The USA leads the way in terms of household electric usage in the world – an average US household consumes approximately 975 kilowatt-hours of electricity each month, three times more than for example the United Kingdom.
Which got me wondering how big US domiciles are versus those in the UK. Turns out: lot of big-ass houses here in the US.
I'd guess that a far bigger factor is that the US has a much higher percentage of houses the use electricity for room heating.
I believe that it is similar for water heating.
In the US there is also a high percentage of houses that use electricity for the stoves and oven and for clothes drying. A brief didn't turn up how much electricity is used for those things in the UK, but if it is like much of the rest of Europe I'd not be surprised if it is lower than in the US.
In the US around 26% of houses use electricity as their only energy source, compared to around 9% for the UK.
>In the US around 26% of houses use electricity as their only energy source, compared to around 9% for the UK.
Something that was interesting to me when I moved from California to central Oregon was that nearly everything was powered by electricity. I didn't even know anybody with a gas stove in Oregon.
Not sure about that, it looks like overall energy consumption still is almost there times as high in the US compared to the UK: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab...
It may be worth to mention that in the UK, energy consumption seems to be particularly low, below the EU average.
Vast majority of people use electricity for stoves in the US. Electric is also common for water heating. Less common to use electricity for space heating except for the South and for auxiliary rooms.
I am using 1300 kWh per __year__ in Germany in my three room apartment, with an electric oven and cooker. That is a lot of electricity for a single home, even with electric heating.
That's really not that bad. Consider that my house - freestanding, about 200 sq meters - was using ~10000 KWh in 2020. I radically changed all that when the war in Ukraine started and the difference is huge, we are now negative with respect to the grid and still use gas but that will soon go towards a heatpump. Conservation cut our consumption (including own solar consumption) by roughly 70%.
I went on vacation for two weeks last month and unplugged everything except the fridge and one HP Microserver N54L and the apartment averaged a little over 4 kWh per day (~120 per month, ~1440 per year)
However, when we are not on vacation the average is around 10 kWh per day.
Edit: We don't use electricity for heating or cooling (Sydney, Australia) as it's included with the apartment at a flat rate of 10 AUD (6.61 USD) per month
Heating is not just air heating but the hot water and the cloth dryer too. I have these running on gas and in a hot month, when the water heating is pretty cheap and the furnace does not run at all, I still spend about 1000 cubic feet of gas (300 kWh).
I am curious about quintile statistics, or at least median. Domiciles are definitely bigger in the US, but I bet the mean average is dragged way up by the top 20% of houses.
Air conditioning also uses the most electricity in a house, and the US has a lot more populated hot and humid regions than many European countries.
Is that an average? I had no idea it was that small in the Uk. I mean, what is the point of a house at that size? It just seems like it might as well be an apartment unit .
I've been saying the same thing to anyone who would listen - 80 sq meter paaprtment is much nicer than an equivalent terraced house, you lose like 15m2 to staircases, its a total waste.
Maij reason is the stupid leasehold laws - in UK you dont buy apartments, you buy a lease on apartment for 100 years. And there is a landlord of the entire buolding. And they can make up tlrandom rules, like forbod you from owning a cat or fish.
But they still build things almost as small now! [1] is wasting space on three bathrooms and a staircase, and has floor plans illustrated with what seems to be rather small furniture.
On the same development they have some apartments. [2] is poorly laid out (the long hallway is wasted space) but still manages to have more living area and costs £65,000 less.
That average is for all domiciles, so will include apartments - even studios. I would say a "standard" 3 bed house is bigger - usually 1000-1200 square feet.
Not only that, I used more heating in LA than in France (900m above sea level) because all the places I lived at had single pane windows that couldn't even physically close
Unless you live in a particularly hostile climate, house size alone won't change your consumption that much. Walls and floors don't draw power, appliances do.
The big difference is that in Europe in general it is much more frequent to directly burn something in your house in order to produce heat. Something almost unheard of in Canada for instance.
The site contains a link to the data source (globalpetrolprices.com), which says:
"The chart shows the price of electricity for households and businesses in over 100 countries. The prices are per kWh and include all items in the electricity bill such as the distribution and energy cost, various environmental and fuel cost charges and taxes."
