This energy scam has been going on for more than 30 years in Europe and the UK.
The former Economic minister and professor Yanis Varoufakis explains [1].
My Fiberhood cooperative has a solution: the Enernet smart grid where you pay $0.01 per kWh. We wire up one in three houses or more in a neighborhood with power routers. People buy and sell only solar electricity from panels in the neighborhood, from batteries and from every ev charging station on every parking spot in the neighborhood and from every parked ev. Each participating house saves $2000 to $5000 per year for 30 years or more[2]. You also get free 25 Gbps internet. You heat your house with a heatpump or cool the house with an ice storage ac powered only by solar. If the cooperative makes any money the share the profit with all the members or they vote to buy more solar panels and batteries. The cooperative gives loans to houses that can not afford their own panels.
People seem to have trouble understanding how commodity markets naturally price their goods but the whole point of this website is to show that electricity prices are finally decoupling.
edit: I didn’t watch the videos, I don’t have time first watch a video and then to dissect bullshit from truth.
But the solar electricity is still overpriced and taxed. People pay several times more for solar electricity from the grid than what they get if they sell to the grid.
It's not overpriced. If it was, the grid operator would be raking in massive profits because they're selling way above cost. In reality grid operators have small margins, this indicates there is no overpricing.
Do you get paid less for power fed to the grid than power sold at retail? Yes. Because they're different things. You get say 5 cents for a kWh fed back to the grid, while you pay more like 25c. But guess what? Wholesalers also get 5 cents to sell to the grid. It's just that there's an additional 20 cents in grid operation and taxes for a retail price.
Taxes you can't avoid, it's not a 'scam'. It's money you pay that goes into public funds and returns to the public, and is spent by people you can vote to elect to represent you.
Grid costs also aren't a scam, they're just a cost of doing business. Again, profit margins are small, so they're pricing based on cost, not based on scam.
And it's all entirely optional. You can just install batteries yourself. You can do whatever you want. You don't have to use the grid. But surprise surprise, there's no reason to think that a small network is on average cheaper than a big network. The bigger the network the easier it is to share storage capacity and offload excesses from one place to another. It's the reason most states and countries try to build interconnectors to even build international grids, and why islands like Cyprus that don't interconnect and have small markets have the highest electricity prices. It's why anyone who builds a home and has the choice to connect to an available grid or not, does so. And why land and homes in locations without grid-access are valued less, because they're more expensive to set-up.
The cost of a nationwide grid is significant. Depending on the terrain and population density, it usually nets out at somewhere between 30%-50% the overall cost of electricity. Sure, if you run a microgrid among a few houses, you won't pay those costs, but someone has to pay the cost to maintain the km of lines to reach deep into the mountains of Bavaria.
Microgrids also have some black swan events that can result in outage; if you are reliant on solar and storage but then experience a 7-day long period of stormy weather and no production. As you note, off-grid is always an option, and when you seriously look into it, you quickly find that costs to have that 24/7/365 service are many times more than just paying to connect to the grid.
At least in the us - the only way a utility can really make more money is by spending more money (as they get a return from the utility commission on a vested capital - massive oversimplification) but it means utilities are not incentivized to spend less rather than more…
Same in Australia, after they were corporatised (turned into companies run for profit rather than run as a service by some level of government) it was recognised that as natural monopolies there would need to be some sort of regulation on how much money they could recover, it was decided a method based on their costs was best, so they spent bad money agter good im expanding the network hugely (based on crazy projections of growth in demand to nowhere) rather than building resilience into the network and lowering their costs.
And that’s not even the cost of marketisation, that’s just the regulated network costs.
The government employees who approve or deny the utility’s priced have an incentive to not approve higher prices. Their bosses are usually elected, and higher utility prices are very unpopular.
I was told by a former southern company exec that the McKinsey did a study for them and their largest competitive advantage was regulatory capture in the states in which they operate - unfortunately I think the politicians are more beholden to the utilities than their constituents..
If you are selling to the grid, there is probably over-supply. Prices are driven by supply and demand. If you want to avoid selling at lower prices and buying at higher, try and get a battery. Check ecoflow to get an idea of the costs.
Ecoflow is a good example of overpriced American tech. I payed $1500 for a 2 kWh battery. Our Fiberhood coop sells a 16kWh battery for $1800. Prices in China are lower still.
Prices have been dropping like crazy as the various battery manufacturers have been competing with each other. They are all pretty similarly priced at this point.
A 2kwh ecoflow now costs $800. Still overpriced, but the gap is steadily narrowing.
