Germany's Solar Boom Eases Power Costs as Gas Price Jumps

It's a paramount imperative for Europe to wean itself from fossil fuels, regardless of environmental arguments (which are extremely relevant still). Getting a safe, unfettered provider of fossil fuels is getting a basically unsolvable problem. China is trying to build as much solar and nuclear capacity as humanly possible; we should do the same too. We've been having these energy shocks since the Yom Kippur war basically, it's like a broken cycle of instability and crisis we can't leave behind. There's no shale to be found in Europe, we just have wind, sun and nuclear to save our backs. And maybe geothermal pretty soon?

Beautiful. How could someone be against renewable energy? It's incredible, and we should be investing a lot more into it.

I love how these article pop up only after we exited depressing cloudy, rainy and snowy season into full blast sunshine for last two weeks or so.

Trump already talks about the war being done and phones with Putin. Why? Do they discuss that the stupid Europeans are now under the LNG thumb of the US and Putin can have Ukraine and Trump can have Greenland?

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.

Aren't power prices determined by the most expensive power source (i.e. gas) regardless of the prices of all other power sources? Otherwise nuclear/hydroelectric would be sold for pennies, no?

https://archive.today/O4JPX

Let me explain why fossil fuels are so politcally sticky in general.

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.

Now just imagine if they hadn't killed their nuclear power plants.

Don't worry, our minister for economic affairs and energy will make sure that we will stop this solar madness and return to good old clean and green gas /s

(she worked and lobbied for the gas sector before joining the current government)

i call BS: in Germany we're paying more than twice per kw than we were 3.5 years ago (it literally doubled in late 2022, from some 22c to 40-odd cents), and it just went up again in February 2026. Lots and lots of talk about lower energy prices, but _nobody_ "on the ground" is seeing it.

(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.)