The price of electricity was mostly because how the Marketplace for power trading was setup .It became very profitable to produce power for export with existing baseload plants because renewable plants could take the load. This has a side effect of causing an periodic oversupply that makes the power very cheap(negative) on the market.

This paradoxically makes power very expensive for everybody who has to pay for the renewable subsidies because the renewable costs are fixed. For instance the price of a kWh is set to 25ct for a producer of renewable power. The power on the market goes into negative because there is a glut with a lot of non-trottleable plants online so say it goes to -.20ct. That means the cost for the power that renewable plant makes is now 45ct. These costs are passed on to the consumer and small Businesses. Larger Businesses that use a lot of Power are generally exempt from paying the renewable subsidies. This makes the Power even more expensive.

Well they are priced in such a way that you only sell that many. This Price isn't totally justified in Production costs but has partially by strategic considerations having to do with production capacities and model planning. Also they are currently still at the point where the company would rather not sell you an electric car if you buy a regular one instead. FUD articles like the one linked above are meant to temporarily flatten demand for electric cars a bit until they are ready to produce more without having to suffer losses in the regular product lines.

After that the Story will change 180 and you will read about how an electric car will produce less CO2 even if the electricity was created in a soviet era brown coal power plant.

Originally the Plan was tho sell clean diesel cars for the next 15 years and then to switch to hydrogen. Hydrogen mostly because it is so familiar because you still fill it up at a gas(hydrogen)station. With the diesel scandal diesel cars have become a very hard sell and Hydrogen never ever made sense (Embrittlement for direct combustion, Hydrogen Fuel cell cars _Are_ electric cars just more complex/expensive, Hydrogen is inefficient to produce). So they are sorta scrabeling while also in in damage control mode atm.

In short the market is only a tertiary factor in this and due to the limited number of players would only fully correct on the scale of a decade or more.

Uhm, yes it doesn't. VW sold 1,985 Cars in January across *ALL* of Europe. And that is the No 1 sold electric car. That Article is about electric cars only.

For comparison 15,631,687 Cars were sold in 2017 in the EU. That would be 1.3 million a month. I don't have figures for January but I don't think its much off.

2000 cars is NOT mass market.

No, Its not a significant factor for CO2. I really just wanted to have a result in the probably right ballpark / magnitude. Thats why the "10 years" from that agency is bonkers.

For a diesel Volvo vs a Tesla model S, assuming the average 2015 power mix in Europe the break even point is about 28.000Km.

I did take some big shortcuts tho. I compared 100kwh worth of Panasonic LiPo batteries + power to the diesel fuel needed to drive the volvo the same distance using Tesla Model S power usage figures.

There are way to slew this in one or the other direction - for instance I did also add CO2 Equivalent for refining the diesel.

Considering where Berylls Strategy Advisors is located and the fact that the German car companies still have no mass-market ready electric car my guess is that this is fake news and can be disregarded.

Dinosaurs are cool. Plus they have lovely plumage.

its pronounced as "iPhone Excess" or "iPhone Excess Max".

Well, why not just fly the assembled BFR to the launch pads they are to be used at suborbitally? I think that's whats eventually gonna happen.

yes, very nice. doesn't change the fact that the claims are a bit dubious to begin with. Also I doubt the new very very very special and expensive motor will be cheap.

This is just an attempt to stretch the sunk investment in gasoline technology a little bit more into the future and to cover the gap till the long overdo electric models can be developed. Because when doing the math directly comparing an electric to a gasoline car there is no way a gasoline engine can beat an electric car. A gasoline engine is a heat engine and as such is limited to Carnot efficiency.

I did the math for relative CO2 (energy) cost comparing a Volvo diesel car to a Tesla Model S. It was a few months ago so I don't have the exact figures anymore but here are the factors i discarded or took into account:

* I assumed an average European energy mix
* I ignored possible positive factors in favor of the Tesla. For instance it very much looks like electric cars will last a lot longer than gasoline cars.
* I ignored all the parts of both vehicles (except the battery)
* I took into account the "Fuel" in case of the Tesla this is both the battery and the Power to charge it
* The fuel of the Volvo (Diesel) includes cost for prospecting, transportation and refining
* I took into account the energy cost of prospecting and mining the resources for the batteries as well as production

Anyway the Result was that around 26000-ish km the electric car would have recovered any possible energy dept its production could have had over a gasoline car. This figure gets massively better when say the batteries are produced with renewable energy (say in Sweden). I also suspect I massively underestimated the energy cost of refining given some statistics i recently saw.

The up stepping phase shifting and "delivering" is all done buy the owner of the solar installation. Its a basic feature of any connected inverter.
As for nuclear, I am all for it - as long as the company running it finance the disposal of the waste and run the power stations safely and take out insurance against possible nuclear accidents.

Currently they do none of it. The disposal of waste is payed for by the tax payer. The companys get around the requirements of keeping profits back against the future costly tear down of the power stations (that has to happen eventually no matter what) by basically mortgaging said power station against he funds for tearing it down. So in the end you will have to pay the tearing down of the station from the less than worthless radioactive hulk of the power station. (I am oversimplifying a bit what they actually are doing is moving all their business except for nuclear to new companies while the stations are nominally worth something).
As for Insurance - no insurer takes them because the costs of a big accident are just too high - so again the taxpayer has to potentially pay for that.

Those are just the indirect subsidies that power companys get.

with the direct subsidies power companies got you could finance the renewables wholesale several times over.
 

the article is a quite accurate depiction of the mess. It doesn't feel like much has changed since 2013.

I made a post about this. The problem is the way the cost of the renewable buildup is placed solely on private households and small businesses. If you use enough power you get an excemption - that means others have to pay for your part and that makes the whole thing even worse.

Yes, but other Power generating dams have been generating power for over 100 years. I bet the sediment problem is only really bad in certain places and can be controlled in others.
Here is a damn I know of running since 1914:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Sadly all this is despite the German governments best efforts. For a few years recently they really tried to limit the growth of renewables. At least when it comes to small and medium network-connected installations. For small installations the credits got rather abruptly reduced. Slightly bigger Installations (>10kw) now have to pay VAT on the power they generate and use themselves. The overall amount of installed renewables got Hard-limited (I assume new installations wont get approved once its reached).

The way the credit system for the renewables works also causes really high electricity costs for private households and small businesses. Basially the cheaper electrical power on the spot market gets the more expensive the electricity gets. This is made worse by market effects cause baseline power plants to run for power export purposes. Running the plants causes the price of power on the national spot market to go actually negative but the power is then actually sold at a profit to neighboring countries.

What makes the prices even higher is the fact that big users of electricity get an exception from paying into the renewable credit scheme. In fact the more power you use the easier this is to get.

The increasing cost is used by the Government to sell the reduction in credits and the limiting of renewable installations to the voters.

Anway wikipedia has the bare facts if you want to read it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I really think that germany now needs a energy storage promotion law but it seems like the current government won't really do anything in that direction. Instead there is talk of really stupid "smart" grid schemes backed by smart meters.