Also, $1800 for 16kwh is a great price. That's $112/kWh. That's pretty close to raw cell costs.
Does the battery pack also come with charge circuitry, inverter, bms?
Of course it comes with our charge and discharge circuitry which is the inverter and also acts as the bms. As far as I am aware as a scientist, we are the only one in the world who charge each battery cell in parallel and slower or pulsed without maxing out or overheating, that's why we get 20000 discharge cycles versus the 5000-8000 the battery manufacture quotes.
Is that available in the US? Can you share a link? That’s an amazing deal. I’ve been recommending server rack batteries (5kwh for $750) to people but if there is something better I’d love to see it.
Fiberhood has an office in Tucson Arizona and will ship to the US if you want to to pay Trumps tariffs. I'm not aware of reasonably priced good battery or inverter makers in the US, besides ourselves (we are a non-profit so we are cheaper).
It is however not that simple to just give you a link, we need to hear from you for what electronics the software system needs to be fine-tuned. We need to understand what battery and electronics you need for each situation. As a scientist I know for a fact that no one in the world makes good battery systems yet, they are all wrongly designed (especially the ev and car batteries). You can easily spot that yourself, no one charges each individual battery cell individually in parallel. Everyone, including the scientists, charges battery packs in series and has battery management systems and ac-dc or dc-dc inverters that are not designed for the particular battery type and brand. Not a single one. If you ever find one that does charge and discharge each cell in parallel and slowly between 50% and 80%, please tell us and we'll tell the world. Right now only Fiberhood electronics charges cells correctly with specially made charger circuitry. The $0.50 to $2 networked printed circuit boards per battery cell we currently sell are the prototypes for the $0.10 battery charging microcontroller chips that we are making.
You can find dozens of Youtube influencers who test and or build cheap serially charged battery packs and your server rack batteries and inverter systems that you can find on professional China business directories, Tabao, Aliexpress and the like. But they are not exactly what you need and they damage your cells by charging them wrongly. No service, no warranties, no insurance, no buyers protection, buyer beware.
Be aware that ordering such systems directly in China is fraught with difficulties, its easy to lose your money.
The price for grid power ought to be somewhat higher than the the grid operator(s) pay at the place where the power is delivered into the grid plus their own costs for running the actual grid. So what do you think is a fair price for building/maintaining/running the grid?
The grid is a nationwide electrical circuit with requirements to connect to most buildings, and with demanding uptime and safety requirements. How much ought building and maintaining that to cost?
>So what do you think is a fair price for building/maintaining/running the grid?
Zero. I think we do not need the national grid and its vastly overpriced (order of magnitude) electricity anymore. A local DC grid, an abundance of solar and huge batteries is all you need.
For example in the Netherlands, 18 million people, 9 million houses or buildings, the national grid needs to triple in size and 1 million houses and almost 20.000 large companies are on a 10 year waiting list to get a connection (so the move abroad or build their own solar grid).
And even if you are on the grid, you pay 50% taxes and €0,31 to €0,78 per kWh. If you are on our Enernet, you only pay around €0.0044 per kWh ($0.0051756/kWh). That is 70 times to 177 times overpriced!!! (calculations in this thread lower down).
It’s really not - we built a rather large solar plant for one of our facilities offsetting like at most like 15% of demand, but because we were paying high utility rates it was a low double digit ROI project just on the spread between us it commercial rates and our cost of production (even higher when you added in the tax incentives) if you can build solar at utility scale costs and defray commercial or retail rates it’s a pretty good deal the problem is getting those utility scale cost structures when the projects are small…
The value of electricity is extremely time dependent. You can easily overproduce solar power for your house during the day fairly cheaply. However batteries + gas generators for cloudy day quickly make the cost significantly higher.
The grid gives you expensive guarantees about reliability. Just giving power does not do that.
You can sign up by becoming a member of the Fiberhood cooperative for free. Send an email to Fiberhood at icloud dot com. We must have your address and map location link or Google map address code so we can draw maps and make a website for your neighborhood to sign up and form an Enernet.
We will do a small survey and put up a detailed map of your neighborhood (like openstreetmap, see the slide in this talk [1]). We hand out door to door flyers and organise a weekend barbeque neighborhood party where everyone can come see how the cable between neighbours goes roof-to-roof, window-to-window or garden-to-garden between power routers. See our cost price bifacial solar panels and the large batteries.
