Posted by marc__1 22 hours ago
The reality is that Spain's electricity is cheap because it is relatively insulated from Europe's core network, because its interconnections with other countries are limited. In financial words, there is a spread with the rest of Europe because the ways to arbitrage that spread are extremely limited. If Spain was located near Germany and well interconnected, their prices would look like Germany's. And while cheap energy is pictured by op as a good thing, Spain understands very well that higher prices are good for its renewables industry, and is pressing for more interconnections[1].
The overall tone of the article feels like the author is here to extoll the virtues of renewables.
[1]: https://www.ft.com/content/8e94079c-585f-11e4-b331-00144feab...
But er, the bigger Algerian pipeline goes to Italy, a country with notoriously high energy prices. So if Algerian gas was the secret that's actually a big problem for you.
"Global horizontal irradiation (GHI, measured in kWh/m /day), the long-term amount of solar resource available on a horizontal surface on Earth."
German average 2.978 kWh/m2
Spain average 4.575 kWh/m2
Probably doesn't make a ton of difference. But I found that very respectable. It made me hopeful they have other basic green sensibilities.
As a red blooded American, this is the funniest thing I’ve seen all weekend.
Find me someone running 81F in summer and 59F in winter and I'll applaud their eco-consciousness.
I don't live in Spain. And this is the first I have heard about their politics keeping tourists away. Can you elaborate?
As always, the protests are really about local issues (lack of housing, jobs, etc) and foreigners are being scapegoated. A lot of this has a dark edge - e.g. locals spraying water on people that appear foreign to them. The framing around sustainability and 'over-tourism' allows the far left to get in on the xenophobia that's been so useful to the far right. Much easier to attack foreigners than actually come up with solutions to deliver more housing or jobs.
Media narratives aside, these incidents have not affected tourism at all. Spain is and continues to be a massive tourism destination, and the average tourist has never even heard of any of this.
Also, our economy is becoming more diversified, precisely thanks to lower energy prices that attract industries that previously gravitated towards Germany and Eastern Europe. [2]
I'm curious about how politics have hurt tourism industry, though, if you could elaborate.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-euro-indicators/w... [2] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/stellantis-chinas-leapmo...
As for politics hurting tourism, there's some formal policies restricting airbnbs and placing higher tourism related taxes on over-encumbered areas, but I think most of the detraction is the anti-tourism protests from locals, which were quite large in 2024-2025. You'd have to consider local sentiment as "politics" for the statement to really be true, I think.
And Spain's economy is far, very far away from "going like a rocket", like your misinformation echo-chamber tries to parrot.
Per capita GDP is growing too, so this is simply wrong.
[1] https://www.aftonbladet.se/minekonomi/a/Exwx4A/elprissmocka-...
The best candidate for lowering prices would be France, but France would most likely re-export that electricity to other countries, and paying to build up the internal grid to carry electricity that is neither bought by nor sold to French actors isn't very attractive.
Ideally Spain would interconnect with Italy, but that's more expensive.
Spain to UK might make more sense.
Sometimes, headlines are out of control.
That being said, building new interconnections makes no economic sense for France. The country has no unserved consumers close to the border. That means any electricity imported from Spain would have to be carried further. That involves grid spending paid for by french consumers, without any benefit for them.
The same goes for gas pipelines. No one enjoys big infrastructure projects for stuff they don't really need.
The one question the article leaves open, but which is pretty relevant, is the question about who should pays for stability services to the grid.
With interconnectivity, those virtues are less visible in local prices. They would be visible in earnings.
A new feature on solar inverters is curtailment mode so they can be remote shutdown when the grid goes negative, since if you're on wholesale energy pricing you'll be charged if you keep driving the grid.
What gives people the right incentives to increase or reduce curtailment? The market price being negative or positive.
Turning off productive solar panels is wasting power.
https://www.politico.eu/article/france-needs-eu-push-on-powe...
Heck, oil is probably the "default" example of what a commodity is, but we're now all acutely aware of what happens when moving that oil from one place to another becomes exceedingly difficult.
It is not. As a case in my point, Spain had a blackout last year (and I completely believe they are competent professionals - the task is just hard).
> It's just that those interconnections haven't been built yet.
They haven't been built because the grid isn't just a technical problem. It's also a socioeconomic problem, and adding new interconnections would require finding who needs to pay for it ; and currently, that question has no answer.
