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Electricity prices are currently falling. But in the longer term, experts consider a price of 60 to 80 cents per kilowatt hour to be realistic if the expansion of renewable energies does not keep pace with demand.
“It’s a very dramatic development,” says master baker Guido Boveleth from Bedburg, in the middle of the Rhenish coal mining area, summing up the past few months. In order to be able to produce economically at all, he is now closed on Mondays. He also does without two assistants in order to absorb the high energy costs. Since the beginning of the year, Boveleth has been paying EUR 3,700 more per month for gas and electricity than in the previous year.
The baker thought he had done everything right. He invested in a new, energy-efficient gas oven three years ago. This consumes thirty percent less than the old model. His new solar system went into operation a few weeks ago. It covers half of his electricity needs. Because of the currently high electricity costs, it pays for itself twice as quickly, says Boveleth.
More expensive electricity, more expensive rolls
He can’t be happy about it. After all, he still has to buy the other half of his electricity requirements at high cost. Since the beginning of the year he has had a three-year contract for 48 cents per kilowatt hour; twice as much as last year. Since then, his baked goods have also become more expensive – by an average of 15 percent. “It’s annoying for me that we’ve now invested in the future, in energy-efficient appliances. And yet it doesn’t have a positive effect on me,” says the master baker.
Electricity prices are currently lower again. According to Internet comparison portals, they average around 30 cents for new customers. However, it is questionable whether the level will remain the same. In the future, the demand for electricity will grow rapidly due to more heat pumps and e-cars.
When gas power plants have to step in
Jürgen Karl from the Friedrich-Alexander-University Nuremberg-Erlangen considers this increasing demand for electricity to be the bottleneck of the energy transition. If the expansion of renewable energies does not succeed quickly enough, there will be a power gap that needs to be covered.
That’s why the specialist in energy process engineering fears “that gas-fired power plants will have to be used more and more frequently in the future.” If gas prices rise again, the start-up of the gas-fired power plants would in turn have an impact on the price of electricity. He therefore considers “an electricity price of 60 to 80 cents per kilowatt hour to be realistic by 2030,” says Karl.
How big the power gap could get
Detlef Stolten, Head of the Institute for Energy and Climate Research at Forschungszentrum Jülich, has exclusively for the ARD business magazine Plus minus calculates how large a power shortage can become if expansion continues to be as sluggish as in the past two years. The result is a power gap of 104 gigawatts. “Reduced to a very simple denominator, by 2030 about a third of capacity will be missing if the expansion continues as it has in the last two years.”
That must be replaced by faster expansion, says Stolten. Despite the current expansion of renewable energies, it is uncertain whether the pace will be sufficient in the remaining seven years.
Are the expansion plans realistic?
When he took office a year and a half ago, Federal Economics Minister Robert Habeck was already aware that the expansion of renewables was in bad shape and that the climate targets for 2030 were at stake. He hastily put together the so-called Easter package. The plan: From 2025, wind energy in Germany is to grow by ten gigawatts of generation capacity every year.
Torsten Levsen, head of the wind farm developer Denker & Wulf, is standing in the middle of his construction site for three new wind turbines. He has been building wind farms for 30 years. He calls the political goals beacons to put pressure on the industry – but it’s difficult to achieve, he says. “We want to achieve our goals. On the other hand, it’s important to us that we’re not overwhelmed,” warns Levsen. “I don’t think ten gigawatts in the next eight years is that realistic.”
In a few weeks, the large wind turbines will be up and running, each producing six megawatts of electricity. Four gigawatts of wind energy are to be added nationwide. At least a doubling of the previous lean years. But the huge components are still lying on the ground.
Price increases with consequences for electricity customers
Torsten Levsen mentions another problem. Because inflation has also put the industry under pressure. According to Levsen, the prices for components have doubled, and the interest rates for financing the huge systems have tripled. Overall, investment costs for a modern wind turbine with an output of around 5.5 megawatts have doubled within a few months from 3.5 million euros to around 6.2 million euros.
Electricity customers will feel the effects, Levsen fears. It remains to be seen whether green electricity will one day really be cheap, as politicians once promised. “In the end, my fear is that fossil energies will determine the price of electricity on the market. If we don’t make progress in the energy transition, it’s possible that whenever there is a power shortage, fossil energies will set the price. And that will lead to higher prices .”