We find that within a few weeks a few hundred people signed up for the cooperative and we start installing the first 10 houses. Most people invest in solar panels and batteries at wholesale prices installed by volunteers. Others get a loan to pay for this. You wind up getting payed for the panels you bought or paying around 1 dollar cent per kWh, saving a few thousand dollars per years for decades.
In the US the Rocky Mountain Institute and its founder Amory Lovins describes this as 'grid defection' and it happens on a large scale now.
Fiberhood has cooperatives forming all around the world, both rural and urban: Ukraine, Peru (near Iquitos by the Indian tribe on the Amazon River Bank, Southern Spain, Slovenia, Finland, The Netherlands, Australia.
The Fiberhood planner maps are in the first slides in the first minute of the video. We used to have an interactive zooming map of Fiberhoods for every house in the Netherlands online but now we only have them available for Fiberhood members because of privacy rules. On the maps you can see where the batteries, solar panels and power routers are located in a Fiberhood version of Google Streetview.
Please give some proof of Varoufakis lying. I always check what he claims in his books and talks and I never spotted a lie. I also check Saul Griffith and Amory Lovins talks, books and papers on factual errors and never spotten one in two decades.
But it means you are simply exploiting the "normal" electricity grid this way by using it when your solar doesn't work and batteries run dry - that is, when the cost of elecitricty in a normal grid, with the high penetration of renewables, is highest. You do the normal capitalism thing: privatise the benefits, socialise the costs... And the higher proportion of renewables in the grid is the higher is your upside.
If you want to completely stop using normal grid and rely on solar alone, you will need to overbuild your solar so massively, you won't be able to afford it (and will run out of land, too). Cost of electricity produced will be several euros per kwh, and a simple calculation shows just how massively unrealistic it is.
They say $0.01/kWh is the target price, to be reached after some decades.
Don't get me wrong, I am excited about solar power but careful about the economics: the capital cost of solar right now is well over 1$/W (panels+inverters+installation/hookup) and even though it is falling nicely, the amortization schedule needs to be considered.
A rule-of-thumb figure is 1kWh of power per year from 1W nominal installed, so the capital cost will have to be amortized over 100 years to reach $.01/kWh. The installed price has to come down by a factor of 10 for this to work out.
When you say "power router," what product are you referencing specifically? I'm trying to search online to find a similar product but I don't think I'm finding the right thing.
Nice! This is the first time i see anyone providing a quantitative answer to this. When the effect becomes more pronounced, it will hopefully remove political barriers for renewable electricity.
Good for the Germans, in the UK we use marginal cost pricing, so consumers pay for the highest costing output regardless of how much if any they use. Means even if we get gas down to 1% well still be paying gas prices.
Note that "gas" in this context means natural gas, not gasoline
As noted in the methodology below, they are measuring the gas-implied level as the marginal running costs of a combined-cycle gas turbine plant: the price of the natural gas necessary to generate a given amount of electricity, plus the cost of the necessary carbon credits to burn that natural gas. Then they compare that to the actual electricity price
You have to ask how much of it is subsidized, otherwise it's pointless. It's very easy to 'decouple' electricity price from natural gas if the government simply pays it with tax money (which is how it works in many asian countries where the electricity prices are less than one third of EU level.)
For me personally it did not. I was a happy Tibber costumer until recently, meaning I was charged the quarterly hour spot price per kWh. The Iran War let to a significant jump in the price during the hours when renewables were low. I switched back to a traditional fixed price per kWh plan because of the high gas prices.
Nope. They pay more than they were with the "old" energy mix of more gas and nuclear.
Telling people it could be worse isn't really something to be proud of.
I personally now have solar panels on the roof and a heat pump so we only use electricity and don't rely on gas. Germany's strategy is really beneficial to households like my own. Unless you're relatively well off or on benefits, you're losing big time. The costs are constantly increasing with people telling others to just take money (you don't have) to install some solar panels on the house (you don't own) or buy an electric car (you can't afford).
Decoupling of energy prices from fossil fuel is going to be spreading around the globe. It's not that hard to grasp. If you are spending non trivial percentages of your GDP on stuff that you burn once in exchange for some twh of energy delivered, lowering that significantly will have a notable impact on your trade balance.
Recent events in the middle east will have made a few countries keenly aware of how overly dependent they are on stuff coming from that region and how easily their economies are disrupted when stuff goes wrong there.
