The former Economic minister and professor Yanis Varoufakis explains [1].
My Fiberhood cooperative has a solution: the Enernet smart grid where you pay $0.01 per kWh. We wire up one in three houses or more in a neighborhood with power routers. People buy and sell only solar electricity from panels in the neighborhood, from batteries and from every ev charging station on every parking spot in the neighborhood and from every parked ev. Each participating house saves $2000 to $5000 per year for 30 years or more[2]. You also get free 25 Gbps internet. You heat your house with a heatpump or cool the house with an ice storage ac powered only by solar. If the cooperative makes any money the share the profit with all the members or they vote to buy more solar panels and batteries. The cooperative gives loans to houses that can not afford their own panels.
[1] Best version with info graffics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3bo-s_OY4Q or
Longer version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NicE0-N9ux0&list=TLPQMDcwNDI... or
short version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaHepQyE37Q
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Merik-Voswinkel/publica...
edit: I didn’t watch the videos, I don’t have time first watch a video and then to dissect bullshit from truth.
Do you get paid less for power fed to the grid than power sold at retail? Yes. Because they're different things. You get say 5 cents for a kWh fed back to the grid, while you pay more like 25c. But guess what? Wholesalers also get 5 cents to sell to the grid. It's just that there's an additional 20 cents in grid operation and taxes for a retail price.
Taxes you can't avoid, it's not a 'scam'. It's money you pay that goes into public funds and returns to the public, and is spent by people you can vote to elect to represent you.
Grid costs also aren't a scam, they're just a cost of doing business. Again, profit margins are small, so they're pricing based on cost, not based on scam.
And it's all entirely optional. You can just install batteries yourself. You can do whatever you want. You don't have to use the grid. But surprise surprise, there's no reason to think that a small network is on average cheaper than a big network. The bigger the network the easier it is to share storage capacity and offload excesses from one place to another. It's the reason most states and countries try to build interconnectors to even build international grids, and why islands like Cyprus that don't interconnect and have small markets have the highest electricity prices. It's why anyone who builds a home and has the choice to connect to an available grid or not, does so. And why land and homes in locations without grid-access are valued less, because they're more expensive to set-up.
The grid is a nationwide electrical circuit with requirements to connect to most buildings, and with demanding uptime and safety requirements. How much ought building and maintaining that to cost?
Maybe a max-capacity price would be better for household grid connections, but that doesn’t change the fact that the grid needs to be paid for.
We will do a small survey and put up a detailed map of your neighborhood (like openstreetmap, see the slide in this talk [1]). We hand out door to door flyers and organise a weekend barbeque neighborhood party where everyone can come see how the cable between neighbours goes roof-to-roof, window-to-window or garden-to-garden between power routers. See our cost price bifacial solar panels and the large batteries.
We find that within a few weeks a few hundred people signed up for the cooperative and we start installing the first 10 houses. Most people invest in solar panels and batteries at wholesale prices installed by volunteers. Others get a loan to pay for this. You wind up getting payed for the panels you bought or paying around 1 dollar cent per kWh, saving a few thousand dollars per years for decades.
In the US the Rocky Mountain Institute and its founder Amory Lovins describes this as 'grid defection' and it happens on a large scale now.
Fiberhood has cooperatives forming all around the world, both rural and urban: Ukraine, Peru (near Iquitos by the Indian tribe on the Amazon River Bank, Southern Spain, Slovenia, Finland, The Netherlands, Australia.
