i call BS: in Germany we're paying more than twice per kw than we were 3.5 years ago (it literally doubled in late 2022, from some 22c to 40-odd cents), and it just went up again in February 2026. Lots and lots of talk about lower energy prices, but _nobody_ "on the ground" is seeing it.
(Edit: unless, perhaps, they're installing their own solar arrays, which many single-family and duplex homes do, but not the apartment buildings most of us live in.)
German here. I pay around 24c/kWh. It's much cheaper than it was in late 2022 with the energy price shock due to russia attempting to blackout Europe. I cannot imagine how much worse we would be off, would our Power generation stem from fossil or nuclear fuel.
More renewables is the answer. We need to build so much that power becomes almost free (already the case in the summer at high noon, see [1]).
If it's almost free, then even electrically cracking molecules to make hydrocarbons and ammonia compounds is cost-competitive if you can quickly start and stop production, which would be really interesting. Those processes don't have to be very energy efficient if the capital and operating costs are relatively low. That last sentence does a lot of work though.
Terraform is working on that - burstable synthetic methane generation using cheap catalysts that you can afford to idle, only generating methane when electricity is cheap.
I think we should solve the "It's cloudy sometimes" problem with state built, extreme oversupply. Also giant solar farms in the southwest and large HVDC power lines to send that everywhere.
There's zero reason why "We make more power than we use most of the time" ever has to be a "problem". I think we should have so much unused power that it makes sense to suck CO2 out of the air to make fuel and chemical feedstocks. Air capture at that scale would be an insane engineering and manufacturing problem though.
You probably shouldn't vote for me though. I have dumber ideas too. But the "Lets do Solarpunk for real" one is probably not harmful to anyone. Except for a bunch of rich families in Texas.
https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/electricity-price chart is extremely noisy, and is quoting wholesale rather than retail, but to my eyes that actually looks flat over the period from before the Ukraine war. It seems to have started that spike in late 2021, before the war in February 2022 (which of course shoots it upwards, that's the "doubling in late 2022" you mention).
> (which of course shoots it upwards, that's the "doubling in late 2022" you mention).
i guaranty you that my electricity costs were 22c in mid-2022, jumped to 47c in either late 2022 or January 2023, and just went up from 47c to i don't know what in February (i got the notification of an increase but didn't bother logging in to see the new prices).
Sounds like you didnt sign a contract with an electricity provider and therefore are put in a fallback ("Grundversorgung") contract with the grid provider, which in 95% of cases is a bad deal for normal consumers.
You are free to make this choice, but if it bothers you enough to complain about it, it should bother you enough to invest 30 minutes and sign a contract: https://www.verivox.de/stromvergleich/
> Solar on the balcony railing is very popular right now, mostly amongst apartment renters
i have yet to see a single solar panel on an apartment building in Brandenburg, Germany, whereas a large portion (perhaps even a majority) of single-family and duplex units here have them. Perhaps they're more common in the richer parts of the country where a profit can be more readily turned, but not up here.
> Perhaps they're more common in the richer parts of the country where a profit can be more readily turned, but not up here.
These cost about 300-400 euros in local Aldi or Lidl (yes they sell them occasionally) with inverter, ready to plug-in (800W limit). At these prices they're accessible to everyone
It sounds like German citizens are poorer than Pakistani and sub-saharan citizens. Sorry to hear the fall, Germany used to have first world per capita income.
That's maybe a problem of east Germany in particular. I see Balkonkraftwerke (small balcony solar arrays, 1-4 modules with a microinverter plugged directly into an outlet) everywhere when I drive through major west German cities, even on rental apartment balconies.
> 1-4 modules with a microinverter plugged directly into an outlet
Interesting, is it really that simple and legal/up to code/safe? My naive assumption is that feeding back to mains would be more complex/costly that that but very cool if not.
These sorts of inverters are grid-tied so they turn themselves off when theres no grid to sync to (eg during an outage). My understanding is that's the main safety issue, and backfeeding while the grid is up is mostly a regulatory concern (as long as you have a modern meter that can tell the difference between electricity going in vs out)
As long as the inverter feeds at most 800W. That's about 4A, on a circuit designed for 16A. You need a new meter, but the old analog meters can run backwards and you can continue using it until you power company replaces it. You do have to register the setup, but that seems to be a quick process. And if you lose power the inverter turns off
Perfectly fine (at least here in the US) as long as your power meter is new enough to not double charge you for feeding back into the grid if your home draw drops low enough. Micro inverters are starting to really take off in modern solar installs to cut down on wiring distances since you can feed it into nearby AC circuits.
It's not 40+c/kWh, the market end-user rate is around 26-30 now. And includes transmission and taxes -- worth noting as some countries talk of price before transmission & tax.
I'm not sure how German power utilities work, but the US being the US, personal solar can drive up our utility costs here. Less people buying power from the utilities means they increase prices on the remaining customers.
Not sure how much this happens in practice anymore - any smart utility is going to use your solar / house battery to cover their spikes and reduce overall costs so they don’t have to keep an old dormant coal plant on the books for the Super Bowl. At least, that’s what I’d expect from my utility.