I live in Berlin, electricity is rather expensive here and people are not treating their gas dependence with enough urgency yet. The city is surrounded by flat country side with lots of wind mills and solar installations. Yet most apartment buildings in the city are still gas heated. Mine is no exception. I have to pay into fueling the gas boiler every month to the extent of about 150ish euro per month. Down from 250ish during the worst of the aftermath of the Russian gas pipeline shut down. I'd love my building to be switched to a heat pump. That's 1800 euro down the drain every year. I'll take a 30-40% cut on that please. It's technically very feasible and measured over 10-20 years, there should be a very clear financial payoff. Done right it should pay for itself probably within a decade. The building has about 20 apartments. Monthly gas bills are 2.5K based on yearly statements. Or about 30K. All out the chimney. That's one hell of a budget to tackle a bit of energy efficiency in the building.
But this is where Germany is its own worst enemy. We're talking a lot of vested interests. Nimby's somehow blocking the notion of literally saving money (as opposed to setting it on fire and chucking it out the chimney). A lack of incentives. A lot of bureaucracy, etc. Even the decision to stop building completely new buildings without a gas connection is somehow controversial in this country where gas is expensive. It is in the middle of a years long gas crisis of its own making and it can't get the decision to stop hitting itself with the proverbial hammer actioned.
A bit of system thinking could turn this around relatively quickly though. For example starting to think of this as investments with clear ROI as opposed to just cost would change the decision making and could also open up a lot of financing. Banks love investments with predictable ROI, for example. And Germany has an excellent credit rating.
However, Germany is grid locked on an irrational fear of financing and debt. It has very little of it relative to e.g. the US or even most other EU countries. It also has huge infrastructure problems. Addressing those requires investment. Investment requires financing. Investments have ROIs which should enable said financing. But that's where penny pinching politicians seem to have a mental block confusing investments for cost and consistently opting to "save cost" rather than to invest. And generally not seeing the forest for the trees.
But the picture is pretty clear. Switch most house holds to heat pumps while at the same time investing in cables, on/off-shore wind, a bit of solar on the side. With lots of battery storage. Etc. would do wonders for the amounts of gas it has to import at great cost. The country has millions of apartment blocks like mine using about 2-3x more energy than needed for heating. Almost all of it in gas form. A program to change those buildings could be executed in 10-15 years and break even in about the same time. It would result in many billions of savings in gas imports per year. That's the few percent of GDP that makes the difference between growth or recession. Germany has been in and out of recession for the last few years. Even powering that exclusively with gas fired electricity plants would yield substantial savings. And it already is transitioning to a grid that is mostly not gas powered. This should be a no brainer. But it somehow isn't. And that's just domestic heating.
229 comments
The former Economic minister and professor Yanis Varoufakis explains [1].
My Fiberhood cooperative has a solution: the Enernet smart grid where you pay $0.01 per kWh. We wire up one in three houses or more in a neighborhood with power routers. People buy and sell only solar electricity from panels in the neighborhood, from batteries and from every ev charging station on every parking spot in the neighborhood and from every parked ev. Each participating house saves $2000 to $5000 per year for 30 years or more[2]. You also get free 25 Gbps internet. You heat your house with a heatpump or cool the house with an ice storage ac powered only by solar. If the cooperative makes any money the share the profit with all the members or they vote to buy more solar panels and batteries. The cooperative gives loans to houses that can not afford their own panels.
[1] Best version with info graffics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3bo-s_OY4Q or
Longer version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NicE0-N9ux0&list=TLPQMDcwNDI... or
short version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaHepQyE37Q
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Merik-Voswinkel/publica...
edit: I didn’t watch the videos, I don’t have time first watch a video and then to dissect bullshit from truth.
Do you get paid less for power fed to the grid than power sold at retail? Yes. Because they're different things. You get say 5 cents for a kWh fed back to the grid, while you pay more like 25c. But guess what? Wholesalers also get 5 cents to sell to the grid. It's just that there's an additional 20 cents in grid operation and taxes for a retail price.
Taxes you can't avoid, it's not a 'scam'. It's money you pay that goes into public funds and returns to the public, and is spent by people you can vote to elect to represent you.
Grid costs also aren't a scam, they're just a cost of doing business. Again, profit margins are small, so they're pricing based on cost, not based on scam.
And it's all entirely optional. You can just install batteries yourself. You can do whatever you want. You don't have to use the grid. But surprise surprise, there's no reason to think that a small network is on average cheaper than a big network. The bigger the network the easier it is to share storage capacity and offload excesses from one place to another. It's the reason most states and countries try to build interconnectors to even build international grids, and why islands like Cyprus that don't interconnect and have small markets have the highest electricity prices. It's why anyone who builds a home and has the choice to connect to an available grid or not, does so. And why land and homes in locations without grid-access are valued less, because they're more expensive to set-up.