It will be a combination of the British climate, and the inefficiency of American buildings (large, poor insulation), equipment (little incentive to reduce energy use with better appliances, timers to turn off heating/cooling when no one is home etc) and lifestyle (clothes must be dried in a machine, not on a line, t-shirt-warmth indoors even in winter).
Climate control is by far the biggest single line item in home energy expenditure [1]. Hopefully in more moderate climates people can consider heat pumps and other more efficient technology to help with this.
When visiting U.S for the first time, the thing that strikes you immediately are the sizes. Everything is bigger, much bigger in the U.S.
Food portions - you’re left wondering if you ordered one single meal, or one day’s worth. Shopping malls - I literally got lost at Macy’s in NYC. Cars - why are cars so big, especially the ones in cities? TVs are big. Even mundane stuff like glue sticks - they come in 3 packs, I can’t buy a single glue stick in most shops!! Most household items come in big packs.
Needless to say, all of this comically big items need space. So houses are big too!
If you are asking yourself why prices in Germany are so high: It's mostly the price surge of natural gas after Russia cut off deliveries in retaliation to sanctions in the wake of the war against Ukraine.
About 50% of the price per kw/h in Germany is set by an auction system. Electricity providers are bidding at any given point in time to provide energy for the grid. The lowest price per kw/h wins. BUT: because no one provider can satisfy the demand on their own, all bids that are necessary to satisfy the demand are considered and the final price is set by the most expensive bid within that range. So even if a wind turbine can provide energy at 9 cents per kw/h, if current demand requires electricity from a natural gas plant at 20 cents per kw/h, all providers within the bracket will get those 20 cents per kw/h from the consumer.
Natural gas has become quite expensive for the past year in Germany and for various reasons, natural gas plants are often the marginal providers in the German network.
The other half of the final price is split about 50/50 between the owners of the network and taxes.
To think there were nuclear reactors already built and running perfectly fine in Germany. That were closed down presumably for ecological reasons. Burning coal and natural gas instead.
They werent that many to begin with they growing increasingly expensive to run, were coming to the end of their lifespan and Fukushima was a risk that was hard to ignore.
It's interesting how Poland's electricity mix has been 80% coal for decades and this passes without comment, but what really enrages some people is a few nuclear power plants in Germany being mostly swapped out with solar and wind energy.
Doesnt seem like environmentalism is really the core issue driving this.
tl;dr: A country like Germany could expand its current electricity production by about 50% while simultaneously phasing out nuclear and fossil fuels at a whole sale price for electricity below current market rates and with current technology.
Converting the entire electricity production of an advanced industrial economy to renewable energy (without using nuclear) is quite straightforward. In case of Germany, a 2015 study compared various scenarios for how electricity demand will develop by 2050. The most expansive scenario assumes a yearly demand of 800 TWh, compared to roughly 500 TWh in 2021. [1] The additional demand comes from electrifying cars and heating, etc.
Demand does of course vary by time of day, but is virtually stable from month to month. Variability of renewable production is quite high, so let's assume that you'd need long-term grid-scale electricity buffers for about 30% of yearly demand. The most basic approach to this would be the transformation of electricity and water into Hydrogen when an excess of electricity is available and the reverse when demand outstrips supply. The combined efficiency of that process (electricity->Hydrogen->electricity) is roughly 50%. I'm actually pretty sure that by 2050 we'll have much better solutions available, but this approach is doable with current tech and has the added bonus of being able to be combined with a hydrogen infrastructure similar to how natural gas is currently used, i.e. for industrial processes and heating.
That would put total yearly demand at 1,040 TWh, which based on the efficiency of currently available PV and wind turbines [2] would require a total nominal installed capacity of about 1.040 GW (based on real world data from Germany, 1 GW in installed renewable capacity is roughly equal to a yearly production of 1 TWh. This will vary based on local circumstances, but Germany is not particularly bountiful in its renewable potential compared to other countries).
Currently, Germany has a total installed capacity of solar, wind and water power generation of about 125GW but I will assume that all these installations will reach their end of life before 2050 and will need to be replaced as part of this project.
At current prices for the installation of new PV (700,000 €/MW) and wind onshore/offshore (3,000,000 €/MW) and assuming a 50/50 split in installed capacity, the total investment for the required 1,040 MW would come to roughly 2 Trillion Euros over 30 years, or about 66 Billion Euros per year.