I think it's mostly for cases where people get 95% of the energy from solar but stay connected to the grid. The fixed costs of a house's connection to the grid are roughly constant, but historically utilities amortized it in their energy prices. We saw something similar in my area during the California droughts when people were "too good" at conserving water, but I guess a lot of the infra costs don't scale linearly with usage
Likely also depends on whether you get your power from a Co-op, investor-owned utility, or some other source. The IOUs will definitely want to amortize infra investment, whereas coops might be more focused on best-power-for-price for consumers, etc.
Only because profits of utilities (and nearly every company) are sacrosanct. Solar installations in US (for homes) are 6 - 10X costlier than other countries.
>Less people buying power from the utilities means they increase prices on the remaining customers.
Demand on the grid is going up.
What's driving up the cost is that all those rebates and 0% loans for solar, heat pumps, etc, etc, tax advantages for qualifying installers, etc, etc, etc, all that stuff is paid for by loading it into the transmission and distribution charges, the "cost of the wires and pipes" on your bill.
> Less people buying power from the utilities means they increase prices on the remaining customers.
Ergo... claims of lower electricity costs are BS, in that electricity's not getting cheaper per unit but is getting more expensive per unit for those without the ability to supplement their residence with solar/geothermal/household nuclear reactor/whatever.
No, it's just your typical distorted market. This happens in places that do net metering, where each joule you send to the grid pays for one joule drawn from the grid. This effectively vastly over-pays for local production, because it doesn't account for the costs of maintaining generating capacity or transmission. Those costs then have to be borne by the other customers instead. Utilities wouldn't offer this voluntarily. Where it exists, it's because it's legally mandated as a way of driving adoption of home solar.
The economically sensible way to do it is to pay individual produces for their power at the same rates they'd get if they were a "real" provider. This would be substantially less, so you'd have to provide much more than one joule to the grid to offset each joule consumed from it. With this, someone feeding their home solar power into the grid is still paying their share for transmission and generation, and there's no undue burden on other customers.
And also pay the local producer for the costs of (not building) transmission and distribution network, because they are producing where its needed and not thousands of miles away which requires transmission and distribution systems as well all the equipment and people that go with it. Also pay extra for creating the most resilient grid: no single point of failure, just tens of millions of producers. Also pay them at the peak rate, because most of the cost is for the peaker gas plants that only run a few hours/day, and overproduction will flatten the peak, encourage energy storage and all the good stuff.
> The query optimizer is allowed to see more opportunities to optimize and avoid unnecessary work.
Let's also not forget that db servers can have a memory, in that they can tweak query optimization based on previous queries or scans or whatever state is relevant. SQLite has no memory, in that sense. All query optimizations it makes are based solely upon the single query being processed.
> I’ve been experimenting with LiveStoreJS which uses a custom SQLite WASM binary for event sync
i'm not sure whether this might be helpful to you, but 3.52 will include a revamped "kvvfs" which (A) also works (non-persistently) in Worker threads and (B) supports callbacks to asynchronously send all db page writes to the client.
> That @ syntax is used in modern day Fossil too. Maybe that adds some extra overhead?
(Long-time Fossil dev here.)
The @ syntax is pre-processed, transformed to printf()-like calls, the destination of which depends on whether fossil is currently running (to simplify only slightly) from the CLI or as a CGI/server process.
That is: @ itself has no runtime costs, but does transform into calls which do have runtime costs. (printf() and its ilk aren't cheap!)
> The fact that they didn’t make STRICT default is really a shame.
SQLite makes strong backwards-compatibility guarantees. How many apps would be broken if an Android update suddenly defaulted its internal copy of SQLite to STRICT? Or if it decided to turn on foreign keys by default?
Those are rhetorical questions. Any non-0 percentage of affected applications adds up to a big number for software with SQLite's footprint.
Software pulling the proverbial rug out from under downstream developers by making incompatible changes is one of the unfortunate evils of software development, but the SQLite project makes every effort to ensure that SQLite doesn't do any rug-tugging.
> The great thing is that my blog is architecturally very simple, with all the content and images in an SQLite database that is live replicated with litestream.
What a weird definition of "architecturally very simple".
> I have a python web app that creates a DB connection per request (not ideal I know)
FWIW, "one per request per connection is bad" (for SQLite) is FUD, plain and simple. SQLite's own forum software creates one connection per request (it creates a whole forked process per request, for that matter) and we do not have any problems whatsoever with that approach.
Connection pools (with SQLite) are a solution looking for a problem, not a solution to a real problem.
There's nothing specific to read about it, just plenty of anecdotal evidence. People use connection pools because connecting to _remote_ databases is slow. SQLite _is not remote_. It's _in-process_ and _fast_. Any connection-pool _adds_ to the amount of work needed to get an SQLite instance going.
It's _conceivable_ that pooling _might_ speed it up _just a tad_ for databases with _very large schemas_ because parsing the schema (which is not done at open-time, but when the schema is first needed) can be "slow" (maybe even several whole milliseconds!).
(Edit: unless, perhaps, they're installing their own solar arrays, which many single-family and duplex homes do, but not the apartment buildings most of us live in.)
reply