[HN Gopher] Why has the price of electricity in Europe reached r...
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Why has the price of electricity in Europe reached record highs?
Author : ciconia
Score : 158 points
Date : 2021-09-20 09:29 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| mhandley wrote:
| The strike price for nuclear power from Hinkley Point C when it
| becomes operational will be PS92.50/MWh. This has received a lot
| of criticism for being too high. With current wholesale rates at
| PS385/MWh, suddenly Hinkley Point C doesn't look so expensive any
| more.
| jabl wrote:
| Well, the price for HPC _is_ very expensive. The stupid thing
| is that by structuring the subsidy in a smarter way the UK
| could have gotten it at half the price. I 've seen no reason
| why they did it how they did except adherence to some
| ideological dogma. Or putting my conspiracy glasses on, maybe
| some politically well-connected bankers in London made off like
| robbers at the expense of the public at large.
| Ekaros wrote:
| TVO in Finland managed to get similar plant for final price
| of 5,7 milliard euros. Though it is not yet producing energy.
| So, UK did somewhat worse in the process.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| Yep, by forcing Areva, the supplier of it, into bankruptcy
| by having the foresight of signing a fixed price deal.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Areva#Restructuring
| pydry wrote:
| Grid scale battery banks also make sense at that price.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Except Hinkley Point C would require those high prices persist
| for a decade in order to pay off. That's unlikely to happen.
| cbmuser wrote:
| Well, I don't see why it shouldn't happen. It's not like the
| UK is currently building nuclear power plants like China or
| Russia do.
| Brakenshire wrote:
| For 3 and a half decades.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| Cost of capital is a thing though. Much easier to raise money
| for a wind turbine or solar panel than a nuclear reactor.
| They're very efficient once running, but at that point they
| have investors and insurers to pay back.
| hanoz wrote:
| _> PS92.50 /MWh_
|
| Index linked.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Didn't see it in the article but what % has consumer prices
| increased by? How do people survive inflation on food prices,
| massively inflated housing costs and now massive power increases
| while living on wages that have essentially not increased for a
| very long time?
| omegalulw wrote:
| The increase is in the first paragraph of the article.
| kzrdude wrote:
| I think it was a question of general consumer prices - food,
| clothes, etc
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Pretty sure that was the wholesale price.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| " In Germany, for example, during the first two weeks of
| September wind-power generation was 50% below its five-year
| average."
|
| I wonder what folks in the past would have thought about the
| concept of 'wind draughts'. Maybe they experienced similar things
| with their grain mills?
| wrnr wrote:
| Dunno about grain mills, but sailers have long known about
| trade winds and the doldrums.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Including the ability to develop sails that allow taking
| advantage of Wind in the opposing direction.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateen
| dan-robertson wrote:
| What is the relevance of sailing upwind to the doldrums
| (where there was little wind) or to trade winds (which
| reasonably consistently blew in the same direction as the
| trade)?
|
| Even the article you linked suggested that early modern
| sailors would change to a square rigging once they got out
| of the changing winds of the Mediterranean. So clearly
| there were some advantages to square rigs (perhaps they
| could be made larger than triangular or gaff rigs with
| technology of the time.) And it would likely be foolish to
| plan a route to beat up a trade wind even if you could sail
| close to it, as you would likely be much slower than
| following the winds.
|
| On contemporary boats, it seems that Bermudan rigs win as
| they can sail close to the wind and can also be large. But
| most people who go sailing today are not taking large ships
| across oceans so their requirements as well as their
| technology will be different.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Like polyglot development nowadays, naturally the best
| ones wouldn't bet their ship in a single technology.
| jabl wrote:
| > So clearly there were some advantages to square rigs
|
| They are generally considered to be more efficient in a
| following wind. Also an accidental gybe with a large
| fore-and-aft rigged sail can be a very dangerous affair.
| Arnt wrote:
| They did. Not getting your harvest in while the weather was
| favourable was a real problem. Mill capacity was one part of
| that, there were several others.
| jjj3j3j3j3 wrote:
| EU is doomed
| madjam002 wrote:
| With electric prices in U.K. going north of PS0.25/kWh I'm
| seriously considering whether solar panels are worth the
| investment
| jjj3j3j3j3 wrote:
| Will EU survive? I don't think so.
| animex wrote:
| I know Europe is well head of the world for EV adoption, I wonder
| if that's starting to impact the grid?
| chess_buster wrote:
| It soon will be, in a positive way:
| https://www.tesla.com/de_de/support/energy/tesla-software/au...
| mdp2021 wrote:
| I do not quite understand why countries with large production
| such as France, which I remembered exported an interesting
| amount, seem to be hit severely (+50%). I thought they should
| have suffered less the unfortunate conjuncture.
| kragen wrote:
| Maybe French generators are free to export their production to
| those who are willing to pay higher prices, rather than selling
| it domestically, just as LNG exporters are free to export their
| LNG to China instead of France if the Chinese can pay more. In
| that case, energy shortages in Germany would raise prices in
| France.
| lbriner wrote:
| In an energy market, contracts are signed for months an/or
| years. If France thinks it has plenty of gas supply, it can
| agree to sell electricity capacity to other countries, when
| the gas goes away, they can't just cancel the contracts.
| kragen wrote:
| There do exist multi-year and even multi-decade PPAs, but
| an enormous amount of power is bought and sold in the day-
| ahead and even 15-minute spot markets. The article we're
| commenting on actually has a graph of prices in the day-
| ahead market; maybe you missed that.
| reedf1 wrote:
| Many many homes in Europe are natural gas fuelled. Combined
| with low-efficiency heating systems (no heat pumps), and bans
| on fracking (like here in the UK) means that countries have an
| over-dependence on a resource that they import and have no-or-
| low production of at home.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| I'm not sure fracking is viable enough to make a difference
| in the UK.
| [deleted]
| ToJans wrote:
| My best guess is that the energy providers speculated on the
| energy trading market and lost, creating a huge gap. There's
| almost no risk for them, because when they win, they make a lot
| of profit, and when they lose they can just tell consumers
| there is a shortage in energy.
|
| Ofc. this market is highly regulated, but if I understood
| correctly there's a lot of room in between the whitespace for
| interpretations.
|
| (Note : Highly simplified explanation, in reality this will be
| implemented via leverage and derivatives, but I've consulted
| for an energy trading division a couple of decades ago.)
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Energy generation (at least in Europe) has changed a lot in
| the last 20 years. So have many financial markets. I would
| strongly suspect that the dynamics of energy markets are
| quite different today to how they were 20 years ago.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| yes, the dynamics of course. brilliant.
| ToJans wrote:
| Even though the landscape might have changed, I don't see a
| reason why trading should change (except maybe for opening
| up the market to smaller players who are "energy
| resellers"...)
|
| In the end, trading is betting on arbitrage, and I don't
| see why an energy producer would stop leveraging this "free
| money".
|
| A simple example: if there was good weather expected in
| another country, the org would set up a contract to buy the
| energy surplus in that country at a cheaper price. Whether
| or not or bio-gas & coal plants were running or not was
| mostly based on how much energy we needed after taking into
| account what happened on the trading floor, the price of
| our fuel and how much the other country would be charging.
| Of course, the other country could decide we didn't offer a
| good price and decide to tone down it's amount of energy it
| produced.
|
| I recall a lot of market making on the CO2 emission rights
| for example, but that's another story.
|
| This is a simple scenario, in real life it was way more
| complex. (Just think about planning something like the
| delivery of coal at a plant.)
| jabl wrote:
| Energy retailing is, AFAICS, a very low fixed cost business.
| You don't need to own any expensive infrastructure. You just
| buy electricity from the wholesale market (usually time-
| varying, although careful operators can of course hedge their
| positions), and sell at fixed price to consumers. You
| essentially need a web site and a bunch of annoying
| telemarketers.
|
| It seems what has happened is that many of these retailers
| are some small fly-by-night operations. When wholesale prices
| are low, they make a lot of hay (making sure to store that
| somewhere that regulators can't get their hands on them),
| when the wholesale price rises, well, declare bankruptcy, and
| start a new company doing the same. Rinse and repeat.
|
| Regulators should really step up the game, making sure that
| retailers are properly hedged etc. Or then forget this idea
| of "deregulated" electricity markets.
| ToJans wrote:
| The org I mentioned in my previous post was not a reseller
| but an energy producer; they were the largest producers of
| energy both in our country and the neighboring countries.
|
| The calculations for plant scheduling took a gazillion of
| parameters into account (CO2 emission rights, pricings of
| different kinds of fuel, weather predictions, ...)
|
| These markets not only trade energy, but also fuel,
| logistics, CO2 emissions, ... (using direct quantities,
| options, leveraged products, things like insurance, ... If
| you could imagine it, there was probably someone trading
| it.)
|
| If you are into this stuff: I built the prototype that
| validated their portfolio position with the other
| suppliers; it was a protocol called EPM (Electronic
| position matching), developed by the EFET (European
| Federation of Energy Traders). I am not sure how it
| evolved, as this was the first iteration of the protocol...
| pjc50 wrote:
| Changes in the marginal price affect the whole market. The
| value of exports has shot up, so the export interconnects are
| probably working at full capacity, resulting in marginal
| generation being brought online to meet domestic need.
| Wildgoose wrote:
| Overworking actually - they've been running a couple of the
| interconnects on the South Coast of England at 50% over
| capacity. Not surprisingly, this eventually overheated and
| ignited the oil-fired cooling, burning one of them down.
|
| <<The fire at the Interconnexion France-Angleterre (IFA) site
| broke out in the early hours of Wednesday. The site was
| evacuated and there were no reports of casualties.
