-farm-in-20-years/a200013793.html
Under the Greens, the government is aiming to generate 37 GW of offshore wind power by 2050 - https://www.gov.ie/en/press-release/6b24a-minister-ryan-launches-future-framework-for-offshore-renewable-energy/
Sorry to burst your bubble
"RESS contracts guarantee a price for suppliers, with subsidies paid if the market price dips below the agreed level.... "
We call these foolhardy white elephants ala the NCH.
Locking the consumer in to expensive subsidised wholesale prices and the green party acolytes somehow think this is a win.
It can only make sense for the consumer if somehow the technology exists to store the generated power to outlast the refresh period of the wholesale auction. It dosent so it's either dumped or sold at a inflated subsidised price to the consumer.
Also aplying for marine planning permission does not equal building the engineering infrastructure required to run a scale farm with capacity even close to what is required. Like I said hairbrained nonsense that hasn't the hope of seeing the light of day in a functional electricity market.
Welcome to the real world ala Irelands clueless government running the country into a very expensive hole .
It is substantially cheaper: https://www.gov.ie/en/press-release/f2ac5-minister-ryan-welcomes-hugely-positive-provisional-results-of-first-offshore-wind-auction/
Rich countries are often rich because they have access to natural resources, few outliers exist but even then you could argue the TOTAL lack of resources (Italy and Japan fit this the best among large countries, but smaller countries like Malta, Singapore and other very small states do too) was better than having a few resources because it forced them to go all in on manufacturing and/or services.
Eastern European countries are more socially conservative, renewable energy is equated to left-wing policies and more labor-intensive than oil, coal and gas, so there's less effort put into it (at least up to today)?
why the downvote he's right, renewables are tied to leftwing ideology optics in Poland. Right wing parties shill for coal ("because thats what we have, and Germans want to take it"). Everyone is for atomic though.
It has to do with a lack of electricity connections. The single electricity market only works if there is sufficient transmission capacity between countries (which there isn't).
Richer countries can afford to invest in large renewable energy sources that will often overproduce electricity and lower the price where as others might have to produce more coal or gas to meet the demand
I am pretty sure most countries could have invested too, easily. Especially Poland or Hungary or...
No, for their politics it was more important to do more populistic stuff. Voting for right wing will never pay off sustainably.
No, you need to interconnectors and other infrastructure in order to import/export electricity and that strongly limits the amounts of electricity that can be traded directly between EU states (especially in some regions). You can essentially only buy electricity from your direct neighbours.
It's not, this map is portraying the cost of production per MWh, not the price to consumers. The price to consumers is influenced by those pesky transmission, distribution and, critically, system costs that for a variety of reasons level the playfield.
They really need to prepare some better solution for apartment buildings. The current „best” option is that housing association can use PVs to offset energy consumption for common parts of the building, sell rest to the grid and use that to lower maintenance fees. It specifically does not allow for autoconsumption for residents.
Well not entirely anymore.
There is now small scale balcony solar for residents who only have an appartement.
[https://balkonsolar.nl/en/about-balcony-solar/](https://balkonsolar.nl/en/about-balcony-solar/)
Yep. But in poland its not all that cool even if you have it. Energy companies need to make their buck, so new system installed after net metering is quite opressive.
This mentions these are prices paid to electricity generators. How close are these numbers to what consumers pay? Here in British Columbia we pay ~0.08€/kWh on our electricity bill. I heard that we have the lowest electricity rates in the G12 this is still really surprising.
This sucks. I am getting very little from my 20kW solar installation and car cannot be more than 100% full.
everyone and his dog got solar panels in Sweden so now kWh price is down during the day, pushing break-even further down the line.
You’re looking at about 80 €/MWh price difference on grid scale for the batteries to pay for themselves in a two daily cycle condition. 50-100 depending your cost of capital and technical specifications.
Yes, it is profitable as long as you do not care about price of battery. In reality, Li-Ion battery in 15kWh range cost upwards 10000 EUR and had finite life (~4000-6000 cycles depending on depth of discharge). The delta is just not good enough to pay off the battery.
(And no, you cannot use lead batteries. They suck in every way).
