Well, the electrons arriving in your home will the same as your neighbours, regardless of which supplier you choose. But by choosing a different supplier you can steer which energy sources will be used to feed that grid, so it still makes a difference, just not exactly where you live.
Levelized Cost of Energy for Germany's existing nuclear fleet was roughly 13ct/kwh.[1] The averaged costs (YTD) from the linked article currently stands at 9.71 ct/kwh. So nuclear in the mix would have increased the costs.
The SCBOE score is a good idea. However, in the case of Germany, it is often overlooked that the power grid dating from the 1970s, which was built as a one-way system from large power plants (nuclear power plants) to consumers, would have needed to be rebuilt regardless. A large share of the grid costs would therefore have been passed on to consumers even without the transition to renewable energy. Additionally, Germany is located in the center of Europe and is thus a major transit country for electricity. Here too, corresponding capacities would have had to be expanded. The expansion of a European power grid also means that the disadvantages of renewable energy variability can be offset. As the SCBOE system also shows, the individual power plant still accounts for the largest share of costs. Many of the additional factors can actually go down in prices as renewables scale up (nuclear has still to prove that this could work there too). In that regard, LCOE remains relevant.
Even in the peak of nuclear electricity production in the year 2001, coal was dominant source electricity in German grid. (Data for 2001, Nuclear 171 TWh, Coal 293 TWh).
Power grid is not and newer was a one-way system, all the AC power lines, transformers don't care for the direction of the current. It's only the amount of current passing through each power lines, transformers that's important.
The side effect of many electric customers installing PV panels and reducing their demand from grid is that the fuel costs of on-demand power plants decrease, but the fixed costs of on-demand power plants (installation, maintenance) stay the same. These fixed costs have to be recouped in the smaller amount of electricity sold by on-demand power plants, therefor per MWh prices from on-demand power plants will increase for electric grid customer.
For most electric customers it's not possible to disconnect from electric grid and rely just on PV panels and batteries.
Germany is not major transit country for electricity. According to data from 2019 electricity interconnection level for Germany was only 10% .
Building of large capacity and long power lines is expensive, therefor many big industrial electric consumers were build near power plants or power plants were build near major industrial customers.
The average electricity price for German households is approximately 32.5 to 34 cents per kWh.
We are not doing an apple to apple comparison if we are not actually looking at what people are paying. The cost of energy is to have the a stable supply of energy delivered at the time that the consumer wants to buy it. The cost of energy production is thus not just the price of producing one unit of energy in isolation, but to have it transmitted in a stable grid at a date and time specified by the consumer. Nuclear energy and solar energy both produce units of energy, but consumers need for transmission, grid stability and time aspects are completely different depending if they buy nuclear energy or solar energy. They are not interchangeable on those aspects.
The 9.71 ct/kwh is the levelized cost of producing electricity from solar. It is not the same as the average cost of consuming energy. Adding nuclear to the mix would not necessary increase costs of consuming energy, even if the average cost of producing energy would go up.
To make a very simplified illustration of this. A energy broker would happily trade 10 units for energy for 1 unit of energy, assuming that they can dictate when and where each unit get transmitted.
The cost of energy is also full lifecycle cost including waste handling, deconstruction and security. I am not saying that everything is that equation for renewables. However, one truth at least in Germany is that we still have not solved the waste problem. Other countries have both better options and also a societal consensus. Here is a study of societal cost of nuclear energy:
Those cost don't even include the full lifecycle societal cost of nuclear energy [0] (25-39 cent by some studies). Sure the renewables also have lifecycle cost we might not pay yet, but in Germany even more important we do not even have a societal and research concesus what to do with the waste (might be much better in other countries)
An installed solar panel will continue producing electricity, no matter how the relationship with the country that produced it develops. Unlike natural gas, oil or uranium where the fuel itself is the actual imported good.
Modern grids favour flexibility over fixed baseload generation (like nuclear) though. When you turn off a nuclear power plant its operating costs basically stay the same, which is horrible when you could cover your whole consumption with basically free solar/wind.
