alt.hn

5/10/2026 at 4:31:51 PM

Spain has become one of Europe’s cheapest power markets

 https://janrosenow.substack.com/p/spain-just-became-one-of-europes

by marc__1

5/10/2026 at 6:58:13 PM

The author's point is that Spain's electricity is very cheap compared to other European countries thanks to its great electricity mix, etc.

The reality is that Spain's electricity is cheap because it is relatively insulated from Europe's core network, because its interconnections with other countries are limited. In financial words, there is a spread with the rest of Europe because the ways to arbitrage that spread are extremely limited. If Spain was located near Germany and well interconnected, their prices would look like Germany's. And while cheap energy is pictured by op as a good thing, Spain understands very well that higher prices are good for its renewables industry, and is pressing for more interconnections[1].

The overall tone of the article feels like the author is here to extoll the virtues of renewables.

[1]: https://www.ft.com/content/8e94079c-585f-11e4-b331-00144feab...

by pyrale

5/10/2026 at 9:01:05 PM

This is an interesting point about energy market balancing but it has causality backwards. Spain simply has a better energy mix than Germany, no matter how big the spread between the countries is as a function of interconnectedness.

by maartenscholl

5/11/2026 at 8:07:32 AM

Let's not forget that Spain has better theoretical PV potential.

"Global horizontal irradiation (GHI, measured in kWh/m /day), the long-term amount of solar resource available on a horizontal surface on Earth."

German average 2.978 kWh/m2

Spain average 4.575 kWh/m2

https://globalsolaratlas.info/global-pv-potential-study

by leonidasrup

5/10/2026 at 11:44:35 PM

Spain also has pretty sensible legislation that is somewhat green. For large public areas the lowest allowed AC setting is 27°C / 81°F. Where-as in America you'll go to a mall and it'll be 65°F. https://www.catalannews.com/politics/item/spain-limits-air-c...

Probably doesn't make a ton of difference. But I found that very respectable. It made me hopeful they have other basic green sensibilities.

by jauntywundrkind

5/11/2026 at 9:53:58 AM

That is very sensible of Spain. I find that 27°C + the dehumidifying effect of AC is exactly the comfort temperature when wearing hot weather appropriate clothes. American polar breeze AC settings seem completely insane to me.

by ahartmetz

5/11/2026 at 8:10:14 AM

It will make a real difference if you're at the gym or in a very crowded place though.

by outime

5/11/2026 at 8:21:27 AM

Wouldn't the AC system adapt to the increased heat production from the extra people and maintain the temperature at 27'C?

by Teever

5/11/2026 at 11:00:07 AM

The AC's temperature sensors won't feel your microclimate or body temperature. I'm all for 27°C in the general case, but yeah I'd prefer a few degrees lower in the gym or in a dense crowd.

by ahartmetz

5/11/2026 at 12:57:50 AM

> Spain also has pretty sensible legislation that is somewhat green. For large public areas the lowest allowed AC setting is 27°C / 81°F.

As a red blooded American, this is the funniest thing I’ve seen all weekend.

by koolba

5/11/2026 at 3:40:13 AM

Sounds good to me. One thing I hate in the summer is being dressed in shorts and t-shirt then going inside and freezing because the AC is on full blast.

by mixmastamyk

5/11/2026 at 11:04:15 AM

You should try it, I find it rather pleasant. When I was in an office with per-room AC settings, I liked 27°C (shorts or light pants + T-shirt or short-sleeved shirt). When I was in Asia, I noticed that the setting was commonly 27°C. It seems to be only North America where "let's show nature who's boss" AC settings are common.

by ahartmetz

5/11/2026 at 12:32:31 PM

Maybe, but most people I know who set their summer thermostat super high like 81F also do the same in winter.. so its just hot vs cold preference.

Find me someone running 81F in summer and 59F in winter and I'll applaud their eco-consciousness.

by steveBK123

5/11/2026 at 12:56:40 PM

27 is really bad when it's constant. I lived like this for long periods of time (top floor + evening sun) and it's exhausting. 25 is fine.

by tormeh

5/11/2026 at 1:43:13 PM

27 with air conditioning is different. It's less humid and usually the air is also noticeably moving.

by ahartmetz

5/11/2026 at 12:39:21 PM

Even within the U.S., there's a correlation between obesity and climate control preferences. Spain's obesity rate is half ours.

by alamortsubite

5/10/2026 at 9:29:41 PM

The article is a mix of facts and figures on the supply side. However, the real reason for the current cheap prices is the lack of demand. Spain's economy isn't doing well and they have hurt their tourism industry with politics. That's most of the reason for the temporarily cheap power that they mostly import from their neighbor. Being dishonest about their energy policy is pure politics.

by hunterpayne

5/11/2026 at 12:35:32 AM

How have they hurt tourism? According to the data here [1] tourism has been going up every year since 1996 except for a moderate hit during the 2008 recession and a big hit during COVID.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism_in_Spain

by tzs

5/10/2026 at 10:52:09 PM

> Spain's economy isn't doing well and they have hurt their tourism industry with politics.

I don't live in Spain. And this is the first I have heard about their politics keeping tourists away. Can you elaborate?

by cheema33

5/11/2026 at 2:14:40 AM

There have been protests against tourism in Spanish cities, esp. Barcelona.

As always, the protests are really about local issues (lack of housing, jobs, etc) and foreigners are being scapegoated. A lot of this has a dark edge - e.g. locals spraying water on people that appear foreign to them. The framing around sustainability and 'over-tourism' allows the far left to get in on the xenophobia that's been so useful to the far right. Much easier to attack foreigners than actually come up with solutions to deliver more housing or jobs.

Media narratives aside, these incidents have not affected tourism at all. Spain is and continues to be a massive tourism destination, and the average tourist has never even heard of any of this.

by troad

5/11/2026 at 2:19:01 AM

[dead]

by cindyllm

5/10/2026 at 10:00:08 PM

Spain's energy policy could easily be improved, but saying that Spain's economy isn't doing well is disingenuous. In terms of GDP, it's one of the countries with the fastest growth in the EU [1].

Also, our economy is becoming more diversified, precisely thanks to lower energy prices that attract industries that previously gravitated towards Germany and Eastern Europe. [2]

I'm curious about how politics have hurt tourism industry, though, if you could elaborate.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-euro-indicators/w... [2] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/stellantis-chinas-leapmo...

by throwaway_2626

5/10/2026 at 11:30:36 PM

It's easy to win the fastest growing award when it has been doing so poorly before. Youth unemployment is at a near twenty year low of 24%, down from recent years around 30%.

As for politics hurting tourism, there's some formal policies restricting airbnbs and placing higher tourism related taxes on over-encumbered areas, but I think most of the detraction is the anti-tourism protests from locals, which were quite large in 2024-2025. You'd have to consider local sentiment as "politics" for the statement to really be true, I think.

by zdragnar

5/11/2026 at 6:55:20 AM

The GDP is growing simply because the population is growing massively. This is such a low-quality measurement driven by government propaganda. Quality of life, GDP per capita, and plenty of other measurements are needed to actually evaluate how an economy is going.

And Spain's economy is far, very far away from "going like a rocket", like your misinformation echo-chamber tries to parrot.

by BonitaPersona

5/11/2026 at 9:57:10 AM

> The GDP is growing simply because the population is growing massively.

Per capita GDP is growing too, so this is simply wrong.

by tpm

5/10/2026 at 9:22:24 PM

[dead]

by fleroviumna

5/10/2026 at 10:31:03 PM

To add to this, Spain gets it gas from Algeria, the rest of europe gets it from Russia and the middle east. So yeah, It's easy to have better prices when your gas is comparatively free from disruptions.

by PowerElectronix

5/10/2026 at 11:06:08 PM

Sure, Algeria does have gas pipelines to Europe. Two of them actually. The smaller one goes to Spain and Spain as we see in this article has lower electricity wholesale prices.