|
| After the fire an electricity interconnector running under
| the English Channel was "not operating", the National Grid
| said in a statement.>>
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58579829
| pjc50 wrote:
| Ooft - I'd heard about the fire, but not that it was caused
| by overworking it!
| mdp2021 wrote:
| (If you are looking for the angled quotes ('<<', '>>'),
| depending on your system and layout, try [RightAlt]+[<] and
| [RightAlt]+[>]. There are keyboard layouts using four
| layers - regular, shifted, alternate and shifted-alternate,
| together with the combinations (e.g. [RightAlt]+[:], [u] -
| 'u') )
| Wildgoose wrote:
| Thanks, but sadly doesn't work on this laptop, (UK
| keyboard), hence taking the lazy option.
| rjsw wrote:
| You are writing in English and quoting an English
| statement, why not use the native ("") quoting style ?
| mdp2021 wrote:
| They are ambiguous as used for both quotation and
| figurative rhetoric. So some prefer to disambiguate: '
| _<<veni, vidi, "vici">>, said the epigone of Pyrrhus_'.
| ben_w wrote:
| I can only read the opening paragraph and first graphic, so
| I'll have to guess: my guess is the European grid plays a big
| part in levelling energy costs within the EU? One of the UK-
| France power connections failed recently, which is why the UK
| is much more expensive than (at least) France and Germany:
| https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uks-national-grid-says-fire...
| hokkos wrote:
| In France nuclear + water + wind + solar, all low marginal
| cost, cover the consumption at 99%+ timestep in the day-ahead
| market, but there is like 18GW of interconnect, so gas + fuel +
| coal are running to power our neighbours, in the electricity
| market the last called capacity in the cost curve set the same
| price for the whole time step (with some provision for
| interconnect capacities). Without interconnect French day ahead
| power price would be at like 17EUR/MWh, but thanks to our
| neighbours it is at 150. But still the day ahead market doesn't
| set the price paid by the consumer, there is long term futures,
| and 100TWh/year of nuclear offered at 42EUR.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| We're working on reducing gas dependency, shortages and price
| fluctuations are one factor, but dependency on Russia is another.
| I do wonder how much our gas import from Russia is helping us
| keep the peace.
| zohch wrote:
| > I do wonder how much our gas import from Russia is helping us
| keep the peace.
|
| And keeping Russians and their "dominion" oppressed. Just shows
| how morally bankrupt Europe is, and with how smug Europe is
| that is really cringey.
| adamc wrote:
| I want to upvote the first sentence, but the second is so
| pointlessly judgmental as to be pretty cringey itself.
| zohch wrote:
| As a non Europen living among Europeans, it's pretty hard
| to ignore the second part. Europe can't care less about any
| actual injustice that happens in the world.
| anticodon wrote:
| I'm Russian and I do not consider myself "oppressed". Stop
| living in your bubble of fake news.
| avtolik wrote:
| Opressed or not, you are a troll. I scrolled through your
| history here and most of your messages are political BS. A
| lot of it - lies.
| chess_buster wrote:
| Thanks for your service.
| anticodon wrote:
| _I do wonder how much our gas import from Russia is helping us
| keep the peace._
|
| I'm really afraid that high gas prices would be the tipping
| point when US and EU would turn from funding internal
| revolution in Russia (figures like Navalny) to a hot war.
|
| Europe always needed and wanted our resources. Just read German
| documents from WWII: only part of it was hatred and desire to
| genocide Russians. The most serious motivation was to plunder
| Russian natural resources.
|
| We don't need Europe. We have the largest country on Earth. We
| have all the natural resources we need. I'm tired of all this
| EU/US bullshit of "Russian aggression". Especially coming from
| a country that is eternally at war with all the world (USA).
| thehappypm wrote:
| WWII? You mean the war that Russia started, allied with
| Germany?
| vetinari wrote:
| Now that's pretty nasty rewriting of history. Did you
| forget that it was Drang nach Osten in the first place?
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| A few important things to realize:
|
| - There's a difference between consumer grid prices and the
| prices on the energy market. The former are stable and also
| include a lot of taxes. In most countries it is actually mostly
| taxes. The latter go up and down depending on who is able to
| supply. Consumer prices are of course affected but it's less
| dramatic when 25% of your rate becomes 40% more expensive.
|
| - There are no blackouts worth mentioning. It's not so much that
| there is a shortage as that there is price pressure on the
| existing supply because of raised cost. Mostly this boils down to
| gas cost going up recently for various geopolitical reasons. So,
| this is not like the situation in Texas earlier this year. Not at
| all. Nobody is sitting in the dark or freezing.
|
| - Europe has an interconnected grid; so prices are affected
| everywhere. Places with cheap over production are exporting to
| places with under production. Probably at a nice profit.
| Ironically, this raises prices locally as well. So e.g. Norway,
| which has an almost 100% renewable grid, sees a lot of lucrative
| demand for energy exports. So, prices go up locally as well.
| That's the energy market working.
|
| - Europe has peaker plants that burn gas or coal that are
| switched on when demand is high. That raises cost for producers,
| which gets reflected in energy pricing. These are plants that are
| normally not in operation because they are too expensive to
| operate at this point.
|
| - Gas is used for heating as well and winter is coming. Northern
| Europe is a bit cooler than usual so lots of places are probably
| already firing up their gas powered heating systems. That would
| increase demand and as mentioned, gas prices are high right now.
|
| - Solar is a substantial portion of the market at this point and
| the amount of light in September is going down. Also August was
| relatively cloudy. Solar being less effective in the dark seasons
| is neither unexpected nor unusual. The more solar we have, the
| bigger the price differences will be. Because when it is there,
| it is cheap. It's part of the reason lots of legacy plants are
| now peaker plants. We still need them but not all the time.
|
| So, the system is working. People suggesting that we need more
| coal, gas, or nuclear need to understand that those are the
| expensive options in the market right now. They are part of the
| problem, not the solution. They are the reason prices are high
| and unstable right now.
|
| Renewable energy on the other hand does not see raised cost; only
| increased profits. The issue is we don't have enough of it just
| yet. So, that's a nice incentive right there to get more of it.
| Particularly offshore wind seems like a nice option lately. The
| more we can rely on that, the more stable the prices are going to
| be because we'll no longer need the expensive alternatives. More
| offshore wind will help. More people with batteries in their
| house will help. More grid storage will help. Smarter pricing and
| metering will help.
| jjj3j3j3j3 wrote:
| Americans have much higher salaries, yet, gas prices are much
| much lower than in germany.
| jsudi wrote:
| That's what it means for a country to be richer: you can buy
| more things with your salary
| hanoz wrote:
| Several UK domestic energy suppliers are now on the verge of
| bankruptcy it seems, and seeking emergency loans from the
| government.
|
| At this time of year almost all of their customers will be many
| hundreds of pounds in credit with them. That money is supposed to
| be protected, but still it's a bit of a worry.
| [deleted]
| lbriner wrote:
| Some have already gone bust. I don't think the concern is the
| credit money, the problem is getting moved to another provider
| and instantly paying a higher rate than before.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Why are the suppliers struggling?
| em3rgent0rdr wrote:
| https://archive.vn/pPk6l
| atombender wrote:
| In Norway, where hydro powers most of the country's energy
| demands, consumer energy prices are now around 100-130% above
| July-August rates. The explanation is apparently partly milder
| weather, with less rainfall and less wind. The other part of the
| explanation is that Norway is connected to the continental grid,
| and is affected by higher rates in Europe.
| matsemann wrote:
| Wonder if Einar Aas could have predicted it.
|
| He was top on the income lists every year (they are public in
| Norway). From trading electricity futures, he was seemingly
| very very good at it for years. But suddenly a big swing wiped
| out his entire fortune with a margin call. Almost bankrupting
| the Nasdaq insurance fund in the process.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17997823
|
| It was argued much recently that connecting us with the rest of
| Europe through ACER would increase the prices since other
| markets would pay more. But that it would also lead to higher
| profits for those delivering the fixed costs part of the power
| bill, thus that part should be cheaper and it was supposed to
| even out somewhat.. ?
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| For the UK it's a tripple whammy right now: high gas prices, a
| fire at an interchange to France and with Brexit they left the
| EU's internal energy market. As a result the prices for
| electricity are skyrocketing at certain times of the day.
|
| That's what weekend pricing looked yesterday:
| https://i.imgur.com/U275C5r.png
| jeffbee wrote:
| I mean, PS1/kWh is pretty high, but it's not totally outrageous
| and it appears to have been capped by some kind of regulatory
| limit. 42C//kWh is the standard retail price in California
| during peak demand hours, and that's not a huge difference.
| vel0city wrote:
| You pay $0.42/kWh real time peak price in CA on a normal day?
| That's an absolutely bonkers number to me. Normal peak real
| time prices in Texas are like $0.12/kWh
| maccolgan wrote:
| Yes, we are talking about California not Texas, not
| unexpected.
| jeffbee wrote:
| That's the summer price between 4pm and 9pm in PG&E
| territory, yes. Avoiding this rate is pretty
| straightforward.
| wrycoder wrote:
| I pay $0.13USD per KWh in NH for electrical energy.
| mjburgess wrote:
| We usually pay 15-20p
| jeffbee wrote:
| I get that it's more, but I clicked through to read the
| article expecting something insane like the $9/kWh rates in
| Texas earlier this year.
| post_break wrote:
| Texan here, that's the wholesale rate. Only people on
| wholesale plans (now banned I believe) would have paid
| that. I paid 9c per kWh during the whole ordeal while
| wholesale pegged at $9 per kWh. My price is fixed at 8.9c
| per kWh for 2 years.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Sure, consumers are normally shielded from the wholesale
| market by regulation or contract (although not
| necessarily in Texas, as some learned), but I'm pretty
| sure the graph posted by the GP is the day-ahead
| wholesale market for some jurisdiction.
