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Comment by hollerith | Hacker News Reader

The cost of electricity is very high or at least it was during the latest period for which I have data, namely the second half of 2023:

45.65 US cents per kilowatt-hour for households in Germany compared to 16.06 US cents per kilowatt-hour for US households.

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Which mostly comes from very high taxes to promote efficiency gains.

The interesting question is: What is the wholesale cost + subsidies?

Subsidies which now are being phased out for new production, or in some cases even lead to companies having to bid to get the privilege to build.

End consumer prices are utterly unusable to determine success or failure of the Energiewende. They are also utterly useless to compare across nations, as they are made up of very different components - e.g. in Germany only 40% is determined by market factors, in France the price is held artificially low by massive subsidies https://www.lemonde.fr/en/energies/article/2023/04/21/france... and so on.

50% of the price in France is also taxes and network maintenance fees so your argument does not make sense.

The retail price is so high because it is a failure of both technology and politics. The taxes are that high because politically they decided to over-invest in a bad technological choice; pretending otherwise is an extremely bad faith argument.

During the second half of 2023, the average price of electricity for residences in France was about 0.273 US dollars per kWh.

I don't understand "in Germany only 40% is determined by market factors". Do you mean that 60% of the price consists of taxes?

All kinds of fees (e.g. for the grid) and taxes, yes. It differs by year and depending on which surcharges were added/removed through laws. E.g. one part was for renewable subsidies and that's been removed in '22.

40% source is here (German, slide 7) https://www.bdew.de/media/documents/BDEW_Strompreisanalyse_0...

Consumer prices are now down to below 0.30 €/kwh again for new contracts (takes a few clicks for anyone) - they were mostly high previously because of Russia's war. This influence on electricity production was removed.

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