Divided by 800 TWh of yearly demand, this comes out to 8.3 cents (Euro) per KWh. This is comfortably below the 2021 average whole sale price of roughly 10 cents/KWh and in Germany would come out to about 20 cents/KWh for private consumers, compared to the current market average of roughly 30 cents/KWh.
Of course current energy production is quite heavily subsidized by the German government. If subsidies continue (or taxes on electricity are lowered), price per KWh could be reduced substantially.
This is of course only a very rough and simplified calculation. But it is straightforward and based on real world data, a pessimistic energy consumption scenario and current technologies. It ignores the potential for geothermal energy, biomass, imported hydrogen, long-distance imports of solar energy from the Sahara, or hydro power from Northern Europe, as well as likely technological improvement for generating and storing renewable energy. Looking at this, I find it hard to believe that absent a complete revolution of reactor design and cost-effectiveness, nuclear power will have any serious role to play in this, given its regulatory challenges, capital expenditure requirements, construction times and unsolved waste management issues.
No, the main reason is Germany shutting down nuclear power plants and replacing them with fossil fuels.
I know that lots of people will argue that wind and solar will lower electricity prices, but since these don’t provide reliable baseload, Germany needs to have lots of fossile power plants in standby.
These doubled structures make the whole system inefficient and expensive.
This isn’t the reason prices are higher. Even if Germany was using nuclear for most electricity, there’s a ton of gas being used in the industry and in homes (like for heating). Using non-nuclear power surely makes things a little more expensive, but it’s definitely not the reason prices are higher than (supposedly) anywhere else in the world.
All your claims are baseless and untrue.
Nuclear was replaced with renewables while also reducing fossil fuel use [1].
Prices are so high because of taxes and a lack of subsidies. Market prices are lower than in France [2]. Apart from gas prices, having to save France from its nuclear energy crunch was another factor for the rise in prices.
Because then, providers would try to guess the highest bid and bid $1 lower. As every bidder would miss once in a while, that loss would be factored in prices, and raise prices overall.
This bidding system ensures that everyone can publish their lowest bid with no fear of losing out, and by doing so, it maximizes publicly available data so regulators and TSOs have a good idea of what is actually available and which investments are necessary.
Because then everyone with cheap production starts bluffing and bidding 19.99 cents and the end result is the same price but now the market is deceptive and unstable.
I don't know the answer, but this is known as a "uniform-price auction", as opposed to "pay-as-bid auction". There is a lot of literature on the subject. For electricity markets, things are complicated by the finite capacity of transmission links and lack of storage.
I don't think I provided any judgement whatsoever, I just described how it works and the effects it had in this specific situation. Both are correct as I described them, to the best of my knowledge.
If you are interested in my opinion, I'm perfectly willing to accept that this kind of auction system works efficiently and effectively under normal circumstances. But in this specific scenario, it led to consumer prices rising by about 130% due to a sudden geopolitical shock. I personally find this less than ideal and I would have preferred a system that provides a bit more stability, because electricity is a fundamental need. Price jumps of this nature were unheard of in Germany, so no one was prepared for them, either.
Yes, it's not as if wind turbine energy would be sold at 9 cents per kw/h if the system wasn't like this. The auction system makes it so that the best way to make money is to share information, which is a good thing.
I would add that part of the difference is service level between the US and Germany. In Germany the outages are far less frequent and for a lot less time.
Outages in the US are very rare. I’ve had three outages in the past 15 years. Two were just a second or two and came back on, one was for a few hours after a big storm.
Of course the US is huge so service levels vary depending on where you are.
What you are describing is mostly about market prices. Market prices rose also in the rest of Europe. The biggest factor really are the taxes. The market price for electricity is lower in Germany than in France, still consumer prices are much higher in Germany.
What I often notice when reading articles like this is people aren't aware of how electricity is priced in different countries. When I was in the UK I had one headline figure of price per KWh that covered everything. This seems to apply in a few European countries too. In Canada however I have a price per KWh and then about 7 or so different extra charges on my bill (local access fees, trasmissions charges, rate riders, distribution charges, administrative fees, etc). All the charges seems to be variable but not necessarily exactly variable based on my KWh usage. From what I've seen this seems to be happen in the United States too.