| PJ_Maybe wrote:
| In Austria, the price per kWh has quadrupled since May 2020,
| which is when I moved in to a new home. Unfortunately this [0]
| chart from my provider only goes back 12 months, but you can see
| even during this short time that the price increased from 5.81c
| per kWh to 12.43c per kWh, which is more than 200%. I checked
| some of my statements, and in May 2020 the electricity price was
| 3.13c per kWh, which represents an increase of about 397%
| compared to today's price.
|
| [0]
| https://www.easygreenenergy.at/dam/jcr:a5800c50-948e-43e9-90...
| albertopv wrote:
| In Italy we paid 13c/kwh o more for years.
| spyke112 wrote:
| Still cheap compared to Denmark. I'm not one for optimizing my
| electric bill, so I've probably got a fairly bad deal by paying
| between 27 c/kWh and 34 c/kWh. 75% of the electric bill
| consists of fees to the state anyway, it's quite ridicules.
|
| The upside is that these fluctuations are kind of mitigated and
| smoothed out.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I remember having fun of two different bills one from
| transfer and taxes and one for power itself. The monthly fee
| for just having connection in apartment building in a town
| was more than what I paid for power it self... Not to even
| mention the taxes and fee for power transmission...
| PJ_Maybe wrote:
| Yeah well these are the raw prices per kWh, there are also a
| lot of fees added by the state and the state run suppliers
| who provide the infrastructure. Pretty sure you can double
| whatever I have quoted for the actual per kWh prices.
| beezischillin wrote:
| They've been signalling a 40%+ gas price increase for the winter
| in the news here in Romania. For the poor people and pensioners
| who often live month to month this is tragic news. They don't
| know how they'll make it when they'll have to choose between food
| and medicine or heat.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I'll assume poor and pensioners live in one of two situations:
| a house where they have a wood stove, or in a building block
| where heating isn't a huge cost because you're surrounded on
| most sides by adjacent units, not the outside.
|
| Of course, the windows may have visible gaps/be single paned
| and there may not be any insulation, iunno.
|
| My Canadian new condo experience is that if you have a south
| facing view, you may not need to turn on your in-unit heat
| unless it's -20C and windy. But that's when built to modern
| standards.
| bserge wrote:
| The answer is firewood. Often illegally acquired. But that's
| only for the rural folk.
| Ekaros wrote:
| And they are thinking of banning that in cities... Not that
| it is wrong, particulate emissions can be real issue.
| beezischillin wrote:
| Cities tend to have central gas heating or communal here.
| Gas tends to be the cheapest option and electric the most
| expensive.
| beezischillin wrote:
| Firewood is not cheap and is becoming increasingly harder to
| acquire. 10 cubic meter of processed and ready to use wood
| was around 750 or more euros this year and will be even more
| in the future.
|
| I put in an order at a mill in June and didn't end up
| receiving anything due to bureaucracy shutting down
| businesses shipping out this year's production. I don't know
| if they ended up getting past that or not as I haven't heard
| back on my reservation and I cancelled it. I managed to find
| the last of last year's production at a local building supply
| store. They told me they will not be bringing new stock next
| year due to high costs and decreasing profit margins. I might
| have to completely transition to electric heating in 2022.
| djrogers wrote:
| What percentage of living costs is gas normally during winter
| there? A 40% increase in 3% of your expenses isn't a big deal,
| but if it's 30% that would really hurt...
| beezischillin wrote:
| I can't tell you from recent personal experience because I
| heat my house with firewood and IR panels but a winter's
| worth of wood cost me twice the minimum wage.
|
| My gas heating costs were minimal when I lived in an
| apartment because it was really well insulated, surrounded by
| neighbours with similarly well-insulated apartments; I could
| heat that up with my desktop pc mining ethereum on a 290X
| back when that was profitable. ;)
|
| As an approximation, heating costs might rise for people less
| fortunate to close to 30-35% of their income if things end up
| as bad as I hear them expect.
| oseityphelysiol wrote:
| Really depends on the type of house you live in. Typical
| heating costs for 50m^2 apartments in "Khrushchevka" type
| buildings (probably the dominant housing situation across
| most post soviet states) should be around 50 Euros per month
| this heating season in Lithuania. Average state pension is
| around 400 euros, so on average, heating should be 12.5% of
| that.
| monkeydust wrote:
| I am in the UK. I pay roughly 20c down and get 5c up for excess
| solar per kWh.
|
| I really want to see an regulatory and technical environment
| where I can trade my excess with my neighbors at mid.
|
| Sure I could store excess but can't justify the battery cost at
| present. This type of trading, as I understand, is happening in
| places like Australia.
| hanoz wrote:
| A combination of:
|
| * Post lockdown firing up of the economy
|
| * No investment in nuclear
|
| * Broken interconnect
|
| * Winter is coming
|
| * A spell of the doldrums
|
| * Reliance on imported gas
|
| * And last but not least, there's no hiding a debauched currency
| when you're using it to buy something the rest of the world needs
| too.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Yes, but also no. Interconnects are fine in Scandinavia, but a
| dry summer means less hydro to pick up in a period of less
| wind. So you need to fire up the coal plant once again, and
| they are slowly being dismantled.
|
| It's really an unfortunate combination of circumstances, and it
| affects areas which doesn't rely on imported gas and nuclear,
| with working interconnects as well.
| marvin wrote:
| It would be super funny if the result of the increased
| interconnectedness of Scandinavia and Europe, sold as a
| measure to decrease the risk of extreme events causing power
| disruption, actually caused power disruption as we've now
| sold off all our generation capacity.
| skocznymroczny wrote:
| I'd have expected the CO2 tax to be a bigger factor than any
| shortages.
| mem0r1 wrote:
| Not building new nuclear power plants in the last 30 years was a
| major mistake, in terms of energy supply security as well as CO2
| emissions.
| nikkinana wrote:
| Because they can
| mistrial9 wrote:
| look up "Negawatts"
| lbriner wrote:
| They are also enormously expensive to construct and don't scale
| down. You can build a single wind turbine for what, $100K? Even
| a basic nuclear power plant is now around $50B, which is a
| large chunk of change to take away from taxpayers leaving even
| less money to research more renewable/sustainable alternatives.
|
| I do think that a better policy decision over the past 30 years
| would be to be more strict on building regulations to ensure
| good levels of insulation at construction time, which is much
| cheaper than retro-fitting. Also making sure it is done
| properly, I've seen plenty of builds where a few sections of
| insulation are missing because the builder ran out and no-one
| really checked.
| PeterisP wrote:
| If you have gigawatt-sized gaps to fill in non-fossil
| generation, then it doesn't matter that something doesn't
| scale down, it's a problem if something doesn't scale up. It
| doesn't matter how much a single wind turbine costs, it
| matters how much a gigawatt of wind turbines costs and where
| you will place all of them.
| cbmuser wrote:
| Exactly. Cheap wind and solar electricity is useless if it
| isn't produced on-demand.
|
| It still blows my mind that so many have such a hard time
| grasping such a simple and fundamental concept.
| chess_buster wrote:
| Because it's just wrong. In any grid you always have at
| least some form of demand side management. Dispatchable
| consumers.
| ephbit wrote:
| Add enough storage to the system and the on-demand
| problem is solved.
| shakow wrote:
| > You can build a single wind turbine for what, $100K? Even a
| basic nuclear power plant is now around $50B
|
| A modern wind turbine will typically feature a 20 years
| lifetime and cost a few million dollars to produce a handful
| of MWs.
|
| On the other hand, we see nuclear power plants happily going
| over 50 years of service while producing power in the
| magnitude of a few GWs -- and they do not cost $50B to build,
| but somewhere in the ballpark of a few $B.
|
| Taking the very very rough estimate of twice 1000 wind
| turbines vs. one nuclear power plant to produce a few GWs
| over half a century, we arrive at $2B for the wind turbines
| vs. e.g. $5B for the nuclear plants. Of course, this does not
| take into account the fact that the wind turbines must be
| supported by another power source for when there is no wind,
| that maintaining a nuclear plant is much more expensive than
| maintaining wind turbines, that 1000 WT require manifold more
| ground space than a NPP, etc.; but we are still very far away
| from $100K vs. $50B. And that is also without taking into
| account the commonly cited load factors of 0.25-0.4 for WTs
| vs. 0.85-0.95 for NPPs, which would require building at least
| twice as many WTs in locations complementary w.r.t.
| exposition to winds to be palliated.
|
| Windmills can be very nifty ancillary power sources, but they
| do not hold a candle to NPPs in the context of a(n)
| (inter)national power grid.
| Retric wrote:
| Nuclear is just as bad in terms of following demand the
| capacity factor is at best 90% but involves weeks of
| downtime for refueling etc. Worse the economics only work
| out when production is kept close to 100% when available
| limiting adoption in a wider electric grid. France dealt
| with sub 70% capacity factors even with massive exports
| that's roughly a 0.9/0.7 = 30% price hike per kWh.
|
| You can use batteries to level our wind but you really need
| multiple nuclear power plants operating in concert which
| gets you back into the 10's of billion dollar range for
| dependable nuclear power. However, even that few billion
| dollars is still massively excessive for a small island.
| The European grid is large enough that the unit cost isn't
| a big deal, but the minimal scale of nuclear still results
| in various inefficiencies from transmission losses etc.
|
| A much larger problem is simply the cost per GWh, building
| nuclear today means estimating it's still going to be cost
| competitive in 40 years which really doesn't seem to be the
| case. Even back in 2000 people where looking at various
| long term estimates and the required subsidies to make
| Nuclear cost competitive didn't seem worth it.