But er, the bigger Algerian pipeline goes to Italy, a country with notoriously high energy prices. So if Algerian gas was the secret that's actually a big problem for you.

by tialaramex

5/11/2026 at 1:32:19 AM

Check your facts.

by spiderfarmer

5/11/2026 at 6:52:35 AM

[flagged]

by BonitaPersona

5/10/2026 at 7:05:37 PM

Hmm. Everyone should just disconnect Germany, let them freeze, and enjoy cheap electricity?

by miohtama

5/10/2026 at 7:18:31 PM

You forget the times with an overproduction of electrical energy in Germany. Then they sell it for a negative price to the neighbor countries. Later, when they need more energy they buy it back at a premium. It is good business for neighbor countries with enough storage (pumping hydro, etc.).

by generic92034

5/10/2026 at 7:30:58 PM

Spain's neighbors could also have lower energy prices with more interconnection to Spain. The whole network diversifies, which would be more beneficial for Europe as a whole.

by ragebol

5/10/2026 at 7:47:13 PM

That would raise electricity prices in Spain just like prices in Sweden - which traditionally had low prices - went up with the 'diversification' of the European distribution network. While these price effects were mostly seen in the southern half of the country due to the way Sweden is divided into 4 price regions with most of the interconnects being found in the southern-most region the recently inaugurated 'Aurora' interconnect with Finland caused prices in the north of Sweden to shoot up [1].

[1] https://www.aftonbladet.se/minekonomi/a/Exwx4A/elprissmocka-...

by Leonard_of_Q

5/10/2026 at 7:41:39 PM

The issue is that Spain has three interconnected neighbours (France, Portugal and Morocco) and all of them are overflowing with electricity.

The best candidate for lowering prices would be France, but France would most likely re-export that electricity to other countries, and paying to build up the internal grid to carry electricity that is neither bought by nor sold to French actors isn't very attractive.

Ideally Spain would interconnect with Italy, but that's more expensive.

by pyrale

5/10/2026 at 8:39:46 PM

There has already been a serious proposal for a HVDC cable from Morocco to the UK. If that's possible, why not go for Spain-Germany?

by crote

5/10/2026 at 8:54:33 PM

Hvdc in the ocean requires way less right of way than hvdc over land. Running oceanic hvdc from Spain to Germany might have some trouble in the English channel where it would be in territorial waters.

Spain to UK might make more sense.

by toast0

5/10/2026 at 9:03:17 PM

Spain has also floated he idea of a HVDC cable to the UK, but it's never happened.

Sometimes, headlines are out of control.

by pyrale

5/10/2026 at 10:34:05 PM

France systematicaly refuses to increase the power of their interconect with Spain, as well as to make a gas pipe that would provide cheap Algerian gas to the rest of europe.

by PowerElectronix

5/11/2026 at 5:52:07 AM

An interconnection is being built up as we speak.

That being said, building new interconnections makes no economic sense for France. The country has no unserved consumers close to the border. That means any electricity imported from Spain would have to be carried further. That involves grid spending paid for by french consumers, without any benefit for them.

The same goes for gas pipelines. No one enjoys big infrastructure projects for stuff they don't really need.

by pyrale

5/10/2026 at 7:14:34 PM

That's not my point. My point is that the price spread between EU electricity markets speaks more to the availability of interconnections than to the virtues of one country's electricity mix. The article gets to that conclusion because that's what it was looking for.

The one question the article leaves open, but which is pretty relevant, is the question about who should pays for stability services to the grid.

by pyrale

5/11/2026 at 10:34:29 AM

Absent interconnectivity, the spread of the price is literally virtues of the electricity mix.

With interconnectivity, those virtues are less visible in local prices. They would be visible in earnings.

by watwut

5/10/2026 at 7:13:45 PM

Then you'd have people run extension cords across the border and selling their cheap electricity at inflated prices to their freezing neighbor.

by noprocrasted

5/10/2026 at 7:18:57 PM

normally when you buy electricity it costs money!

by mhh__

5/10/2026 at 8:10:50 PM

Many times negative spot prices.

by victorbjorklund

5/10/2026 at 10:37:39 PM

Which is bad, it's a market and infrastructure failure. Negative prices are to get generators to turn off.

A new feature on solar inverters is curtailment mode so they can be remote shutdown when the grid goes negative, since if you're on wholesale energy pricing you'll be charged if you keep driving the grid.

by XorNot

5/11/2026 at 9:08:28 AM

It's a good thing and you explain why in your second paragraph.

What gives people the right incentives to increase or reduce curtailment? The market price being negative or positive.

by ZeroGravitas

5/11/2026 at 9:31:49 AM

If the market is being driven negative then it means there's an oversupply. Which means overall the price of electricity is higher then it should be - negative prices have to be compensated by higher positive prices at other times, and reduce the return on capital to build new power infrastructure of all sorts.

Turning off productive solar panels is wasting power.

by XorNot

5/11/2026 at 9:56:53 AM

The negative price can also be thought of as paying people to use the productive solar panels rather than turn them off, it's a two sided market that drives demand to times of clean and cheap energy, which lowers costs for everyone.

by ZeroGravitas

5/11/2026 at 2:32:51 PM

That market-maximalist strategy isn’t producing price reductions in Europe so far.

by pyrale

5/10/2026 at 10:54:05 PM

[dead]

by izacus

5/10/2026 at 7:13:18 PM

This is a lesson in how electricity isn't really a commodity e.g. it's very very difficult to send some electrons from one side of the world to another.

by mhh__

5/10/2026 at 7:26:17 PM

But all commodities are like this. It is actually pretty easy to send some electrons great distances, or heck at least it's a well understood, solved problem. It's just that those interconnections haven't been built yet.

Heck, oil is probably the "default" example of what a commodity is, but we're now all acutely aware of what happens when moving that oil from one place to another becomes exceedingly difficult.

by hn_throwaway_99

5/10/2026 at 7:35:54 PM

> or heck at least it's a well understood, solved problem.

It is not. As a case in my point, Spain had a blackout last year (and I completely believe they are competent professionals - the task is just hard).

> It's just that those interconnections haven't been built yet.

They haven't been built because the grid isn't just a technical problem. It's also a socioeconomic problem, and adding new interconnections would require finding who needs to pay for it ; and currently, that question has no answer.

by pyrale

5/10/2026 at 8:25:13 PM

Hard is relative. Sure, it's hard, but it's a lot simpler problem than something like being able to consume tropical fruit in a temperate country in the middle of winter.

The difference of course is that the invisible hand of the market gets that fruit into grocery stores. For various relatively good reasons, power is driven by very visible hands.

by bryanlarsen

5/10/2026 at 9:05:49 PM

> Sure, it's hard, but it's a lot simpler problem than something like being able to consume tropical fruit in a temperate country in the middle of winter.

"Brain surgery? Well, that's not exactly rocket science..."

by pyrale

5/11/2026 at 1:49:18 AM

There are quite a few visible hands driving the fruit industry. Trade agreements, tariffs, water rights, disease/blight controls, and of course weather events/patterns are regularly in the news and discussed as it pertains to the cost and availability of various fruits (and veg).

