It's sadly not that surprising. Germany has a lot of heavy industries that require access to relatively low and stable energy prices. Furthermore, given the changed world situation regarding energy and the lack of developed nuclear power, they will need to rely on wind and solar power to a greater extent.

Regrettably, energy poverty is a new concept we will have to learn in Europe, I'm afraid...

> lack of developed nuclear power

Well, Germany had a few (remaining) nuclear power plants, and the lasts were shut down this year for political reasons. Apparently, it's better to import gas from Qatar and burn coal in the meantime while enjoying a (partially) self inflicted recession.

The lost generations of nuclear engineers in Germany is a concerning issue. Training a nuclear engineer requires a long-term commitment, from sparking interest in the field to building new plants in Europe. Without a new generation of nuclear engineers, Germany will struggle to maintain its nuclear power plants and develop new ones. It's crucial to invest in education and training programs to attract and retain young talent in the nuclear industry. Doing it today may result in a new power plant in like… 60-100 years.

? Sorry why?

The remaining nuclear power plants just had 4GW of output. Just this year alone 12 GW of renewables will come online.

That's a dishonest comparison as wind and solar are extremely volatile and can't replace a stable power source. You need something like coal for that.

You need peaking power plants such as Gas to cover volatility.

The comparison is a bit dishonest because it doesn't include the capacity factor of either technology:

Solar ~11%

Wind ~21%

Nucear ~90%

The nuclear power plants that were shut down would’ve needed extremely expensive maintenance to keep them running.

It’s a really complicated issue, with lots of misinformation floating around on both sides of the discussion. After all, nuclear power plants aren’t actually economically viable either without heavy subsidisation and socialising the trash management (at least the ones we’ve had in Germany).

While I can’t say wherever Germany should’ve built more nuclear power plants… I’m however certain that most online discussions about the topic are extremely misinformed. The biggest reason for this situation is probably corruption, some of which has been proven and reported on going back decades with Schroeder for example.

> The nuclear power plants that were shut down would’ve needed extremely expensive maintenance to keep them running.

That's false. The reason for the shot down was not economical but political. We pay an extremely high price for our nuclear delusions.

It’s both true. Their maintenance was delayed for years because of that political decision to shut them down, which worsened the situation.

And for the record: I never claimed that the decision to shut them down wasn’t politically motivated, I just pointed out multiple reasons why it wasn’t completely bonkers. The way you phrased your point also makes it pretty transparent why misinformation campaigns work so well. You once heard one part of the story and now believe to understand a very multilayered situation.

Calling the situation multilayered is just an excuse to partly justify this terrible mistake. There is no doubt that the cost of shutting them down far exceeds the cost of letting them run, so the remark about "extremely expensive" maintenance is just false.

Maintenance to keep them running would have been prohibitively expensive, because non was done in last years due the decision to shut them down. So yes, the cost of getting them back into running shape was prohibitive due to that maintenance backlog.

Different question so, instead of complaining about spoiled milk, what is your proposal for the future? A realistic one please takong into account project lead times for new power plants.

Unfortunately, I'm not so sure there's a quick fix for this.

Both nuclear, water and gas have the advantage that they're pretty massive and can store energy while they rotate. In the past, these systems were great for the grid because they kept on spinning and were hard to slow down. So, when there was a big load on the grid, like when an industrial plant fired up a huge device that sucked up lots of power, these giant machines took a while to slow down. That meant they could pump some extra power into the grid, at least for short periods.

The realistic option is probably to expand solar and wind power and also set up hydro pumps for storing energy. Alongside that, also invest in SMR reactors and supercapacitor to handle sudden spikes in grid demand.

> Maintenance to keep them running would have been prohibitively expensive

No. It would have been very cheap compared to the long term cost of a) an energy and economic crisis and b) with replacing nuclear with other power sources.

That kind of corruption goes bavk to the likes of Strauss. Otherwise, fully agree.

But gas and power are now cheaper than they were before the war?

It's spot prices, which:

1) Can change very fast, e.g. on potential strong China reopening or colder than usual winter.

