."Next time someone says, 'Germany installed a lot of wind and solar and it’s electricity prices skyrocketed,' you can let them know that was a consequence of increases in the price of natural gas." — from @andrewdessler.com's post on The Climate Brink.
— Jay Turner (@jayturner.bsky.social) July 24, 2025 at 12:59 PM
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Thursday, July 24, 2025
Have renewables decreased electricity prices?
Andrew Dessler's post mentioned below is here.
Again, Dessler's blog post is here.
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While I don't doubt this, I don't understand why specifically _renewables_ are the focus of any discussion here. In the 80s and early 90s when anthropogenic global warming entered public consciousness, renewables as we know weren't a real alternative. Nuclear and hydro were, and they still _are_. (For that matter, hydro is a renewable but somehow it's not included in them.) For me, renewables are just a distraction.
We have an enormous hydro potential in the Himalayas, we should've already built cross-continent and intercontinental high voltage lines, we should've spent a few years worth of military budget to build nuclear power stations. If the world was not fokked up politically, we would already have the energy equivalent multiple times of what we use from fossils now.
An electricity company supplying customers estimates the total consumption for the following day and invites bids from generators.
Each generator bids a number of megawatt hours at a particular price. The supplier then accepts bids starting with the cheapest and moving to more expensive bids until they have enough. The last and most expensive bid sets the price for the day.
The auction might look like this.
The supplier needs 100MWh.
The wind farm bids 40MWh at $10 per MWh.
The nuclear plant bids 40MWh at $20.
The gas plant bids 20MWh at 40$.
The coal plant bids 20MWh at $50.
The supplier accepts bids from the wind farm, the nuclear plant and the gas plant. The most expensive is gas, which means everyone gets paid $40 per MWH.
Add a solar plant bidding 20KWh at $10. The price is now set by the nuclear plant and the price for the day drops to $20.
This is how renewable ultimately reduce the price of electricity, by displacing expensive fuel burning plant from the bidding process altogether.
The daily energy mix for Germany is shown in the following link:
https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy_pie/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&interval=day&datetimepicker=25.07.2025
The daily spot market electricity prices for Germany are shown in the following link:
https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/price_spot_market/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE
Tracking along the spot market electricity prices shows the variation in price with an increase/decrease in renewable energy used for electricity production.
When the renewable energy used in electricity production goes up and the non-renewable energy used goes down, electricity prices come down.
nyolci: In the US hydro (which is far more prevalent in the western US) is pretty much at capacity--there are no more places to build dams because all the elevation changes of all the usable rivers are accounted for. (I think hydrologists call this the "head.") In fact there's been an ongoing movement to *remove* dams for the same of salmon and other species, such as on the Klamath River in southern Oregon/northern California where four dams have been removed. PS: It doesn't seem to be going well:
https://californiaglobe.com/articles/klamath-dam-removal-its-an-environmental-disaster/
but I don't know a lot.
Canada looks pretty bad on this chart in terms of % of green electricity. But most of Canada's electricity comes from nuclear and hydro - both green. For example, Ontario is 70% green power, but the cost is quite low. https://www.ieso.ca/Learn/Ontario-Electricity-Grid/Supply-Mix-and-Generation
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