Off the top of my head, we've recently had shortages of fresh strawberries because of weather in California, a shortage of peas because of weather too, and various changes in Trump's tariffs were done to try and alleviate the rising cost of certain fruit and veg.

by gusgus01

5/10/2026 at 9:00:59 PM

Commodities are traded on type, quantity, and place. Oil of a specific grade at a specific port. Pork bellies (no longer traded) of a specific grade in Chicago. Etc.

If you want the commodities elsewhere, you have to provide for transportation. Same for electricity. Grids (or grid sections) where supply outpaces local demand and transmission to remote grids can hit negative spot prices even when neighboring grids haven't.

by toast0

5/10/2026 at 7:18:05 PM

That it is treated as such speaks volumes to the craft of the people designing and maintaining the grid.

by pyrale

5/10/2026 at 7:22:15 PM

Unfortunately in Britain at least politicians are absolutely dead set on taking the piss / abusing this by e.g. adding huge amounts of subsidy and stealth taxes into what should be price discovery mechanisms (or for example when was the last time you heard someone talking about how cheap renewables are and discuss the CfD schemes).

by mhh__

5/10/2026 at 10:13:46 PM

> when was the last time you heard someone talking about how cheap renewables are and discuss the CfD schemes

All the time? Every single HN discussion about this ends mentioning CfD, often as if it's some secret nobody knows about even though the CfD strike prices are often headline news when they're agreed.

by tialaramex

5/10/2026 at 10:26:07 PM

I've basically only just seen this stuff started to be discussed critically in the media in fairly recent years.

not including $work discussions with energy traders.

by mhh__

5/10/2026 at 11:37:16 PM

> in fairly recent years

Although this financial instrument dates from late last century, its use in energy markets is much newer, the UK began using CfDs for electricity about a decade ago.

So, yeah, if you recall conversation about wholesale electricity prices back in 2010 they wouldn't have mentioned CfDs for the same reason they didn't mention the effect of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it hadn't happened yet. Back then renewable electricity generation schemes were subsidised very differently.

by tialaramex

5/11/2026 at 9:13:41 AM

Why are you hearing it discussed critically? It's a great British innovation that has demostrably made the world a better place and provided the UK (and others who have copied it) with big investments in cheaper and cleaner energy.

by ZeroGravitas

5/11/2026 at 11:33:49 AM

Recent piece in critic magazine by Chris bayliss for example.

by mhh__

5/11/2026 at 11:52:43 AM

Oh I see where you've gone wrong then:

https://www.desmog.com/2026/04/28/reform-donor-jeremy-hoskin...

> A major right-wing political funder has dramatically increased his fossil fuel investments this year, DeSmog can reveal.

> Jeremy Hosking, who owns the hedge fund Hosking Partners, donated £1.7 million to Reform UK between 2019 and 2024. The party, led by Nigel Farage, campaigns to scrap the UK’s flagship 2050 net zero emissions target, remove environmental protections, and turbocharge new fossil fuel extraction.

> Hosking also owns The Critic magazine, which frequently attacks climate policies and supports new North Sea oil and gas exploration. Its current edition carries a cover story titled “The Green Myth: Fossil Fuels are Britain’s Real Energy Source”.

...

> Its current cover story is written by contributing editor Chris Bayliss, who argues that renewable energy is unreliable and expensive. In a follow-up piece online, he blames “elite” support for net zero on “climate hysteria”.

> Bayliss is a former civil servant who works in the energy sector in Iraq. He’s the Iraq Country Lead for IM Power, which runs liquefied natural gas (LNG), oil and coal power plants, offers “oil and gas refining, storage and pipeline solutions”, and works to “maximise value from hydrocarbon resources

by ZeroGravitas

5/11/2026 at 4:49:01 PM

Do you have any substantial counterargument beyond "you aren't allowed to think that"?

by mhh__

5/11/2026 at 5:19:13 PM

No, I'm hereby banning you from reading obviously biased sources of partisan information that has been repeatedly proven false by logic, reason and experience.

by ZeroGravitas

5/11/2026 at 7:37:39 PM

> experience

We have some of the most expensive energy in the world, what gives? I was told renewables were cheap

Would you rather be biased or blind?

by mhh__

5/11/2026 at 11:13:35 PM

> We have some of the most expensive energy in the world,

Some of the most expensive fossil fuel energy in the world it's true. So, we should be striving to reduce that further, like Spain, right ?

by tialaramex

5/12/2026 at 9:47:53 AM

We have already done that. Do you know why gas often sets the price?

by mhh__

5/12/2026 at 11:32:04 AM

Because it's the most expensive used generation almost always?

But I'd actually be interested in seeing the underlying market data, even say for a week ago. Actually seeing the underlying offers really helps you to properly understand what the future looks like.

For example, right now wholesale is about £70 per MWh. What did the underlying bids and offers look like to hit that price ? How much CCGT was available for less than £50 ? 10MW ? 100 MW? 1 GW ?

by tialaramex

5/12/2026 at 7:50:09 PM

If it was the most expensive it wouldn't transact at that price, the price clears roughly to minimise excess demand i.e. gas is often the energy you can actually at a given time.

by mhh__

5/13/2026 at 7:17:25 AM

No, by definition the most expensive used generation did transact at that price because it's a clearing auction. You probably skimmed over what I wrote because it didn't conform to how you'd imagined this works and you mistakenly thought you understand.

I expect that you've modelled this as a sort of "All or nothing" situation but of course that's not how it works for electricity, which is why the underlying data would be interesting. That "guts" of a market help you understand the meaning of the surface numbers like a wholesale spot price or a week-in-advance price.

For example, you can see in the released data that spot prices can go negative without all the gas generation switching off. Some modest amount of CCGT will apparently pay money to the grid to stay running, sometimes for hours, despite lack of demand. Most of the gas goes away at negative prices, but some will still be there, so what's that about exactly ?

My guess (which the underlying data would help confirm) is that generators bid their "tick over" generation at a low price, perhaps even a negative price, so as to rarely need to switch off the generator and pay the considerable shutdown/ startup prices, but bid a lot more at a high price which covers their fuel and other expenses. Do they also have a further tier of pricing for running the generator at some sort of "red line" less efficient but more productive rate? I have no idea, and without the raw data or an inside knowledge of their companies there is no way to know.

by tialaramex

5/12/2026 at 9:08:51 AM

See, this is where logic and experience would have helped.

Would burning more expensive gas during a gas price crisis have helped?

No, UCL research suggests that wind power saved over 100 billion (this is net of 45 billion in subsidies) from 2010 to 2023! And it continues to do so.

And that's after it got effectively banned from being built onshore for a decade in England, costing many billions more.

(Though, the world got lucky here as the CfD mechanism helped prove offshore wind was feasible, another British success story).

by ZeroGravitas

5/12/2026 at 9:50:18 AM

> logic and experience

This is patronising drivel.

We burn gas when there is no wind & sun. We do this because there no alternative other than the lights going out. You are not seeing the whole.

by mhh__

5/12/2026 at 11:58:08 AM

Let me rephrase your comment:

When there is sun and/or wind we burn less gas.

Gas current and futures price for just the gas that needs burned (nothing about plant maintenance or carbon price to compensate for pollution or cost for building the plant or paying loans taken to build it etc.) is at 100, 90 and 80 pounds per MWh over the next 3 years.

That is more than the cost to build entirely new solar and wind, about double the cost of the best current projects, maybe 50% more than the average.

So even if you waved a magic wand and instantly solved several major world crisis affecting the price of gas, it still would be cheaper to build renewables in the UK than to buy just the gas alone.

This is true in the UK and basically everywhere in the world except maybe Russia, some parts of the middle east and the US Shale regions, but even there it's a close thing!

This has led to these being nearly 100% of all new electricity capacity built globally. Which only drives prices lower, and displaces gas and so makes gas cheaper than it otherwise would be too.