Well, the US is still dependent on foreign heavy oil for their refineries as it mostly produces shale oil (for export). So it very much isn't independent even though it looks like it when you see the numbers.
Pipelines would have to run through multiple countries, meaning you now not only have to share your income with someone else (transit fees etc) but it also means that you have to stay on good terms with these countries.
Somehow I think the stars might be aligning this time though. People are genuinely fed up with Windows and governments around the world are loudly thinking about how to reduce dependence on US tech. And then there is Proton which makes it much easier for Gamers to jump ship. To me it feels like there is more momentum than ever for this.
On the other hand I am also a realist and I don't think that Linux will take over the Desktop, but it will certainly have its biggest growth year ever in 2026.
> On the other hand I am also a realist and I don't think that Linux will take over the Desktop, but it will certainly have its biggest growth year ever in 2026.
I _love_ Linux, but I agree with this as well. I don't think Linux will ever be easy enough that I could recommend it to an elderly neighbor. I hope to be proven wrong, though.
What frustrates me about this particular moment is that at the same time Windows is getting worse, I feel that OS X is _also_ getting worse. This _is_ an opportunity for Apple to put a big dent in Windows market share.
> I don't think Linux will ever be easy enough that I could recommend it to an elderly neighbor.
The only reason I wouldn't do this is because that elderly neighbour wouldn't be able to install Linux and might not have any obvious place to get support from. Where can Grandma go to get support for her Linux laptop, even if she's willing to pay?
However, in a world where they can buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled and receive support from the same shop they bought it from if they do run into problems, then absolutely I would (not that that support is going to be great, but then they're at least no worse off than they were when they need support with Windows or a Mac, and I imagine they'll run into less problems on Linux than on Windows, given their use cases are likely to be very narrow and simple, i.e. web browser, e-mail, maybe simple office stuff).
> What frustrates me about this particular moment is that at the same time Windows is getting worse, I feel that OS X is _also_ getting worse. This _is_ an opportunity for Apple to put a big dent in Windows market share.
Aye, I agree. MacOS has been getting a bigger slice of the pie, but it's hard to ascribe what's the main cause, and to what extent each cause is contributing. We got the M chips being ungodly good (even the M1 is still serviceable, and damn right affordable even at this point), Windows growing worse, but the laptop market is also contracting, with a steady stream of people leaking out, saying 'screw this, I'll just use my phone or tablet. I don't need a PC for anything anymore.'.
All the casuals I know use a Mac for a laptop because they want something simple and functional, and Macs do that job, but they keep doing that job worse and worse. Everybody else casual might have a Windows laptop, but barely ever use it. The rest are gamers and power users, and thus need a proper machine and can't stick to a phone and tablet.
Apple could attract from the groups who would otherwise be done with non-phone/tablet computing, but their offering is growing weaker and weaker.
> Somehow I think the stars might be aligning this time though
> governments around the world are loudly thinking about how to reduce dependence on US tech
I am definitely sympathetic, after all, I worked for a major Linux company for quite a few years, started using Linux RH) in 1994, and even wrote some network related kernel modules.
However, this switch to Linux is not going to happen (apart from where it is already used heavily, from servers to many non-PC systems).
I have been in projects for large companies but also government on and off. Now, I manage the IT of a small (<50 employees) non-IT business with people in several countries.
People who actually comment in these discussions seem to be entirely focused on the OS itself. But that is what matters the least in business. Office is another, and even there most people who don't deal with it at scale are way too focused on some use case where individuals write documents and do some spreadsheeting. It's almost always about a very small setup, or even just a single PC.
However, the Microsoft stack is sooooo much more. ID management. Device management. Uncountable number of little helpers in form of software and scripts that you cannot port to a Linux based stack without significant effort. Entire mail domains are managed by Office 265 - you own the domain and the DNS records, you get licenses for Office365 from MS, you point the DNS records to Microsoft, you are done.
