Carbon-aware electricity pricing, measured daily on 38 grids(carbonawarepricing.com) |
Carbon-aware electricity pricing, measured daily on 38 grids(carbonawarepricing.com) |
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.
No amount of wind turbines will generate electricity without wind, or to be more precise:
Cut-in speed: 3–4 m/s (12–15 km/h) to begin spinning and producing power.
Cut-out / Stop speed: Above 25 m/s (90 km/h) where brakes are applied to prevent mechanical damage
Germany has to have backups, currently quite expensive, for all this times of missing renewables production.
Will this be fixed at some point or is the German model not actually as good as you imply?
Now you might ask why electricity is taxed to oblivion. Some don't like nuclear or coal. Some prefer oil or gas. In the end, there's a majority that wants electricity to be expensive.
Germany's wholesale prices are similar to many other European countries, the worst is easily Ireland because of their geography, small, northern, coastal, they often need to import power, and that import has to come from Britain, which is between them and the continent, so their prices will almost always be higher than Britain's already not-great prices - we're obviously not going to sell the Irish £89 per MWh electricity and then charge our own users £119 per MWh for the same product.
Let's look at the wind right now: uniform wind across Germany:
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2026/09/04/1200Z/wind/surface/...
Let's look at the wind earlier: uniformly no wind across Germany:
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2026/09/02/0000Z/wind/surface/...
Hmmmm.
UK has big variations in carbon intensity depending on how solar & wind is doing, so easy enough to make a small effort to align discretionary things like washing machine with that
There is also a very nice dashboard for UK grid that shows clearly what's going on at any point in time.
further the grid price only represents variable costs, congestion, and bidding strategies of gen to try and also recoup fixed costs and make a profit. This may translate to cheaper when lower carbon because variable cost is zero for many renewables but making it explicitly happen breaks the market price finding mexhanism and is probably an even larger aubsidy to renewables, which in itself is stupid vs just pricing the carbon externalities and letting the market decide.
We should probably also subsidize the conversion, for people who look at the incentives, want to become more flexible, but don’t have the money.
And we might have to handle some special cases—maybe hospitals, for example—where reliable power is an important social good. But these should be rare.
And since the heat pump will be the biggest total consumer in a household (in winter), there is not a huge opportunity for flexibility.
For example dishwashers, overnight battery charging, car charging, etc should be able to receive scheduling data from the grid to determine the best time to run.
Users could of course be given a choice whether to use grid scheduling in exchange for lower prices or not.
The electricity distribution system is a big sparse graph. If they are allowed to pass signals back and forth, don’t look too close, and maybe we can call it an AI enhanced grid. Then we can call this sort of ability to schedule appliances based on those signals “closed loop AI enhanced green appliances” or something similarly buzzwordy.
At the moment, lower prices are not necessarily a guarantee of lower emissions. And so, if you want to orchestrate loads to move them to the lowest emission time windows (perhaps not prioritizing cost), carbon signal is the way to do so.
For a global map, check out Electricity Maps:
It reads yesterday's generation mix from ENTSO-E and the EIA, works out the carbon intensity hour by hour, and compares a normal tariff against two carbon-aware ones.
It started for Switzerland, which turned out to be a good place to start for an odd reason. Swiss electricity is already very clean — about 34 gCO₂/kWh — and yet it's one of the best grids in the set at 2.4%, because it imports from dirtier neighbours and its carbon intensity swings through the day. Louisville, at 741 g/kWh, gets 0.01%: it burns coal at the same rate around the clock, so there's no cleaner hour to move into.
Across 38 grids, the correlation between the saving and how dirty a grid is comes out slightly negative. With how much it varies, it's 0.91. Being dirty doesn't help at all — being uneven is the whole thing.
Fair warning: the demand response is a model rather than measured behaviour, and it uses average carbon intensity, not marginal. Happy to hear your thoughts.
Otherwise, there would be an obvious solution which is to increase the price all the time to reduce demand and thus reduce CO2 consumption, but it is impractical politically.