Microgrids also have some black swan events that can result in outage; if you are reliant on solar and storage but then experience a 7-day long period of stormy weather and no production. As you note, off-grid is always an option, and when you seriously look into it, you quickly find that costs to have that 24/7/365 service are many times more than just paying to connect to the grid.
And that’s not even the cost of marketisation, that’s just the regulated network costs.
Series of awful blunders.
A 2kwh ecoflow now costs $800. Still overpriced, but the gap is steadily narrowing.
Also, $1800 for 16kwh is a great price. That's $112/kWh. That's pretty close to raw cell costs.
Does the battery pack also come with charge circuitry, inverter, bms?
> Fiberhood coop sells a 16kWh battery for $1800
Is that available in the US? Can you share a link? That’s an amazing deal. I’ve been recommending server rack batteries (5kwh for $750) to people but if there is something better I’d love to see it.
It is however not that simple to just give you a link, we need to hear from you for what electronics the software system needs to be fine-tuned. We need to understand what battery and electronics you need for each situation. As a scientist I know for a fact that no one in the world makes good battery systems yet, they are all wrongly designed (especially the ev and car batteries). You can easily spot that yourself, no one charges each individual battery cell individually in parallel. Everyone, including the scientists, charges battery packs in series and has battery management systems and ac-dc or dc-dc inverters that are not designed for the particular battery type and brand. Not a single one. If you ever find one that does charge and discharge each cell in parallel and slowly between 50% and 80%, please tell us and we'll tell the world. Right now only Fiberhood electronics charges cells correctly with specially made charger circuitry. The $0.50 to $2 networked printed circuit boards per battery cell we currently sell are the prototypes for the $0.10 battery charging microcontroller chips that we are making.
You can find dozens of Youtube influencers who test and or build cheap serially charged battery packs and your server rack batteries and inverter systems that you can find on professional China business directories, Tabao, Aliexpress and the like. But they are not exactly what you need and they damage your cells by charging them wrongly. No service, no warranties, no insurance, no buyers protection, buyer beware.
Be aware that ordering such systems directly in China is fraught with difficulties, its easy to lose your money.
The grid is a nationwide electrical circuit with requirements to connect to most buildings, and with demanding uptime and safety requirements. How much ought building and maintaining that to cost?
>So what do you think is a fair price for building/maintaining/running the grid?
Zero. I think we do not need the national grid and its vastly overpriced (order of magnitude) electricity anymore. A local DC grid, an abundance of solar and huge batteries is all you need.
For example in the Netherlands, 18 million people, 9 million houses or buildings, the national grid needs to triple in size and 1 million houses and almost 20.000 large companies are on a 10 year waiting list to get a connection (so the move abroad or build their own solar grid). And even if you are on the grid, you pay 50% taxes and €0,31 to €0,78 per kWh. If you are on our Enernet, you only pay around €0.0044 per kWh ($0.0051756/kWh). That is 70 times to 177 times overpriced!!! (calculations in this thread lower down).
Maybe a max-capacity price would be better for household grid connections, but that doesn’t change the fact that the grid needs to be paid for.
The grid gives you expensive guarantees about reliability. Just giving power does not do that.
Blah blah contracts blah markets blah always an excuse in the UK for why everything is more expensive than other countries
Is there a wall in the way? Tear it down. Make it happen
God we demand so little of our politicians in reality
We will do a small survey and put up a detailed map of your neighborhood (like openstreetmap, see the slide in this talk [1]). We hand out door to door flyers and organise a weekend barbeque neighborhood party where everyone can come see how the cable between neighbours goes roof-to-roof, window-to-window or garden-to-garden between power routers. See our cost price bifacial solar panels and the large batteries.
We find that within a few weeks a few hundred people signed up for the cooperative and we start installing the first 10 houses. Most people invest in solar panels and batteries at wholesale prices installed by volunteers. Others get a loan to pay for this. You wind up getting payed for the panels you bought or paying around 1 dollar cent per kWh, saving a few thousand dollars per years for decades.
In the US the Rocky Mountain Institute and its founder Amory Lovins describes this as 'grid defection' and it happens on a large scale now.
Fiberhood has cooperatives forming all around the world, both rural and urban: Ukraine, Peru (near Iquitos by the Indian tribe on the Amazon River Bank, Southern Spain, Slovenia, Finland, The Netherlands, Australia.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbqKClBwFwI&t=5574s
If you want to completely stop using normal grid and rely on solar alone, you will need to overbuild your solar so massively, you won't be able to afford it (and will run out of land, too). Cost of electricity produced will be several euros per kwh, and a simple calculation shows just how massively unrealistic it is.
