by Eugyppius
Climatism in Germany is attended by all manner of naïve ideas and bright pink fairytale slogans. Among the latter is a dubious proverb proclaiming that “The sun doesn’t send any bills” (in German: “Die Sonne schickt keine Rechnung”). Such proverbs always seem initially plausible (is there anything freer and more democratic than sunshine?) while proving to be basically the opposite of the truth. In fact, the energy transition has landed German taxpayers in the position of paying billions of Euros for the sun to shine. It is becoming an unmitigated disaster, and what is worse, the more we expand solar capacity, the more we will have to pay. For something that does not send any bills, sunshine has sure become very expensive here in the Federal Republic.
Welt calls it “the solar trap”, and it works like this: our Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) pledges to pay renewables producers fixed tariffs for every kilowatt hour of electricity their installations feed into the grid. Whether you are an ordinary climate-conscious person with solar panels on your house or you run massive solar farms, the EEG entitles you to receive these fixed “feed-in tariffs” for a period of 20 years. The EEG also requires grid operators to accept your electricity regardless of demand and to sell it on the electricity exchange.
Now the sun, although it may not charge for its services, turns out to have this naughty habit of shining in many places all at once. When this happens, electricity supply often exceeds electricity demand and exchange prices fall. They can fall all the way to zero, or in extreme situations of excessive sunshine they can even go negative. Negative prices mean that you have to actually pay “buyers” to take the excess power off your hands. Whether the prices are merely very low, or zero, or negative, the German taxpayer has obligated himself, via the EEG, to pay these producers of unwanted if extremely green and climate-friendly electricity their fixed feed-in tariffs anyway. That is, we are on the hook for the difference between the actual exchange value of excess electricity and the feed-in tariffs promised to producers. In this way we have ended up literally paying for the sun to shine.
In September alone, Germany paid €2.6 billion to renewables producers for electricity that had a market value of a mere €145 million. Our sunny autumn is destroying our already-fragile Government budget. Federal number-crunchers had originally allocated €10.6 billion for feed-in tariffs in 2024, but already the Government owes €15 billion and the year is not yet over. Scholz’s Cabinet is thus trying to allocate an additional €8.8 billion for the rest of the year. The Parliament has yet to approve the additional funds, though, and also the damned sun will just not stop bloody shining, and so probably even this supplementary allocation won’t be enough. We’re bleeding money, all for a sun that doesn’t send any bills.
This problem will get worse before it gets better. The more solar panels we install, the greater oversupply we’ll face when the sun shines, and the larger the spread between the fixed feed-in tariffs and the actual market value of this green electricity. In 2024, as I said, the Government projected that feed-in tariffs would cost €10.6 billion, but they’ll probably end up costing €20 billion at least. Next year, the costs are projected to be even higher, and the year after that, they will be higher still. As Welt reports, the German Government plans to triple our solar capacity to 215 gigawatts over the next six years – “the equivalent of 215 nuclear reactors” every time the sun emerges from behind a blessed cloud.
The energy transitioners know they messed up. The new plan is to change the rules for solar subsidies. When prices go negative, larger producers won’t receive their fixed tariffs, and they’ll also have to sell their electricity themselves. In this way, they will become newly sensitive to market demand and stop overproducing electricity when nobody wants it. It’s almost like creating a blind system totally oblivious to market incentives was a bad idea. Unfortunately, the new rules will apply only to new solar installations. The German Government will still have to honour its insane agreement to pay the operators of older solar plants for years to come. We will burn billions for nothing.
You’ll also note that these new rules only target larger operators. The millions of small operators out there – all the ordinary people who have bolted solar panels to their roofs – constitute a serious, ongoing problem for which nobody has any solution at all:
In the long term, [energy economist and Government adviser] Lion Hirth believes that “all electricity producers will have to operate directly on the electricity market”. Even the owners of small rooftop photovoltaic systems would theoretically have to become direct marketers, because only this would provide the economic incentive to take their system off the grid when there is an electricity surplus. “In principle, I consider the expansion of direct marketing to be the only sensible approach in the long term,” Hirth said. … Direct marketing, however, is also highly regulated at the bureaucratic level and also expensive, so it is hardly an option for small systems.