So whenenver I see someone say oh I pay 10c per KWh I don't know if that's just the posted figure or the actual amount they pay per KWh if they took their entire bill and divided it by their usage.
I was going to post to say exactly the same thing. I recently moved Ontario, Canada to BaWü Germany. Yes, the kWh price is 3 times higher here, but I can find a contract where I pay about 9 euro a month for delivery, compared to $40 CAD I was paying (after rebates) every month on various fees back in Ontario. Most months I paid more for delivery than my usage back home. It’s nice to have the majority of my energy bill under my control.
Normalizing prices to USD also makes little sense, as I don’t get paid in USD in either country. Normalizing to daily income makes more sense, even though that’s not a perfect measure of affordability (I pay more for electricity but less for internet/cell service, for example). A more interesting measure to me is how many people struggle to pay an average household electricity bill.
That said, I completely agree with other commenters that Germany’s closing of nuclear plants was a big mistake, if not from the energy pricing point of view, then from an environmental impact perspective. I can see a coal burning plant in the far distance from my office window, and I’d much rather that thing was shut down then the nuclear plants.
It’s been a while since I emigrated but my UK bill used to include a daily “standing charge” on top of the per kWh rate.
My bill in the US does split things up between the supplier (who buys the energy) and the infrastructure operator. By US standards it’s not too complex. I definitely miss the EU rule on advertised prices being all inclusive though.
The other variable in pricing can be time of use. Not all providers do this, but it can be cheaper to use electricity when it is in low demand and opposite when in high demand. I suspect this will become more popular as EVs gain popularity and change usage patterns.
Around here, prices even change depending on time of use. Peak hours start at 4pm when people start getting off work, and solar production starts going down. My price at peak demand is more than double my off-peak prices.
Norway (where I'm from) is somewhat complex, because the country is divided into five regions, and the northernmost regions have poor transfer capability to the southern regions.
The southern regions, however, have quite good transfer capacity to export (to European countries), so those regions often have to compete with export prices.
What this means, is that the prices can vary significantly withing Norway. While we up in northern Norway paid around $0.0005 / kWh last summer, my relatives south paid something like $0.3-$0.4 / kWh. It's been a pretty big deal for the past years.
Our energy production is almost purely hydro, with wind and solar as very distant second and third source. All our LNG is more or less sold off to Europe.
With Norway's energy there is some "fun" I learned about recently:
Apparently people in northern Norway got contracts for "normal" electricity. Due to the power grid and energy production the electrons there are however mostly from renewable energies.
Now here in Germany people have contracts with "renewable" electricity. This then works the way that German energy suppliers virtually buy the Norwegian renewables, while the Norwegians virtually buy the non-renewable from Germany.
Thus Germans think they pay for renewables and do something good, while Norwegians think "oh, all plants here are renewable all is fine" but in the end only the companies benefit.
> we up in northern Norway paid around $0.0005 / kWh last summer
Is that figure accurate? It’s so crazy low that it would lead me to expect the area to be saturated with aluminum smelting and other high electric consuming operations.
Fun fact: We've had negative prices, a couple of times. In which case you actually get money for the electricity you use.
But those are very rare moments, and only last a couple of hours her and there. Not unique to Norway, but basically what happens is that there's huge amounts of downpour, coupled with little demand / usage - typically something you see in periods where people are away, and if the weather conditions are there.
Without having studied the Norwegian grid, the Swedish one that it is connected to also experience negative prices som nights when there’s a lot of wind and we generate some 10 GW of wind power. Coupled with the nuclear plants in Sweden that still are online and we pretty much have an issue with too much being generated…
Then again things freaked out in the opposite direction when two of the plants went a offline, the wind was basically zero and we had freezing temps all over the country.
Hydroelectric power is pretty stable as a baseline but can only scale so much. At some point higher-cost energy would have to come online to meet demand, at which point the savings would be gone.
Dont forget to mention people living in the north dont love the idea of investing in transmission infrastructure as it will only make them pay more for electricity.
In July 2022, the average price I paid was 0.0192 NOK / kWh - so that's around $0.0018 / kWh. But that was the monthly average price, the daily minimum can be much lower.
I'm incredibly lucky to live in Quebec, Canada: 100% green hydro power at low rates. Tarif D has the first 40kwh at 6.509 Canadian cent/kWh, then 10.041 [0]
It's also state owned.
