ᐅ Gas Prices – Where Is Gas Still Affordable?

Marvinius schrieb:

Didn't people expect an ice age back in the ’60s? 🙂 🙂 🙂
It's terrible what those two from the green agitprop department are saying here.
Were you all trained with the "I love you all" approach?

Oh, how terrible, now the Greens have to deal with the consequences of green policies themselves. A.M. was practically some sort of red-green mole...

Wow...someone here clearly has bigger problems than the current situation.

Well...here too you can find a small cross-section of society...

Yesterday, there was a very interesting report that I briefly tuned into. It was about electricity pricing for producers, the electricity market in the EU, and how Germany has been generating a surplus of electricity for years. Currently, gas power plants in Germany are running at full capacity to compensate for missing electricity in France (I believe it was about 10 TWh, and yes, these are the ones with nearly 60 nuclear power plants, almost half of which are offline due to maintenance or technical defects). The German electricity surplus is also supplied to other EU countries, indirectly reaching Italy.

Wait a minute, didn’t we want to fill our gas storage tanks for winter? That doesn’t add up – does it?

Electricity prices on the Leipzig power exchange are apparently paid according to the most expensive production price, and this applies to everyone. That means the cheaply produced renewable energy TWh and the supposedly cheap nuclear power, etc., are all compensated at the HIGHEST price per kWh. So renewable energy producers are currently making a fortune (of course, not the small rooftop photovoltaics, but mainly large companies with concessions. There was talk of over 30 billion euros in EXTRA earnings). Habeck wanted to tax these profits, but politically it seems to be running into a dead end because currently it is being investigated, and it would probably be very difficult 🙁

End consumers are expected to pay around 50-55 cents per kWh soon, according to (reliable?) forecasts. And these are not just “domestic problems” in Germany, but across the entire EU. Ursula von der Leyen gave a nice speech on this, but well, talking doesn’t help much anymore. For me personally, I’m not too worried—once I’ve sold my old, energy-hungry house, I will come out relatively well. But for many others, I don’t see a socially acceptable solution in the next 1-2 years 😱

An employee of our tax advisor is a co-owner of several large wind turbines. He already spoke at the beginning of the year about a windfall last autumn/winter (due to the missing cap on the Renewable Energy Act’s maximum price, so about 20 cents instead of around 5 cents per kWh). Considering the large number of MWh generated, one can imagine that some people don’t even know how to get rid of all that money 😉

i_b_n_a_n schrieb:

An employee of our tax advisor is co-owner of several large wind turbines. He already mentioned earlier this year a windfall last autumn/winter due to the lack of upper limits in the Renewable Energy Act, resulting in about 20 cents instead of around 5 cents per kWh. With many generated MWh, you can imagine some people don’t even know how to get rid of all that money 😉

Just as a note: Social fairness would look different. Unfortunately, this profiteering also damages supply security.

Marvinius schrieb:

Just a quick note: Socially responsible is something else, and unfortunately this rip-off also damages supply security.

Well, at least we agree on that. The only difference is the slightly different conclusions we draw from it 😳

i_b_n_a_n schrieb:

Well, we do agree on that. Only the different conclusions we draw from it differ "just a little" 😳

I’m happy to explain my conclusions once again:
The "energy transition" was built around gas because gas power plants can compensate for the significant fluctuations in photovoltaic and wind power generation particularly well.
Realistically, we are maintaining two parallel electricity generation systems: the "renewables" and the fossil fuel backup. Since the output from renewables can drop to 0.0 kWh during the well-known dark doldrums, the fossil fuel backup system must cover 100% of demand and therefore would actually be sufficient to supply the entire electricity needs on its own.
This makes it clear that renewables are essentially unnecessary and at best double the electricity cost compared to a country that only maintains one electricity supply system.

In practice, the system has become a subsidy machine for the new green elites and their beneficiaries, as well as a mechanism for social redistribution from the lower/middle classes to the upper class. Previously, this was called something like the Renewable Energy Act, but now it is financed more opaquely through the state budget. Subsidies for electric vehicles are of course also included.

Since the energy transition ultimately relies on cheap Russian gas and therefore cannot truly be sustainable or "fossil-free," it would now be appropriate and socially much fairer not to spread the costs of the gas price explosion across all gas customers but to specifically charge the "energy transition" beneficiaries, for example the tax advisor you mentioned…

Marvinius schrieb:

Since the output of "renewables" can drop to 0.0 kWh during the well-known dark doldrums,

How often and where exactly did the (even cumulative) feed-in power from "renewables" actually drop to 0.0? Please also include the "less exciting" renewables like run-of-river hydroelectric plants.