Hirth notes that rooftop installations also don’t make any economic sense. They are three times more expensive, per unit of capacity, than large solar fields. Yet we can’t get rid of these small operators, because climate change propaganda has generated a whole population of eager-beaver German greenists who want to make a personal contribution to stopping climate change by screwing renewable technology to their roofs. As always, climate politics prioritises individual consumer choices and experiences over pragmatic, system-wide outcomes, because at base the Green voter does not really want to stop CO2 emissions. He wants to have the experience of stopping CO2 emissions, and that is not even nearly the same thing.
In the meantime, all budget planners can do is “hope for bad weather” to “decrease solar power feed-in and cause electricity exchange prices to rise again”. Before our Renewable Energy Sources Act, the sun indeed did not send any bills, but in our desperation to change the weather we have created an artificial system in which it will not stop sending them. Ours is truly one of the dumbest eras in human history.
This article originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.
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Nick Stokes: “Wind and solar are free!”
Tis most unfortunate … But, like the article stated … Ours is truly one of the dumbest eras in human history.
Indeed, who would ever have figured out beforehand that paying PV feed-in tariffs with government spending is not a good idea?
“The sun doesn’t send any bills” is certainly true. Missing from this statement is the fact that neither does the earth. No one gets a bill for coal, gas and oil either. The true cost for all of these is the cost of bringing the energy from the source to the consumer, in a form he can immediately use. Right now, the highest cost is for solar produced electricity, especially when you include the cost of having no electricity when it is most needed.
Every watt-h produced by solar or wind is one less watt-h produced by carbon fuels. Win win.
Ours is truly one of the dumbest eras in human history.
Our ERA has produced some of the dumbest asses ever, who somehow managed to grab hold of the levers of power but do not quite know what to do with them
Well, history over the last twenty or so years has clearly shown they know how to eff them up, royally.
They know enough so that they can use that power to their economic advantage.
and end up running into the ditch or off then cliff!
Sure. If you ignore the watt-h’s used to make the solar panel, maintain it, and dispose of it at end of life. Then there is the negative price on electricity which the article focuses on. Meaning you have to PAY someone else to take that power. Now, where did that money come from? Well it came from other economic activity that produced that money. That activity most likely uses carbon fuels.
Not so simple as you think.
And the backup for when the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine
You say:
You’ve just been told:
I guess reading comprehension isn’t your strong suit.
Anyone who thinks that humans can “Save the Earth” by not using natural resources has a comprehension problem, and its not due to reading difficulty.
It’s the classic “True Believer” problem as Eric Hoffer described eloquently in his 1951 book. If you haven’t figured out how to comprehend it for 73 years, it’s hopeless now anyway.
Then along come those inevitable winter periods of persistent cold and clouds – and solar is useless and wind turbines unreliable as always.
Stock up on firewood and candles and enjoy your Green Dreams
Clueless would be an understatement.
@trafamadore: you forgot the /sarc tag.
Except when one fairly compares the LCOE of a watt-hour produced by carbon fuels compared to a watt-hour produced by PV or CSP solar or onshore/offshore wind including the cost of energy storage to make both comparable on a 24-hour supply capability (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source ).
A fair comparison shows that carbon fuels WIN, solar and wind LOSE. But maybe for you costs don’t matter.
And every watt-h (your term) of installed wind and solar power must be backed up by a reliable source of energy. In Texas, we just created the Texas Energy Fund with money to make loans and grants to reliable (natural gas) power sources to make our grid reliable. This fund was appropriated with $10 Billion from the General Revenue fund. Simple math – we have 30 million residents so that breaks down to $166 in costs to every Texan to offset the lack of reliability because we have 39,000 MW of wind and 26,000 MW of solar “installed” capacity that often provide less than 5% of installed capacity when demand is high. This doesn’t show up on your electric bills but is an additional direct cost subsidy for these unreliable, non-environmentally friendly green scams.
Wrong. French EDF entered a crisis of “renewables” where the variation of production forced on thermal unit is causing all sorts of issues.