From what I've seen it's the best combo of green and pricing in the world.
The lines in front of my house were shorted by a tree, melted and fell, blocking my driveway. In about 20 hours the power was back, 2 trucks came and fixed the lines. I live in the countryside, so YMMV
Household prices are meaningless in this context, because they are artificially kept low in France and sometimes are affected by taxes and fees elsewhere.
The true comparison require a lot of data and work. One would have to first calculate how much subsidies that each government spend on energy production, how much tax money is spent on grid stability, how much the taxes are, how high the fee is for grid connection, and how much easy producer take.
Spot market prices is just whatever the price is in EU, since all the grids are connected and every country in EU must trade if they have surplus energy. It represent the collective supply and demand within EU.
Thanks to that indeed, but the future doesn't look great, as little has been done in the last 20 years. So France will have to do a lot in the next decade, and that may change our prices.
There's a important lesson about using nuclear power as an energy source in there. Contrast that with Germany which is shuttering their nuclear power plants in favor of renewables.
There is no such lesson. EDF is going bankrupt, France is spending billions trying to replace reactors aging out and about 20% or so of the ~70 billion decommissioning costs are funded.
The important lesson here should be that retail prices != prices.
It bundles distribution and electricity prices. In NZ the wholesale price is the same accross the country (marginal pricing), but different distribution companies charge different rates.
This is overly simplified. A few aspects come to mind that have huge effects, in orders of magnitude:
* Price differences during day/week/seasons. Cold day? Electricity can be 2-3x higher than the day before. Lots of sun/wind? Price plummets. ...
* Price differences in regions. Norway, Sweden, Germany, those alone have huge differences in electricity prices depending on where you live.
* Pricing relative to economic output, i.e. GDP. Or household income.
There are surely more. This really strikes me as a propaganda page as the data is too oversimplified to be usefulfor real discussions, but enough to point to it to further an agenda. ("See, we shouldn't have turned off those nuclear plants, see how expensive electricityhas become!")
Yes, but these are averages so it shouldn't matter. Assuming this is total spent in all households over a year, divided by population, it accounts for all fluctuations in time and region. And at the end of the day, all that really matters is what you paid over the year.
And they already have a chart that adjusts for average wages as well.
So nothing whatsoever here strikes me as misleading or propaganda. Averages are a totally legitimate comparison tool between countries.
I'm actually curious just what you imagine this could even be "propaganda" for. Because it seems like just an incredibly fact-based neutral overview to me. I don't see any agenda at all, unless there's a sentence or paragraph I missed?
> Yes, but these are averages so it shouldn't matter. Assuming this is total spent in all households over a year, divided by population, it accounts for all fluctuations in time and region
Except that that's definitely not what's shown here.
> I'm actually curious just what you imagine this could even be "propaganda" for
They do have a graph of proportion of income spent on electricity. I see Switzerland is near the top, but as you mention, there is quite a lot of variation by kanton here. Oth, one of the first i noticed moving here was how much cheaper electricity was compared to the uk
It's true is pretty much every large country that the rates will vary by region. The rates vary by geography and since long distance transmission lines are expensive and limited in capacity the prices will always be somewhat local. If you live in an area with lots of water flowing down mountains or shallow magma you probably have cheap power. If you live on an island your power is probably from natural gas or even diesel shipped in from overseas and costs a relative fortune.
As an aside, not sure of the exact year, sometime around the 2000s, uk made it possible to buy your electricity from any provider in the uk, despite living in cambridge, i chose swalec(wales), and they didn’t bill me for 2 years and then i changed address, in that case, uk was ridiculously cheap
Maybe it strikes you as propaganda because you disagree with what it seems to indicate?
Why would it matter if people in Berlin pay more than people in Munich, or vice versa? Energy policies are generally national, so national data is the correct level of granularity.
Most of your criticisms seem to stem from a lack of understanding as to what the word "average" means.
Readit News
The USA leads the way in terms of household electric usage in the world – an average US household consumes approximately 975 kilowatt-hours of electricity each month, three times more than for example the United Kingdom.
Which got me wondering how big US domiciles are versus those in the UK. Turns out: lot of big-ass houses here in the US.
https://shrinkthatfootprint.com/how-big-is-a-house/
2164 sq. ft vs. 818 sq. ft
Which sure would explain that difference.