| cbmuser wrote:
| All nuclear power plants in Germany are capable to be
| operated in load-follow mode, see:
|
| > https://www.ktg.org/ktg-wAssets/docs/fg-bet-rph-
| lastfolgebet...
|
| Also, nuclear power was never subsidized in Germany:
|
| > https://dserver.bundestag.de/btd/14/080/1408084.pdf
| (page 16, answer 27)
| oezi wrote:
| > Also, nuclear power was never subsidized in Germany
|
| The German government took over responsibility for
| managing final storage of nuclear waste for something
| like 20bn EUR from the industry but is already projecting
| that it might cost more like 50bn EUR to actually find
| such a place.
|
| Nuclear's price will still haunt tax payers long down the
| road.
| Retric wrote:
| Nuclear "Load following" doesn't reduce the number of
| workers needed, capital investment etc. It's like turning
| off wind turbines you don't really save money, it's just
| useful to help balance the grid. In effect every time you
| do this with Nuclear, Wind, or Solar you end up
| increasing the cost per kWh produced.
|
| _In 1998 the Atomic Energy Act established the maximum
| insurance liability of nuclear insurer at about EUR2.5
| billion; for damages above that cap the Federal
| Government is liable according to SS 34 of the Atomic
| Energy Act._ That's a German nuclear subsidy, they have a
| few.
| chefkoch wrote:
| >Also, nuclear power was never subsidized in Germany:
|
| Haha, that's a good joke.
|
| >Direct and indirect German government subsidies alone,
| including research grants and tax credits, since the
| mid-1950s have added up to EUR287bn, FOS has calculated.
| Another EUR9bn were spent on other costs for the state,
| such as police operations during anti-nuclear protests,
| or follow-up costs from nuclear operations in former
| Eastern Germany.
|
| "Great part of these costs never had been included in the
| electricity price, which is why atomic energy wrongly was
| considered as a cheap power source,"
|
| https://www.rechargenews.com/transition/no-higher-cost-
| energ...
| calcifer wrote:
| > they do not cost $50B to build, but somewhere in the
| ballpark of a few $B
|
| Which reactors are those? Hinkley Point C in the UK is
| PS22.9 billion _so far_ and is years away from completion.
| Likewise, Olkiluoto Unit 3 in Finland is up to EUR11
| billion so far and also years from completion.
| google234123 wrote:
| The reactor we stopped building 30 years ago didn't cost
| near that.
| shakow wrote:
| Those two examples are innovative sister projects (the
| EPRs) which are infamous in the nuclear community for
| having gone _far_ overboard regarding both delays and
| over budget, and are much more representative of France
| fucking up its industrial know-how than anything else.
| Prices of more conventional designs (https://www.synapse-
| energy.com/sites/default/files/SynapsePa...) stand in the
| aforementioned mentioned ballpark.
| Arnt wrote:
| Or, if you want: Not building twice as many (wind/anything) was
| a major mistake.
|
| Nuclear power plants fail sometimes, just like the wind fails.
| In 2016 almost a third of the plants in France were offline at
| the same time, some for planned maintenance, some unplanned,
| and the peak prices were higher than now.
|
| All these things are fixable by overbuilding enough. There's
| nothing special or magic about nuclear.
| roenxi wrote:
| > There's nothing special or magic about nuclear.
|
| Apart from the technology, safety profile and generally being
| the cleanest source of energy ever discovered. And being able
| to stockpile enormous amounts of energy in a small heap if
| necessary ^^.
|
| And if we could just convince people to accept it only
| causing say, half as much damage as coal it would be
| ridiculously cheap too. These appallingly high safety
| standards are expensive.
|
| ^^ _EDIT_ Which would really help if there was some sort of
| large, unexpected event which disrupted the world 's logistic
| chains for a few years. Unlike natural gas. Longer term
| supply rather than short term spot markets, lots of room to
| recover from surprises.
| ephbit wrote:
| > ... appallingly high safety standards are expensive.
|
| Not an expert on probability/statistics ... but wouldn't
| lower safety standards have meant, not 1 Tschernobyl and 1
| Fukushima but most probably like say 10 such events in the
| last 30 years?
|
| Yeah no, something tells me that having lower than
| "appallingly high safety standards" isn't a deal I'd want.
| Not at all.
| [deleted]
| aljg wrote:
| Half as much damage as coal is a pretty low bar! Natural
| gas also meets it, for example.
|
| Your broader point is strong though, and there's no reason
| 4th-gen nuclear power plants being designed now couldn't
| deliver a quarter (or less) the damage of coal while still
| being economical.
| wffurr wrote:
| Can't overbuilding also increase prices because all those
| plants have capital costs that have to be paid for whether
| they produce or not?
| xvedejas wrote:
| The capital costs mean the plants cost more to run than
| they would otherwise, but this wouldn't necessarily factor
| into the price. There's no reason to pay more for extra
| energy that costs more, so adding a plant that charges even
| more than the market price would not be able to sell any
| energy: the market already provides for demand at a lower
| price. What might actually raise the price is plants going
| offline, or existing plants raising their price. These
| things will probably happen, but they could happen anyway
| regardless of whether new plants come online.
|
| To attempt an analogy, if I put up a sign that I'm selling
| iPhones at $6000 each, that won't actually raise the prices
| of iPhones. That's because customers can already get enough
| iPhones from Apple, even though they complain that Apple
| sells them for too high a price too. My offer is just never
| an alternative, not until Apple raises their prices much
| much higher (or goes out of business).
| gabaix wrote:
| Building more nuclear helps de-risk wind droughts.
|
| This isn't specific to nuclear; building more of a different
| kind mitigates the risk.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Not really. NPPs as backup to wind would be horribly
| expensive. Wind droughts don't happen often; even the
| current price during them would not make a NPP pay off.
|
| What would make sense is larger local stores of hydrogen,
| to be burned in combustion turbines during the rare wind
| outages.
| xxpor wrote:
| We should probably prefer pumped hydro before stored h2.
| chess_buster wrote:
| Molten Salts powering the old coal plants in a closed
| system.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| > What would make sense is larger local stores of
| hydrogen, to be burned in combustion turbines during the
| rare wind outages.
|
| Would this work when there's little wind for a week or
| more?
| pfdietz wrote:
| Absolutely. Hydrogen can be stored underground for maybe
| $1/kWh of storage capacity. There would also be power
| related costs, but those don't matter nearly as much for
| rare event backup.
|
| Germany alone has the potential to store an estimated 9.6
| PWh of hydrogen, enough to supply their average electric
| power demand for years, not weeks.
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03
| 603...
| modo_mario wrote:
| Creating hydrogen with excess power is really inefficient
| energy wise and also tips the scales of cost a lot.
| dageshi wrote:
| If the energy is basically free which under certain
| circumstances (lots of wind) could happen, does it matter
| how inefficient it is?
| ben_w wrote:
| Depends how expensive the electrolyser is. Just because I
| did make something when I was 9 years old that could fill
| up a small jamjar with hydrogen, doesn't necessarily mean
| it's economically viable.
|
| (I have no idea either way if this is an important limit
| or not. Just that it can have other sources of downside
| besides merely using otherwise wasted energy).
| pfdietz wrote:
| There have been reports of cheap mediocre efficiency
| alkaline electrolyzers in China for under $200/kW. This
| is indeed a key area for hydrogen from intermittent
| renewables to be successful, but I think there's great
| room for cost decline here as volume ramps up.
| thrill wrote:
| The creation of the hydrogen is only a portion of the
| overall system cost, which may total cheaper than
| alternatives.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Only a fraction of the renewable output would have to be
| routed through hydrogen, though. It turns out this is
| still cheaper than new nuclear for providing "synthetic
| baseload" supply, especially if one looks at projections
| of how much renewables should cost in the time it would
| take for any new nuclear plant initiated today to come
| online.
| p_l wrote:
| Said "fraction", for moderately modest needs and assuming
| just 24h window where it provides "baseload" can be as
| "low" as 1/3rd of total renewable capacity - assuming
| that renewables do 100% of peak whiel saving the excess..
|
| Or so analysis from people I know in the industry,
| interested in decarbonising (not fossil lobby related),
| show.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Sounds about right. See https://model.energy/ for a toy
| model that gives about that number, when you solve the
| optimization problem for Germany. The optimal solutions
| still have some renewable curtailment, though.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Are there any commercial operators of electric grid
| storage using hydrogen? I can only find prototype or
| demonstration projects.
|
| Most of the time, people saying grid-scale storage is
| feasible point to technologies that exist in the
| prototyping phase. The reality is that we don't know
| whether these solutions will be feasible at scale, or if
| they'll hit bottlenecks or poor scalability that drives
| up cost when deployed at scale. Comparing a
| _hypothetical_ cost of hydrogen, to _actual historical_
| cost is comparing apples to oranges.
| ephbit wrote:
| Hydrogen is relatively inconventient/difficult to handle
| except when transported via pipeline.
|
| There appear to be no dense long range pipeline networks
| (for hydrogen) connecting multiple countries (yet).
|
| Pipeline networks for natural gas aren't designed to
| safely transport pure (or high concentrations of)
| hydrogen, so over a certain concentration hydrogen would
| have to be converted into synthetic natural gas. The
| latter conversion appears to not yet be deployed at very
| large scales.
|
| Seems to me that the reason why there is no large scale
| hydrogen generation yet (though there are medium-
| large/industrial scale projects now), is simply that
| until now large scale wasn't economically feasible. With
| hydrogen strategies and more pressure from a price on CO2
| on their way we'll definitely see more of it soon.
| pfdietz wrote:
| For grid storage, hydrogen would not need to be
| transported at all (although the option to do so is there
| if it's favorable). It could be made above the storage
| caverns, pumped into them, then extracted and consumed
| there.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Why should any exist yet, when natural gas has been so
| cheap? Tighten the screws enough to eliminate fossil fuel
| dispatchable sources and you'll start to see it (or
| something else that can solve the same problem better).