The difference of course is that the invisible hand of the market gets that fruit into grocery stores. For various relatively good reasons, power is driven by very visible hands.
"Brain surgery? Well, that's not exactly rocket science..."
Off the top of my head, we've recently had shortages of fresh strawberries because of weather in California, a shortage of peas because of weather too, and various changes in Trump's tariffs were done to try and alleviate the rising cost of certain fruit and veg.
If you want the commodities elsewhere, you have to provide for transportation. Same for electricity. Grids (or grid sections) where supply outpaces local demand and transmission to remote grids can hit negative spot prices even when neighboring grids haven't.
Just to illustrate the scale costs of energy moved in the form of natural gas:
Nord Stream 1 + Nord Stream 2 with combined capacity of the four pipes is 110 billion cubic metres per annum (3.9 trillion cubic feet per annum) of natural gas.
Calorific Value of Natural Gas from 34 to 52 MJ/m3
https://met.com/en/media/energy-insight/calorific-value-of-n...
So energy per annum for NS1+NS2 is between 3.74^18 J and 5.72^18 J. The maximal power throughput of NS1+NS2 is then between 118GW and 181 GW.
"According to Gazprom, the costs of the onshore pipelines in Russia and Germany were around €6 billion. The offshore section of the project cost €8.8 billion."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream_1#Costs_and_financ...
So the cost is about $123M per GW of capacity.
For comparison: the Biscay Gulf electricity interconnection
https://cinea.ec.europa.eu/news-events/news/cef-energy-bisca...
"The EPC contracts will cover two high-voltage direct current (HVDC) links (each with a capacity of 1000 MW, amounting to approximately 1600 km of HVDC submarine and land cables), the two converter stations and the civil works associated with the land cables."
2000 MW capacity with cost of EUR 2.85 billion gives:
1425M Eur per GW of capacity
Of-course the projects have been build decades apart so inflation plays a big role and Nord Stream pipelines are currently damaged.
What you really want is electric potential differences that push electrons. It's the difference between having oil and having hydraulic energy (pressure and flow rate).
All the time? Every single HN discussion about this ends mentioning CfD, often as if it's some secret nobody knows about even though the CfD strike prices are often headline news when they're agreed.
not including $work discussions with energy traders.
https://www.desmog.com/2026/04/28/reform-donor-jeremy-hoskin...
> A major right-wing political funder has dramatically increased his fossil fuel investments this year, DeSmog can reveal.
> Jeremy Hosking, who owns the hedge fund Hosking Partners, donated £1.7 million to Reform UK between 2019 and 2024. The party, led by Nigel Farage, campaigns to scrap the UK’s flagship 2050 net zero emissions target, remove environmental protections, and turbocharge new fossil fuel extraction.
> Hosking also owns The Critic magazine, which frequently attacks climate policies and supports new North Sea oil and gas exploration. Its current edition carries a cover story titled “The Green Myth: Fossil Fuels are Britain’s Real Energy Source”.
...
> Its current cover story is written by contributing editor Chris Bayliss, who argues that renewable energy is unreliable and expensive. In a follow-up piece online, he blames “elite” support for net zero on “climate hysteria”.
> Bayliss is a former civil servant who works in the energy sector in Iraq. He’s the Iraq Country Lead for IM Power, which runs liquefied natural gas (LNG), oil and coal power plants, offers “oil and gas refining, storage and pipeline solutions”, and works to “maximise value from hydrocarbon resources
Although this financial instrument dates from late last century, its use in energy markets is much newer, the UK began using CfDs for electricity about a decade ago.
So, yeah, if you recall conversation about wholesale electricity prices back in 2010 they wouldn't have mentioned CfDs for the same reason they didn't mention the effect of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it hadn't happened yet. Back then renewable electricity generation schemes were subsidised very differently.
And for the numbers it seems obvious that renewables are a fundamental part of the picture.
You have to have a backup, the devastating effects of week long electric blackout in winter in a future Germany heating homes with heat pumps, would be comparable with a major war.
Will there by push, after the new gas power plants will be build, to use them not only as backup, but as gas peakers? Probably yes, but this dependents on future CO2 emission costs and natural gas costs.
Even the previous government was planing expansions of gas power plants.
https://www.ingenieur.de/technik/fachbereiche/energie/12-gw-...
Personally, I think Germany should have not exit nuclear energy production but expand it, but this error was made in 2000s and Germany has to live with the consequences.