Didn't you start this thread by complaining about expensive energy?

We have the solution and you don't like it because you read news from magazines owned by people who pretend climate change isn't real.

by ZeroGravitas

5/12/2026 at 7:48:24 PM

So what if it's a cold night with no wind? I'm not saying renewables aren't cheap, I'm saying that you can't fully construct a grid on them and that this has not been communicated.

Our energy is expensive and volatile because of this (and subsidies to implement it). You don't seem to be capable of following my argument. It's not a free lunch. Renewables are also slightly problematic for grid stability although I expect we will have enough fast storage / (possibly synthetic) inertia eventually.

"What if we don't fix the roof?"

"but it's sunny?"

by mhh__

5/13/2026 at 8:39:05 AM

> I'm saying that you can't fully construct a grid on them

You can add storage, which twenty five years ago looked completely impractical but it turns out actually no.

by tialaramex

5/11/2026 at 5:36:18 AM

It is actually very easy to move electrons. I only need to get on an aeroplane to move a lot of electrons around.

by verzali

5/11/2026 at 7:55:46 AM

It's very easy to move electrons, it's just expensive to move lot of electrons.

Just to illustrate the scale costs of energy moved in the form of natural gas:

Nord Stream 1 + Nord Stream 2 with combined capacity of the four pipes is 110 billion cubic metres per annum (3.9 trillion cubic feet per annum) of natural gas.

Calorific Value of Natural Gas from 34 to 52 MJ/m3

https://met.com/en/media/energy-insight/calorific-value-of-n...

So energy per annum for NS1+NS2 is between 3.74^18 J and 5.72^18 J. The maximal power throughput of NS1+NS2 is then between 118GW and 181 GW.

"According to Gazprom, the costs of the onshore pipelines in Russia and Germany were around €6 billion. The offshore section of the project cost €8.8 billion."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream_1#Costs_and_financ...

So the cost is about $123M per GW of capacity.

For comparison: the Biscay Gulf electricity interconnection

https://cinea.ec.europa.eu/news-events/news/cef-energy-bisca...

"The EPC contracts will cover two high-voltage direct current (HVDC) links (each with a capacity of 1000 MW, amounting to approximately 1600 km of HVDC submarine and land cables), the two converter stations and the civil works associated with the land cables."

2000 MW capacity with cost of EUR 2.85 billion gives:

1425M Eur per GW of capacity

Of-course the projects have been build decades apart so inflation plays a big role and Nord Stream pipelines are currently damaged.

by leonidasrup

5/11/2026 at 10:01:05 AM

I think the joke was that all matter is full of electrons.

What you really want is electric potential differences that push electrons. It's the difference between having oil and having hydraulic energy (pressure and flow rate).

by ahartmetz

5/10/2026 at 10:41:33 PM

The relative isolation you cite for power being cheap were true a decade ago when power was expensive. The author is correct in extolling the virtues of renewables.

by g8oz

5/11/2026 at 3:52:07 AM

This is correct. The price for electricity has been increased by 2x-10x in the Nordics because of the interconnect with Germany.

by try-working

5/10/2026 at 8:45:39 PM

I mean it is hard to argue with the number - I believe everyone will benefit for more interconnections. More energy to Europe, more money to Spain.

And for the numbers it seems obvious that renewables are a fundamental part of the picture.

by iot_devs

5/10/2026 at 6:09:02 PM

The past few years has also had Solar continuing to decrease in price so its increasingly going to be the primary choice. On top of that battery prices have been plummeting too so that now Solar + battery is cheaper than other options like Nuclear and especially Gas. Most of the EU will be running on Wind and Solar in the coming years, its a change that is now rapidly occuring based entirely on the rare economics. Solar and Wind are half the price of anything else.

by PaulKeeble

5/10/2026 at 10:04:17 PM

Don’t underestimate the corrupt politics of some countries, especially Germany. There are individuals actively working against the global cost curve and trying to misallocate the capital to gas at the large scale. Katherine Reiche is the primary example. She’s pushing for building as much capacity for gas plants as possible, instead of choosing battery storage as the cheapest option.

by gregorygoc

5/11/2026 at 5:58:10 AM

Ha, yes, a lot of deniers/delayers are going on about how Germany "wasted" billion on renewables, when in fact they had a booming solar industry, which got nuked by politicians, who changed the policies, as can be seen in 39C3 video "Recharge your batteries with us".

Was the subsidy system which was in effect in 2010's unsustainable? I think so, yeah. But the changed policies resulted in companies producing solar going bust, and the Chinese firms, which were doing fine, were able to buy out the patents and know how.

So, did Germany waste billions? Yes, but by letting the solar producers go bust.

by zejn

5/11/2026 at 11:05:41 AM

The billion spend on renewables in Germany were not "wasted", there were spend on the primary goal of the German Energiewende, to allow Germany exit nuclear electricity power production.

The 39C3 video "Recharge your batteries with us" is an emotional call to action "We Can Do It!" solar panels everywhere, without showing the other backbone of the German electric grid: the German gas and coal power plants.

I would recommend other CCC video:

"Deaths per TWh" The Price of Energy and Reducing CO2 Emissions

https://media.ccc.de/v/Camp2019-10193-deaths_per_twh

by leonidasrup

5/11/2026 at 7:11:17 AM

Solar panel production is extremely energy intensive. Germany has one of the highest energy costs in the world. So there was no way for Germany to maintain a competitive solar panel industry.

by mbid

5/11/2026 at 4:45:25 PM

Germany has high energy costs, but back in 2010s they didn’t because they had access to cheap Russian gas.

by gregorygoc

5/11/2026 at 7:51:44 AM

If only they'd been able to build enough solar power to bring down the energy costs to the point where they could build solar.

by AndrewDucker

5/11/2026 at 8:47:52 AM

They could also just split the Germany into multiple bidding zones, then north parts of Germany would have a lot of cheap wind power, similar as in Sweden.

by zejn

5/11/2026 at 10:12:46 AM

Over the figurative dead body of Bavaria. They want cheap energy for their industry, they don't want wind power because it's ugly and bad for tourism, they will maybe accept a little well-hidden solar power, they don't want overland cables because they are ugly, and they don't want underground cables because they heat and dry out the ground. There is also some market distortion because energy is traded as if transfer capacity was unlimited, but when Bavaria buys cheap wind power that can't be moved, they still pay the cheap price but the energy is locally "replicated" at e.g. gas power stations, which is paid by... OK, I forgot, but it's a terrible system.

These "they" are different Bavarian persons and groups depending on topic, but the net effect is that Bavaria is Germany's energy bully.

Fortunately, several gigawatt-class HVDC lines are coming online this year. These somehow happened despite the protests, it's a minor miracle.

by ahartmetz

5/11/2026 at 11:19:21 AM

> similar as in Sweden

Sweden's electricity is ~40% hydro, ~27% nuclear and ~23% wind. How is this in any way comparable to Northern Germany?

by mbid

5/11/2026 at 11:42:55 AM

> similar as in Sweden

-- which has 4 bidding zones.

by zejn

5/11/2026 at 12:31:22 PM

What's the point?

Sweden has lots of potential for long-term energy storage as hydro power, which makes wind power viable. Northern Germany is mostly flat and there's not even close to enough storage capacity (on the order of ~weeks) to make a wind powered grid economically competitive.

by mbid

5/11/2026 at 4:09:40 PM

The point is apparently being missed.