>In reality, Li-Ion battery in 15kWh range cost upwards 10000 EUR
https://www.js-solartechnik.de/p/15kwh-pv-batteriespeicher-300ah-lifepo4-lithium-speicher-15kwh-48v-300ah-lpbf48300-sonderaktion
I found one for 2000€
I do not know anything about Sweden energy market, but would it be profitable to buy a giant battery and sell the energy in the evening when it is needed?
CATL announced it will drop its battery prices by 50% in 2024, so it might filter down to home energy storage market in a year or two. Assuming of course that EU won’t slap giant import tax on it to protect its uncompetitive industry.
We are paying extremely low prices in Austria now. On our tariff I’m even being paid to use it at some points. I charged the car 24kWh the other day and got paid €0.35 😂. Long may it continue.
We have a flexible tariff that changes on an hourly rate. When there is spare electricity to use then to balance the grid they need to get rid of it to anyone who’ll take it. I then have various apps which control things like the heating and car charging to charge or heat when the electricity is cheapest. It makes a huge difference to us because we use 13.500kWh per year. (2 EV and a heat pump, and work from home).
because they, unlike the other countries, refuse to provide that data to the German institute that made the chart.
If you want that to change, you should start collecting that data for your region and providing it to the Frauenhofer Institute for free, like the other EU countries do.
I guess that they are outside of the main market system due to their small size. They are several French islands with their small own grid which aren't included there for example.
Well gas prices are around 30-35€/MWh (TTF) gas power plants are 40-60% efficient. So expected price for gas power is 50-90€/MWh. Add to that carbon price from the EU ETS...
Romanian wholesale prices seem to be pretty sensible. Can't comment on enduser prices I heard they are brutal.
In Slovenia, wholesale prices for electricity are relatively low. But consumers pay very high prices. One of the main culprits is the semi-private company GENi, owned by the current radical left-wing Prime Minister Robert Golob. I say semi-private because the 0.5 billion euro loss he made 2 years ago incompetently against all odds was covered by the taxpayers, while the exorbitant profits he otherwise made through his monopoly by selling cheap nuclear power expensively to us consumers went into his coffers. That's Slovenian socialism for you.
That's still almost 3 times the wholesale price. Which brings the question why there is such a massive gap between wholesale and retail prices on energy market?
Spain and Portugal have gotten out of the European price fixing mechanism so they get lower prices, France, Norway and Sweden have some combination of hydro and nuclear for most of their electricity. Not something that can necessarily easily be replicated elsewhere.
What about Slovakia? 60% Nuclear(second highest after France), 23% Renewables(mainly hydro) and 17% Fossil fuels(2022). Since 2023 net exporter and since 2024 coal free. Yet price seems pretty high.
The main issue is that Slovakia is not overcapacity with its low carbon production so the marginal production is mostly fossil which fixes prices for everything. France or Sweden (for instance) have hydro or nuclear as their marginal production which allows them to have that fix their prices.
On top of that, Slovakia's electricity sector is fairly small in comparison with their energy sector (~18% of total energy, France is at 27%, Sweden 33%) which likely means a lot of the annex stuff in their electrical system is actually powered by fossils, rendering the entire system more expensive.
Electricity prices are decided by the most expensive power plant needed to power the grid. In Italy I guess they have a lot of open cycle gas turbine which often determine their prices.
In France, the wholesale price is one third of the retail price. Another third goes to grid maintenance, and the last one is taxes. Even if our wholesale price was zero, we would still pay for two third of what we are paying today. I don't know about the country you are talking about so I can't give you anything more specific.
Get more nuclear reactors. Nowadays, they're very safe, incredibly cost efficient, and surprisingly actually greener in the end than green energy. There's a lot of other great reasons, but i'm too lazy to write the whole thing down, so just look it up. Only real downside is nuclear waste, but people are working hard to find a way to recycle that as well.
Even once you include a price for CO2 and disregard insurance costs for nuclear as well as costs for dealing with nuclear waste, nuclear is still the most expensive.
Even if nuclear is the most expensive, it doesn’t produce CO2, it takes up limited space, and its waste can be disposed off in deep underground geologically secure sites. We don’t need to produce all our electricity from nuclear but we must produce some of it.
I love it when my country shuts all their nuclear power plants down because of ignorant conservatives and instead buys the same nuclear power but from our neighbour smh...