Fiberhood is unique in that we have our own Enernet power routers (a software controlled multi-port bidirectional AC-DC-DC inverter peer to peer network) that can share large amounts of DC current, has special power aggregation to enable megawatt EV chargers in every house, battery nano-inverters that make cheap batteries last up to 20000 charge/discharge cycles, integrate (free) discarded solar panels and has a range of software defined networking options including 4 x 25 Gbps internet ports per house. Most smart grids are just a different meter and payment scheme, not a radical rewiring of the entire electricity system in the neighborhood without a commercial company or government controlling what citizens pay. Other smart grids raise the cost of grid defection, Fiberhood tech makes it possible to have abundant redundant solar energy at its cost price $0.01 per kWh, many times cheaper than national AC grid pricing anywhere in the world. The tech was made to prevent making money on energy but incentivize solving the climate crises by making Solar by far the cheapest option. Stop almost all carbon and methane greenhouse gas emissions by going 100% solar.
As noted in the methodology below, they are measuring the gas-implied level as the marginal running costs of a combined-cycle gas turbine plant: the price of the natural gas necessary to generate a given amount of electricity, plus the cost of the necessary carbon credits to burn that natural gas. Then they compare that to the actual electricity price
What's up with Americans consistently calling things "wrong" like this? "Gas" isn't even the right state of matter for the subject, nor is "football" actually a sport where the ball is mostly for the foot, almost like things are intentionally named bad.
We're both wrong. It's a liquid at room temperature, and it's called not petroleum.
"Football" is a different game in the US because it arrived there from England in the 19th century when carrying the ball was allowed. In England the sport eventually split into distinct sports: association football (aka soccer) and rugby. In America they evolved the game independently but didn't change the name.
Hope that clears it up.
That's the part that don't make no sense, so no, still very unclear why Americans keeps insisting on calling things the wrong names :)
The full names of the two rugby codes are "rugby union football" and "rugby league football". So Americans aren't alone in their cavalier use of the word "football".
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_rules_football
Yeah, that never happens, not even with important national institutions or anything like that.
Of course it does, why would anybody say "gas" when they are talking about a liquid? :p
The reason why power prices can still decouple: Because there are more and more quarter-hours where gas plants are NOT setting the price and the marginal cost is set by renewables.
The same is happening in the UK.
> , so consumers pay for the highest costing output regardless of how much if any they use.
No, if no Gas is needed (!) for power production in any quarter-hour, the price is not set by gas.
PS: Emphasis on needed. Gas plants may still be running at a loss for whatever reason (heat coupling, special contracts), but if they are not needed to provide the power, they will have to bid at a loss, and then they will not be able to drive the price.
It's true that even 2% of usage being gas, means 100% of the demand pays the gas price.
But (!) that's only true for the spot market at that particular point in the day. And that changes all the time.
Example: if you use zero gas for 80% of the day, and use just 10% gas for remaining 20% of the day, then that day gas was just 2% of total demand, like we said earlier. But it's not true that gas prices dictated 100% of the price that day.
After all, gas prices dictated only 20% of the day's prices. The remaining part of the day there was no gas demand, and thus it did not dictate the price. And that happens more and more often.
The more renewables + storage are built out, the more time of the day that gas is displaced, not used and thus not part of the price mechanism.
Second, if the market pays at the gas price, the renewables reap all the profits (because their costs are far below the gas price). This incentivizes further renewable capacity build-out, eventually displacing gas entirely. This incentive structure pushes the market the fastest towards lowest-cost generation, which is renewable nowadays.
edit: terrific 15m explanation on spot pricing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Paun0siu67o
Saudis pump oil at cost of $10 per barrel. Will they sell it to you at $10? Nope. The average oil price? Nope.
Saudis will sell the barrel at the highest price people are willing to pay - the marginal price. So if the most expensive oil needed to match the global oil demand is some super expensive arctic oil project, the oil will be priced according the marginal cost of that project even if only 1% is needed.
> What does "decoupled" mean? In a gas-dominated electricity market, the marginal generator setting the price is almost always a gas-fired power plant (CCGT). That means electricity prices are structurally linked to gas prices — when gas rises, electricity rises with it. Decoupling happens when enough zero-marginal-cost renewable generation (wind, solar) pushes gas off the margin for enough hours that the annual average electricity price no longer tracks gas.