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Many places are already seeing energy surpluses.
| California and Hawaii are consistently reaching excess
| daytime energy production. If we really can store
| electricity in hydrogen $1/KWh, then we should be seeing
| hydrogen storage being built to profit off these
| intervals of negative energy prices. But we aren't. Is it
| because people fail to see this market opportunity? Or,
| maybe, it's because writing a white paper claiming an
| extremely cheap cost is not remotely the same thing as
| actually building an energy storage facility at said
| cost.
|
| I agree, we should tighten screws to eliminate fossil
| fuels. But hydroelectricity is the only scalable form of
| grid storage we currently have, and that's limited to the
| right geography. Expecting some unproven technology to be
| a silver bullet for storage is extremely wishful
| thinking. We need to be honest about technologies like
| hydrogen, compressed air, flywheels, etc: These are
| experimental technologies that _might_ operate cheaply at
| scale, but we have no real-world experience to back up
| these claims. I could just say "storage is irrelevant
| because fusion will deliver energy at $1/MWh" and while
| nobody can technically disprove it, since they can't see
| into the future, it's also dishonest to claim this as
| fact for the same reason.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Natural gas is really hard to displace here, and won't
| happen until it becomes and stays expensive. It may now
| be above that price level in Europe, but it has to stay
| there to enable the capital investment in large scale
| green hydrogen production.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Yet the condition you claim will give rise to widespread
| adoption of energy storage already exist in Hawaii:
| fossil fuels have to be imported making it expensive, and
| daytime energy prices regularly go negative due to
| widespread solar adopt. These conditions have existed for
| years. Yet people aren't storing and reselling this
| energy. Why not? If hydrogen storage really costs only
| $1/KWh then a company can reclaim their investment cost
| in less than a week of operation, with an average price
| of $0.30/KWh in the state. It's basically free money.
|
| The reality is that hydrogen storage costs nowhere near
| $1/KWh. People making predictions about what a technology
| will cost and actually building it are two totally
| different things.
| pfdietz wrote:
| That storage cost is in salt formations, a technology
| that is already widely used to store megatons of natural
| gas. A single salt formation in Delta, Utah could store
| enough hydrogen to supply the entire US average grid
| power for 30 hours (and efforts to exploit this formation
| for hydrogen storage are ongoing). Salt formations exist
| in ample supply in Germany and Europe, but there are none
| in Hawaii, which is entirely volcanic.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| The same excess of energy during peak renewable
| production exists in California, and parts of Europe. So
| this problem is more than just Hawaii's geology. There
| are costs in electrolysis, compressions, decompression,
| and conversion back to electricity that are just being
| hand-waved away.
|
| Can you point me to a developer that's actually offering
| to build hydrogen electric grid storage at $1/KWh? As in,
| if I give them $1 million they will build 1 GWh of
| hydrogen electric storage for me. Are there any
| enterprises actually willing to provide grid storage at
| this cost? If so, please point them my way. I'll make a
| massive amount of money. But I doubt I'll have anyone
| taking this offer.
|
| The storage costs your citing are absolutely incredible.
| As in, I genuinely do not believe them. You're claiming
| that the entirety of the US's grid storage (which cost
| billions of dollars to build, mostly in the form of
| hydroelectric storage) can be matched by only $20 million
| in hydrogen storage. This is a cost estimate totally
| disconnected from reality. Until enterprises are actually
| building hydrogen electric grid storage for $1/KWh then
| this figure is meaningless.
|
| If not then what's your explanation as to why people are
| mission out on the opportunity to become billionaires or
| trillionaires by construction hydrogen electric storage?
| Bill Gates alone could build enough storage for 24 hours
| of the USA's electricity consumption with only 10% of his
| net worth.
| p_l wrote:
| Scaling is also hard... Turns out you need more than
| "trickle" overproduction to make reliable amounts of
| green hydrogen for energy storage.
| tjansen wrote:
| It's true, but when does it make sense to include plants
| that do not deliver reliable power?
|
| Wind power makes a lot of sense as long as you are still
| using fossil fuels. Every watt generated by wind power
| means that you can reduce fossil fuel, and thus lower your
| CO2 emissions. But once you got rid of fossil fuels and you
| have a reliable source of power without CO2 emissions, you
| can get rid of the unreliable ones.
| adrianN wrote:
| Wind and solar are pretty cheap and storage keeps getting
| cheaper, that's why they make sense.
| jules wrote:
| Batteries are so expensive that it is unclear whether
| they will ever solve the large scale storage problem: yes
| they're getting cheaper, but they have to continue to get
| cheaper for a long time before they're suitable, and it's
| unclear whether fundamental limits will be hit before
| that. _If_ battery technology improves to the extent that
| it becomes viable for large scale storage, _then_ wind
| and solar can become our main source of energy. Until
| then, nuclear is the only proven solution. Betting on
| batteries _now_ amounts to gambling with the planet.
| adrianN wrote:
| As far as I know, few people suggest (Lithium-)batteries
| for long term storage. Electrolysis, optionally followed
| by turning the Hydrogen into Methane, seems like a much
| more scalable solution. That works at scale today, it's
| just too expensive to make sense at this point. Then
| there are other types of batteries that might become much
| cheaper in the future, perhaps redox-flow batteries or
| something like that.
| p_l wrote:
| According to people I talked with, who did analysis for
| "Green hydrogen" as storage method, assuming Poland - we
| would need something along the line of 150% peak
| production, locally, _before it started moving the needle
| at all_ - and I 'm not sure of this wasn't in combination
| with nuclear (though limited by the idiotic free market
| on electricity).
|
| All of that assumes that the demand doesn't go up...
| Which is not compatible with things like climate goals
| chess_buster wrote:
| Hydrogen, molten salt to drive ex-coal plants, redox-
| flow, ...
| jhgb wrote:
| Batteries are not supposed to solve the large scale
| storage problem. They're best at solving the small scale
| storage problem. Recently they solved the problem of
| small scale storage on wheels.
|
| > If battery technology improves to the extent that it
| becomes viable for large scale storage, then wind and
| solar can become our main source of energy.
|
| Batteries are not the only way of storing electricity.
| pydry wrote:
| Battery backed solar/wind is cheaper than nuclear these
| days.
|
| It's not been that way for long though. Economic grid
| scale batteries are here but still relatively new.
|
| It makes sense to continue running old nuclear plants but
| not to build new ones. Much too expensive.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| Probably.
|
| I'll point out using existing natural gas peaking plants
| to make up for temporary shortfalls of solar and wind
| power is also a viable stop gap.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Is it? Are you taking into account battery degradation
| from 1 cycle every day? The vast majority of battery
| chemistries won't last more than 3-4 years under those
| circumstances, and those that would are either much more
| expensive or experimental.
|
| As of now storing 10kWh at 1kW costs around 1000$ from
| the cells alone. If you're changing them every 3 years
| then you have to spend 10 000$/kW over 30 years whereas
| nuclear is the same price per kW for a 30 year period.
|
| If you don't take that into account then sure.
| jungturk wrote:
| Aren't lifetimes closer to 10+ years due to better
| battery management (managed operating temperature and
| charge/discharge)?
|
| Tesla suggest such with its megapack
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Megapack
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Only if you don't do daily ~80% discharges.
|
| You can avoid that right now because the grid has
| baseload. But if it doesn't you can avoid the wear
| cycles.
|
| 10 years is about what you'd expect if you only discharge
| ~30% of capacity daily, which is how it is operating
| right now.
| tjansen wrote:
| We are decades away from having enough storage to make
| wind and power a reliable power source. There is not even
| technology that would scale up enough to store a
| country's power for weeks or at least a few days.
|
| China just has announced ambitious plans to install
| storage for 100 GWh by 2030. China's electric power
| generation capacity is 2200 GW (in 2020). That's not even
| enough to provide electricity for 5 minutes....
| adrianN wrote:
| We're also pretty far away from the kinds of renewable
| penetration where you actually need a lot of storage, so
| we have plenty of time left to build more batteries and
| electrolyzers.
| nradov wrote:
| Electrolysis is extremely inefficient. It's unlikely to
| be a practical means of grid scale energy storage any
| time soon.
| jhgb wrote:
| It's not just a means of energy storage; it's a method
| for producing a vital chemical feedstock. If your main
| alternative is processing natural gas, building more
| electrolysers is a no-brainer. You'll have to do it no
| matter what the efficiency, since we just don't have a
| better way.
| adrianN wrote:
| Yeah round trip efficiencies are very bad, but at scale
| it's cheaper than batteries as far as I know.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The two storage modes are complementary. Batteries would
| be good for diurnal storage, hydrogen for longer term and
| rare event backup.
| ephbit wrote:
| 80 per cent is what you call extremely inefficient ...
| what percentage would be "efficient" then in your
| opinion?
|
| > Accounting for the accepted use of the higher heat
| value (because inefficiency via heat can be redirected
| back into the system to create the steam required by the
| catalyst), average working efficiencies for PEM
| electrolysis are around 80% ... [https://en.wikipedia.org
| /wiki/Electrolysis_of_water#Industri...]
| ben_w wrote:
| > There is not even technology that would scale up enough
| to store a country's power for weeks or at least a few
| days.
