alt Hacker Newsi 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.)
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Seems like the prices skyrocketed in all of the EU in late 2021/early 2022.
Price graph 2015 - 2025: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Maybe something happened, like... a war.
https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/electricity-price chart is extremely noisy, and is quoting wholesale rather than retail, but to my eyes that actually looks flat over the period from before the Ukraine war. It seems to have started that spike in late 2021, before the war in February 2022 (which of course shoots it upwards, that's the "doubling in late 2022" you mention).
> and it just went up again in February 2026.
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.
It's not 40+c/kWh, the market end-user rate is around 26-30 now. And includes transmission and taxes -- worth noting as some countries talk of price before transmission & tax.
I'm not sure how German power utilities work, but the US being the US, personal solar can drive up our utility costs here. Less people buying power from the utilities means they increase prices on the remaining customers.
I call BS on that. The average price per kWh is just some cents more expensive than before COVID. See e.g. https://strom-report.com/strompreisentwicklung/ or https://www.verivox.de/strom/strompreisentwicklung/
If you are paying a lot more, consider changing the provider.
Solar on the balcony railing is very popular right now, mostly amongst apartment renters
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German here. I pay around 24c/kWh. It's much cheaper than it was in late 2022 with the energy price shock due to russia attempting to blackout Europe. I cannot imagine how much worse we would be off, would our Power generation stem from fossil or nuclear fuel.
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...