There has been a long standing request to split Germany into multiple price zones[1], because Germany as a single zone does not adequately match the underlying network transmission limitations and there have been multiple occasions where power flowed through neighboring zones, which in turn required both network upgrades[2] in the zones neighboring Germany and expensive redispatch[3] in the south Germany. Industry in the south of Germany fights this back as this would mean the energy prices in the south would rise (and drop in the north), as when the transmission lines are congested, the prices start to diverge.

Keeping Germany a single zone is essentially a subsidy to Bavarian industry. The industry fights this so hard that it has basically become an energy insider joke.

[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/grid-operators-recommen...

[2] https://www.pse.pl/web/pse-eng/news/news/-/asset_publisher/6...

[3] https://www.ffe.de/en/projects/potential-for-reducing-redisp...

by zejn

5/11/2026 at 5:45:29 PM

If someone had guts (not the current governments) they would split the Germany into zones and all the Bavarian whining about “ugliness” would fade rather quickly when the prices went up.

by gregorygoc

5/11/2026 at 10:34:19 AM

Not sure if you're serious, but this was not viable in the 2010s, or even today in Germany at all because of Germany's high latitude: No matter how efficient solar panels become, they will always be more economical to operate closer to the equator. Anyway, the Chinese factories for the most energy intensive parts of solar panel production mostly run on coal power.

by mbid

5/11/2026 at 11:48:43 AM

Don't tell the UK they aren't supposed to be getting >15% of grid power via solar panels, because it's more efficient if the panels are in Spain.

by zejn

5/11/2026 at 12:24:12 PM

How many solar panels does the UK produce?

by mbid

5/11/2026 at 11:44:09 AM

As much as we could discuss the independence of Katherine Reiche from gas industry, how much new gas power plants could be replaced by battery storage? Not much. The new gas power plants will be the backup of the electric production after Germany shuts down coal power plants. This backup, or call it insurance, is for weeks long times when wind and solar don't deliver enough, the famous German Dunkerflaute. There are research projects for long duration energy storage systems, but building using current battery storage technology for week long Dunkerflaute that occurs once a decade event would be extremely expensive.

You have to have a backup, the devastating effects of week long electric blackout in winter in a future Germany heating homes with heat pumps, would be comparable with a major war.

Will there by push, after the new gas power plants will be build, to use them not only as backup, but as gas peakers? Probably yes, but this dependents on future CO2 emission costs and natural gas costs.

Even the previous government was planing expansions of gas power plants.

https://www.ingenieur.de/technik/fachbereiche/energie/12-gw-...

Personally, I think Germany should have not exit nuclear energy production but expand it, but this error was made in 2000s and Germany has to live with the consequences.

by leonidasrup

5/10/2026 at 6:14:32 PM

Not most of EU but geographically large and diverse and low-latitude countries will. Spain has winds from three different sea areas and is known sunny, so they are in a good position.

by happosai

5/10/2026 at 6:45:00 PM

Well that' doesn't always scan. Austria has a lot of wind, sun and hydro so its energy prices should be in line with Sweden, Norway, Denmark amongst the cheapest in Europe, and yet it's routinely amongst the more expensive in the EU.

by joe_mamba

5/10/2026 at 6:50:32 PM

Trading across borders seems to be a part of this story.

If your local price is high you can import, if it's low you can export.

If you're at the end of a grid and/or your transmission capacity is limited your price has the possibility to go higher or lower without that damping mechanism.

Electricitymaps has a pricing layer which seems to show central Europe moving in sync when I randomly check it:

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes?sig...

by ZeroGravitas

5/10/2026 at 6:59:25 PM

And the counter intuitive thing is that people in countries with lots of renewables and not so many external links (e.g. Scandinavia with hydro) might be against adding more links since it will increase electricity prices.

by tonfa

5/10/2026 at 6:55:54 PM

So energy in Spain is cheap because they produce a lot but can't sell a lot easily, and Austria/Central Europe is expensive because they sell their domestic energy too easily?

If this is what you meant, then it sounds like an argument against free trade, if it means you keep ending up with the short stick.

by joe_mamba

5/10/2026 at 7:34:31 PM

Free trade doesn't always benefit everyone equally, only a net benefit overall. It's a bit like how people often misinterpret the second law of thermodynamics "but the entropy decreased when the ice froze!"

by HPsquared

5/11/2026 at 6:20:26 PM

>Free trade doesn't always benefit everyone equally, only a net benefit overall.

Yeah but everyone has an equal right to vote. If they don;'t benefit, why would they agree to get screwed for the "net benefit" of others?

by joe_mamba

5/10/2026 at 7:05:46 PM

Economists would say that the money coming in outweighs the higher costs and therefore you could redistribute that money and everyone comes out ahead.

Whether that happens in real life is a different question.

by ZeroGravitas

5/10/2026 at 7:11:05 PM

>Economists would say that the money coming in

Does that money go directly into my pocket so I can afford the more expensive energy? Or does it go into the pocket of private energy companies?

Because I feel like there's some faults with this "free market", which is mostly just socializing losses and privatizing profits.

by joe_mamba

5/10/2026 at 7:37:11 PM

And what if the energy companies are owned by foreign investors?

by HPsquared

5/10/2026 at 7:47:16 PM

That would be economic colonialism with extra steps.

But for the end user, whether you're being ripped off by a local or a foreign energy oligarch, it doesn't really matter, people just want to pay less.

by joe_mamba

5/10/2026 at 7:45:51 PM

Electricity is expensive in Central Europe because the ETS system (carbon trading) has made fossil based production expensive.

We’re right in the middle of the transition with maximum volatility swinging between extremely cheap renewables and expensive fossil plants.

by ViewTrick1002

5/11/2026 at 6:52:39 AM

I checked and it looks like ETS are increasing prices of gas produced electricity 20-30€/MWh. So not little (although peaks are around 140€/MWh). But these are taxes that can be used to reduce the reliance on gas (actually, it's mandatory to use them for transition projects).

by MakersF

5/11/2026 at 6:01:36 PM

Austria could be there but they would need to build oversupply of solar, wind and (pumped) hydro to saturate the export grid lines. And currently Austria isn't building renewables at scale. I think there is a strong NIMBY movement so the best places to build wind and pumped hydro are blocked...

by happosai

5/11/2026 at 6:30:27 PM

>Austria could be there but they would need to build oversupply of solar, wind and (pumped) hydro to saturate the export grid lines

Or, you could reduce the export grid lines. Both have the same effect on supply/demand.

by joe_mamba

5/10/2026 at 6:22:48 PM

1/5th the price of nuclear.

Probably when combined with batteries it is half the price.

There are some colder areas in northern europe especially where solar doesnt work as well but they also tend to be better served for hydro (which can also store power).

by pydry

5/10/2026 at 6:30:43 PM

Solar works also in the north, except in the winter of course, and it complements wind pretty well. So solar does make economic sense and is actively built in the north too.

by distances

5/10/2026 at 7:31:51 PM

Northern locales though have a much greater energy need for heating in the winter. So the "battery" solutions can often just be cheap heat batteries because there is not so much a thing as "waste heat" - that heat can be used directly without worrying as much about efficiency losses in conversion.

There are already a bunch of examples of Northern locales using these heat batteries - just heat up a big block of something when energy is cheap and solar/wind are overproducing, then use a network of insulated pipes to distribute that heated water.

by hn_throwaway_99

5/10/2026 at 6:53:01 PM

So sad we could not apply economy of scale for nuclear... The main reason solar and batteries are so cheap is economy of scale.

by empiricus

5/10/2026 at 6:57:55 PM

I don’t think we have really tried. At least not in the last couple of decades.

by tonyedgecombe

5/10/2026 at 8:08:19 PM

The problem is that nuclear reactors are huge so you're never going to build that many of them compared to wind turbines (thousands) or solar panels (millions).