|
| Don't mistake a manufacturing limit for a tech scaling
| limit. While it may take decades to get there, batteries
| _could_ do that; in the mean time, intercontinental HVDC
| connections _could_ substitute for some of that storage
| (not all the storage all at once unless mining increases,
| but certainly plausible over the scale of a decade or so
| and we would need that timescale to build the renewables
| themselves anyway)[0], and the batteries are in addition
| to existing pumped hydro, and even in the current "low
| wind" scenario the UK is still getting 3.8 GW (~11%) from
| wind[1][2] rather than getting _nothing_.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28474201
|
| [1] https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
|
| [2] https://gridwatch.co.uk/demand/percent
| [deleted]
| nradov wrote:
| While intercontinental HVDC interconnects are technically
| feasible, no major world power would ever depend on those
| for essential power supplies. It's just too risky if
| foreign countries can cut off your electricity during a
| war or other crisis. Energy independence is strategically
| critical in a way that transcends economics.
| adrianN wrote:
| Then why do countries rely on foreign oil, gas, and coal
| all the time?
| ephbit wrote:
| Because they at least can store months worth of
| gas/oil/coal on their own territory.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Do we have the lithium/etc reserves to meet the storage
| needs for the entire planet? Nuclear is proven and if we
| claim to believe that climate change is an existential
| threat I don't know why we would pin all our hopes on
| solar and wind and some to-be-discovered storage
| solution. To be clear, I'm not against solar and wind--on
| the contrary, I want a diverse clean energy portfolio.
| But wasting time emitting while we pray for a storage
| solution for wind/solar seems utterly foolish.
| oezi wrote:
| Sorry, but Nuclear is just proven to fail. Even if we
| would reverse course on Nuclear today it would be 20 or
| 30 years until the plants would be build. By that time
| solar and wind will another magnitude cheaper.
|
| The way forward is wind and solar. Everything else
| shouldn't be focused on.
| foxfluff wrote:
| What's driving the price decrease in wind?
| jhgb wrote:
| Economies of scale, largely.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > Nuclear is just proven to fail ... the way forward is
| wind and solar
|
| Nuclear is the _only_ proven clean technology for base
| load generation. The only hiccup is political (i.e.,
| people decided they don 't like nuclear), and while it's
| a big political problem, the whole climate crisis is an
| enormous political problem. Yes, there's the waste to be
| disposed of, but we already have to manage some waste and
| once you have to safely manage a little nuclear waste
| it's a marginal increase in cost to manage a whole lot of
| nuclear waste.
|
| Further, innovations in nuclear are making it cheaper,
| safer, and faster to build. Moreover, as another
| commenter pointed out, if we were willing to ease some of
| our restrictions on nuclear such that our nuclear plants
| didn't need to be a thousand times safer than our coal
| plants (but merely, say, twice as safe), then nuclear
| could be even less expensive and facilities built more
| rapidly.
|
| Yes, wind and solar will play a major role in the future,
| but we incur tremendous risk by ignoring nuclear.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Do we have the lithium/etc reserves to meet the storage
| needs for the entire planet?
|
| Yes. There are basically so many different chemistries
| (and non-chemical storage methods) that the important
| question is "which type should we prefer" rather than
| "can we even do it".
| vagrantJin wrote:
| Yeah, I don't think it's an either or _science_ decision
| any more than its likely a business-cum-political
| situation.
| tjansen wrote:
| I guess a manufacturing limit is bad enough. The global
| battery production is expected to reach 2063 GWh/year by
| 2028 [0]. That wouldn't be enough to store China's
| electricity consumption for a single hour. The production
| would need an increase by several orders of magnitude.
| Are there enough raw materials for this? How much waste
| would there be, given the limited lifespan of those
| batteries?
|
| What about a no-wind scenario? I don't know what wind in
| the UK is like, but in Germany this happens quite often.
| In November 2015 wind output dropped to 0.2 GW (0.5% of
| its 40GW power rating) [1]. Hydro doesn't help in such a
| scenario (<4% in Germany), nor will bio mass (<10%).
|
| [0] https://energycentral.com/c/ec/world-battery-
| production
|
| [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute (German)
| ben_w wrote:
| > The production would need an increase by several orders
| of magnitude.
|
| Yes, but that doesn't itself seem like an implausible
| economic shift given how large the existing fossil fuel
| sector is.
|
| Challenging, sure -- perhaps it is _politically_
| impossible, I wouldn't know as I'm not at all politically
| astute -- but _physically_ it seems fine.
|
| > Are there enough raw materials for this?
|
| That part at least is fine. Earth is big, and while
| lithium is in the category "rare Earths", it isn't all
| that rare compared to what we need, and even if it was
| lithium isn't even the only option for storage.
|
| One of the things suggested in your [2] was long-distance
| HVDC to different weather zones, and Scandinavian (hydro?
| I'm unclear) storage. In principle we could also do
| antipodal HVDC (different time zone for day/night,
| different hemisphere for summer/winter), though on a
| previous thread I was encouraged to do the maths and
| realised the EU collectively would use a 1m^2 cross
| section conductor for current HVDC designs (if you wanted
| 100% substitution rather than it being merely part of the
| solution), and this will take quite a long time to mine
| at current rates.
|
| > How much waste would there be, given the limited
| lifespan of those batteries?
|
| No idea, but the current alternatives are "set lots of it
| on fire" (fossil fuels) and "bury a tiny quantity of
| extraordinarily dangerous stuff in scary artwork for
| geological timescales" (nuclear), and all it has to do is
| beat those.
|
| IIRC the end-of-life batteries can be processed back into
| their raw material more easily than can the rocks we
| start with for fresh batteries.
| jhgb wrote:
| > while lithium is in the category "rare Earths"
|
| No, it's not. Where did you get that from? Surely not
| from elementary school chemistry lessons, where you're
| taught that lithium is an alkali metal.
| ben_w wrote:
| News articles that want to dismiss renewables seem to
| often call it that.
|
| You're right, of course. I'm not a chemist and it shows.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Also worth noting that "rare earths" aren't rare (nor are
| they earths), that's just their name.
| pfdietz wrote:
| There was a propaganda effort trying to paint renewables
| as dirty, pointing to environmental problems with Chinese
| REE refining. Shellenberger was hawking this at one
| point, claiming PV uses rare earth elements. One still
| hears echoes.
| dv_dt wrote:
| By recent performance, if we build nuclear we are decades
| away.
| tjansen wrote:
| Even if that's true, at least we would be betting on
| proven technology. What makes you think that unproven
| technology for storage can be built faster?
| dv_dt wrote:
| By the number of abandoned nuclear projects in the west,
| it's not proven.
| korantu wrote:
| In this case 'proven' means was ever deployed at scale
| and worked successfully.
|
| Nuclear has track record of decarbonizing entire
| industrial economy in just 10 years.
|
| We dont have storage solution with such track record.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Nuclear has never decarbonized an entire industrial
| economy, so by that definition, nuclesr is nkt "proven
| technology".
|
| It probably could have, if you priced carbon
| appropriately 50 or 60 years ago, but no one did so cars
| and various industrial processes never made the shift and
| other random things like cow burps it cant even
| theoretically fix.
|
| Now it's too expensive to bother trying even for the bits
| it's suited to.
|
| Ironically, the main thing that wpuld make nuclear
| cheaper, would be cheap energy storage as youd only need
| to uild enoigh plants to generate the average yearly
| demand and use tge storage to handle the varying loads.
| pfdietz wrote:
| And if you wanted to power the world with nuclear, you'd
| need breeder reactors or seawater U extraction. Burner
| reactors powering the world would go through a megaton of
| natural uranium each year.
| dv_dt wrote:
| Nuclear is in an awkward place. All of the proven last
| gen designs are considered too risky to build new now.
| But it also seems that the next gen designs are not
| proven at all in terms of construction timelines or
| buildability. For example, many next gen US nuclear
| projects were canceled after continuous schedule and
| budget overshoots. The completed next gen French reactor
| in China, for example is showing unexpected behavior and
| has been temporarily taken offline for review, and other
| next gen French design builds are, like the US designs
| and projects, behind schedule and over budget.
|
| That's just the direct industry. The support industry for
| nuclear plant construction materials has also lost
| maturity and scale between first gen and new gen, as
| evidenced by the failure of upgrade materials in the So
| Cal Edison San Onofre plant. This is after decades of
| investment.
|
| Because its so much less complicated to scale, my bet is
| on storage before any next round of new nuclear plants
| are built at scale. But we don't even need that much
| storage in the next decade, we mostly need far more
| renewable energy acceleration in very proven and fast,
| reliable rollouts.
| ephbit wrote:
| Something makes me think that storing weeks worth of
| electricity isn't going to happen in the near future (<
| 30 years).
|
| Storing hydrogen isn't that easy/cheap either.
|
| So I'd guess we're going to see storage of energy in the
| form of liquid/liquefiable hydrocarbons (synthesized from
| hydrogen) like methanol or propane.
| autoliteInline wrote:
| >There is not even technology that would scale up enough
| to store a country's power for weeks or at least a few
| days.
|
| My bet is that the Japanese will build some huge
| newfangled storage facility. There'll be a big
| earthquake. The storage will meltdown/burn/whatever
| somehow. It'll cause a great big semi-permanent problem.
| Everyone will declare victory and shout 'at least it
| wasn't nuclear'.
| Arnt wrote:
| But if a country mitigates, e.g. by having many operators
| of different technologies, then consumers can hardly help
| noticing the price of nuclear. So the operators of nuclear
| plants end up having to explain a why they're expensive b
| that they are more reliable than the Japanese operators at
| Fukushima and c) why they still require public subsidy of
| their liability insurance.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| When you say "why they're expensive" do you mean the
| plant itself, or the produced electricity?
|
| In any case Fukushima is easily explained: They ignored
| the risk of tsunami despite two studies (and governmental
| bodies) warning of it. The real reason the Fukushima is
| so damaging, is that the Japanese are seen as generally
| "competent", so their mistakes/hubris are seen as
| reproducible anywhere i.e. "if the Japanese couldn't get
| it right".
