Gas prices - Where is gas still affordable?

Since you have noticed it yourself by now, you build photovoltaics, just briefly for the others: The cheap energies are the renewables. The expensive ones, because of which we are in the economic and climate crisis, are the fossil fuels.

In Germany it applies: to have 1 KW of renewable electricity you need almost 1 KW from fossil power plants. That's just how it is. Storage (including pumped storage) on such a scale does not exist and is not foreseeable except for PowerPoint players ("digitalization," "supply orientation," "virtual power plants," etc.). Again, hardly anyone understands the required dimensions. That’s the crux. So you have to operate a gigantic shadow power plant park, which depending on the power plant, is only in operation for a few to a thousand hours a year. Out of 8,860 hours that the year has. Since renewables have priority. It doesn’t help if you can generate wind for 5 cents/kWh. Because massive transmission lines are behind that first (most regions in Germany are supplied regionally with electricity and the long-distance lines are only for balancing to reduce the number of reserve KW). And secondly, a conventionally dimensioned conventional power plant must be built and maintained. But only for a few hours of operation, i.e., with a utilization rate in the single-digit percentage range or below. If you now amortize the investment in such a power plant over the years and divide it by the number of generated kWhs, absurd numbers naturally come out, of course! But that is not the "fault" of the conventional power plant, but only due to the erratic generation of the wind power plant. Why were these 40 new gas power plants planned for the energy transition? Which have now become obsolete since 24.2. If sun and wind alone are so great and can generate electricity for one cent. Are the investors stupid? Little tip: Because of the few earnings due to low utilization, they wouldn’t have been built anyway, simply because they are unprofitable – I know this firsthand from Uniper. With that, the energy transition would not have been successful anyway.

The reason why light switches still work in France and the German stock exchange electricity price remains somewhat reasonable is the small amount of renewables that, despite all resistance, have nevertheless been able to arise.

If those are the renewables, then please explain to us why the spread between the EEX futures of July and January of the same year has continued to widen in recent years? Electricity has always been relatively more expensive in winter due to demand, but since the supply (photovoltaics) is now also decreasing, the conventional power plants (made more expensive due to the few operating hours) have to go from reserve to production and now preferentially supply their energy, made more expensive by the renewables. Hence the rising spread! What renewables may cheapen in price in summer is causally blown back out price-wise in the winter half-year because of them.

And if MANY are doing it NOW, where does the electricity come from NOW?

from the ramped-up factories for photovoltaic modules in Germany. The space for this is sufficiently available on the large housing blocks, um, residential blocks or multi-family houses thanks to the tenant electricity prevention policy of recent years. Okay, (wo)manpower might be a bit lacking for installation, but we'll just have to get to work after hours under professional supervision and contribute a little work for the common good! I believe there are even enough volunteers for this (maybe the tenants of the housing blocks who can thereby scare away their utility bill specter?)

Is eben so.

Yeah, damn. What else am I supposed to say now?!

I can understand anyone for whom climate protection doesn't matter when they no longer know how to heat their place. And these issues cannot be separated, unfortunately they belong together.

Exactly, paraphrasing B. Brecht: "first comes heating, then morality"

And if many do it NOW, where does the electricity come from NOW?

The electricity for that, of course, comes as always from the outlet :rolleyes: The one-million-dollar question, however, is: how does electricity always get into the outlet on demand? Delivering electricity for 1 cent/kWh on a windy, cloudless July day does the person heating nothing good if they have to turn on their heat pump on a relatively windless January night at -5° must—no "supply-oriented" trickery here. Now the demand is there, not in July! And if then the electricity has to come from the rarely used lignite power plant (and that therefore costs 60 cents/kWh) or it even leads to rolling blackouts, of course the person heating is only helped to a limited extent

Yes damn. What else am I supposed to say now?!

Something like: That you are speechless and have run out of arguments.

from the restarted factories for photovoltaic modules in Germany.

Depending on the source (from studies of the last 10 years), you need between 3,000 and 9,000 kWh of cumulative primary energy in the manufacturing chain for 1 kWp module capacity. In sunny regions (so not in Germany), you ideally reach an energetic payback time of about 2 years. For us, rather 3 years or more. However, since production would have to grow exponentially to ensure a significant increasing share of photovoltaic capacity, the self-production of photovoltaic and its local installation will, over many years, ultimately represent an energy eater rather than an energy producer. Only when entering the saturation range does the energy sink become a macroeconomic net harvest. Before that, we energetically pay the price. But stupidly, we currently hardly have anything left to invest anyway... Simple mathematics, but Greenpeace doesn't tell you that ;) Wind power is much better in this regard; the energetic payback in northern Germany is only about 6 months.