You been reading too many right wing blogs funded by the oil and coal industry..
Again miss-information from the usual sources.
First of all taxes. Are they included in or not in the numbers. Now on Germany, almost 50% of the consumer price is taxes as of 2013. So when you say German electricity prices are 300% higher than US.. do those prices include taxes? How much taxes do US consumers pay on their electricity?
According to Eurostat
Electricity and natural gas price statistics - Statistics Explained
Germans paid 29,4 euro cents per kWh.
Americans pay differently depending on where they live, but the average is 12.84 US cents per kWh according to the Department of Energy.
Now the currency conversion comes into it.
Germans pay 39 cents per kWh vs Americans 12.8 cents per kWH. Big difference no? Well no, because the German taxes account for almost 50% of the consumer price. Now I suspect there are taxes on electricity in the US too, but that is very dependent on what state we are talking about so an actual comparison is hard to do, but in no way are the taxes 50% of the price or even close to that. So if we take 50% of the german price we get 20 cents.. and lets be large and take off 3 cents.. that is at best 100% more, not 300% more.
And then there is the other factor.. efficiency and actual consumption. All the statistics out there show that the US, uses almost double the amount per capita than that of Germany.. and dont tell me that the US is more "industrialized" than Germany..
So the Germans might pay more for electricity, but they also consume half that of the US, which means the actual cost is actually about the same... go figure!
At the end of the day this has to do with the future not here and now. Germany, like many European countries have invested in the future, just as they invested in more fuel efficient cars 30 years ago. The latter paid off big time when oil hit 150 dollars a barrel and Americans were screaming in pain over the price of petrol.
The only problem is of course the taxes.. energy is a big tax generator for most European countries, and the less energy we use or generate ourselves, the less we buy and hence the less we pay in taxes.. and that factor is holding back European countries.. not price, not technology, but having to deal with a smaller tax income.