It wasn't stated in the website and I didn't see anything about it from skimming the github. I didn't read the thesis, though :D
What bounds the response is not willingness but plumbing: which import/export products the supplier lets you pair, and the export limit on a single-phase connection (about 3.7 kW). I reconstructed a 200 kWh home battery on the published half-hourly rates for June to August: the exact optimum moves 50 to 60 kWh a day, and the connection is a bigger lever than the software by a factor of two to three.
But if we have multiple tasks with multiple levels of defer-ability (either due to efficiency benefits or due to people just wanting to run their dishwashers at a time convenient to them), it could be more complicated. But working out trade offs like this is what the market is for, right?
And yes, we pay VAT (19%) and electricty tax (0.0205 € / kWh).
But we also pay other things, like Konzessionsabgabe, KWKG-Umlage, AbN and Offshore-Netzumlage. They have various reasons:
AbN is used to make electricity artificially cheaper for ecenomically important companies that have a high usage of electricity. So this doesn't go to government, it's no tax.
KWKG (Kraft-Wärme-Kopplungs-Gesetz) is payed to keep the oil and gas power plants in operation. We now have so much renewable energy, they it wouldn't be economically feasible to operate them -- they have quite low duty cycles these days. They are however important for the quality of the whole network. So this doesn't go to government, it's no tax.
Konzessionsabgabe could perhaps counted as tax. The lines of the electric grid go over public property. Or they use the area below the pedestrian sidewalks. And so they have to pay for it. So this doesn't go to government, it's no tax, more a rent.
Offshore-Netzumlage is because we have sooooo much electric wind power in the north and baltic sea, but most bigger industry is in the south. It is used to pay for the new electric trasses. So this doesn't go to government, it's no tax.
Also, electric power in Germany is both cheap and expensive. The internal price is often cheap. But the price to end-customers is often expensive. One part of that is that many end-customers don't switch their electricity power. In history, we had local power distributors, often in the hand of the city or the county. But since perhaps 20 years one can now just select anyone, whoever has the lowest price. However, the majority of the germans stay (due to lazyness?) with their local providers. Which are usually on the more costly side.
Source so far: https://strom-report.com/strompreis-zusammensetzung/
Also we should not forget that Germany has one of the best electric grids in Germany. We can take the SAIDI and compare electric grids of regions or countries. And in Europe, Germany has the lowest SAIDI of all large industrial countries. Some have a lower SAIDI, but they are tiny-states.
So, what is SAIDI? The System Average Interuption Duration Index --- or how long per year and customer the power is out. And here we're better than e.g. Austria, France, Belgium, Sweden ... but also MUCH better than the USA, which seem to have exceptional shaggy electric grids.
So price is one thing... but that you can depend on the electric power in Germany, but maybe not abroad, is another thing.
Source for SAIDI: Germany and english language Wikipedia, Bundesnetzagentur
Another point: 3.3% of federal tax income, or 1.7% of all taxes paid by citizens, goes directly into "Klima- und Transformationsfonds" i.e. gets pumped into energy transformation. And the state even pumps more money into that, by means of "Sondervermögen" (taking additional debts). Measured as a percentage of federal state tax income, seems like Germany is pumping more than 7% total into energy transformation. Quite a lot I think, and even if this is not directly a tariff on electricity, it's easy to imagine how this can result in general price inflation.
In practice having the machine heat the water is usually a good choice because the machine already wants to take a set amount of water and heat it to a specific temperature (based on your chosen programme, silk knickers obviously do not want the hot water you use to clean cotton bedsheets after your youngest didn't wake up in time) whereas your hot water boiler just makes arbitrarily hot water forever.
What you need to know is the marginal carbon cost, which will be much less variable as almost all dispatchable generation is fossil.
So yes, you should avoiding adding load when there is a severe supply crunch and the marginal power is generated by gas peaker plants (often gas turbine based), and use power when renewable generation is otherwise being curtailed, but most of the time the grid is firmly in the middle regime with a fairly average marginal cost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Flamanvi...
Edit: compare this with China: they added 315 GW of Solar capacity in a single year (2025; see page 34 of the PDF).
https://www.irena.org/Publications/2026/Mar/Renewable-capaci...
(You can't compare nameplate capacity directly, but it can be safely assumed that 2 orders of magnitude more is ... actually more)
https://spectrum.ieee.org/renewables-up-nuclear-down-in-fren...