I believe that it is similar for water heating.
In the US there is also a high percentage of houses that use electricity for the stoves and oven and for clothes drying. A brief didn't turn up how much electricity is used for those things in the UK, but if it is like much of the rest of Europe I'd not be surprised if it is lower than in the US.
In the US around 26% of houses use electricity as their only energy source, compared to around 9% for the UK.
Something that was interesting to me when I moved from California to central Oregon was that nearly everything was powered by electricity. I didn't even know anybody with a gas stove in Oregon.
However, when we are not on vacation the average is around 10 kWh per day.
Edit: We don't use electricity for heating or cooling (Sydney, Australia) as it's included with the apartment at a flat rate of 10 AUD (6.61 USD) per month
Air conditioning also uses the most electricity in a house, and the US has a lot more populated hot and humid regions than many European countries.
Maij reason is the stupid leasehold laws - in UK you dont buy apartments, you buy a lease on apartment for 100 years. And there is a landlord of the entire buolding. And they can make up tlrandom rules, like forbod you from owning a cat or fish.
Its lime tyrany of a medieval lord
There are old Victorian houses built for factory workers, although most of the smallest have been demolished: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-up_two-down
But they still build things almost as small now! [1] is wasting space on three bathrooms and a staircase, and has floor plans illustrated with what seems to be rather small furniture.
On the same development they have some apartments. [2] is poorly laid out (the long hallway is wasted space) but still manages to have more living area and costs £65,000 less.
[1] https://www.taylorwimpey.co.uk/new-homes/worthing/barley-gra...
[2] https://www.taylorwimpey.co.uk/new-homes/worthing/barley-gra...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35374014
Above is a link for many Canadian and US cities. The range is enormous.
The big difference is that in Europe in general it is much more frequent to directly burn something in your house in order to produce heat. Something almost unheard of in Canada for instance.
"The chart shows the price of electricity for households and businesses in over 100 countries. The prices are per kWh and include all items in the electricity bill such as the distribution and energy cost, various environmental and fuel cost charges and taxes."
Everything has to come out of that budget.
Unfortunately in the UK apartments are associated with the dirty poors, so people prefer to live in awful tiny houses over spacious apartments.
> Which sure would explain that difference.
The amount of stoves, fridges and washing machines do not scale with area though.
You would expect larger houses having lower power use per square excluding electric heating and AC.
[1]: https://www.directenergy.com/learning-center/what-uses-most-...
Food portions - you’re left wondering if you ordered one single meal, or one day’s worth. Shopping malls - I literally got lost at Macy’s in NYC. Cars - why are cars so big, especially the ones in cities? TVs are big. Even mundane stuff like glue sticks - they come in 3 packs, I can’t buy a single glue stick in most shops!! Most household items come in big packs.
Needless to say, all of this comically big items need space. So houses are big too!
About 50% of the price per kw/h in Germany is set by an auction system. Electricity providers are bidding at any given point in time to provide energy for the grid. The lowest price per kw/h wins. BUT: because no one provider can satisfy the demand on their own, all bids that are necessary to satisfy the demand are considered and the final price is set by the most expensive bid within that range. So even if a wind turbine can provide energy at 9 cents per kw/h, if current demand requires electricity from a natural gas plant at 20 cents per kw/h, all providers within the bracket will get those 20 cents per kw/h from the consumer.
Natural gas has become quite expensive for the past year in Germany and for various reasons, natural gas plants are often the marginal providers in the German network.
The other half of the final price is split about 50/50 between the owners of the network and taxes.
It's interesting how Poland's electricity mix has been 80% coal for decades and this passes without comment, but what really enrages some people is a few nuclear power plants in Germany being mostly swapped out with solar and wind energy.
Doesnt seem like environmentalism is really the core issue driving this.
Converting the entire electricity production of an advanced industrial economy to renewable energy (without using nuclear) is quite straightforward. In case of Germany, a 2015 study compared various scenarios for how electricity demand will develop by 2050. The most expansive scenario assumes a yearly demand of 800 TWh, compared to roughly 500 TWh in 2021. [1] The additional demand comes from electrifying cars and heating, etc.