2) Do not fully represent cost of long-term contracts.

Also, with reduced industrial output (especially in energy intensive production) you need less gas. If you try to return to the previous levels, the price will react sharply, thus making growth in those sectors difficult. Finally, a significant amount of electricity generation has migrated from gas to coal, which is not free of consequences...

Also spot prices reflect the storage availability. The storage will be filled by October according to the existing contracts. I.e. there is no much room to receive more gas if it will have to be brought to Europe in the next few months.

A really cold winter without Russian gas may bring the spot prices back to record levels as then the supply lines will be the bottleneck.

Long term Europe needs bigger storage to smooth price volatility.

Cheaper than immediately before the war. Far more expensive than the long-term average of the 2000s and 2010s.

Edit: also, immediately before the war, Russia already seems to have started restricting supply, driving up prices.

Financial markets are complex, and often have a long lag time. There are many compounding factors at play here.

Curious, won’t a recession do that?

Why? How expensive is nuclear vs wind and solar at this point?

Depends; a lot more expensive typically. But the real challenge is the process of getting any nuclear built in a hurry. This seems to be a process that is measured in decades; not months or years.

And given the cost, is not something that seems to be very popular in any case right now. Wind and solar are much more popular. The cost is much lower, plans are easy to get approved because there is very little controversy (other than some level of NIMBYism) and you can be up and running pretty soon after.

And a useful side-effect of investing in renewable technology is that it can be exported. German companies like Siemens and others are making quite a bit of money with this. That's a good thing in times of recessions. Germany's heavy industry will end up going cold turkey on fossil fuels because of cost and climate. This is short term very disruptive of course but that also means a lot of money is being invested in alternatives. Which of course is something Germany can export as well. Germany might come out fine.

> a lot more expensive typically

more expensive to operate existing plants that were already paid for a long time ago? i could never understand the shutting down part.

Nuclear is very cheap when you have an available power plant like Germany has... but instead decides to shut it down because that's not politically acceptable to use them

I think public opinion has shifted actually, but greens are still very ideologically opposed and a member of the coalition government.

The plants in Germany would have been due for expensive maintenance and they are old. (Maybe not EOL old but old)

The problem for Germany is that nuclear power plants, wind, and solar don't product natural gas.

Natural gas can be turned into electricity, but electricity cannot practically be turned into natural gas and German industry needs a lot of natural gas.

But with sufficient baseload nuclear, one could free up gas capacity because of the lower demand for gas peaker plants. Similarly, if electricity were as cheap as gas per kWh, many industrial applications could actually switch to electrical heating.

The cost of nuclear isn't important to this short term debate, simply having it is.

Right, solar and wind, although relatively cheap to produce, unfortunately, face challenges when it comes to energy storage. These types of industries require stability.

Electricity cannot be stored, regardless of source. Base load is a thing, sure. But there are ways ro cope with that, all energy hungry industries in Europe, and Germany, found ways to do so. That includes everything, from steel over chemicals to paper.

The lack, and price, of gas for things other than electricity was a problem for a while. But one that had nothing to do with nuclear power.

Electricity can be stored, mostly in pumped hydro storage, but also in e.g. battery storage, pressurized air or heated rock. But storage is scarce, expensive and doesn't look like it is going to be built anytime soon (for the usual reasons, NIMBY, environmentalism, YAGNI (correct or imagined), "energy abstinence is more virtuous", "we can manage by regulating demand", etc.)

Pumped hydro capacities are all but fully occupied, and few and far between to begin with. Battery tech os nowhere close, nor is battery capacity, to make as much as a dent overall.

Nuclear is dirt cheap when you have your power plants already built. Most of the cost of nuclear is building cost and related capital cost for the loans you take to build one and teardown/disposal. All German reactors had already paid off, teardown and disposal are deposited up front. So just running cost for them, mostly people and fuel, which is in the 5ct/kWh range (for sources e.g. look at the last IPCC report, but good numbers are hard to come by for the usual trade secret reasons).