It was only when Russia started invasion in 2022, that the politicians in France started to change their opinion.
If you want build a nuclear power plant you go to nuclear supplier with uninterrupted experience in building nuclear power plants, like South Korea, China or Russia.
The South Koreans build Barakah nuclear power plant 5600 MWe for $32bn.
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.
And the question is, are those wind turbines without subsidy?
Here in the Netherlands some big energy users like Aldel already have stopped, those big users are also good in up and down scaling energy usage on demand, and also those products have to come from somewhere else now, so in the end the question is about energy and availability.
Some (or a lot of) subsidies can be justified.
Australia used similar tech to make the most of baseload coal overnight since the 1950s.
It's just a good idea, and should be used to get cheaper cleaner power in grids today too.
Solar energy aligns so much better, peaking its production when the consumption is high, going to zero when the consumption gets low, except for the diner time. In Spain we get really low prices (sometimes near 0) in the middle of the day, you don't have to plan or incentivize night consumption.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untertagedeponie_Herfa-Neurode
https://radioactivity.eu.com/articles/radioactive_waste/acti...
We learned quite lot about underground migration of plutonium over millennia because we studied the remnants of the natural nuclear fission reactor which nature run about approximately 1.7 billion years ago in Oklo, Gabon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...
"Plutonium has moved less than ten feet from where it was formed almost two billion years ago contained in the sedimentary rocks that kept them from being dissolved or spread by groundwater."
https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=de&...
So in 100% renewables Europe scenario, you have build multiples of renewable production in each region.
You build enough renewables in Western Europe to power the whole Europe, you build enough renewables in Central Europe to power the whole Europe and you build enough renewables in Eastern Europe to power the whole Europe and build electric grid to transfer 2/3s of electricity produced in each region into other regions.
Can it be done? Yes, but it will be very expensive.
Many renewable energy modelers often ignore realities and costs of physical electric grid and model whole continent as copper plate which can transfer infinite amount of electricity from each to point to any other point.
For more realistic scenarios German government is looking into power-to-gas energy storage systems, where you convert renewable electricity to hydrogen, ammonia or ethanol and store it underground. There are also plans to import large part of these gases/liquids from other countries, so no energy independence in the future.
https://www.bundeswirtschaftsministerium.de/Redaktion/EN/Pre...
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-revise-hydrogen...
The peaker natural gas plants are not running at 100%, they mostly run a few hours for peak production. Any critical infrastructure is built for peak utilization and there will always be some idling.
The good thing with electricity is excess production can be used to charge cars, pump water, produce green hydrogen or green ammonia. People are creative, they will figure out what to use excess production for.
https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&...
Also, both wind and solar (especially solar) change vastly under a sub-daily aggregation.
And the backup source for Germany is the nuclear electricity from France. The grid is at the European scale.
No, electricity is not likely to become a deflationary product. It hasn't been in my lifetime and I don't see that changing. Products which do that are weird and they don't tend to do it for very long.
There was a period (last century, more than fifty years ago) when Oil was deflationary in the US, as the very easily extracted Saudi Oil came online and US import bans ended - you'd pay the same dollar price to fill a car with gasoline in one year as the next and of course wages continued to grow so that oil is getting cheaper in real terms. But that's a long time ago, a time when gasoline was 30 cents per gallon.
Solar PV is just straight up cheaper than any fossil power. Solar Farms the UK agreed to subsidise in 2022 came online early last year and even in those more normal times (before Trump started a war in the Middle East) the "subsidy" amounts they were paying us totalled a few million quid a year because the fossil power was so expensive. Once Trump got into it, we were being paid like £3-4M per month in "subsidy" because of course the fossil fuel costs more now but sunlight is still free.
But that does not translate into lower prices for consumers, at most it means their prices might not rise as quickly.
(I acknowledge fossils have been going up for various reasons, and have become more scarce, and energy demands are rising)
If you're paying 25 cents per kWh and and the wholesale price was $100 per MWh then 10 of those 25 cents were for wholesale electricity, but you're paying 15 cents per kWh for "other things". Maybe a huge improvement to generation technology reduces that wholesale price to $90 per MWh, amazing, but alas general inflation increases your suppliers other costs to 16 cents per kWh and so you pay... 25 cents still.