Was the subsidy system which was in effect in 2010's unsustainable? I think so, yeah. But the changed policies resulted in companies producing solar going bust, and the Chinese firms, which were doing fine, were able to buy out the patents and know how.
So, did Germany waste billions? Yes, but by letting the solar producers go bust.
The 39C3 video "Recharge your batteries with us" is an emotional call to action "We Can Do It!" solar panels everywhere, without showing the other backbone of the German electric grid: the German gas and coal power plants.
I would recommend other CCC video:
"Deaths per TWh" The Price of Energy and Reducing CO2 Emissions
These "they" are different Bavarian persons and groups depending on topic, but the net effect is that Bavaria is Germany's energy bully.
Fortunately, several gigawatt-class HVDC lines are coming online this year. These somehow happened despite the protests, it's a minor miracle.
Sweden's electricity is ~40% hydro, ~27% nuclear and ~23% wind. How is this in any way comparable to Northern Germany?
-- which has 4 bidding zones.
Sweden has lots of potential for long-term energy storage as hydro power, which makes wind power viable. Northern Germany is mostly flat and there's not even close to enough storage capacity (on the order of ~weeks) to make a wind powered grid economically competitive.
If your local price is high you can import, if it's low you can export.
If you're at the end of a grid and/or your transmission capacity is limited your price has the possibility to go higher or lower without that damping mechanism.
Electricitymaps has a pricing layer which seems to show central Europe moving in sync when I randomly check it:
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes?sig...
If this is what you meant, then it sounds like an argument against free trade, if it means you keep ending up with the short stick.
Whether that happens in real life is a different question.
Does that money go directly into my pocket so I can afford the more expensive energy? Or does it go into the pocket of private energy companies?
Because I feel like there's some faults with this "free market", which is mostly just socializing losses and privatizing profits.
But for the end user, whether you're being ripped off by a local or a foreign energy oligarch, it doesn't really matter, people just want to pay less.
We’re right in the middle of the transition with maximum volatility swinging between extremely cheap renewables and expensive fossil plants.
If you have a steel mill for example you need to be able to basically guarantee a certain level of energy production to run it viably because the risk of there not being any power during adverse weather is enough to make it unviable (you can't just turn these things off). This is the reason why gas and nuclear probably aren't going away (or at least shouldn't).
If they increase in price then firm production is stimulated to build to meet the gap.
Probably when combined with batteries it is half the price.
There are some colder areas in northern europe especially where solar doesnt work as well but they also tend to be better served for hydro (which can also store power).
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/24/uk-solar-generation-h...
There are already a bunch of examples of Northern locales using these heat batteries - just heat up a big block of something when energy is cheap and solar/wind are overproducing, then use a network of insulated pipes to distribute that heated water.
France plans to build a series of six reactors for its EPR2 programme with each reactor scheduled for completion 1-2 years apart, but that is only expected to reduce costs by 30% compared to the (hugely expensive) EPR.
Small modular reactors hope to improve things but it's far from clear they will end up any cheaper. Historically making reactors bigger makes them more efficient. The Rolls Royce SMR is just under 1/3rd of the size of the EPR so even if successful any cost reductions are not likely to be dramatic.
We'd probably go deep into hydro, fire up every gas peaker plant, and through skyrocketing prices incentivize everyone to switch to emergency diesel generators where possible.
You're talking about a once-in-100+-years event. We'll deal with it the same way we dealt with the various oil crises.
For example a short event in US with duration 2 hours–4 days, depending on location, affecting 55 million people.
Deaths: Almost 100
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
The Economic Impacts of the August 2003 Blackout
"Based on the much-studied 1977 New York City blackout. ICF Consulting estimated the total economic cost of the August 2003 blackout to be between $7 and $10 billion"
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ml1113/ml111300584.pdf
Short blackout: 2025 Iberian Peninsula blackout
"The employers' organization CEOE estimated that the outage resulted in economic losses valued at €1.6 billion."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackou...
Who's going to build and run them? They'd be enormously expensive because they'd almost never sell power.
(Of course the answer is if you build 3 weeks of battery storage you can pretty obviously build 4).
Well what are we doing if the straight of hormuz isn't hormuzing?
Demand will adapt via price signals. Same story as in every market.
