[…] is promising to bring down electricity prices for energy-intensive industries by constructing new gas-run plants.
The irony. Isn’t natural gas one of the most expensive ways to generate electricity?
Not sure about today but ever since the shale boom in the US it’s been among the cheapest. A main stumbling block for renewables adoption has been competing the price of gas electricity generation.
Though there is a subtle difference. The US has a lot of oil and natural gas. While German hasn’t. We used to get the majority from Russia.
The US Henry Hub is at $3.42/million btu and the Dutch TTF is at $12.11/million btu right now. Those are the two main hubs in the US and the EU, thats why I used them, but it shows the massive cost of shipping LNG to Europe.
Gas power plants can not compete in Germany against wind or solar. The best they can do is back up, but electricity storage like batteries will take a lot of market share from that as well.
For one, shale gas/oil is cheap domestically in the US because of subsidies, otherwise it probably couldn’t compete with conventionally-sourced oil/gas. For two, to get the stuff to Europe, you need to liquefy it and put it on a tanker and then travel a bit. Hence, LNG overall (much of it from Russia rather than the US, actually!) is used only for the final percentage points rather than being a dominant source. The dominant source of pipeline gas in Germany used to be Russia. Since 2022, the dominant source of gas is Norway.
What’s not visible in the graph above is that consumption also went down considerably (by ~20%) in Germany since 2022, as people adjusted down their boilers, and the recession took hold.
I’ll wait and see if this bs actually happens.
So much about lowering emissions
The EU does not allow subsidies to any project, which requires specific technologies. Also any gas power plant receiving subsidies, needs to be converted to hydrogen by 2035.
If they dont extent the deadline, given that the eu as of late has been doing 180 on a lot of thing, which makes me really scepticall of 2035 deadline
Bavaria. Of course. The “Wind turbines destroy the beautiful looks of nature” land.
The regressives just keep going, don’t they?
Bavaria is in such a bad Place in Europa. There isnt much Wind and barely any Mountains for Waterpower expect on the tiny southern Rand of the State.
And they tried nothing to improve their situation. Oh wait, they regulated wind power even more with their dumb “10H” rule.
And now they are getting desperate - major investitions in Bavaria from major players (e.g. Intel) were dropped because the bavarian energy mix was deemed “too dirty”. We in the northern part of DE are on a very good way to renewables. In fact, being not so industrialized as the south, we have a surplus of clean-ish energy already. But still suffer high energy prices because of those MFers.“Mia san Mia”. Blargh.
Judging by TV Spots and Sturm der Liebe which takes place in Bavaria, you would think the whole State is in the Alps. For me, who lives in the “Land in Gepirg”, Tyrol, its pretty funny seeing these Spots. xD
We suffer from a similar issue. We produce twice as much Energy as our Land (Südtirol!) needs, but the Politicans dont want a own Energy-Board or something. So we pay as much as the Italians for Electrical Energy!