The French gov managed to hide (with the help of the always complicit MSM) that the “corrosion sous contrainte” was not about unused “viroles” on the NEVER used safety stop system “RIS” = Réseau d’Injection de Sécurité (bore acid injection). We were told corrosion was in NOT used pipes. The corrosion is in the water pipes of the primary circuit. The whole thing is a scam. It’s the thermal stress from temperature gradient from not using full power and frequent power changes. (Except for the new EPR design, power change can only happen with a temperature change. The EPR can change coolant flow rate too.)
So we only heard “yaddi yadda it’s mysterious” but it is not mysterious. It’s frequent, rapid, temp change.
But of real insignificance in the overall state of things
Rooftops in Australia are often the largest lunchtime generator. Today rooftops were supplying 50% of the NEM demand. South Australia demand was negative and the rooftops in the region were exporting to Victoria. Wholesale prices in SA went negative at 0720 and are still negative at 1600.
It is now economic for households in Australia to leave the grid. It is no longer economic for households in fringe developments to connect to the grid. It is lower cost to install solar panels and batteries than exposing the household to high grid costs.
Australian households now have the economic choice of making their own electricity or remaining exposed to the ever rising cost of grid power. As more leave the grid, the growing costs of all the new grid hardware and maintenance is spread across a smaller consumer base.
Rick,
do not Australian house holders require elctricity 365 x 24 x 60, something the sun, even with storagae cannot gurantee?
Well, in a lot of rural areas, we don’t get that anyway, so no, we don’t.
I have only electricity coming into my house. No water, gas or phone. My electricity fails several times a year, often for an entire day. When stormy, it’s almost guaranteed to fail at some point, and in the tropics where I live, summer is always stormy.
I’ve seriously considered solar + batteries, but circumstances are causing me to move instead.
I read recently that ~ 30% of Australian households live in multi-level strata apartment style buildings.
So this significant cohort of the citizenry doesn’t have the opportunity of a roof of their own on which to install solar panels, and receive the attendant subsidiaries and rebates for their electricity consumption costs.
Talk about inequality and denial of inclusion by renewables proponents.
Hypocrites.
I would disagree, people with their own roof top panels and a batteries who are not connected to the grid are not hypocrites. They are simply choosing not to take power from the grid but to provide their own. On the other hand if they have a connection and only use it when their panels don’t produce then they are acting hypocritically. You either do one or the other not both. These people do receive rebates but that is not a hypocritical choice just an economic one, I doubt that you would turn down a rebate if one was offered for some project that you were undertaking.
You don’t know me, or where I draw a line on hypocrisy.
I did pass on the opportunity to install taxpayer subsidized solar panels and batteries.
I know when governments want to buy support for things that don’t stand up to open market rationality or competition.
I very much doubt most households are actually able to be truly off-grid.
Certainly nobody in a multi-story apartment or condominium.
Gives ‘sunburn’ a whole new meaning.
>> Hirth notes that rooftop installations also don’t make any economic sense.
That seems not quite correct, thanks to massive tax incentives.
Most of these small operators are capable of doing their math!
Also, it could make macro-economic sense if these households would perform some of their energy intensive procedures during sunshine instead of selling as much solar electricity as possible and then doing their laundry and such with the cheaper “net electricity” in the evening.
Part of the cost for small operators btw comes from the large net owners defrauding them of their right to sell their produce t this guaranteed price while consuming cheaper “net electricity”in parallel.
You missed the other incentives for house owners to put PV on the roof.
The higher electricity prices reduce the payback periodAdd in batteries and you can go off grid when the grid fails.
It makes it worse for those that can’t afford the kit or don’t have the right roof direction but what do the Greenies care.
As someone who has designed off grid homes, it’s not as simple as adding a tesla powerwall to your solar panels.
If you are grid connected then a battery backup can help smooth some of the peak hr bills, but you better have a generator if you think you are going to go ‘off-grid’.
To be truly off-grid, you need to oversize the panel field and then oversize the battery backup because it is when you need it most that you will be without power.
“…you better have a generator…”
It’s reached the point here in the mountains of West Virginia, that if you want reliable power you add a generator and a fairly large (100-500gal) propane tank to run it. Gas and diesel both have long term storage problems, solar isn’t always available, and battery backup has reliability problems.
I’ve found that a wood stove with a heat pump for summer cooling and backup heating works great. Just keep a couple of years worth of wood for the wood stove on hand and, if you’re really into survival mode, a crosscut saw and splitting wedge.