France plans to build a series of six reactors for its EPR2 programme with each reactor scheduled for completion 1-2 years apart, but that is only expected to reduce costs by 30% compared to the (hugely expensive) EPR.

Small modular reactors hope to improve things but it's far from clear they will end up any cheaper. Historically making reactors bigger makes them more efficient. The Rolls Royce SMR is just under 1/3rd of the size of the EPR so even if successful any cost reductions are not likely to be dramatic.

by laurencerowe

5/11/2026 at 4:30:13 PM

Small modular mass produced reactors have been tried for about 30-40 years without any real progress on making them cheap.

This isnt for a lack of investment either.

by pydry

5/10/2026 at 9:59:41 PM

Europe was spending 200 billions / year on gas from russia. I imagine they could try to build 100 reactors for that price, but it would take a couple of years I imagine...

by empiricus

5/11/2026 at 4:32:07 PM

Gas is dispatchable. You can treat it like a huge battery. Nuclear power not only isnt a substitute for gas, it needs gas as a backup and to mediate supply and demand.

Gas is also waaaay cheaper than equivalent amounts of nuclear power - like 3x cheaper.

by pydry

5/10/2026 at 6:45:08 PM

How much would it cost to build out batteries which cover entire continent's electricy needs for say three weeks (as there can be 2-3 week lulls of no wind and no sun in Europe in the winter)? Cause that sounds like a lot of batteries. Not to mention, if a freak 4 week lull occurs, we'll go back to Middle Ages for a week.

by badpun

5/10/2026 at 6:51:35 PM

You would likely get to 97% green energy first with 5-8 hours of storage: https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...

(for Australia it is 5, for other countries it might be 8)

Once you get to that "nice to have" problem of what to do about the remaining 3% of power needs it would probably make most sense to synthesize and store gas (methane/hydrogen) from electricity when solar and wind is overproducing. Gas can be stored cheaply for long durations. The roundtrip efficiency is poor but it's still cheaper than nuclear power on the windiest sunniest day.

The nuclear + carbon lobbies would of course prefer to model green energy transitions by pretending that the wind and sun simultaneously turn off for 2 weeks at a time every year and that electricity can only be stored in very expensive batteries. This is not realistic.

by pydry

5/10/2026 at 8:32:37 PM

It might not be quite that good in less sunny countries. Similar modest overbuilding of wind and solar in Denmark is simulated to get to about 90% with 12h of storage. This is still good enough though.

https://xcancel.com/enn_nafnlaus/status/1565923581246091264

by laurencerowe

5/10/2026 at 6:50:55 PM

Australia's CSIRO studied this for Australia, renewables were half the cost of nuclear, factoring in storage and transmission for both renewables and nuclear (yes, nuclear also needs storage because energy demand varies with time). Australia is uniquely endowed with sun and land, so other countries/regions may arrive at different results.

by energy123

5/10/2026 at 7:37:32 PM

If you live in Australia, have a house and roof, you're a bloody idiot if you didnt install solar.

by blitzar

5/10/2026 at 8:00:55 PM

You don't even need a roof. If you have enough land then a ground mount system is more convenient and easier to maintain.

by bot403

5/11/2026 at 2:01:49 AM

I think by having a roof GP meant lives in a house instead of an apartment. If you don't have your own roof you probably don't have land either.

by pibaker

5/11/2026 at 11:54:11 AM

Australia is also well endowed with coal and no carbon pricing, so for Australia the cheapest form of electricity production is a mix of solar + battery + coal.

by leonidasrup

5/10/2026 at 6:56:47 PM

Solar still produces even in overcast conditions, during the day. If it's light/medium overcast, most of which Germany usually is it still produces 50-80% of nominal. It only really doesn't produce anything at night or when it snows.

by ricardobayes

5/10/2026 at 8:02:22 PM

Yes this is one thing that surprised me owning solar. Some days its pretty cloudy and I can still get 2kw or so from my 7kw max.

by bot403

5/10/2026 at 8:55:48 PM

"But what if thing thing that never happens were to happen?"

We'd probably go deep into hydro, fire up every gas peaker plant, and through skyrocketing prices incentivize everyone to switch to emergency diesel generators where possible.

You're talking about a once-in-100+-years event. We'll deal with it the same way we dealt with the various oil crises.

by crote

5/11/2026 at 12:10:24 PM

Those once-in-100+-years events are called crises because they have large impact on economy and loss of human life.

For example a short event in US with duration 2 hours–4 days, depending on location, affecting 55 million people.

Deaths: Almost 100

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

The Economic Impacts of the August 2003 Blackout

"Based on the much-studied 1977 New York City blackout. ICF Consulting estimated the total economic cost of the August 2003 blackout to be between $7 and $10 billion"

https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ml1113/ml111300584.pdf

Short blackout: 2025 Iberian Peninsula blackout

"The employers' organization CEOE estimated that the outage resulted in economic losses valued at €1.6 billion."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackou...

by leonidasrup

5/10/2026 at 10:45:22 PM

You can't fire up capacity you don't have. Your scenario implies a massive idle stock of power plants.

Who's going to build and run them? They'd be enormously expensive because they'd almost never sell power.

(Of course the answer is if you build 3 weeks of battery storage you can pretty obviously build 4).

by XorNot

5/10/2026 at 9:16:54 PM

But what do we do when the sun isn't shining?

Well what are we doing if the straight of hormuz isn't hormuzing?

Demand will adapt via price signals. Same story as in every market.

by oezi

5/10/2026 at 6:46:29 PM

> (as there can be 2-3 week lulls of no wind and no sun in Europe in the winter)

This is simply entirely untrue. Europe's a big place, there's not a single day ever where there is no sun in it.

by gpm

5/10/2026 at 8:51:10 PM

>On top of that battery prices have been plummeting too so that now Solar + battery is cheaper than other options like Nuclear and especially Gas.

I'm a little bit sad that pumped hydro doesn't get more attention in the discussion. It might be too late for it to matter, with improvements in battery prices and ongoing lithium discoveries. But that only underscores the fact that it should have been allowed to matter twenty years ago. Utilities have slow-walked solar all around the world because of concerns about the grid stability, which has been well within the reach of pumped hydropower to fix since many years ago. In fact major pumped hydropower projects were mostly carried out in the United States during the nuclear power optimism era.

It is a little destructive to construct pumped hydro reservoirs. But it generally isn't as damaging as a conventional hydroelectric dam. The reason lies in the source of the water. In a conventional dam, you need a lot of water flowing in from up high, so you dam a major river near its lower cataracts. This disrupts the migration of fish and animals along the river and impacts the whole ecosystem of the rather large drainage basin upstream, and disrupts the migration of fish. But when a closed-loop pumped storage reservoir is created above an existing lake, usually a much less important stream is selected. Its immediate valley is still inundated, but the area of effect is much less. It does tend to prolong the use of the existing dam, but we are already preserving basically all existing dams.

It might still be appropriate in some places where imports are less affordable like Latin America or it might appeal to protectionists in the West. In general, hydro is usually cheap.

by scythe

5/10/2026 at 10:49:59 PM

Pumped hydro is objectively worse then batteries.

Anyone can install batteries anywhere at a fairly minimal local fire risk.

A dam is a major mechanical structure which if it fails will straight up obliterate downstream towns, and as such requires a numerous specialized engineering designs and on going maintenance to retain basic safety.

by XorNot

5/11/2026 at 12:56:28 AM

The depreciation of a dam versus batteries can can weigh the benefits towards dams.

by jcrben

5/11/2026 at 12:11:11 PM

There have been two hydroelectric power plant failures in the United States in the last fifty years, and one near miss. This is among hundreds of dams many of which have operated for more than a century.