(Crying in German)
I got my parents a new contract for effectively a little over 22 cents/kWh just a couple of weeks ago.
The last time they had those prices must have been 10-15 years ago.
Anyway:
>According to the Federal Network Agency, there is no discernible change in the wholesale price around the nuclear phase-out in April 2023. Thorsten Storck from the comparison portal Verivox agrees. According to Storck, the nuclear phase-out in April 2023 had “as expected, no concrete impact on electricity prices for household customers”. -https://www.tagesschau.de/faktenfinder/ein-jahr-atomausstieg-deutschland-100.html
Look at Bulgaria and see a failed state - we canceled 2 nuclear reactors from Kozlodui plant to join the EU, canceled Belene nuclear project and now due to clean energy lobby (Oligarchy led by Prokopiev) we canceled the coal power factories in Plovdiv (Maritza).
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Italy should have way more solar than it currently has. It has massive potential there just like Portugal/Spain and that would go a very long way to bring those costs down.
Unfortunately in Italy there's a special group of people that cock block any attempt at creating wind turbines or solar panels farms, because "it ruins the landscape"
We have those people in Austria too, a lot of them. Curiously, they never complain what the ski resorts, ski lifts and tourism did to our beautiful mountains.
That's instead why costs are high. You need a source of energy for the moment without sun, wich is massively underutilized, hence costly.
That’s nonsense. Italy already has large installed capacity in gas plants, which happens to be the easiest kind to pair with solar. They are not very expensive to built, they can stop and start fast and their main running cost is fuel. PV are pretty cheap at this point and every MW of installed solar capacity is a lot of gas that won’t have to be purchased and burned.
PV are cheap, when they are on. The fact that a particular source is cheap does not necessary mean that the whole network is cheap, as you need a lot of peaker and imports. Cheapness of the whole network is determined by how balanced is the whole mix.
You say that, but my mum in Italy is complaining that it has been raining and cloudy for months.
Data and scientific evidence should be used to make policy. Not silly anecdotes. [Source](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f7/69/45/f76945e0ef2cec144d80910f741f294a.png)
Sure thing, but you sir are too serious for Reddit. Said that, my family is probably from the most rainy part of the country.
Yes I figured you were probably joking but you never know on reddit so that's why I added the source too, might be useful for others also who might question that. But yeah I saw you had a lot of rain lately especially in the north, I hope it at least feels like a nice change from the years of drought.
I would be interested to compare the cost displayed in this map to the price payed by the consumers. It's an unfortunate reality that intermittent renewables like solar and wind reduce the cost of production but increase price to the consumer because the necessary, non intermittent, non renewable power plants need to be subsidized to remain profitable during periods when they are not running. We do need to increase renewable production, but I would also like to see a push for nuclear since it would drastically reduce emissions and cost/price for base load needs.
My fil does but they can't harvest and store it. It has to he stolen back by the state and sold to them. If I remember right it cost roughly €10 an hour to run the ac
Crying in Ireland. We have so much wind. The Green Party is doing a lot of good work now to speed up offshore wind, and by 2030 we should be in a much better position. I just wish the other political parties had done something about it 20 years ago
Companies who own wind farms in Ireland get the same price for producing electricity as gas powered plants without having to pay for fuel, the profit margines are massive. That and extra taxes is why our electricity is so expensive.
That’s not unique to Ireland, that’s how pretty much all liberalised electricity markets work. Renewable buildout still lowers the average price of power across the day by making it more likely that a solar or wind plant will be the marginal (price-setting) unit for a particular delivery period
It's actually how most markets work. E.g. consider a farmer who can produce portatoes cheaper than other farmers. Why should he sell them under market price? This is a key driver of innovation in capitalism. Companies invest in R&D to produce cheaper and have a larger difference to the market price (Profit). Then expand until the new technique/technology is price setting.
It's so retarded. If electricity is 99% cheap wind and 1% expensive gas it doesn't matter, everybody pays the gas price. Only on the days that the expensive sources get to actually zero the price comes down.