These things I pointed it out more than a decade ago.
They did something similar in The Netherland and Belgium. But they betrayed the people and changed the rules because it costs billions of subsidies.
Every time I read of more solar power I say prices will go up. Why don’t others seem to understand or are some just evil? If our peak is 10GW/h and you already have 20GW/h solar capacity those greens idiots are calling to go to 40GW/h. It’s just ridiculous.
I don’t agree with rooftop installation, I prefer them above destroying land with large solar field installations. But rooftop should always have been off-grid for personal use. This could make economical sense for the owner.
But even with all proof on the table we won’t see any chance, instead they are gearing up for more unwanted wind and solar energy.
If you want some green madness look at Belgium. They planned to build an energy island in the Nord Sea, price has gone up from 2.2 to 7 billion, and will likely be even more in the end. The whole project is just stupid. And Denmark already pulled out of their part because of excessive costs.
This is a genuine question
If the German government decide that they ca no longer afford this scheme and decide they won’t pay for electricity they don’t want how do Solar Farm owners turn the panels off? What happens if they can’t be turned off?
Supplementary can said owners afford using their own money to install storage, presumably battery, to supply at other low generation times?
This happened in the UK, early FIT schemes gave ridiculously high index linked export rates per Kwh to home owners who signed up to solar panels on their roof. Guaranteed for 25 years, some are currently being paid over 70p per Kwh. After a couple of years the UK Govt clocked they were mad to have offered these rates and tried to retrospectively decrease them, cue a court case and the contracts cannot be changed. These are FIT contract for 2011/12 so still 13 years to go.
Thanks Ed but I’m still none the wiser.
I really wanted to know how you stop solar PV generating electricity when the sun is shining on them.
Solar panels don’t need to be “turned off”. If you disconnect them from a load, e.g. with a relay or a manual switch, they will still (when the sun is shining on them) produce a voltage (energy), but no work (power). You could say that the electrical potential being generated is thus “static” electricity (available to do work) rather than “dynamic” (flowing somewhere).
Yup, we currently get 72p per Kwh, & rising due to index-linked FIT export rates
& the contract runs till 2037 … best investment ever.!!
They have paid for 2 backup gen sets, a changeover switch, 18mths fuel, separate 12vDC LED lighting ( battery ), a log-burner & chainsaw, plus change.
In a power-out, the only thing we don’t run is the electric shower, every thing else is normal.
We also have oil & tank gas heating, both with ~12mth fuel.
First off the inverters you install must be on an approved list and have the right country grid code ie the criteria for when the grid fails and the inverter disconnects from the grid such as during a blackout to protect line workers. Then there are extra rules included, the Netherlands uses grid frequency, so inverters set to the Netherlands grid code start to restrict output as the frequency raises from 50.2hz and stop output completely at 52hz. Germany uses reactive power or COS to limit PV output. Both the frequency and reactive power of the Grid can be controlled nationally or by region by the National Grid so they can limit PV input if required.
Ah, but Wir Schaffen Das!
Once again I’d like to thank Germany for being the crash test dummy for renewables. But is anyone listening to the results of the crashes?
Awesome!
Here in the UK a developer has submitted proposals for a giant solar farm covering 11 square miles near Newark in Nottinghamshire and comprising 1.5m solar panels. It is more than twice as big as the largest solar farm approved so far near Cottam in Lincolnshire.
Since Labour was elected mad Miliband has approved four of the five largest solar projects so far and has vowed to take on “The blockers, the delayers and the obstructionists” who oppose large solar and onshore wind developments.
The people who live in the area of the new solar farm are non too happy. 54.2% of respondents to a consultation process were against and only 16.3% in favour. 26.4% wanted to see changes to the proposal before they would support it and 3.1% had no opinion
How much of those 11 square miles of proposed solar farm requires clear cutting of forests or destruction of farm land for grazing livestock?
Is anyone concerned at all that the increase in specular reflectivity from solar PV panels compared to natural ground vegetation will contribute to atmospheric heating and adversely impact the natural hydrological cycle in the region?
I don’t think there is much forest involved, that has already mostly been removed over the centuries, but there is certainly a lot of prime fertile agricultural land that is going to be covered.