| Arnt wrote:
| Either, since the income should justify the investment:
| One wants nuclear plant operators to have plenty of
| income, so as not to be tempted to save on maintenance.
|
| I agree entirely with the hubris argument. And it's a
| harsh one, because if an organisation claims to be more
| competent than the Japanese and and safety-minded too,
| why can't it persuade an insurer to sell it liability
| insurance on normal commercial terms, at a justifiable
| price? It's a difficult argument to make.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > if an organisation claims to be more competent than the
| Japanese and and safety-minded too, why can't it persuade
| an insurer to sell it liability insurance on normal
| commercial terms, at a justifiable price?
|
| It's because nobody else buys that amount of insurance. A
| hundred billion dollar insurance policy has significant
| risks and costs to the insurer completely independent of
| the actual risk of a claim.
|
| For one thing, the insurer is required to hold enough
| capital to pay out possible claims no matter how unlikely
| they are. So you're basically paying interest on that sum
| of money in the difference between the ordinary market
| rate of return and the lower return on the "safe"
| securities insurers are allowed to hold. That cost is
| completely independent of the risk of a claim; it's
| strictly based on the amount of insurance you want.
|
| Then what happens if there is e.g. a major earthquake
| which causes a minor incident at a nuclear plant, so that
| 99% of the damage is caused by the earthquake but the
| insurer is a deep pocket and the judge is sympathetic to
| the earthquake victims? That's a risk an insurer has to
| account for, but it's not a risk you can address by
| improving the safety of the nuclear plant because the
| risk is rooted in politics.
|
| When the risk of an incident is low enough, it's costs
| like that which dominate the premium for the policy. You
| can make the risk of a legitimate claim arbitrarily small
| and those costs would still be the same.
|
| And it's an isolated demand for rigor. Nobody else is
| required to carry that amount of insurance. When a coal
| mine turns an entire town into a superfund site and kills
| thousands of people, they just file for bankruptcy. What
| would the alternatives cost if they had to carry the same
| insurance, or pay for their externalities?
| nradov wrote:
| That's why huge insurance policies are typically
| syndicated across multiple insurers with reinsurance
| companies taking on part of the risk.
| fundatus wrote:
| > Building more nuclear helps de-risk wind droughts.
|
| No, not at all. Nuclear is used for base loads, not to
| compensate fluctuating electricity production of other
| sources.
| asdff wrote:
| Whenever nuclear fails you can trace it directly to poor
| policymaking rather than any faults with the underlying
| technology, unlike something like coal which is flawed from
| the drawing board due to pollution.
| tjansen wrote:
| You can't compare 1/3rd of all plants being down with the
| volatility of wind power.
|
| On November 3, 2015, German wind power generated only 0.2 GW.
| Its power rating at that time was over 40 GW. How do you want
| to compensate for that?
| _ph_ wrote:
| By having other power sources as well. Starting with
| offshore wind, then of course, solar cells. Build up more
| storage (both biological gas and synthetic gas, water,
| batteries), strengthen the European networks. The chance is
| very good that on windless days in Germany, there will be
| quite a bit of wind in France. Same with solar. A 1 GW DC
| line to Norway was put into operation just recently. And of
| course, we can keep all those gas power plants in reserve
| for those few days per year when nothing other is
| sufficient. The goal should first be, not requiring them to
| run on a day to day basis.
| Seanambers wrote:
| Yeah.. Lets base a large amount of our energy generation
| capacity on a resource that require a large amount of
| space and has a non zero chance of not producing
| anything, and lets back that up with excess power
| generation capacity which can mitigate this and does not
| exhibit this flaw.
|
| Windmills are f.king stupid for anything other than local
| production.
|
| Solar, Nuclear + Gas and grid storage seems like a way
| better approach.
|
| Not to mention the fact that in wintertime windmills
| needs to be de-iced with the same chemicals they use on
| airplanes in colder climates.
| _ph_ wrote:
| It is stupid not to have windmills in the mix. In Germany
| they contribute more electricity than solar cells.
| Especially at night, in the winter. So one should have
| both solar and wind, the mix depending on the local
| conditions. In southern Germany there is more solar, in
| the north more wind, especially near the coast. Wind
| power also doesn't require much space, you can farm or
| grow forests below them.
| wcoenen wrote:
| Wind turbines that need to deal with ice typically have
| an internal de-icing system, with electrical heaters[1].
|
| The meme about de-icing with chemicals was spread by oil
| and gas consultant Luke Legate. The picture he shared was
| actually showing a helicopter using plain hot water to
| de-ice a wind turbine in 2015[2]. This is sometimes used
| as a backup de-icing method.
|
| [1] https://www.iqpc.com/media/1001147/37957.pdf
|
| [2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/02
| /18/fac...
| _-david-_ wrote:
| >There's nothing special or magic about nuclear.
|
| Except it can run at peak efficiency when it is cloudy and
| not windy. This is one of the biggest selling points with
| dirty energy.
| adrianN wrote:
| But also in terms of cost? Nuclear power plants are not exactly
| cheap.
| pfdietz wrote:
| A NPP is an order of magnitude more expensive than a combined
| cycle power plant of the same power output. So even if
| electricity prices are high now because of gas constraints,
| that doesn't mean a NPP would have been a good idea.
|
| Europe should perhaps have diversified their gas suppliers,
| with more LNG.
| jabl wrote:
| > Europe should perhaps have diversified their gas
| suppliers, with more LNG.
|
| If climate change is supposed to be an existential threat,
| we shouldn't be doing major investments into fossil
| infrastructure.
|
| Anyway, if we spend all that money to build LNG
| infrastructure, like terminals, ships, and having contracts
| with suppliers etc. just for the few and far between
| situations where the price of LNG drops below Russian gas,
| the price/kWh is going to be pretty high as well due to all
| that capital sitting idle most of the time.
|
| A bit like this, per se sensible, argument someone in this
| thread made that keeping a nuclear plant around just to
| balance wind/solar output is pretty expensive.
| PeterisP wrote:
| One of considerations for LNG is that it's not purely an
| economic concern as from a country perspective energy
| independence might be considered just as important as
| climate change (in the short term) and it's worth paying
| some premium to secure it. Just as Europe has farming
| subsidy policies that essentially result in Europe paying
| a premium for food over what would be a "global market
| price" (importing more food from e.g. Africa and
| exporting less food), mostly in order to ensure long-term
| food supply independence.
| jabl wrote:
| I fully agree. Energy, particularly gas, is certainly
| seen as geopolitics in the Kremlin.
|
| That being said, I think the focus should be on
| (massively!) building out
| wind/solar/nuclear/transmission/storage, allowing Europe
| to tackle both climate change and dependency on a not-
| entirely friendly Russia at the same time.
| cbmuser wrote:
| Nuclear doesn't need any backup plants or grid extension.
| The capital costs are high, but the electricity production
| is almost a 100% planable and reliable.
|
| I mean, Germany's electricity situation is basically
| proving you wrong. We have the highest electricity prices,
| worldwide.
| me_me_me wrote:
| Its more expensive to build because you know... a nuclear
| meltdown is a thing to avoid.
| cbmuser wrote:
| Russia's brand-new Novovoronezh II NPP with 2x1200 MW
| costs $4 billion to build.
|
| Germany is paying 24 billion Euros of renewable energy
| subsidies through its electricity prices - every year.
|
| Nuclear can be cheap if you don't mess it up.
| pfdietz wrote:
| And also because combustion turbines are a seriously nice
| technology. Heat exchangers are expensive. A NPP
| transmits heat across many fluid/solid interfaces: fuel
| rods to coolant, primary to second coolant heat
| exchanger, secondary loop to steam generators, and steam
| to cooling water in the condenser after the turbines. A
| simple cycle combustion turbine avoids all that. Even a
| combined cycle power plant puts much less heat through
| its steam bottoming cycle for a given power output.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Correction: I added an extra loop there. Silly -- the
| primary loop drives the steam generators. I may have been
| thinking of MSRs, which have a sterile salt loop between
| the steam generator and the fuel bearing salt.
| retzkek wrote:
| Also worth noting that Boiling Water Reactors (about half
| the current fleet) eliminate the steam generators and
| secondary loop, at the cost of increased nuclear and
| mechanical complexity in the reactor.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| LNG gets expensive because it's a globalize market. Cheaper
| to use pipelined Russian gas and try not to think too hard
| about the repercussions.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The price of NG in Europe is now well above the price of
| LNG.
| foepys wrote:
| Considering what the US and Australia did to France a few
| days ago, the EU might not want to depend on LNG from the
| US. With Russia they know with whom they are dealing.
|
| France and Germany are the EU's most influential
| countries and the US is continuing to meddle in EU
| matters even after Trump left. From the EU point of view
| there is next to no change since Biden took office and
| now even France is questioning NATO.
| pfdietz wrote:
| LNG is a global market now, so one is not locked into LNG
| from just one supplier. It used to be that LNG required
| long term contracts, but there's enough sloshing around
| now that the market is more like oil.
| google234123 wrote:
| It was cheaper 30 years ago when we stopped building...