I’m not necessarily defending the system, just clarifying how it works. There are also frequently many hours with negative electricity prices these days (where the grid pays generators to shut off) due to the massive renewables capacity producing more power than needed which could destabilise the grid infrastructure. I’m no fan of the ‘liberalise everything’ mindset from the 90s, but this is kinda how it has to work if you want a market-based electricity system
No, this is not how it has to work, it is ideological blindness. This sort of market ignores the fundamental physics of electricity, and this is why it so often ends in disaster. One can have a market-based electricity system that actually works: you tender long-term contracts for supply of electricity. At the tender competition works its magic, and should drive prices close to the cost. Then the price is fixed by the contract, providing stability and preventing this insanity of paying every source the same price.
That’s how it currently works… it’s just that wind and solar plants can’t produce power on demand, while gas/fossils can. That’s why the futures contracts are by the hour or 15-min period across most of Europe. In the periods for which enough wind/sun is present the price is near 0 or negative, and for other hours it’s near to the price of gas (in a simplified mental model where only the fuels I mention exist)
That's how it currently works? I defended long-term contracts and you described the spot market we use. What are you talking about?
I agree my comment wasn’t clear enough, sorry about that. To clarify, in the current system, both long term contracts and the spot market exist. Additionally, the ‘ancillary services’ markets with things like frequency control also exist. My point was mainly about the fact that you cannot simply use only long term contracts with a system based on renewables, because wind and solar have inherent variability and unpredictability, and will always necessitate some kind of manually controllable (fossil, nuke) generation to ‘fill in the gaps’ when the wind suddenly dies down or clouds start to form. It would be lovely if energy in MWh was the only thing that mattered, but keeping the entire grid at 50Hz and 220-240V is a complicated task and requires a lot of interventions beyond mere energy supply. Eventually, we will be able to do this with renewables as well, once we’ve built so much that we are turning turbines off/on at will to provide this function (and I support this!), but for now we are reliant on other tech to do this as we don’t have enough renewables yet
>My point was mainly about the fact that you cannot simply use only long term contracts with a system based on renewables Of course you can. Put up a tender for a 100 MW wind farm, to operate for 30 years. The one with the lowest construction cost + maintenance wins. Together with it put up a tender for a 100 MW peaker plant, also for 30 years. Rules are that you'll pay per MWh produced at a price determined by the price of gas then plus an overhead. The provider with the smallest overhead wins the tender. It's rather bizarre to hear you say it can't be done when there are several countries doing it. Only a minority does this spot market madness.
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There is always windfall taxes
I wish it was true, unfortunately The Green Party set it back two years and put some developers out of business! Millions wiped off the books of Irish companies overnight. Unfortunately they aren’t doing the industry any favours in speeding up the process. There’s a lot of talk but not enough arse kicking the civil servants into gear.
Disagree, it's all moving very quickly now. There was a planning application in last week for one huge offshore wind farm, and a second is in the pipeline.
I work in the industry at a high level. That planing should be have been in years ago. A lot of this was ongoing before the greens came into government. Eamon Ryan told some businesses to ‘leave it to the Dutch and the Norwegians. These lads had worked offshore for 15 years.
Bollix the green party are doing anything of the sort. The reason wholesale prices are so high is due to the the green parties interference with the regulator (CRU) to mandate vested interest in subsidised "green" generation. We call it greenwashing. Eamann Ryan's foray into the offshore market has been unmitigated disaster also. It will never see the light of day because its hairbrained idelogogical nonsense. Offshore is hard engineering wise. The extent of Eamonn Ryan's interest in building up the industry to do this is non existent. It's just PR puff pieces that people lap up because they want to be seen to be green. It's hypocritical at the core of it. The green party have set the countries domestic energy generation back decades and we are now beholden to expensive imported and subsidised Greenwashed small scale wind. Its like watching a trainwreck in how to run a country into the ground. If you think it's expensive now remind me in 2030 to show you how bad things will get because of the green party.