Wind is also in the 5ct/kWh range, solar at 10ct/kWh. However, to get both to a load factor of over 90% (which is typical for nuclear power plants) you would need a sufficient amount of storage and overbuild your capacity, which will cost an additional >10ct/kWh.

On the energy markets in Europe, at least the one Germany is connected to, the prices per kWh are calculated basedbon generation costs. Meaning investments and fox costs are not considered. CO2 certificates are so. With those being way too cheap the three cheapest electricity sources are: Wind, PV and coal. If memory serves well you have then hydro and nuclear, with has gas power plants usually being priced out more often than not.

That structure doesn't really make sense from a climate perspective. It does show so, that nuclear is far, far from being cheap.

> On the energy markets in Europe, at least the one Germany is connected to, the prices per kWh are calculated basedbon generation costs. Meaning investments and fox costs are not considered.

Nope. Definitely not.

Prices are based on a) fixed-price contracts that are negotiated with energy-producers and b) an spot-price auctioning model that is based on supply/demand. As an energy reseller, what you cannot get with your long-term contracts you have to make up with spot priced. With some additional provisions: Renewables get fixed prices (determined by bid) by lay by their regional reseller. And the highest spot price is always paid out to all lower-priced energy producers.

But in all that, no energy producer will leave out the building and financing cost from their price calculation. Otherwise e.g. renewables would be free, because their generation cost is practically zero, no people or fuel to pay for, just building and financing.

Fixed prices =|= fixed costs. And yes, spot prices actually do exclude those. Sure, companies do include those in their internal calculations. The energy markets don't care. And yes, the results of this are funny. E.g. closing down gas plants without a single opertional hour because they are just not able to operate economically.

The first of many to officially enter a recession. We all know it is coming, there is no avoiding it. Lots of places are already in a recession but just doesn't officially announce it yet.

Things are going to get tough and I am tired...

>We all know it is coming, there is no avoiding it.

"We all know a recession will happen in the future." Yes, that is how recessions work. The economy is cyclical, so if you predict a recession long enough, you will eventually be right.

Considering that the energy prices fell down to their usual levels, I'd not be surprised if this recession turns out to be short-lived.

The recession is caused by monetary factors. The energy prices just add a little more pop into it.

Surprisingly it looks like the UK might avoid it

What? Isnt the UK now the poorest western European country?

The state of the NHS, while embarassing, has little bearing on whether we enter a recession. Most of their effort goes into helping people who do not productively contribute to the economy.

I see it as a major symptom of larger structural issues that are going to make the UK poorer for 10 to 20 more years. You haven't even begun to steal in earnest from the wealthy and successful corporations, which will cause capital flight and further erode your standard of living. First you need many more union strikes, then you need to elect the hard left (which is coming), then you need to finally accept the inevitable and cut taxes, regulations, red tape, open up immigration, etc.

But this will take 10 to 20 years.

There is absolutely no appetite to elect the hard left. The left of the Labour party is dead and it is unclear if its leader will even be a member of the party in the next election.

We did get a significant tax cut a few months ago (?), it wasn't a rate change but they removed the cap of how much of your pension is tax free.

Immigration is at record levels, I'm not sure what it would mean to open it up further.

I think the stuff you are hoping for will happen quite soon, especially with loosening of regulations around food (so we can e.g. import US meat)

Appetite does not always have bearing on what the chef will serve.

> then you need to elect the hard left (which is coming)

who have you been getting your political information from? the Morning Star?

Discussed recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36070611

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36082406

why does it feel like every tech website turns into an amateur humanities and economics discussion group?

It's a topic everyone has an opinion on I guess and engagement drives what gets surfaced.

Because everything is subject to politics so discussing tech automatically leads to discussing politics. Where politics is discussed people tend to have different opinions which leads to longer discussions [1] which makes this all the more visible.

[1] ...and lots of greyed-out posts, unfortunately

because this stuff affects everyone including startups

they are easy subjects

Yet again, this seems to confirm that whatever problems the US has, as bad as those seem, are worse overseas even in Western countries. Higher inflation, more unrest, higher unemployment, weaker growth, worse stock market returns, etc.