A pumped-storage dam also doesn't increase the area subject to flooding. If the upper dam fails, it flows into the lower lake. This can potentially be a design consideration. It's not like a greenfield hydropower dam.

If you want to play the rare catastrophic risk card, battery fires can release highly toxic hydrogen fluoride. But the damage of climate change is far greater than the very small risk from either dams or batteries, which is preventable in both cases with proper maintenance and monitoring. I think the tail risk question is moot, honestly.

by scythe

5/10/2026 at 7:15:53 PM

You have to think about these things as a portfolio rather than just by minimum price.

If you have a steel mill for example you need to be able to basically guarantee a certain level of energy production to run it viably because the risk of there not being any power during adverse weather is enough to make it unviable (you can't just turn these things off). This is the reason why gas and nuclear probably aren't going away (or at least shouldn't).

by mhh__

5/10/2026 at 8:07:35 PM

If you need predictable price buy futures.

If they increase in price then firm production is stimulated to build to meet the gap.

https://www.next-kraftwerke.com/knowledge/futures-market

by ViewTrick1002

5/10/2026 at 10:01:36 PM

If the grid balance is dominated by bursty renewables then you can potentially price the stable / on-demand generation out of the market (or lead to a massive contango to incentivise said producers)

by mhh__

5/10/2026 at 7:43:29 PM

Spain is one of the largest buyers of Russian LNG [1], even doubled in March compared to February 2026 and has been linked to servicing "shadow fleet" tankers carrying Russian oil [2].

Moral bankruptcy.

[1] https://cepa.org/article/spains-baffling-russian-gas-addicti...

[2] https://kyivindependent.com/spain-escorts-shadow-fleet-vesse...

by TheGuyWhoCodes

5/10/2026 at 8:29:33 PM

bs. all of the eu is doing this. the top importer is hungary, then france. and that's the official figures, not counting imports "rerouted" through other countries.

regardless of inflamed speeches eu simply cannot operate without that energy. should have thought about that before starting a war with russia. best of lucks!

by znort_

5/10/2026 at 9:59:34 PM

EU is gradually stopping all energy purchases from Russia. Long term contracts for LNG purchases stop end of this year, pipeline gas late next year. Oil imports from Russia are planned to come to end late next year, too.

The days of Russian energy exports to EU are basically permanently over, and will not be reinstated even after the war has ended.

by distances

5/11/2026 at 1:26:13 AM

I think Spain is showing that majority renewables can work, if you are willing to work through the pain. Someone needs to lead the way and figure out how to make it work, so I am glad they are doing it. I do think this article and most information is focused on cheer-leading rather than telling it like it is.

This title of the article is misleading. Spain is one of the cheapest power generation markets, but In the article it states "Spanish households pay above the EU average". Then the reason is stated "Other system costs are rising. The flip side of getting energy cheap is paying more elsewhere to keep the system stable.".

Spain of course also had a blackout and the article states "every country in Europe needs to modernise how it handles voltage stability". I believe that's code for "its harder to manager power transmission grids with renewables". I have been told by a power engineer that read the report on the blackout that the authors are going out of their way not to explicitly blame renewables, but these things that caused the blackout are bigger issues now due to the switch to renewables.

But it makes sense for Spain to continue down this path and not pollute with coal or rely on other countries for gas imports.

by gregwebs

5/10/2026 at 9:22:27 PM

Jan Rosenow doesn't know what he is talking about, power markets are not only day ahead market, but there are a lot of other maturities, CAL27 is higher in Spain than France or the Nordics.

https://www.eex.com/en/market-data/market-data-hub

by hokkos

5/10/2026 at 10:04:53 PM

Well, it’s HN. People love to spread articles that push renewables. In the meantime, France has the cleanest and cheapest electricity among the large countries in Europe.

by cbmuser

5/11/2026 at 7:54:10 AM

That's some serious cherrypicking.

Where CAL27 low is either limited interconnectors (Nordics and Spain) or major nuclear (France). The other countries have CAL27 over 80 eur.

by zejn

5/10/2026 at 7:52:15 PM

Maybe it's cheap compared to other European countries but that doesn't mean it's cheap. Electricity in Spain is expensive.

by sunk1st

5/10/2026 at 8:22:32 PM

it's in the article: wholesale energy price is among the cheapest in eu, but retail price to residents (including tolls, fees and taxes) is well over eu average. tells you something about spain ...

by znort_

5/10/2026 at 10:05:40 PM

Might be because the article doesn’t tell you the whole story.

by cbmuser

5/11/2026 at 6:57:35 AM

So the article is not telling the whole story. Wonder why they may have hyper-focused on only a part of the whole story.

by BonitaPersona

5/11/2026 at 7:55:17 AM

It is, but you have to read it and you need some degree of prior knowledge to understand it correctly, as with everything.

by zejn

5/10/2026 at 7:37:29 PM

The reality is that expensive electricity in the EU is by design. The EU ETS imposes heavy taxes on fossil fuels (and they are set to increase even more), which in turn causes the price of electricity to rise. Fully renewable electricity generation is still a long way off, so this will continue for a long time. But it is entirely a self-imposed political problem and could easily be fixed by getting rid of the EU ETS or capping the price of emissions at a more reasonable level.

by mono442

5/10/2026 at 7:39:12 PM

Yeah, crippling Europe in the long term for short term gain might not be the best idea - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/15/critical...

by gman83

5/10/2026 at 8:08:44 PM

It's for long term gain. Energy independence, combating climate change which will cost more to mitigate than the energy costs.

by wolvoleo

5/10/2026 at 7:40:39 PM

why would you do that

by throawayonthe

5/10/2026 at 7:42:27 PM

It seems many markets have punitive pricing on electricity, california being one egregious example.

In most places, if you buy more of something, you are a good customer, it is usually more economical to sell to you and you get a discount.

In california people who use more kilowatts, pay more.

by m463

5/10/2026 at 8:19:34 PM

Punitive pricing is a great thing.

The less energy you spend to deliver value, the better for everyone.

by Rygian

5/10/2026 at 9:24:52 PM

I can think of many many examples of using electricity as a greater value to society than not using it.

by m463

5/11/2026 at 6:23:54 AM

You misread my comment.

If someone can deliver the same greater value to society using less electricity than you, they should be rewarded.

by Rygian

5/11/2026 at 2:04:22 AM

Power grid is the limiting factor, not power plant. Transporting energy can cost more than generating them.

by j16sdiz

5/10/2026 at 8:00:07 PM

Shhhh.... Don't let Sam Altman find out.

by iamkrazy

5/10/2026 at 5:47:28 PM

> Damian Cortinas, chair of ENTSO-E’s board, told the Financial Times that “the issue is not about renewables” but about the grid’s ability to manage “fast voltage variations” that can destabilise the system. Unusual oscillations triggered a cascade of plant disconnections, and grid managers lost control. The real lesson is not that Spain has gone too far on wind and solar,

YES THEY DID, they went as far as making nuclear power plants shut down due to negative prices so their reliable stable power wasn't a pacemaker anymore and it blew up in their faces. And this was a topic on TV shows with several experts alerting of this FOR MONTHS before the blackout.

Sure, there are new technologies to stabilize solar and wind's fluctuating outputs but they are no just plug and play. Those are very, very complex systems that take years to set up properly. While there are nuclear power plants are just there collecting dust because the EU pressured Spain to make them unprofitable to maintain so they would be shut down.