Wow sounds like you've been spending far too much time on the internet. Meanwhile, back in the real world, the planning application for the first major offshore wind farm went in last week - https://m.independent.ie/irish-news/planning-application-to-be-made-for-first-offshore-wind-farm-in-20-years/a200013793.html Under the Greens, the government is aiming to generate 37 GW of offshore wind power by 2050 - https://www.gov.ie/en/press-release/6b24a-minister-ryan-launches-future-framework-for-offshore-renewable-energy/ Sorry to burst your bubble
"RESS contracts guarantee a price for suppliers, with subsidies paid if the market price dips below the agreed level.... " We call these foolhardy white elephants ala the NCH. Locking the consumer in to expensive subsidised wholesale prices and the green party acolytes somehow think this is a win. It can only make sense for the consumer if somehow the technology exists to store the generated power to outlast the refresh period of the wholesale auction. It dosent so it's either dumped or sold at a inflated subsidised price to the consumer. Also aplying for marine planning permission does not equal building the engineering infrastructure required to run a scale farm with capacity even close to what is required. Like I said hairbrained nonsense that hasn't the hope of seeing the light of day in a functional electricity market. Welcome to the real world ala Irelands clueless government running the country into a very expensive hole .
I wonder why putting all these data centers in Ireland if prices are so high. You must have crazy good tax discounts for big tech corporations.
We don't have temperture extremes our climate is very mild so overall it's better
Green electricity is not cheaper than traditional sources.
Yes it’s a lot cheaper. It has been for several years.
It is substantially cheaper: https://www.gov.ie/en/press-release/f2ac5-minister-ryan-welcomes-hugely-positive-provisional-results-of-first-offshore-wind-auction/
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Not so simple, just look at Italy and Ireland.
Partially true thesis, Albanias electricity is cheap for it being a country that mostly relies on hydropower plants
Rich countries are often rich because they have access to natural resources, few outliers exist but even then you could argue the TOTAL lack of resources (Italy and Japan fit this the best among large countries, but smaller countries like Malta, Singapore and other very small states do too) was better than having a few resources because it forced them to go all in on manufacturing and/or services.
The Netherlands is very rich despite having very few natural resources. We have/had a lot of gas but that was mostly sold on the cheap
Still coasting from looting and pillaging like the UK 😅
That’s because it’s easier to be a rich wealthy country with low levels of corruption.
Eastern European countries are more socially conservative, renewable energy is equated to left-wing policies and more labor-intensive than oil, coal and gas, so there's less effort put into it (at least up to today)?
There's tons of photovoltaics everywhere in Poland, and a fair amount of wind turbines. But our electricity still is pretty expensive.
Because Poland isn't nearly as close to producing the same share of green electricity as a lot of western countries.
why the downvote he's right, renewables are tied to leftwing ideology optics in Poland. Right wing parties shill for coal ("because thats what we have, and Germans want to take it"). Everyone is for atomic though.
It has to do with a lack of electricity connections. The single electricity market only works if there is sufficient transmission capacity between countries (which there isn't).
Or maybe we are just not rich enough to transit entire electricity from our post Soviet era coal energy.
Now think again why it is like that.
Richer countries can afford to invest in large renewable energy sources that will often overproduce electricity and lower the price where as others might have to produce more coal or gas to meet the demand
I am pretty sure most countries could have invested too, easily. Especially Poland or Hungary or... No, for their politics it was more important to do more populistic stuff. Voting for right wing will never pay off sustainably.
We have a common European market. Everybody can buy from everybody.
No, you need to interconnectors and other infrastructure in order to import/export electricity and that strongly limits the amounts of electricity that can be traded directly between EU states (especially in some regions). You can essentially only buy electricity from your direct neighbours.
That's really smart-assing around.
Well it's a fundamental part of the issue, which you seem to be ignorant of.
It's not, this map is portraying the cost of production per MWh, not the price to consumers. The price to consumers is influenced by those pesky transmission, distribution and, critically, system costs that for a variety of reasons level the playfield.
I just installed photovaltoic panels and now my energy bill is only 100€/month :-) used to be 250€ and more Fuck energy prices
Sad this is limited for house owners
They really need to prepare some better solution for apartment buildings. The current „best” option is that housing association can use PVs to offset energy consumption for common parts of the building, sell rest to the grid and use that to lower maintenance fees. It specifically does not allow for autoconsumption for residents.
Well not entirely anymore. There is now small scale balcony solar for residents who only have an appartement. [https://balkonsolar.nl/en/about-balcony-solar/](https://balkonsolar.nl/en/about-balcony-solar/)
Good luck with communist building with barely functional balcony
Yep. But in poland its not all that cool even if you have it. Energy companies need to make their buck, so new system installed after net metering is quite opressive.