Losing half their gas supply and a huge amount of electrical as well, didn't help... but England and Italy will quickly follow, France and Spain with longer delay. The failure of China reopening was also a big hit.

Yeah, one has to admit that the US quite cleverly pulled at least some strings and got its win-win-situation while Europe is in no other position as to pay and still loose.

If you throw enough stuff on the wall, something will utimately stick. Even if it is just for a moment.

Well, yes and no.

Even if inflation or unemployment get worse, it's a whole different deal for the average citizen to deal with those when you have socialized healthcare or unemployment benefits.

Does the US not have unemployment benefits or other programs? During and after Covid, trillions was spent on various stimulus and aid programs for affected Americans.

It helps that Washington has thousands of troops in those countries, and not the other way around.

This is true, misleading and repeated to the point of worthlessness.

There was a big to do among our NATO allies about ramping up their own spending in response to the previous President threatening to pull out of NATO. They want those troops there, under NATO command and especially lately.

It does matter, because it means Washington has tangible leverage over these supposedly-sovereign states and can enforce hard limits on their behavior. As an extreme example, a nationalist coup against a weak & corrupt Berlin simply can't happen with such an enormous foreign military presence. We learned from Versailles.

The IRA and NS2 sabotage were really bad for Germany. But what are they gonna do about it?

https://www.politico.eu/article/france-and-germany-find-grou...

You're saying Germany isn't actually sovereign?

And what's that about US troops preventing a nationalist coup? That sounds like an insane conspiracy theory.

We're not an occupied nation. There are 35,000 US troops in Germany. Compare that with 180,000-250,000 German troops (depending on how you count them).

And the NS2 sabotage is pretty much irrelevant. No gas has ever flown through that pipe, and it was exceedingly unlikely to ever happen after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Oh, NS2 sabotage is quite relevant as it shows that "someone" can blow up (partially) German infrastructure while Germany have no guts to even wink in the direction of the perpetrator. Not exactly a definition of a sovereign country.

NS2 was not quite German infrastructure, it's really Russian infrastructure. It was also entirely irrelevant for Germany at that point, no gas ever has flown through it and none would have almost certainly even if it were still fully intact (one strand is undamaged).

We don't know if the German government knows who did this. So I don't think we can draw any conclusions from the lack of action here, we simply do not have enough information.

>NS2 was not quite German infrastructure, it's really Russian infrastructure

What are you talking about? Western companies literally own half of NS2.

>no gas ever has flown through it and none would have almost certainly even if it were still fully intact (one strand is undamaged)

I wonder if intentionally delayed certification of the pipeline by Germany has anything to do with "no gas ever has flown". The point is: NS1 + NS2 was a constant temptation for Germany and blowing it has removed the "wrong" incentive.

>Basocally everyone wanted NS2 to be gone, including the Russians

I call BS. Not only have they invested a significant amount of money into it, they also sell gas to Europe through Ukraine even today. I think they would like to have working pipelines which do not cross any intermediate states, even in offline state.

Can you provide some recent (say, post-Merkel) examples where Berlin has acted in its own interest at the expense of Washington's interests? And how did Washington respond?

I'm genuinely curious since you seem to know a lot about German national governance.

That is entirely irrelevant, you're the one making absurd claims about Germany not being sovereign. You're also leaving a very short timespan here, one dominated by the war against Ukraine where US and German interests align very well.

There is one event, if you believe the reports. And that was Germany allegedly making US deliveries of main battle tanks a requirements to agree to Leopard 2 deliveries to Ukraine. That was not something the US wanted to do at that point, though obviously it also wasn't something they disagreed with entirely.

As other commenters have remarked, the bombing of Germany's energy infrastructure by a literal ally is an extraordinary violation of sovereignty. You can do mental gymnastics to pretend that is irrelevant. It's called "being in denial". And yet Germany is now in an energy-cost-induced recession. Is that also "irrelevant"?