[1] https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/877586/4e4dce913c3d88...
A nuclear reactor moves the entire market down, including the costs to the consumer when he buys solar energy.
Here is a UN document explaining it: https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2025-09/GECES-21_2025_...
There are significant problems around rolling out that much capacity quickly enough, and I also don't think nuclear should have been shut down that hastily, but I don't think "only nuclear can cover long-term energy needs" is true in any way.
[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant_...>
And they still don’t have a long term storage but therefore rotting barrels with nuclear waste in the interim storage facility Asse which have to be retrieved. Cost estimate around 14 billion Euros.
https://energy-charts.info/charts/price_spot_market/chart.ht...
A widening gap between electricity cost and gas cost (and fuel cost) will be THE main driver of electrification! Installing a heat pump will be a no-brainer, driving an electric car will be a no brainer.
This can only happen once electricity decouples from gas prices - but that requires lots of renewables in the mix!
High gas prices + gap is small -> Big opportunity to undercut via cheaper methods like solar -> attractive investment -> more new builds
High gas prices + gap is wide and widening -> Smaller and smaller opportunity to invest in solar, as the market is already dominated by solar prices -> less attractive investment -> less new builds
Am I missing something here?
Occasional negative prices -> Invest in intermittent consuming applications.
Essentially it's not an isolated market, but part of a bigger whole.
As an example imagine a village that constituted 1% of the population of a country. The village was 100% renewable, and the country was 0% renewable. If the village disconnected its grid, in isolation its prices would be dictated by its renewables. But if its connected, its renewables just get traded on a market with marginal prices. If a person elsewhere in the country has more expensive generation, they'll but your cheap renewables at their price level. Thus the village will experience high prices like everyone else.
Now suppose Germany is that village in an interconnected EU market. Of course the numbers from my example are exaggerated, but the point remains: Germany's renewables aren't enough, if pricing is set at a much larger market, with fewer renewables.
Today about 20% of Germany's electricity was exported. While only about 6% of its demand came from gas. In other words if Germany was disconnected, it'd have needed no gas, and thus prices would've been lower.
Of course disconnecting isn't a good idea for other reasons, as on other days Germany imports. And Germany's ability to export its renewable excess generates significant revenues, creates incentives to build more renewables, and offsets emissions and pollution in other countries, too.
But long story short, it'll take more for one part of the whole to go renewable. As the EU is generally transitioning towards renewables we see a decoupling happen.
In a commodity market, the price is always set by the most expensive producer that is still able to sell. That's natural - why would I sell my apples cheaper than the other farmer if you need so many apples that you have to by from both of us?
This marginal price is only for the spot market right? So the key question is more what % of the mix is spot vs longer term. And thus what the overall impact is on total blended price.
But ultimately, due to arbitrage, PPA prices will converge towards expected spot market prices.
Inverters a different story.
Nope. They pay more than they were with the "old" energy mix of more gas and nuclear.
Telling people it could be worse isn't really something to be proud of.
I personally now have solar panels on the roof and a heat pump so we only use electricity and don't rely on gas. Germany's strategy is really beneficial to households like my own. Unless you're relatively well off or on benefits, you're losing big time. The costs are constantly increasing with people telling others to just take money (you don't have) to install some solar panels on the house (you don't own) or buy an electric car (you can't afford).
So I don't know where you're getting the "No" from?
You could argue that maybe investing all those subsidies into nuclear would have been cheaper, but that would have had a lot of path dependencies that simply did not pan out in Europe.
It's one single grid. You get coal, nuclear, wind, solar, and everything else. If you buy from a provider, you get that mix.
An energy transition isn't just some big centralized state planned enterprise. It's also the sum of people putting up their own solar (on the balcony if they're renters!) etc.
An 800W plug-in solar system for your balcony can be had for 200 euros these days, breakeven is super quick.
Do you have any reason to believe the methodology in the linked page is wrong?