Demand does of course vary by time of day, but is virtually stable from month to month. Variability of renewable production is quite high, so let's assume that you'd need long-term grid-scale electricity buffers for about 30% of yearly demand. The most basic approach to this would be the transformation of electricity and water into Hydrogen when an excess of electricity is available and the reverse when demand outstrips supply. The combined efficiency of that process (electricity->Hydrogen->electricity) is roughly 50%. I'm actually pretty sure that by 2050 we'll have much better solutions available, but this approach is doable with current tech and has the added bonus of being able to be combined with a hydrogen infrastructure similar to how natural gas is currently used, i.e. for industrial processes and heating.
That would put total yearly demand at 1,040 TWh, which based on the efficiency of currently available PV and wind turbines [2] would require a total nominal installed capacity of about 1.040 GW (based on real world data from Germany, 1 GW in installed renewable capacity is roughly equal to a yearly production of 1 TWh. This will vary based on local circumstances, but Germany is not particularly bountiful in its renewable potential compared to other countries).
Currently, Germany has a total installed capacity of solar, wind and water power generation of about 125GW but I will assume that all these installations will reach their end of life before 2050 and will need to be replaced as part of this project.
At current prices for the installation of new PV (700,000 €/MW) and wind onshore/offshore (3,000,000 €/MW) and assuming a 50/50 split in installed capacity, the total investment for the required 1,040 MW would come to roughly 2 Trillion Euros over 30 years, or about 66 Billion Euros per year.
Divided by 800 TWh of yearly demand, this comes out to 8.3 cents (Euro) per KWh. This is comfortably below the 2021 average whole sale price of roughly 10 cents/KWh and in Germany would come out to about 20 cents/KWh for private consumers, compared to the current market average of roughly 30 cents/KWh.
Of course current energy production is quite heavily subsidized by the German government. If subsidies continue (or taxes on electricity are lowered), price per KWh could be reduced substantially.
This is of course only a very rough and simplified calculation. But it is straightforward and based on real world data, a pessimistic energy consumption scenario and current technologies. It ignores the potential for geothermal energy, biomass, imported hydrogen, long-distance imports of solar energy from the Sahara, or hydro power from Northern Europe, as well as likely technological improvement for generating and storing renewable energy. Looking at this, I find it hard to believe that absent a complete revolution of reactor design and cost-effectiveness, nuclear power will have any serious role to play in this, given its regulatory challenges, capital expenditure requirements, construction times and unsolved waste management issues.
[1] https://www.agora-energiewende.de/fileadmin/Projekte/2015/St... [2] https://www.smard.de/home/marktdaten
I know that lots of people will argue that wind and solar will lower electricity prices, but since these don’t provide reliable baseload, Germany needs to have lots of fossile power plants in standby.
These doubled structures make the whole system inefficient and expensive.
[1]: https://reddit.com/r/uninsurable/comments/12agamh/german_ele... [2]: https://reddit.com/r/uninsurable/comments/12dtygj/comparison... [3]: https://reddit.com/r/uninsurable/comments/12afq01/germany_ke...
I already paid twice as much per kwh as my friends who stayed in France, that was the case since 2017
Since the Russian gas episode I pay 3-4x more
What’s the logic here? Why not just accept bids in order of ascending price until demand is met?
This bidding system ensures that everyone can publish their lowest bid with no fear of losing out, and by doing so, it maximizes publicly available data so regulators and TSOs have a good idea of what is actually available and which investments are necessary.
But actually it's a good thing.
The providers who (through investment and/or technological superiority) are able to provide cheaper electricity, make more money.
Capitalist progress engine at its finest!
If you are interested in my opinion, I'm perfectly willing to accept that this kind of auction system works efficiently and effectively under normal circumstances. But in this specific scenario, it led to consumer prices rising by about 130% due to a sudden geopolitical shock. I personally find this less than ideal and I would have preferred a system that provides a bit more stability, because electricity is a fundamental need. Price jumps of this nature were unheard of in Germany, so no one was prepared for them, either.
Of course the US is huge so service levels vary depending on where you are.
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So whenenver I see someone say oh I pay 10c per KWh I don't know if that's just the posted figure or the actual amount they pay per KWh if they took their entire bill and divided it by their usage.
Normalizing prices to USD also makes little sense, as I don’t get paid in USD in either country. Normalizing to daily income makes more sense, even though that’s not a perfect measure of affordability (I pay more for electricity but less for internet/cell service, for example). A more interesting measure to me is how many people struggle to pay an average household electricity bill.