Sure, MS tools and the various admin websites are a mess, duplicating many things, making others hard to find. But nobody in the world would be able to provide soooo much stuff while doing a better job. The truth is, they keep continuously innovating and I can see it, little things just conveniently showing up, like that I now have a Teams button to create an AI script of my conversations, or that if more than one person opens an Office document that is stored in OneDrive we can see each other inside the document, cursor positions, and who has it open.
Nobody in their right mind will switch their entir4e org to Linux unless they have some really good reasons, a lot of resources to spare, and a lot of experience. Most businesses, for whom IT is not the be-all-end-all but just a tool will not switch.
But something can be done.
The EU could, for example, start requiring other stacks for new special cases. They cannot tell the whole economy to switch, not even a fraction of it, but they could start with new government software. Maybe - depends on how it has to fit into the existing mostly Microsoft infrastructure.
They could also require more apps to be web-only. I once wrote some code for some government agency to manage business registrations, and it was web software.
The focus would have to be to start creating strong niches for local business to start making money using other stacks, and to take the long road, slowly replace US based stacks over the next two or three decades. At the same time, enact policies that let local business grow using alternative stacks, providing a safe cache-flow that does not have to compete with US based ones.
The EU also needs some better scaling. The nice thing about the MS stack is that I can use it everywhere, in almost all countries. The alternative cannot be that a business would have to use a different local company in each country.
I read a month ago that EU travel to the US is down - by only ~3%. Just like with any calls for boycott of this and that, the truth is that those commenting are a very tiny fraction. The vast majority of people and businesses are not commenting in these threads (or at all), and their focus is on their own business and domain problems first of all. Switching their IT stack will only done by force, if the US were to do something really drastic that crashes some targeted countries Microsoft- and Cloud-IT.
> However, the Microsoft stack is sooooo much more. ID management. Device management. Uncountable number of little helpers in form of software and scripts that you cannot port to a Linux based stack without significant effort. Entire mail domains are managed by Office 265 - you own the domain and the DNS records, you get licenses for Office365 from MS, you point the DNS records to Microsoft, you are done.
Is there any bit of this that is not web based or does not support Linux nowadays? Office 365 runs on a browser, and even Intune supports some enterprise oriented distributions, like RH, so device management shouldn't be a problem. But even if none of that was true, there is certainly competition in the IT management space. Defaulting to Microsoft just because of a Windows based fleet doesn't sound like a great idea.
> The truth is, they keep continuously innovating and I can see it, little things just conveniently showing up, like that I now have a Teams button to create an AI script of my conversations, or that if more than one person opens an Office document that is stored in OneDrive we can see each other inside the document, cursor positions, and who has it open.
This is stuff other vendors have been offering for ages now.
The browser versions of the Office apps aren't comparable to the native apps, and also don't support whatever native integrations (like VBA add-ins) companies use.
Trading dependency on a company in Redmond, WA, USA, for one in mountain view, CA, USA does nothing for moving away from USA in the dependency chain, but it proves that it's possible. And I know it's possible as there are several billion-dollar companies in Google Workspace I know of personally. And if it's possible for them, it means it's possible for the EU to get there. The only question is will they ever? Let's form a committee to schedule a meeting to look into that question.
"Possible" is everything that does not violate any laws of the universe, that is not a useful criterion!
Oh and thanks for ignoring everything I wrote I guess. Not that I expected anything different, it is always the same in these threads after all. Why bother with arguments, especially those of the person you respond to?
But you see, this "laziness" actually supports my point. Not even you want to do the hard thing and bother with what somebody else thinks when there is a much easier path. But you expect others to care about the things that you care about, without spending much effort even merely understanding their position.
Billionaires tend to have multiple properties in multiple states/countries. This is more a residency issue and probably low friction for them to change states personally. The thing holding back would be where their business and employees are located.
> LEDs aren't mandated per se, but they are the most attractive alternative.
Yeah, basically what the EU did was to say: For X Watts of electricity at least X Lumen of light has to be produced. And this number was gradually increased. Since old school light bulbs are quite inefficient when it comes to producing light, they slowly had to be phased out.
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