(for Australia it is 5, for other countries it might be 8)
Once you get to that "nice to have" problem of what to do about the remaining 3% of power needs it would probably make most sense to synthesize and store gas (methane/hydrogen) from electricity when solar and wind is overproducing. Gas can be stored cheaply for long durations. The roundtrip efficiency is poor but it's still cheaper than nuclear power on the windiest sunniest day.
The nuclear + carbon lobbies would of course prefer to model green energy transitions by pretending that the wind and sun simultaneously turn off for 2 weeks at a time every year and that electricity can only be stored in very expensive batteries. This is not realistic.
This is simply entirely untrue. Europe's a big place, there's not a single day ever where there is no sun in it.
I'm a little bit sad that pumped hydro doesn't get more attention in the discussion. It might be too late for it to matter, with improvements in battery prices and ongoing lithium discoveries. But that only underscores the fact that it should have been allowed to matter twenty years ago. Utilities have slow-walked solar all around the world because of concerns about the grid stability, which has been well within the reach of pumped hydropower to fix since many years ago. In fact major pumped hydropower projects were mostly carried out in the United States during the nuclear power optimism era.
It is a little destructive to construct pumped hydro reservoirs. But it generally isn't as damaging as a conventional hydroelectric dam. The reason lies in the source of the water. In a conventional dam, you need a lot of water flowing in from up high, so you dam a major river near its lower cataracts. This disrupts the migration of fish and animals along the river and impacts the whole ecosystem of the rather large drainage basin upstream, and disrupts the migration of fish. But when a closed-loop pumped storage reservoir is created above an existing lake, usually a much less important stream is selected. Its immediate valley is still inundated, but the area of effect is much less. It does tend to prolong the use of the existing dam, but we are already preserving basically all existing dams.
It might still be appropriate in some places where imports are less affordable like Latin America or it might appeal to protectionists in the West. In general, hydro is usually cheap.
Anyone can install batteries anywhere at a fairly minimal local fire risk.
A dam is a major mechanical structure which if it fails will straight up obliterate downstream towns, and as such requires a numerous specialized engineering designs and on going maintenance to retain basic safety.
A pumped-storage dam also doesn't increase the area subject to flooding. If the upper dam fails, it flows into the lower lake. This can potentially be a design consideration. It's not like a greenfield hydropower dam.
If you want to play the rare catastrophic risk card, battery fires can release highly toxic hydrogen fluoride. But the damage of climate change is far greater than the very small risk from either dams or batteries, which is preventable in both cases with proper maintenance and monitoring. I think the tail risk question is moot, honestly.
This title of the article is misleading. Spain is one of the cheapest power generation markets, but In the article it states "Spanish households pay above the EU average". Then the reason is stated "Other system costs are rising. The flip side of getting energy cheap is paying more elsewhere to keep the system stable.".
Spain of course also had a blackout and the article states "every country in Europe needs to modernise how it handles voltage stability". I believe that's code for "its harder to manager power transmission grids with renewables". I have been told by a power engineer that read the report on the blackout that the authors are going out of their way not to explicitly blame renewables, but these things that caused the blackout are bigger issues now due to the switch to renewables.
But it makes sense for Spain to continue down this path and not pollute with coal or rely on other countries for gas imports.
Where CAL27 low is either limited interconnectors (Nordics and Spain) or major nuclear (France). The other countries have CAL27 over 80 eur.
Moral bankruptcy.
[1] https://cepa.org/article/spains-baffling-russian-gas-addicti...
[2] https://kyivindependent.com/spain-escorts-shadow-fleet-vesse...
regardless of inflamed speeches eu simply cannot operate without that energy. should have thought about that before starting a war with russia. best of lucks!
https://energyandcleanair.org/january-2026-monthly-analysis-...
The days of Russian energy exports to EU are basically permanently over, and will not be reinstated even after the war has ended.
In most places, if you buy more of something, you are a good customer, it is usually more economical to sell to you and you get a discount.
In california people who use more kilowatts, pay more.
The less energy you spend to deliver value, the better for everyone.
If someone can deliver the same greater value to society using less electricity than you, they should be rewarded.
YES THEY DID, they went as far as making nuclear power plants shut down due to negative prices so their reliable stable power wasn't a pacemaker anymore and it blew up in their faces. And this was a topic on TV shows with several experts alerting of this FOR MONTHS before the blackout.
Sure, there are new technologies to stabilize solar and wind's fluctuating outputs but they are no just plug and play. Those are very, very complex systems that take years to set up properly. While there are nuclear power plants are just there collecting dust because the EU pressured Spain to make them unprofitable to maintain so they would be shut down.