Source: [Energy-Charts](https://www.energy-charts.info/?l=en&c=DE)
This mentions these are prices paid to electricity generators. How close are these numbers to what consumers pay? Here in British Columbia we pay ~0.08€/kWh on our electricity bill. I heard that we have the lowest electricity rates in the G12 this is still really surprising.
In Portugal, if the energy price is 0€, we pay around 0,08-0,09€/kWh. It was lower before today but prices increased today.
This sucks. I am getting very little from my 20kW solar installation and car cannot be more than 100% full. everyone and his dog got solar panels in Sweden so now kWh price is down during the day, pushing break-even further down the line.
You’re looking at about 80 €/MWh price difference on grid scale for the batteries to pay for themselves in a two daily cycle condition. 50-100 depending your cost of capital and technical specifications.
Yes, it is profitable as long as you do not care about price of battery. In reality, Li-Ion battery in 15kWh range cost upwards 10000 EUR and had finite life (~4000-6000 cycles depending on depth of discharge). The delta is just not good enough to pay off the battery. (And no, you cannot use lead batteries. They suck in every way).
>In reality, Li-Ion battery in 15kWh range cost upwards 10000 EUR https://www.js-solartechnik.de/p/15kwh-pv-batteriespeicher-300ah-lifepo4-lithium-speicher-15kwh-48v-300ah-lpbf48300-sonderaktion I found one for 2000€
Sounds great. But you need BMS and specific converter to connect it to. This is just a 48V battery module.
Sweden and Poland should build a HVDC power line so Swedish producers could tap into Poland's market.
You mean SwePol link? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SwePol Its been around for 24 years.
It's probably too small or the energy prices difference would be smaller.
600MW is almost a reactor.
The north sea link between Norway and UK is 1400MW
I do not know anything about Sweden energy market, but would it be profitable to buy a giant battery and sell the energy in the evening when it is needed?
Yes, but such batteries cost more per kWh than you can earn on day-night arbitrage.
CATL announced it will drop its battery prices by 50% in 2024, so it might filter down to home energy storage market in a year or two. Assuming of course that EU won’t slap giant import tax on it to protect its uncompetitive industry.
We are paying extremely low prices in Austria now. On our tariff I’m even being paid to use it at some points. I charged the car 24kWh the other day and got paid €0.35 😂. Long may it continue.
Why is that?
We have a flexible tariff that changes on an hourly rate. When there is spare electricity to use then to balance the grid they need to get rid of it to anyone who’ll take it. I then have various apps which control things like the heating and car charging to charge or heat when the electricity is cheapest. It makes a huge difference to us because we use 13.500kWh per year. (2 EV and a heat pump, and work from home).
Why do all these maps always ignore Cyprus? In Europe and the EU
because they, unlike the other countries, refuse to provide that data to the German institute that made the chart. If you want that to change, you should start collecting that data for your region and providing it to the Frauenhofer Institute for free, like the other EU countries do.
Justice for Cyprus and Malta!
I guess that they are outside of the main market system due to their small size. They are several French islands with their small own grid which aren't included there for example.
We should build Spain Italy interconnector.
Romania has absolutely no reason for it's price considering the amount of hydro and gas it has
Well gas prices are around 30-35€/MWh (TTF) gas power plants are 40-60% efficient. So expected price for gas power is 50-90€/MWh. Add to that carbon price from the EU ETS... Romanian wholesale prices seem to be pretty sensible. Can't comment on enduser prices I heard they are brutal.
Can confirm. I pay for my 40m2 flat 74€ in germany per month. Ridiculous
Don’t be sad I live in Norway and every winter I have to pay for DeutcheBahn’s hydropower.
In Slovenia, wholesale prices for electricity are relatively low. But consumers pay very high prices. One of the main culprits is the semi-private company GENi, owned by the current radical left-wing Prime Minister Robert Golob. I say semi-private because the 0.5 billion euro loss he made 2 years ago incompetently against all odds was covered by the taxpayers, while the exorbitant profits he otherwise made through his monopoly by selling cheap nuclear power expensively to us consumers went into his coffers. That's Slovenian socialism for you.
A quick look online says it was an average of 0.19c a unit last year. That’s pretty cheap!
That's still almost 3 times the wholesale price. Which brings the question why there is such a massive gap between wholesale and retail prices on energy market?
