CEO of German utilities company RWE publishes a desperate post about the state of Germany’s energy sector after a 12-day wind drought led to a spike in the price of MWh to +€800

https://i.redd.it/trfqsr2vgm2e1.jpeg

by MeCagoEnPeronconga

44 comments

  1. Germans gotta rediscover religion and start praying for wind and sun. If only there was a kind of clean energy with massive output.

  2. Did I miss the part where he explained why the gas power plants of his company that were built to react to exactly those situations weren’t doing what they were supposed to do?

  3. I geh his point but whats his solution? Wait years to build nuclear back up? Run more expensive coal mines?
    The only real way would be to massively build out renewables and even more storage

  4. Okay, so he is making a big deal because something could in theory have happened but it didn’t happen and it has never happened in the past, while every month we are making more progress to prevent the thing that didn’t happen to never happen anyways.

    Guess he likes publicity, maybe he should become a politician.

  6. It’s all a matter of a how many days of the year this happens. 12 days is just 3% of a year. You can’t have an energy solution that is more expensive 97% of the time and cheaper 3% of the time. You just need a good backup solution. At the moment that is gas storage and backup gas turbines.

  7. The CEO of a energy company wants more gov funds? Wow, thats something new. /s Gas-Powered Plants are for that scenario currently, why doesnt he use these?

  8. He is advocating for more expansion, and Germany does need that.

    And he will get that, German Energy Companies got plans for large amount of Energy storage, surpassing the foresight of the German government by more than 5 times.

    Also the solar build up is in good shape. The only thing lacking is Wind. This is mostly a bureaucracy problem. But companies do exist and energy providers pay good money for good people.

    So the future, while Germany is in need of imports in the short future, looks promising.

    And one more thing, those dark doldrums he is talking about do exist. And you can calculate them ahead of time. The worst one will always be during autumn. Every other doldrum is not as harsh as the autumn one. So his fearmongering is misplaced. And I assume he does this because of the upcoming German election. Although he has no reason to be worried.

  9. Unfortunately, I don’t have all the information needed at hand, but I see that he only talked about domestic production, not domestic production capacity.

    In other words: we imported electricity, but that was more likely the case because it was cheaper than using all our domestic plants and not because we didn’t have the capacity to produce enough ourselves. That’s how a market economy works.

  10. I may be stupid, but does this post really have literaly nothing to say?

  11. There is ZERO chance that Russia disinformation campaigns didn’t affect the public opinion in Germany regarding nuclear energy.

    Germany needs to dig deep, find some guts and get going on a MASSIVE energy infrastructure investment programme.

    The same goes for the rest of Europe!

  12. Isn’t that the CEO of a company that keeps tearing down entire villages to make space for their coal quarries?

  13. Yes, the election discussions are started. CDU will exit of the exit of the exit of the exit from Nuclear power (if possible).

    Lets see what Merz will say during the election campaign.

  14. CEO of one of the big 4 energy companies in Germany (and the one using the most coal) advocates for what exactly? Government aid probably? How about you spend some of your earnings, that literally doubled in 2023?

  15. Don’t be fooled, he is campaigning for his company. Althouh he ist not really stating what to do, let this be clear: he wants his company to thrive. Maybe he wants more government subsidies for his companies electricity plants. And for all the nuclear-heads: RWE strongly opposes extension of terms for the last nuclear plants that were shut down. These plants even in the best case could only produce 5 % of the energy demand and it would require huge investments even investing in new fuel rods. The shutdown would have to be halted like 10 years ago to make any, not just economically, sense.

  16. Irrelevant, its the price for consecutive weeks that matters and impacts long-term pricing.

  17. 15 Years of CDU/CSU hindering and ultimately destroying the national development and industrial production of PV and Wind energy projects and manufacturers. Thank you Angela!

  19. for the first time in my life I see the term “wind drought”.

    lmao do these even exist

  20. In Finland 10c / kWh is quite normal, and he’s complaining about a price that’s 80c / kwh which we’ve seen relatively often during the past few years. In fact I remember last winter the process hiked to 2€ / kWh which is 2.5X what he’s complaining about. Not saying 80c / kWh ain’t lot, but still the ”new normal” might be something that’s closer to that than 0.

  21. Explain to me again why utilities aren’t government run? Why do we need corporate middle men to make things worse?

  23. As far as I’ve learned, legislation around electricity pricing plays a huge role in these price spikes. Price is set according to the last kWh needed, so even if wind and solar can sustain 90% of required load at €0,5 per kWh, the price will be the €8 that the imported supply costs. So, if electricity could be priced at the average price of supply instead, spikes wouldn’t be so high.

  24. All over Europe countries are spending billions on building out the infrastructure needed to handle stuff like, especially the connections between countries are being strengthened.

    Parallel to this the fossil alternative energy sources are also growing and the “power to x” technology is seeing huge investments.

    Ohh and the super high prices are exactly meant to handle peak loads on low power days like this.

  25. Must feel good that they shut down all nuclear power plants….

  26. If only there was some way to prevent this, like not destroying your whole nuclear energy sector.

  27. Didn’t see him complain when the energy price we pay is always calculated by the MOST expensive source, for instance when 1% extremely expensive nuclear or coal energy top the 99% extremely cheap wind or solar energy in price finding.

  28. If only there was a super stable energy source that could maintain a stable base load as well as adapt to daily usage spikes

  29. Serves them right. Anyone could see it coming but Germans keep voting to decommission nuclear.

    Wish rest of Europe cut the lines to Germany and let them deal with their own shit.

  30. Sounds like a masked lie, we had Gale wind currents in the past week (it’s still very windy today in NRW)

  31. He is not a subjective person in this debate. But also, Germany’s approach to their energy system is next level full on retarded. Seems former “superpowers” are competing on who can f up 5he most nowadays.

  32. We need storage for the excess of solar and wind energy for exactly these spikes. The energy network provider cry there’s to much solar energy, electricity prices go to negative and we still have to buy it and the producers (,gas, coal) renewables are too fluctuating and on peaks we don’t have enough.
    Translated it means we want to go back to the times where we were essentially printing money.

  33. Time to cut our electricity cables to Germany and Denmark. I do not want German prices in southern Sweden.

  34. europe – Trying to hit itself in the feet endlessly because what would be life if not on a challenge run?

  35. In Germany we have a tax which is applied on produced energy, this tax is applied again after the energy has been stored into a pumped storage power plant.

    So basically there is no economic reason to build energy storage.
    As long as this law exists, this situation is exclusively created by the politicians.

  36. Keep in mind RWE is HEAVILY invested in fossile power generation, so they obviously have an interest in making that more attractive and discrediting green/renewables.

  37. Germany destroying Europe, v3.0.

    It’s always them for some reason.

  38. Another Merkel disaster – Germany urgently needs to go fully nuclear. The spending on solar and wind has been a waste of money.

  39. Germany is adding 161GW with roughly 320GWh of
    storage of grid-level battery power to the grid in the next 3 years. This is a desperate attempt to recover sunken cost from fossil power plants which will become unprofitable.

  40. Almost as if shutting down nuclear power plants was an unwise move…

  41. If only we had nuclear power plants to mitigate this…

  42. What’s that ? Renewables can’t provide base load power ? Noooooo couldn’t be. I’m shocked.

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