Luckily, the US-Israel-Iran war made the EU leadership turn and now they want nuclear. I hope it's not too late.
1. Stable power grids are much easier with a mix of generation sources that includes substantial rotating mass and baseload generators.
2. Nuclear is awesome from a climate change and energy security point of view, and it would be amazing if it were cheaper or more valued.
When power was primarily generated by thermal plants with big rotating masses, we got frequency control implicitly from the inertia of those generators. When there was a demand spike, the generators handled the millisecond to few seconds regime just by their inertia, while the seconds to minutes regime was handled by plant control systems increasing throttles or starting more peaker plants.
I disagree that renewables themselves are the problem. Cheap solar energy does not have to mean that we shut down all the uneconomical generation sources, nor does it mean that we cannot do FCAS with modern technology.
Battery electric storage systems have actually eaten much of the FCAS market in the USA, where they can respond way more effectively and efficiently than other systems in the 1 to 10 second regime. By and large, we don't store solar energy for use overnight - we store it (or really any energy) for use in smoothing short demand spikes.
I would love to see more nuclear, and more advanced nuclear. Modern designs are safe, effective, and amazingly capable. They just aren't as cheap as paving the world with solar cells or burning natural gas left over as a fracking byproduct.
Every major renewable grid has installed additional intertia to avoid blackouts.
Variously called "synthetic inertia", "virtual inertia" or "grid-forming inverters".
Some people treat the spinning metal like vinyl records and think you can't get that "warmth" with the new tech but on objective measures, including cost, they win.
People install them because they were the old tech for this, and there's lead times and caution, it's just slowly changing legacy not something batteries can't physically do better.
This really depends on the amount of battery storage installed. In California we now see battery discharging through to the morning.
https://engaging-data.com/california-electricity-generation/
However, several officials and energy experts have rejected the idea that renewables are to blame. EU energy commissioner, Dan Jørgensen, stated that there was "nothing unusual" about the electricity mix at the time of the blackout, and that the outage was not due to a "specific source energy". [1]
They don't _actually_ want nuclear, luckily it's just lip service. Because it doesn't solve the problem surfaced by the US-Israel-Iran war: You'd still be dependent on other countries for your (nuclear) fuel needs.
Like Canada and in the future also Sweden? Two really hostile countries to be dependent on.
The most promising additional uranium source is Australia. But if Europe wants security it should be sourcing it domestically - which just isn't going to happen.
That was not a stabilization problem per-se, but the companies that had to do the stabilization just didn't although the were being paid for that. Please read the final report.
People didn’t do what they said they’d do: No problem with the system it’s the people that didn’t do what they said they would do.
And no more blackouts because now they are running nuclear 24/7 to keep things stable.
And again, it's not completely Spain's government fault as it obviously came from the EU and their anti-nuclear stance.
What does it even mean to "protect the nuclear"? Give them free money for the sake of it? They are already facilities being paid to keep the system in sync, or "protected" as you say, and they are paid very handsomely. But someone got greedy, it seems.
For one year we had to hear that the blackout was to blame on the renewables, and now that the final report is out and places zero blame on the shoulders of the renewables, we couldn't read anything in the newspapers (electric sector is a main supporter of local press through ads or indirect ownership), or we have to read incredible bad blame redirects like "this is on the government for not protecting nuclear".
And sure, it is a Really Good Idea to contract additional intertia to keep the grid stable. But why shouldn't that be done on the open market? Why pay a fortune for spinning a reactor's turbine at idle load when running a gas peaker plant's turbine at idle works just as well for a fraction of the price?
"Experts" that now are being proved wrong. In Spain we have a good share of "experts" that are practically hired by the electric industry to parrot their interests in TV and other media for months or even years. Half politicians end their career either in Iberdrola or Endesa or Naturgy, the other half in some bank.
The problem there is that they can't upgrade the grid fast enough at the neighborhood level. Combine that with residential electricity contracts where you pay the spot market price, and suddenly you've got a whole bunch of people who want to source or drain electricity at the same time, with a total capacity which far exceeds what their local grid is physically capable of.
The solution is to change a grid connection fee which depends on the peak load, where drawing/supplying a steady 1kW during the day is significantly cheaper than doing 12kW for 2 hours and 0kW for 22 hours. You're incentivized to spread out your load, so you are less likely to fall for needless consumption of "free" electricity.