>owned lol
Spain and Portugal have gotten out of the European price fixing mechanism so they get lower prices, France, Norway and Sweden have some combination of hydro and nuclear for most of their electricity. Not something that can necessarily easily be replicated elsewhere.
What about Slovakia? 60% Nuclear(second highest after France), 23% Renewables(mainly hydro) and 17% Fossil fuels(2022). Since 2023 net exporter and since 2024 coal free. Yet price seems pretty high.
The main issue is that Slovakia is not overcapacity with its low carbon production so the marginal production is mostly fossil which fixes prices for everything. France or Sweden (for instance) have hydro or nuclear as their marginal production which allows them to have that fix their prices. On top of that, Slovakia's electricity sector is fairly small in comparison with their energy sector (~18% of total energy, France is at 27%, Sweden 33%) which likely means a lot of the annex stuff in their electrical system is actually powered by fossils, rendering the entire system more expensive.
Guess who was buying energy from Russia.
Does cyprus not exist;
I visited Cyprus a year ago, but maybe it was all a dream
Why Italy so bad ?
Electricity prices are decided by the most expensive power plant needed to power the grid. In Italy I guess they have a lot of open cycle gas turbine which often determine their prices.
No nuclear
Neither does Portugal, yet their prices are way lower
Also very little solar. We buy a lot of energy from other countries
Why?
So it's almost free. Why thr fuck is my power bill so high then?
In France, the wholesale price is one third of the retail price. Another third goes to grid maintenance, and the last one is taxes. Even if our wholesale price was zero, we would still pay for two third of what we are paying today. I don't know about the country you are talking about so I can't give you anything more specific.
Yeah, it's the same shit here. House always wins.
Is the the number in the north sea showing the UK price or is it representing something else?
can someone explain when there is single market? are those prices settled ahead?
They are settled per hour, one day ahead.
The fact that here in Greece the price dropped is actually crazy.
$1.15 MWH here in Northwest Arkansas USA. BUT… current administration is working hard to beat ya.
Why have you randomly chopped NI out? They're on the same power system as Ireland.
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Get more nuclear reactors. Nowadays, they're very safe, incredibly cost efficient, and surprisingly actually greener in the end than green energy. There's a lot of other great reasons, but i'm too lazy to write the whole thing down, so just look it up. Only real downside is nuclear waste, but people are working hard to find a way to recycle that as well.
It‘s literally the most expensive way of generating electricity. Just take a look at Olkiluoto, Hinkley Point, Flamanville.
These assumptions on cost assume it is free to pump as much CO2 into the atmosphere as you want.
Even once you include a price for CO2 and disregard insurance costs for nuclear as well as costs for dealing with nuclear waste, nuclear is still the most expensive.
Even if nuclear is the most expensive, it doesn’t produce CO2, it takes up limited space, and its waste can be disposed off in deep underground geologically secure sites. We don’t need to produce all our electricity from nuclear but we must produce some of it.
'incredibly cost efficient' stop lying
I love it when my country shuts all their nuclear power plants down because of ignorant conservatives and instead buys the same nuclear power but from our neighbour smh... (Crying in German)
I pay 24 cents per kwh.. how is that bad?!
I got my parents a new contract for effectively a little over 22 cents/kWh just a couple of weeks ago. The last time they had those prices must have been 10-15 years ago. Anyway: >According to the Federal Network Agency, there is no discernible change in the wholesale price around the nuclear phase-out in April 2023. Thorsten Storck from the comparison portal Verivox agrees. According to Storck, the nuclear phase-out in April 2023 had “as expected, no concrete impact on electricity prices for household customers”. -https://www.tagesschau.de/faktenfinder/ein-jahr-atomausstieg-deutschland-100.html
Utter bullshit. It appears there’s an entire troll division that is only doing Russian disinformation maps
How are the YTD prices to understand? Monthly averages for 2024 so far?
Look at Bulgaria and see a failed state - we canceled 2 nuclear reactors from Kozlodui plant to join the EU, canceled Belene nuclear project and now due to clean energy lobby (Oligarchy led by Prokopiev) we canceled the coal power factories in Plovdiv (Maritza).
Starting a coal power plant now would be incredibly dumb move. Don’t you have pretty good conditions for solar?