https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=de&...

https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=de&...

In Europe, the average weekly electricity generation in 2025 was 14.0 TWh, and no week fell below 10.2 TWh. In 2026, the average output was about 15.5 TWh, and so far, no week has fallen below 12.5 TWh.

Of course, batteries are needed for short-term storage, but with the creation of excess capacity in wind and solar power, the troughs below the load curve become narrower and shallower, drastically reducing the need for storage.

The market for baseload electricity has disappeared in Germany, as renewables push the residual load to zero or below for almost the entire year:

https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?c=DE&l...

The base load is an imaginary line passing through the troughs of the residual load curve.

https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/price_scatter/chart.ht...

Since price elasticity for electricity is very high, the market cap decreases by approximately €150,000 for every additional GWh of renewable energy production. A single additional offshore wind turbine with an annual output of 60 GWh reduces the combined revenue of all electricity producers by about €9 million per year that it is in operation.

Blocking wind power and solar projects only serves to secure the profits of monopolists and oligopolists in the electricity market, but causes massive harm to the economy.

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48758309

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Modern grids do not require high-risk investments in ultra-inert baseload power that ultimately fails to find a market; instead, they require low-risk investments in highly flexible power sources, such as batteries or pumped-storage facilities and transmission upgrades, that can capture surplus electricity at low cost (sometimes negativ) and sell it hours later at favorable prices.

The 2036 electricity futures price for Germany is €70/MWh. The break-even point for France’s EDF for old nuclear power plants that had long since been written off financially was at roughly the same level in 2020. Due to rising labor costs, their break-even point is now significantly higher. There were solid economic reasons why EDF was recently nationalized 100%. New nuclear power plant construction in France is a foreseeable economic disaster. Private investors would have fled long ago.

Weather fronts move across the continent on a very regular basis; when the wind dies down, the sun shines more.

Thermal power generation, which is difficult to control, is completely unnecessary in an environment where we have negative electricity prices practically every day from March to October. In Europe, we need rapidly controllable energy sources—obviously more storage capacity.

Due to the many hours during which electricity prices are close to zero, the economically viable full-load hours of a nuclear power plant are reduced to barely 3,000 hours per year, effectively tripling the real levelized cost of electricity (LOCE). In addition to the high costs of nuclear power plants, there is also the enormous expense incurred by the government for military and police security at the facilities.

Since the government prioritizes nuclear power, this leads to heavily manipulated electricity prices, with homeowners with solar panels being among the biggest losers, as they are required to feed electricity into the grid but are effectively paid the full negative prices (usually via weighted average pricing methods)

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https://doi.org/10.3390/data10110172

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46922475

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“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” ― George Orwell, 1984 (2026?)

(from central Europe)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46026970

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