And we haven't even brought up FM Baerbock and where her allegiance lies (the Washington-based Atlantic Council said she was "in lockstep" with them).

Regarding the German tanks, it says everything that even the Scholz-Baerbock regime was reluctant to send them. If it was truly in Germany's national security interest, it would be a no-brainer. But it's not about national security, it's about politics and Washington's interests in the region.

So there's clearly a strong case for Germany not really being sovereign. When I ask you to make the opposing argument, you evade.

There is no evidence the US destroyed the pipeline. Hersh's story is a fairytale with lots of alleged facts that have been specifically debunked. There is no robust public evidence on who actually destroyed the pipeline. Everything that is public is circumstancial and contradictory.

You are making a very extreme and frankly just plain insulting statement here by disputing our sovereignty.

>> The Scholz-Baerbock regime

I thoight you people moved on from blaming her to blame Habeck for everything by now...

Also nice, that everyone ignores the fact NATO is an alliance, and having one country moving alone woupd be really bad in a time showing strength and unity is paramount.

So, ypu know who blew up NS2, owned by Gazprom? Care to tell me who it was?

Yet our troops are still welcomed and NATO is more popular than ever.

I’m not saying it doesn’t put us in an advantageous position if it came down to war with Germany or France, but it does matter that we handle trade disputes and NATO as separate matters, and it isn’t as if EU has exactly been kind to American tech companies lately given with each passing year they pass new onerous legislation that mostly affects foreign tech companies more than it affects their own domestic industry because their own home grown tech industry wasn’t worth much before we took any protectionist measures.

Right now we are guests in the country with our shields and spears pointed in the direction of the East because we have overlapping interests in defending their nations with their present governments as they are against the threat of Russia. The reality on the ground now outweighs an incidental hypothetical that would be a repeat of a hundred years ago. If our presence dissuades a second rise of Nazism, that’s probably as much to Germany’s benefit as it is ours, but the market disputes are between the EU and USA, not European NATO and North American NATO and while we’re there as guests and not belligerents, we’re there to defend Germany, not impugn its sovereignty.

Where Europe is protectionist about tech, the US did the same about steel, aluminium, aircraft and certain foods. I guess the tech sector is just more present in the minds of HN readers.

I didn't forget about that, but I felt no need to double-down on the both-sides bit when the one I replied to already mentioned the IRA, and it's irrelevant to the point that trade including disputes and NATO are separate threads to the Trans-Atlantic relationships between America and our European allies. We can go tick for tack for all I care on trade—I mean I do care to the extent that I think it's dumb and we shouldn't but it also isn't a political priority for me—whereas NATO is severely more important independent of where we stand on the balance of our trade relationships at the end of the day because keeping Europe free and independent of Russia matters a great deal more.

That even includes ensuring they have the freedom to pass screwball legislation that screws with our tech companies and moves the needle closer to re-evaluating their European operations as a priority.

I'm not hearing any Europeans outside of Russia chime in to say they would in fact prefer the opposite outcome or an inverse set of priorities where we give them better access to American steel, aluminum, aircraft and food markets but dissolve NATO and pull out of their respective countries. It's a complicated series of military, trade, diplomatic and personal relationships with both profits and losses on both sides of the Atlantic, but on balance is still beneficial for Americans and Europeans.

The economic benefits of NATO for the USA wouldn’t change much today if Germany had its own troops instead of the US troops stationed there. Of course, if the troops were never there in the first place, that’s a different matter.

The biggest actual difference isn’t US troops stationed in NATO countries but rather the extent of the US as a global reserve currency and the power of the petrodollar. The concerns over these are well-founded as the powers that be have willingly traded the latter in exchange for upping the US’ position in the current brinksmanship with Russia, when Russia was never the economic juggernaut to be reckoned with and certainly not worth giving up those cards for.

How?

Also do you think US would not remove their troops if the host countries actually wanted to?

The US removed its presence from France at their request.

Wait, doesn’t it actually help those countries?

Germans are invited to invade the United States of America. I hope to see your 5,000 helmets faring well.