If that wholesale price somehow halved and it was all passed on (good luck with that) your 25 cents per kWh goes to 20 cents, only a 20% drop.
The learning curve for solar is shallowing, and while it's steeper for offshore wind and especially floating offshore wind, those are both way more expensive than solar, so you'd need much more price decrease for them to be cheaper than say, coal.
Because today it makes no economic sense. Supply chain for horse carts is also very atrophied.
>The South Koreans build Barakah nuclear power plant 5600 MWe for $32bn.
Still very expensive. Flamanville is an extreme when things go really bad, but 175 MWe for 1 bn is also very high. 1 bn buys ~1 GW of solar, ~1 GW of onshore wind, or ~3 GW of battery capacity. You should only build new nuclear either to get a better mix in the grid (up to 5% is the nuclear lobby recommendation), or because you have no sun and no wind.
Probably 1 GW solar power plant, together with 1 GW onshore wind and 1 GW of gas power plant. Then you have to also pay the natural gas to compensate for times of low solar + wind production. You can build battery storage to decrease the natural gas consumption, but how much battery storage do you have to build and how much can you reduce the natural gas consumption strongly depends latitude and local weather patterns.
https://solarbatteryatlas.electrotech-revolution.com/deploym...
Flamanville running at 100% generates 32TWh. It is amortized in 9 years. I'd say it's doing pretty okay even with its ballooning cost.
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.
During day hours and with clear weather it's solar.
Currently at night in Germany it's: imports from other countries + coal power plants + gas power plants + little bit of hydro/biomass.
The plan for coming decade is to replace coal power plants with new subsidized gas power plants.
https://table.media/en/europe/news/gas-fired-power-plants-eu...
the answers exist, euro states just can’t get out of their own way and actually build things
https://speed2power.epri.com/demand-characteristics.html
I wrote software for monitoring and controling electric grids on country level and later software for controling nuclear power plants, I know a little bit about resiliency.
Physicaly, you can do 3X redundancy in electric generation and electric grid, as there are no physical laws against it, but such large infrastructure is expensive and you have to pay the CAPEX even if the infrastructure is almost never utilized. Also transporting electricity over large distances is really expensive, therefor only relative small amount of electricity can be transport in europe and future targets are modest.
"The EU has set an interconnection target of at least 15% by 2030 to encourage EU countries to interconnect their installed electricity production capacity. This means that each country should have electricity infrastructure in place that would allow it to import, from its neighbouring EU countries, an equivalent of at least 15% of the electricity production capacity on its territory."
https://energy.ec.europa.eu/topics/infrastructure/electricit...
https://pubs.rsc.org/ee/article-abstract/11/3/469/565531/Rel...
Someone has to pay for this, either customers or tax payers (through goverment subsidies) and Europe already has high electricity prices (when compared with China and US).
"The energy sector is one of the largest and most important sectors of the world economy. Accounting for 8%–10% of world GDP, it is second only to health care in size and is equally pervasive in scope"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/energy-...
This is how the modern grid shifts demand.
Australia has still lot of work to do in decarbonization of economy, as on only 8% of primary energy is from low-carbon energy sources.
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/australia#how-much...
Even China has currently higher share of energy from low-carbon sources. 12 % in 2025.
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china#how-much-of-...
Comparison between China, Australia, Europe, France.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-mix?tab=line&count...
Resiliency requires redundancy and that means excess production capacity. It is now mostly peaker gas plants that run only a few hours a day at most. Instead, solar panels are dirt cheap and you can have lots of redundancy pretty cheap. There are many uses for excess energy, it can be used for green hydrogen (industrial heat) and green ammonia (fertilizer) or pump water back if there is hydro. Most importantly, Europe has ~460 million vehicles, all of these can be EVs and have flexible demand. People are creative and they will find many uses with time-of-use pricing.
As a civilization, we're only just getting started on solar. So far, its been horizontal panels to capture when the Sun is brightest. The next phase is vertical solar. It requires zero land and can be deployed anywhere, think of all the fences and walls and tall buildings. It can be deployed in cities, close to consumption, without requiring new transmission infrastructure. Vertical solar will add 4 hours solar production. And Europe is geographically a large area, ~3400 miles wide, which means with grid interconnect, you can add 4 more hours excess production, ship to the other countries and get paid.
