Just comparing overall prices per kWh is useless since large and especially energy-intensive companies pay far lower prices than consumers. In Germany, consumers pay a high proportion of the costs of the transition to renewable energy, and earn a small proportion of the cost savings.
This article is a mess. Waste of time. I’m not even sure if Germany’s prices are indeed too high or not, as you can’t easily compare prices like it is done in the article.
“… but its prices remain tied to volatile fossil fuels.”
Yeah… no.
https://flex-power.energy/energyblog/the-great-decoupling/
But I guess the daily fairy tale of expensive renewables is important to keep the money from fossil lobbyists flowing…
Did not read the article, sorry if there is more context
But the quote you picked sounds like the opposite and more like a critisism of fossile fules
It’s one of the usual variants of “renewables don’t work”. In this case the story how cheap renewables are irrelevant as prices are tied to fossil fuels anyway, which we can’t replace.
Which is -see: the link I provided- not true at all. In actual reality renewables are pushing out fossil fuels to a constantly increasing extent, massively reducing production costs in those time frames, that will naturally increase with more renewables and storage.
And they then smoothly transition to the next propaganda tale we hear from fossil fuel lobbyists on a daily basis: how Germany has invested so much in renewables, earning them the highest electricity costs in Europe (read: renewables are actually expensive!).
You need to read the whole article to the end (and we all know barely anyone does) to find the small final paragraphs putting everything said before into perspective (without high taxes Germany would be on the cheaper end, and it’s actually a lack of smart grid handling and storage that makes redispatch measures neccessary).
Its not news at all. Electricity prices in Germany have been bad for a while now, ever since the war in Ukraine started, when we stopped buying cheap russian gas and shut down nuclear. Still its the right path to renewables, we shall never depend on russia or any single actor in this way again hopefully.
German households pay around a third more for electricity than the EU average, despite the country’s impressive efforts to ditch fossil fuels.
OK bullshit already from the first sentence! 🤮 🤡
Germany is expensive because they chose to close their nuclear power, and scrambled to replace it, and have high taxes on electricity. It’s neither because or despite renewable energy.
Denmark has way more renewable energy than Germany, but it has been built since already in the 70’s.
The reason Denmark is expensive in 2025 is because we had a 0,90 DKK tax which is equivalent to 0,12 €.
Without that we would be at 0,21 or near the bottom of the prices in EU. And our electricity is 91% renewable, while Germany only has 61%! The tax was removed in Denmark per January first 2026.It’s also extremely misleading to list the prices including taxes, hiding the actual cost without tax.
When it’s a tax, it’s not the electricity, but part of the entire tax structure of the country, for instance higher energy tax could mean lower tax on vegetables, and vice versa.
AFAIK the article was not supposed to be about tax, but about electricity prices.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable_electricity_production
Bullshit article with bullshit false info. German electricity is NOT expensive because of renewable, but because of taxes and closing the nuclear power plants before replacement of that power was in place.
Germany is expensive because they chose to close their nuclear power,
OK bullshit already from the first half sentence 🤮 🤡
Nuclear is the single most expensive form of power generation and has nothing tondo with high electricity costs in Germany.
Taxes are a reason but also bad grid policies and bad policies regarding compensation for feeding locally generated electricity into the grid (privately owned solar power), gas policy etc.Nuclear is the single most expensive form of power generation
That’s because of the cost of establishing it, not the running cost. The cost of establishing it are not recouped by closing them down.
The plants shut down were all over or near their design lifespan and about half a century old.
Even if Germany had decided to continue with nuclear power it would have had to replace all of them with new reactor blocks.
Debatable. There are still costs for maintenance, uranium imports, safety and security, waste storage etc. And, most importantly, in Germany nuclear power is replaced by even cheaper renewables. Again, nuclear phase out is not a factor for electricity costs in Germany. Grid infrastructure and an anti-renewables policy (that plays into bad grid infrastructure) are.
Debatable
No, not debatable, nuclear is cheaper once infrastructure is paid off. Much cheaper with SMRs on new builds. Darlington was recently expanded with SMRs.