Seems more West specific. Related to money printing and lockdowns during COVID.

It is down almost 12% since the November 2021 all time high [0] and since the market crash happened [1] as I said before.

[0] https://www.google.com/finance/quote/.INX:INDEXSP?window=5Y

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29508238

The DAX40 is a piece of German financial engineering, aka not fair to compare to the S&P500: the DAX40 excludes a large part of public German corporations + as a price index it includes distributed dividends, which causes an unfair advantage when compared to a price return index like S&P500.

And so far nobody tried to overturn election results in an European country, for now.

Education quality, political polarisation, inequality, poverty index, happiness.

I think their failed energy policy has a lot to do with this

In which way has it failed?

Burning coal in winter and turning off safe(!) and paid off(!) nuclear plants sounds like a failure to me.

Nuclear power plants need maintenance ("failing" France is used an example for this all the time on HN) and fuel rods. With the nuclear exit, reaffirmed by a conservative government, was decided ages ago, German nuclear plants were in no position to rwtain their certification. Nor was fuel ordered or available.

And yes, still having coal is a failure from a climate perspective. Energy was plenty so, if we exclude price hikes caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And those price hike were global.

The right wing parties at this very moment campaigning against heat pumps is a better example.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36089912

Yes. Because it is.

The "grid" wasn't "strained". The main source of cheap gas got strangled due to a war. Most of it was used in home heating and industry, neither of which nuclear would help with without more electrification.

Yes, because regardless of the niose the CDU/CSU and FDP make, thebgrid im Germany never had any issues.

Yes, you get more heat out of a CCGT->Heat pump, than directly with a gas boiler

This has been known for decades, see Without Hot Air: http://www.withouthotair.com/c21/page_150.shtml

They closed their nuclear power stations which made them even more dependent on natural gas which was in short supply, leading to an increase in the use of coal (which is supposed to be "bad for the climate" due to the higher CO₂/TWh coefficient) and an increase in electricity import dependency which in turn drove up prices in the rest of Europe. German industry is both dependent on electricity as well as natural gas, the decision to close those - perfectly functional - nuclear power plants reduced the amount of natural gas available to industry even more since it was now also needed more for electricity production. I already mentioned the higher electricity prices.

In short the "traffic light coalition" chose ideology over logic as well as ideology over the will of the German people [1] to the detriment of all - even the ideologues even though they will be hit less hard since they have well-remunerated positions and state pensions.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35665122

simple, the price is to high. Germany might be "Weltmeister" with one of the highest energy prices...

I’m certainly not discounting your experience but do you really think this is something that took shape only over a couple of weeks? Or did you mean that you woke to the realization?

People take it out on their peers rather than their masters

Only if they lack political education.

The education system, controlled by their masters, has no interest in education the people to blame their masters, so of course most are uneducated in this regard.

This isn't new. Historically, many great teachers of the workers have got around this with a little cleverness.

It'll happen again.

especially if they have political education most of the time lol

No, the fact is that somehow for decades German authorities think they have a right / a budget (that is build up by taxes paid for by natural Germans and also documented, naturalized, legally working people now living in Germany) to spend on things here and there over half of the world, be it illegal migrants, approved migrants, EU-internal subsidies or subsidies and projects for other nations across the globe. Ukraine, Afghanistan and Syria come lately to mind.

That this insane behavior doesn't bode well regardless of 'polictical education' should come to no ones' surprise. Especially if you, as a so-so earner, pay almost 40% in taxes and social security / healthcare. And if you happen to already have experienced socialism before, you have an even less chilled opinion. Thank you.

Both socialist and capitalist liberal states are bad, liberation requires overcoming the power structures of both state and capital. We all stand to gain from it, it's not like a new tax system.

Socialist states are just elitist authoritarian capitalism. Both kinds of states trap their populaces in endless all consuming work. Please, let's move on, we have automation and industrialized processes now to not need constant work at the behest of rulers commanding us or gatekeeping and bean countnig access to reproducible technology and information

(It's incidentally also the same fight as the ecological problem.)

>Only if they lack political education.