Don't get me wrong, I am excited about solar power but careful about the economics: the capital cost of solar right now is well over 1$/W (panels+inverters+installation/hookup) and even though it is falling nicely, the amortization schedule needs to be considered. A rule-of-thumb figure is 1kWh of power per year from 1W nominal installed, so the capital cost will have to be amortized over 100 years to reach $.01/kWh. The installed price has to come down by a factor of 10 for this to work out.
0:00-5:35 : ~ 0.32€
5:35-8:45 : ~ 0.38€
8:45-10.30 : ~ 0.30€
10:30-16:45 : ~ 0.18€
16:45-18:00 : ~ 0.31€
18:00-24:00 : ~ 0.34€
As noted in the methodology below, they are measuring the gas-implied level as the marginal running costs of a combined-cycle gas turbine plant: the price of the natural gas necessary to generate a given amount of electricity, plus the cost of the necessary carbon credits to burn that natural gas. Then they compare that to the actual electricity price
Nope. They pay more than they were with the "old" energy mix of more gas and nuclear.
Telling people it could be worse isn't really something to be proud of.
I personally now have solar panels on the roof and a heat pump so we only use electricity and don't rely on gas. Germany's strategy is really beneficial to households like my own. Unless you're relatively well off or on benefits, you're losing big time. The costs are constantly increasing with people telling others to just take money (you don't have) to install some solar panels on the house (you don't own) or buy an electric car (you can't afford).
Recent events in the middle east will have made a few countries keenly aware of how overly dependent they are on stuff coming from that region and how easily their economies are disrupted when stuff goes wrong there.
I live in Berlin, electricity is rather expensive here and people are not treating their gas dependence with enough urgency yet. The city is surrounded by flat country side with lots of wind mills and solar installations. Yet most apartment buildings in the city are still gas heated. Mine is no exception. I have to pay into fueling the gas boiler every month to the extent of about 150ish euro per month. Down from 250ish during the worst of the aftermath of the Russian gas pipeline shut down. I'd love my building to be switched to a heat pump. That's 1800 euro down the drain every year. I'll take a 30-40% cut on that please. It's technically very feasible and measured over 10-20 years, there should be a very clear financial payoff. Done right it should pay for itself probably within a decade. The building has about 20 apartments. Monthly gas bills are 2.5K based on yearly statements. Or about 30K. All out the chimney. That's one hell of a budget to tackle a bit of energy efficiency in the building.
But this is where Germany is its own worst enemy. We're talking a lot of vested interests. Nimby's somehow blocking the notion of literally saving money (as opposed to setting it on fire and chucking it out the chimney). A lack of incentives. A lot of bureaucracy, etc. Even the decision to stop building completely new buildings without a gas connection is somehow controversial in this country where gas is expensive. It is in the middle of a years long gas crisis of its own making and it can't get the decision to stop hitting itself with the proverbial hammer actioned.
A bit of system thinking could turn this around relatively quickly though. For example starting to think of this as investments with clear ROI as opposed to just cost would change the decision making and could also open up a lot of financing. Banks love investments with predictable ROI, for example. And Germany has an excellent credit rating.
However, Germany is grid locked on an irrational fear of financing and debt. It has very little of it relative to e.g. the US or even most other EU countries. It also has huge infrastructure problems. Addressing those requires investment. Investment requires financing. Investments have ROIs which should enable said financing. But that's where penny pinching politicians seem to have a mental block confusing investments for cost and consistently opting to "save cost" rather than to invest. And generally not seeing the forest for the trees.
But the picture is pretty clear. Switch most house holds to heat pumps while at the same time investing in cables, on/off-shore wind, a bit of solar on the side. With lots of battery storage. Etc. would do wonders for the amounts of gas it has to import at great cost. The country has millions of apartment blocks like mine using about 2-3x more energy than needed for heating. Almost all of it in gas form. A program to change those buildings could be executed in 10-15 years and break even in about the same time. It would result in many billions of savings in gas imports per year. That's the few percent of GDP that makes the difference between growth or recession. Germany has been in and out of recession for the last few years. Even powering that exclusively with gas fired electricity plants would yield substantial savings. And it already is transitioning to a grid that is mostly not gas powered. This should be a no brainer. But it somehow isn't. And that's just domestic heating.