The developers say sheep will be able to graze under parts of it!
Google can be your friend . . . here is what its AI says about the matter:
From what I’ve seen, grass don’t grow in tha’ shade. It’s just guess, but it looks to me like grass in a solar farm only gets about 50% partial sun :<)
I assume Cottam was chosen because of the now retired (and demolished?) coal fired power station giving easy access to the grid. Presumably this new proposal is in what was Mega Watt Valley for the same reason.
Probably right. There is a massive amount of solar being proposed all around this area.
Yet another solar subsidy farm for Anglesey, covering 3,700 acres of mostly farmland, ( around 2% of Anglesey)
https://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/mega-solar-farms-threaten-swallow-30058079
We just got an offer this week from a company to install a solar farm on our property. Sounds like a good idea.
Back in the early 1930’s they asked the leader of the German government about installing green energy on the grid. He said ‘Nien’.
So they installed nine solar panels, and nine turbines onto the energy grid. Never had a problem with outages, or excessive costs.
So, Hitler was right.
“… receive these fixed “feed-in tariffs” for a period of 20 years.”
The contract writers for the solar industry, being smarter than the government bureaucrats (GBs), will have reason to celebrate as they retire. The GBs will ignominiously leave the system with their undeserved pensions.
“Tulip mania” lasted only 3 years. CO2 mania has now gone on for 40 years. I’d love to see the end. There is a 97% chance I will reach ambient room temperature prior to the cessation of this madness.
“The sun doesn’t send any bills” . . . but it sure demands a heavy tribute of taxes/subsidies for harvesting its sunshine.
I have always been amused by the German idea that they can get useful energy from solar when they really need it. The most southern point in Germany is a mountain pass called Haldenwanger Eck in the Bavarian Alps: at 47°16’N
For Americans, that is between Hibbing Minnesota (for Europeans Hibbing is the town where Bob Dylan was born and raised) at 47°25′N and Lake Itasca, the headwaters of the Mississippi at 47°13′N.
That is way north. In December and January you get about 8 1/2 hours of daylight, but the altitude of the sun is about 24 degrees. That means bloody little energy when it is dark and really cold outside.
Like, why bother at all?
Yes. But even worse, overall Germany is generally considered to be nation with more overcast days than clear sky days.
Attached is a screen-grab of what Google’s AI has to say about the matter.
Note that 1,600 hours of average annual sunshine is about 18% of the total hours, or not even 40% of a year’s projected 12 hours/day x 365.25 days = 4,383 hours of sunshine.
There is absolutely no reason for the tax payer to be charged for dishonest and ignorant government policy. It has to stop now. Home solar panels should not be able to add their excess energy to the grid, if they have excess they need to stop producing or store it themselves. Wind and solar should be removed from the grid but if we can’t do that they also should be required to store their own excess. Lastly we should never pay these mongrels for power they aren’t producing.
Solar is pathetically energy dilute anywhere. Above 45 degrees North latitude it’s worse. Munich, in Southern Germany is at 48 degrees North latitude. Decades of “less than wise” waste., Tragic Green politics.
The problem is production vs. demand: Solar PV produces electricity precisely during the least demand period of the day: 10 am to 2 pm peaks.
So the effect, as you increase the amount of solar PV on a grid, is to reduce systemwide electricity prices during the solar PV production periods to zero or negative.
You can build expensive battery farms to shift this power to the evening power consumption peak, but it is…expensive.
This is made worse because of the solar PV capacity factor: every 1 kW of dispatchable power generation requires at least 3 kW of solar PV. This in turn forces a requirement to be able to store this “excess”.
So let’s do the math: you need 3x as much solar PV to match dispatchable generation, systemwide. You need at least 1:1 battery storage to shift to peak consumption. You need additional generation and storage to account for weekly, monthly, seasonal and yearly variation which in turn forces more storage capacity.
It is an open loop where the non-subsidized ratepayers are forced to foot the bill.
This is why increased solar PV (and wind, slightly smaller scale and different time zones, but same problems) causes electricity prices to keep going up.
Feed-in tariffs are a scam: pure subsidy for the wealthier part of the population that can afford to take advantage of the tax breaks in order to get into the scam.