That said, I completely agree with other commenters that Germany’s closing of nuclear plants was a big mistake, if not from the energy pricing point of view, then from an environmental impact perspective. I can see a coal burning plant in the far distance from my office window, and I’d much rather that thing was shut down then the nuclear plants.
My bill in the US does split things up between the supplier (who buys the energy) and the infrastructure operator. By US standards it’s not too complex. I definitely miss the EU rule on advertised prices being all inclusive though.
There are a few tariffs without a standing charge, but I think that would be useful mostly for a holiday home, second home etc.
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The southern regions, however, have quite good transfer capacity to export (to European countries), so those regions often have to compete with export prices.
What this means, is that the prices can vary significantly withing Norway. While we up in northern Norway paid around $0.0005 / kWh last summer, my relatives south paid something like $0.3-$0.4 / kWh. It's been a pretty big deal for the past years.
Our energy production is almost purely hydro, with wind and solar as very distant second and third source. All our LNG is more or less sold off to Europe.
Apparently people in northern Norway got contracts for "normal" electricity. Due to the power grid and energy production the electrons there are however mostly from renewable energies.
Now here in Germany people have contracts with "renewable" electricity. This then works the way that German energy suppliers virtually buy the Norwegian renewables, while the Norwegians virtually buy the non-renewable from Germany.
Thus Germans think they pay for renewables and do something good, while Norwegians think "oh, all plants here are renewable all is fine" but in the end only the companies benefit.
Is that figure accurate? It’s so crazy low that it would lead me to expect the area to be saturated with aluminum smelting and other high electric consuming operations.
But those are very rare moments, and only last a couple of hours her and there. Not unique to Norway, but basically what happens is that there's huge amounts of downpour, coupled with little demand / usage - typically something you see in periods where people are away, and if the weather conditions are there.
A typo, surely?
It's also state owned.
From what I've seen it's the best combo of green and pricing in the world.
0: https://www.hydroquebec.com/residential/customer-space/rates...
100% hydro.
Zero emissions.
0.11 USD per kWh.
Owned and operated by the City of Seattle, not a profit-making corporation.
I moved to Canada from the UK and it’s still unbelievable to me how much cheaper energy is here.
If you’re renting a place you don’t even pay for gas. I have unlimited gas in my apartment all year round! I’ve never been so warm in my life.
I would highly recommend any young Brits reading this to seriously look at making the move. It’s amazing out here.
It seems like hydro would be cheaper.
Here are spot marked prices: https://tradingeconomics.com/france/electricity-pricehttps://tradingeconomics.com/germany/electricity-price
Spot market prices is just whatever the price is in EU, since all the grids are connected and every country in EU must trade if they have surplus energy. It represent the collective supply and demand within EU.
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https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/03/edf-to-redu...
The important lesson here should be that retail prices != prices.
https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/
It bundles distribution and electricity prices. In NZ the wholesale price is the same accross the country (marginal pricing), but different distribution companies charge different rates.
* Price differences during day/week/seasons. Cold day? Electricity can be 2-3x higher than the day before. Lots of sun/wind? Price plummets. ...
* Price differences in regions. Norway, Sweden, Germany, those alone have huge differences in electricity prices depending on where you live.
* Pricing relative to economic output, i.e. GDP. Or household income.
There are surely more. This really strikes me as a propaganda page as the data is too oversimplified to be usefulfor real discussions, but enough to point to it to further an agenda. ("See, we shouldn't have turned off those nuclear plants, see how expensive electricityhas become!")
And they already have a chart that adjusts for average wages as well.
So nothing whatsoever here strikes me as misleading or propaganda. Averages are a totally legitimate comparison tool between countries.
I'm actually curious just what you imagine this could even be "propaganda" for. Because it seems like just an incredibly fact-based neutral overview to me. I don't see any agenda at all, unless there's a sentence or paragraph I missed?
Except that that's definitely not what's shown here.
> I'm actually curious just what you imagine this could even be "propaganda" for
I did end the post with just that.
Why would it matter if people in Berlin pay more than people in Munich, or vice versa? Energy policies are generally national, so national data is the correct level of granularity.
Most of your criticisms seem to stem from a lack of understanding as to what the word "average" means.