Or you can do what Romania does and install Solar with batteries: https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Solar-Energy/Solar-P.... If a poor Eastern European country can figure out how to build renewables, I'm sure its not a hard task for Western Europe?
> I wrote software for monitoring and controling electric grids on country level and later software for controling nuclear power plants, I know a little bit about resiliency.
You have a fixed worldview, the grid is an unchangeable fixed structure, and it can never be changed because you wrote a bit of software in COBOL 50 years back. What happened in your 20s is the best and ideal grid and it should never change. In your age of fossil fuel, production was far away, needed transmission infrastructure to bring power to the cities. Because coal is extremely polluting, hydro is geo-fixed and nuclear needs to be far (nobody will allow it). None of those assumptions are true anymore.
https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2026/co2-em...
I think the best option would be a world wide CO2 tax, because we already see carbon leakage, competitive advantage of economies with more CO2 production, but cheaper energy and cheaper products. (China, US over Europe)
> Resiliency requires redundancy and that means excess production capacity.
Redundancy is good and desirable, but someone has to pay for the infrastructure even when it's not fully utilized or is used to full extend only few times a year (Dunkelflaute). Overbuilding electricity production and overbuilding electric grid is expensive. In the past get to high reliability countries had only about 5 - 10% spare electric production capacity, not a spare coal power plant for each running coal power plant.
"Of course, the probability of Dunkelflaute is higher in winter, with peaks in November and January. Here, on average, there are 50-100 hours of Dunkelflaute per month, and as many as 150 hours in Sweden."
https://www.kraftblock.com/blog/bringing-light-into-dunkelfl...
When more solar/wind is installed on grid the necessary builds of backup peaker gas plants, expansion of electric grids to balance out the weather caused variations in production is no calculated in the LCOE of the solar/wind power plant. LCOE for solar PV plus battery storage is better indicator, but even then doesn't include the backup peaker gas plants and expansion of electric grids. (China builds backup coal power plants for solar).
> solar panels are dirt cheap
Solar panels are dirt cheap, because they are made in China. Polysilicon production is very energy intensive and China has a lot cheap electricity. Lot of production in Inner Mongolia, lot of sunshine and lot of coal.
https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2025/12/china-takes-9-...
> excess energy, it can be used for green hydrogen
How to do it economically is a open research problem, because Alkaline water electrolysis has problems with fluctuating solar power supply (battery storage and solar overbuilding may be necessary) and Proton exchange membrane electrolysis is expensive (uses expensive metal because of corrosion).
https://raw-science.org/iridium-pem-electrolysers/
https://www.solas.capital/hydrogen-vs-energy-efficiency-inve...
Isn't the Romania Romania battery storage system buildout enabled by subsidies (tax payers money) ?
https://cop31tr.com/romania-shifts-solar-subsidies-toward-ba...
> You have a fixed worldview, the grid is an unchangeable fixed structure, and it can never be changed because you wrote a bit of software in COBOL 50 years back. What happened in your 20s is the best and ideal grid and it should never change. In your age of fossil fuel, production was far away, needed transmission infrastructure to bring power to the cities. Because coal is extremely polluting, hydro is geo-fixed and nuclear needs to be far (nobody will allow it). None of those assumptions are true anymore.
I didn't see any COBOL code, oldest code was Pascal, but was been replaced because Sun stopped official support of Pascal compiler on Solaris.
Coal burning is terrible, lot of particulate matter (depending on the filtering system of the coal plant), sulfur, toxic heavy metals (lead, arsenic, cadmium), radioactive elements (uranium, thorium and decay products) (under normal situation coal power plant outputs more radioactive material then nuclear power plant into air). Gas is much cleaner, but still some methane leakage and lot of CO2.
> nuclear needs to be far (nobody will allow it)
We scared the people to death in 1970s, 1980s, 1990s with nuclear fear mongering. Movies: China syndrome, Dr. Strangelove, and other. Nuclear power production has been made equal with nuclear weapons. Activists presented each nuclear powerplant as ticking nuclear bomb.
Chernobyl was a big Soviet failure, but probably smaller then the 1984 Bhopal chemical disaster.