Luckily, the US-Israel-Iran war made the EU leadership turn and now they want nuclear. I hope it's not too late.

by alecco

5/10/2026 at 6:03:47 PM

I agree with you on a few points:

1. Stable power grids are much easier with a mix of generation sources that includes substantial rotating mass and baseload generators.

2. Nuclear is awesome from a climate change and energy security point of view, and it would be amazing if it were cheaper or more valued.

When power was primarily generated by thermal plants with big rotating masses, we got frequency control implicitly from the inertia of those generators. When there was a demand spike, the generators handled the millisecond to few seconds regime just by their inertia, while the seconds to minutes regime was handled by plant control systems increasing throttles or starting more peaker plants.

I disagree that renewables themselves are the problem. Cheap solar energy does not have to mean that we shut down all the uneconomical generation sources, nor does it mean that we cannot do FCAS with modern technology.

Battery electric storage systems have actually eaten much of the FCAS market in the USA, where they can respond way more effectively and efficiently than other systems in the 1 to 10 second regime. By and large, we don't store solar energy for use overnight - we store it (or really any energy) for use in smoothing short demand spikes.

I would love to see more nuclear, and more advanced nuclear. Modern designs are safe, effective, and amazingly capable. They just aren't as cheap as paving the world with solar cells or burning natural gas left over as a fracking byproduct.

by aftbit

5/10/2026 at 6:14:36 PM

Old power station turbines can be repurposed as inertia services via a stability market. Example in the UK: https://www.neso.energy/news/deeside-power-station-begins-wo...

by jonatron

5/10/2026 at 6:20:17 PM

Batteries are sweeping stability markets wherever they are set up. They're simply cheaper and better at it.

by ZeroGravitas

5/11/2026 at 8:13:57 AM

No, these are two different things. One is stability market, where batteries are now king, the other is physics of fault ride-through, where actual physical inertia is a real neccessity, at least for the time being. That is why synchronous condensers are installed.

Every major renewable grid has installed additional intertia to avoid blackouts.

by zejn

5/11/2026 at 8:37:53 AM

No, batteries do that better too.

Variously called "synthetic inertia", "virtual inertia" or "grid-forming inverters".

Some people treat the spinning metal like vinyl records and think you can't get that "warmth" with the new tech but on objective measures, including cost, they win.

People install them because they were the old tech for this, and there's lead times and caution, it's just slowly changing legacy not something batteries can't physically do better.

by ZeroGravitas

5/11/2026 at 9:47:18 AM

Ah, that's nice to hear. This also means we won't have to have another type of hardware on grid, since the batteries can make this work.

by zejn

5/10/2026 at 6:58:08 PM

> By and large, we don't store solar energy for use overnight - we store it (or really any energy) for use in smoothing short demand spikes.

This really depends on the amount of battery storage installed. In California we now see battery discharging through to the morning.

https://engaging-data.com/california-electricity-generation/

by laurencerowe

5/10/2026 at 6:05:08 PM

No that's not the case:

  However, several officials and energy experts have rejected the idea that renewables are to blame. EU energy commissioner, Dan Jørgensen, stated that there was "nothing unusual" about the electricity mix at the time of the blackout, and that the outage was not due to a "specific source energy". [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackou...

by ndr42

5/10/2026 at 6:01:09 PM

Spain's blackout was exactly 1 year ago, no other blackouts since. And the mix of nuclear stayed almost the same.

That was not a stabilization problem per-se, but the companies that had to do the stabilization just didn't although the were being paid for that. Please read the final report.

by jfernandezr

5/10/2026 at 6:07:43 PM

No blackout for a year: nothing to see here.

People didn’t do what they said they’d do: No problem with the system it’s the people that didn’t do what they said they would do.

by m101

5/10/2026 at 8:33:36 PM

The government refused to protect nuclear plants when prices went negative for a long time, so of course they were turned off because the companies were losing money. That was the obvious plan all along.

And no more blackouts because now they are running nuclear 24/7 to keep things stable.

And again, it's not completely Spain's government fault as it obviously came from the EU and their anti-nuclear stance.

by alecco

5/10/2026 at 9:11:30 PM

Wait, so not giving unprofitable power plants subsidies to keep operating at a loss is "anti-nuclear"?

And sure, it is a Really Good Idea to contract additional intertia to keep the grid stable. But why shouldn't that be done on the open market? Why pay a fortune for spinning a reactor's turbine at idle load when running a gas peaker plant's turbine at idle works just as well for a fraction of the price?

by crote

5/10/2026 at 11:06:26 PM

You can run nuclear (or gas or whatever) at a minimum to keep the network stable. Read my comments. Solar and wind are very unstable and unless you have the latest generation hardware (costing hundreds of millions) you need some stable source.

by alecco

5/10/2026 at 9:12:09 PM

Nuclear was working as usual the day of the blackout and the previous days.

What does it even mean to "protect the nuclear"? Give them free money for the sake of it? They are already facilities being paid to keep the system in sync, or "protected" as you say, and they are paid very handsomely. But someone got greedy, it seems.

For one year we had to hear that the blackout was to blame on the renewables, and now that the final report is out and places zero blame on the shoulders of the renewables, we couldn't read anything in the newspapers (electric sector is a main supporter of local press through ads or indirect ownership), or we have to read incredible bad blame redirects like "this is on the government for not protecting nuclear".

by otherme123

5/10/2026 at 6:57:43 PM

> made the EU leadership turn and now they want nuclear

They don't _actually_ want nuclear, luckily it's just lip service. Because it doesn't solve the problem surfaced by the US-Israel-Iran war: You'd still be dependent on other countries for your (nuclear) fuel needs.

by fundatus

5/10/2026 at 7:28:17 PM

> You'd still be dependent on other countries for your (nuclear) fuel needs.

Like Canada and in the future also Sweden? Two really hostile countries to be dependent on.

by madspindel

5/10/2026 at 9:06:20 PM

Sure, if you ignore the fact that Kazakhstan supplies about half of the world's uranium. Canada accounts for only 10%, and Sweden currently produces zero due to its extremely poor ore quality.

The most promising additional uranium source is Australia. But if Europe wants security it should be sourcing it domestically - which just isn't going to happen.

by crote

5/10/2026 at 8:56:39 PM

Dependency on nuclear fuel is less of a problem because you don't need to re-fuel a station often. Lack of gas creates a much more urgent problem.

by citrin_ru

5/10/2026 at 9:26:08 PM

> And this was a topic on TV shows with several experts alerting of this FOR MONTHS before the blackout.

"Experts" that now are being proved wrong. In Spain we have a good share of "experts" that are practically hired by the electric industry to parrot their interests in TV and other media for months or even years. Half politicians end their career either in Iberdrola or Endesa or Naturgy, the other half in some bank.

by otherme123

5/10/2026 at 7:08:59 PM

Also worth tracking whether consumption is increasing. Rebound Effect can kick in - when energy prices fall most people use more energy, produce/consume more junk, use more heat/cooling etc. Its like dealing with very low interest rates. It can produce a whole lot of brainless behaviour.

by nxh76

5/10/2026 at 9:28:24 PM

Some countries are already (accidentally) solving this problem.

The problem there is that they can't upgrade the grid fast enough at the neighborhood level. Combine that with residential electricity contracts where you pay the spot market price, and suddenly you've got a whole bunch of people who want to source or drain electricity at the same time, with a total capacity which far exceeds what their local grid is physically capable of.

The solution is to change a grid connection fee which depends on the peak load, where drawing/supplying a steady 1kW during the day is significantly cheaper than doing 12kW for 2 hours and 0kW for 22 hours. You're incentivized to spread out your load, so you are less likely to fall for needless consumption of "free" electricity.

by crote