Real life costs can diverge significantly from those estimates. Olkiluoto block 3, which achieved first criticality in late 2021 had an overnight cost to the construction consortium (the utility paid a fixed price agreed to when the deal was signed of only 3.2 billion euros) of €8.5 billion and a net electricity capacity of 1.6 GW or €5,310 per kW of capacity.[28] Meanwhile Darlington Nuclear Generating Station in Canada had an overnight cost of CA$5.117 billion for a net electric capacity of 3512 MW or CA$1,457 per kW of capacity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
Germany shit their pants after Fukushima and knee jerked to shut down nuclear. How many Tsunami’s have hit Germany?
, nuclear is cheaper once infrastructure is paid off.
The marginal costs for renewables - that is the cost of producing one more MWh if the plant is up and running - is zero. With merit-order pricing, this is their market price. Nuclear cannot compete with that price. Also, while wind energy provides cheap base load, solar electricity production matches the daily demand curve very well. Because of this, it needs less of relatively expensive storage. It was never the plan to use pure nuclear power - that would have been way to expensive. It was always only meant for base load, which is a small fraction of the daily peaks or the daily average demand. Because of that, it was never planned to replace most fossil energy with nuclear - it would have been way too expensive. Nuclear was touted as cheap base load, remember?
Germany’s problem is an entirely different one: Consevative goverments have deliberately obstructed and hampered the extension of renewable energy and power networks. This still needs to happen, and is costing money now. And the conservative government, again, lowers prices and network fees for big companies, and charges citizens for that. That’s why it is expensive.
Germany shit their pants after Fukushima and knee jerked to shut down nuclear. How many Tsunami’s have hit Germany?
Wrong. Nuclear phase out in Germany was decided first years before Fukushima.
No, not debatable, nuclear is cheaper once infrastructure is paid off.
How come waste disposal/storage is never accounted for in these calculations?
Wrong. Nuclear phase out in Germany was decided first years before Fukushima.
By the Greens, in a way that could be and was undone. Merkel committed the majority to it.
How come waste disposal/storage is never accounted for in these calculations?
Permanent waste disposal is unnecessary. Keep doing what we do now and temporarily store it for the forseeable future.
Ironically there would be no global warming if we had fully switched to nuclear energy in th 70ies. In a way, the Greens fought for the destruction of the environment.
Any law can be undone and no policiy is safe from a power shift.
Don’t blame the Greens for climate change you dishonest nuisance.
Nuclear was never the answer, just different problems.
Ironically there would be no global warming if we had fully switched to nuclear energy in th 70ies.
A main driver of climate change is the meat industry btw. How would nuclear change that?
@CyberEgg @SaveTheTuaHawk
Which calculations are you referring to?
Nuclear waste disposal/storage is unavoidably accounted for in France as it is part of the budget and the responsibility of the generators of the waste themselves.The calculations of operating and maintenance cost. I have yet to see calculations of those where the cost of waste disposal and management is listed. It’s not a small factor, in Germany it costs around 1 billion anually after the end of nuclear, plus the ongoing search for a permanent storage site.
Also, this is about Germany, not France. But since you bring up France, what are the betting odds for how many NPPs are going to be shut down this summer due to overheating river systems? How much are the cost of downtime, the environmental damge done to these rivers etc?
Uuhm… No. Germany doesn’t have uranium deposits which renders any nuclear power generation unviable and prohibitively expensive.
Germany can buy uranium like every other country. France is all nuclear, without any uranium mined in France. Germany also has no gas or oil .
Germany can buy uranium like every other country.
Or… OR, we invest those running costs in the infrastructure (storage and lines) to harvest unbound energy via photovoltaic solar arrays, tide power and wind farms.
@DmMacniel @SaveTheTuaHawk
Sure. But that is deflecting the argument. Purchase of Uranium is no more expensive for Germany than it is for France.
By decommissioning nuclear, Germany LOST the investment it had already made & then had to invest AGAIN to build alternatives (+to fossil fuel, its immediate fall-back), after public panic over “Fukushima”. (1 death directly attributed to date – Most people still don’t know the name of the thing that actually killed 20k people.)
Yes, 👍 Renewables!@DmMacniel @SaveTheTuaHawk
France did not panic (they were 71% nuclear-powered already so immediate decommissioning would have been virtually impossible), but they are managing a transition to renewables anyway as nuclear is gradually phased out.