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| At this point nuclear is the most expensive per mw. And the
| vast majority of that expense is upfront. So almost no one
| wants to invest in these things because they're incredibly
| risky.
| cbmuser wrote:
| The fixed priced negotiated for Hinkley Point C is
| something like 90 GBP per MWh for the next 35 years.
|
| The market spot price in the UK is at 150-200 GBP per MWh
| now.
| jhgb wrote:
| > is something like 90 GBP per MWh
|
| ...in 2012 value of GBP. Right now the inflation-adjusted
| value is something like 112 GBP per MWh or so. You'll
| have to do the math yourself for future inflation.
|
| Also the spot price remaining like this for the next 35
| years is obviously out of question. These levels of
| prices will attract investments in generator technologies
| that can be scaled up very quickly.
| brabel wrote:
| > they're incredibly risky.
|
| Nuclear is risky?? I've heard the opposite, nuclear power
| plants tend to be extremely safe. You probably think it's
| risky because of 2 or 3 large scale accidents in the last
| 50 years or so. While those have a large impact, I don't
| think I would consider nuclear "extremely risky" just
| because of those.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| I mean financially risky.
| cbmuser wrote:
| Actually, it's the opposite. It's absolutely low risk
| because the electricity production can be sold years in
| advance if you want.
|
| Nuclear electricity has the highest of all capacity
| factors and is therefore almost 100% planable, so there
| is virtually zero risk.
| jhgb wrote:
| If your average cost overrun is around 100%, then it
| absolutely is financially risky. And selling years in
| advance is not just possible but _necessary_ for nuclear
| plants - people would _never_ agree on such prices 10-20
| years from now so the _have_ to be locked in even as the
| plant is being built.
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| Very little in electricity generation has virtually zero
| risk.
|
| Nuclear tends to have a higher capacity factor than most
| other baseload generators, but it also has unplanned
| outages.
|
| https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=45176
|
| The biggest risk I've seen is that unanticipated events
| (including financial events) will completely shutter a
| unit, like San Onofre and Indian Point 2.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generati
| ng_...
| splistud wrote:
| By all means go to current financial markets and ask for
| huge loans in this low-interest-rate high-inflation
| market. It isn't even about risk (though risks caused by
| regulation/government oversight are manifold). It's about
| return, or the lack thereof.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| I think they mean from the standpoint of it being a major
| financial investment with a non-negligible risk of
| project-failure subject to political whims and a high
| likelihood of significant cost overruns. I'd love to see
| some subsidies to address those issues though.
| mem0r1 wrote:
| (Some) Advantages of nuclear power in comparison to
| 'renewables': - EROI (energy return on energy invested) -
| ratio of land required / energy produced - much lower flow of
| materials (rare earth etc.) - constant and very high power
| output (no storage needed)
| adrianN wrote:
| Well yes, but I'm a bit skeptical that nuclear is also
| cheaper.
| cbmuser wrote:
| It is cheaper as long as you don't ignore the necessary
| backup power plants that solar and wind need.
| ben_w wrote:
| IIRC nuclear is cheaper than the batteries, if that's the
| limit, but land use of PV is a bit of a red herring: it
| can scale up or down, fit in spaces other things don't.
| Rooftops, waste land, mounted on top of road noise
| barriers...
|
| There's no reason that I'm aware of _not_ to cover the
| grounds of nuclear power plants in PV.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| >There's no reason that I'm aware of not to cover the
| grounds of nuclear power plants in PV.
|
| I'd be hesitant to impede access to various parts of the
| facility for safety reasons. Also, until a permanent
| storage solution is developed, reserving space for onsite
| storage is a very sensible thing to do.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Some companies are buying up old farmland in California's
| central valley and turning them into solar farms. Seems
| like a great transition of land use, especially if water
| is going to be a continual problem over here.
| ben_w wrote:
| Huh, I'd have assumed they'd do that in Nevada rather
| than in Central Valley. But yeah, it can go anywhere
| that's otherwise unused.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| Central Valley is a lot closer to large population
| centers.
| lopis wrote:
| Nuclear is not as clean as people try to green wash it out to
| be, nor is it ethical. https://meta.eeb.org/2017/10/18/french-
| state-owned-company-c...
| Manuel_D wrote:
| The face that merely "thousands" of people are impacted by
| France's uranium mining isn't testament to a large ecological
| impact, but the opposite: Nuclear's ecological impact is far
| _less_ than renewables. Hydroelectricity - by far the largest
| renewable energy source, more than wind and solar combined -
| has displaced hundreds of thousands of people. The Three
| Gorges Dam alone displaced 140,000 people [1]. Lithium and
| cobalt extraction will need to increase by orders of
| magnitude to provide the necessary storage for intermittent
| renewables.
|
| The immense energy density of nuclear fuel means far _less_
| of it needs to be extracted to provide energy.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam#Environment
| al...
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Building more energy-hungry datacenters that picked up any wind
| farm production also hasn't helped.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| But need that killer low latency!
| dan-robertson wrote:
| French generation is ~70% nuclear (10% wind/solar) and German
| is ~10% (~40% wind/solar). Yet their prices track each other
| closely. So I think this explanation is too simplistic.
|
| Possibly there are large interconnects between the French and
| German grids levelling out wholesale prices, but my assumption
| is that they cannot carry enough power for this imagined
| scenario where nuclear makes a big difference.
| ___luigi wrote:
| + This map shows these statistics
| https://www.electricitymap.org/map
| refurb wrote:
| If you have interconnects, energy is fungible - just like oil
| or other commodities.
| Retric wrote:
| Electricity is only fungible on a second by second basis
| while ignoring transmission losses.
|
| Local power production has a significant advantage. This
| gets offset when distant locations have significant
| geographic advantages like hydroelectric power or wind etc,
| or when peak production or demand varies between locations.
| in3d wrote:
| It will go down to 0% in Germany in several months. Germany
| is shutting down its last six nuclear power plants and no new
| ones can be built. Italy, Switzerland and Belgium also want
| to shut down their nuclear power plants. Shameful,
| unscientific public opinion in Western Europe despite more
| people realizing the danger of global warming.
| Vadoff wrote:
| What's the purpose in shutting them down?
| skrause wrote:
| They're mostly old and EOL.
| neuronic wrote:
| The mistakes were made 30 years ago and once more after
| Fukushima. Germany should have gotten off coal first, then
| nuclear.
|
| Or it should have built modern reactors 20 years ago. Now
| it's too late, too long and too expensive.
| hiram112 wrote:
| While I understand the fear of nuclear, especially in
| Europe where Chernobyl took place, I find it kind of silly
| that countries like Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Belgium,
| etc are shutting down THEIR nukes, while bordering France
| (and other countries) who aren't shutting them down.
|
| Do they imagine that the radiation / fallout from their
| neighbor's catastrophe would respect national borders?
| frostburg wrote:
| It was and is idiotic populism.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| France is pretty much winding their industry down. The
| only one under construction is Flammanville 3 [0] which
| is currently projected to cost EUR19.1 billion compared
| to the initial budget of EUR3.3 billion. The current goal
| is 50% reduction to 2035 with no new plans being decided
| until Flammanville 3 is completed. [1]
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#
| Flamanvi...
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Franc
| e#Recent...
| ElKrist wrote:
| I'm pro-nuclear but your argument is the same used by
| people saying "what's the point of my country reducing
| its CO2 emissions because it's only contributing to X% (X
| << 10) of global emissions?"
|
| Some of France's neighbor are asking for the shutdown of
| some nuclear plants. It's much easier to ask this when
| you don't have any yourself
| betaby wrote:
| There are no nuclear plants in Italy producing commercially
| available electricity AFAIK.
| danmaz74 wrote:
| A referendum after Chernobyl forced the Italian
| government to shut down all nuclear power plants in Italy
| before the 90s
| atoav wrote:
| Not being able to eat certain mushrooms or animals for
| decades in whole regions because of radioactive rain does
| that to a population yeah.
| ddalex wrote:
| Eastern will happily pick up the slack on new nuclear power
| plants and sell that electricity to balance the trade.
| cbmuser wrote:
| France is supplying electricity to all of its neighbors and
| they're trading in the same market.
|
| Thus, if electricity is scarse and expensive across Europe,
| French wholesale prices rise as well.
|
| FWIW, the French government forces EDF to sell the
| electricity to its national competitors at a fixed price of
| around 50 Euro/MWh, IIRC.
| ravis11 wrote:
| What everyone seems to be missing here is that in France
| alot of heating during winter is done with electricity
| which is not the case in germany. So peak electricity usage
| in France during Winter is much higher and that is the time
| where it needs to import alot.
| legulere wrote:
| Germany is a net-exporter of electricity
|
| https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-
| energy-c...
| JPKab wrote:
| "Net exporter" doesn't really matter for the specific
| conversation at hand.
|
| A better way to quantify grid health would be to identify
| periods of peak demand across northwestern/central
| Europe, and then tally who is selling power to whom at
| those inflated prices.
|
| I have solar panels on my home, as do most of the homes
| in my neighborhood. However, we recently had to have a
| natural gas substation built adjacent to the community to
| deal with the demand surges coinciding with supply
| disruptions (every time it snows).
| hiram112 wrote:
| Just out of curiosity, assuming your internal batteries
| are charged to the max (e.g. after a sunny day), about
| how long can you go if it starts snowing or is very
| cloudy, before you need to start pumping in natural gas?
|
| Maybe my understanding of how it all works using your own
| solar panel and the neighborhood's gas lines is too
| simplistic, though, to answer.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| > Yet their prices track each other closely.
|
| If by "track each other closely", you mean prices in Germany
| are reliably 50% higher than those in France[1], then yes,
| they "track each other" closely. German energy policy has
| been an unmitigated disaster, creating by far the most
| expensive electricity prices in the OECD and of course the
| highest in Europe, whereas prices in France are below the EU
| average.
|
| https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-
| explained/index.php...
| looki wrote:
| The source refers to retail electricity prices and thus
| doesn't apply here. The German electricity price is subject
| to lots of different taxes and fees; energy generation
| makes up less than a quarter of it [1]. These taxes do not
| need to exist and even the "EEG" which subsidizes
| renewables could be paid via the general budget. Like, for
| example, power plants could be paid for by the state. The
| comparison of household prices therefore makes little
| sense, as it implies the governments are in a race to offer
| the lowest rates to its population.
|
| [1]: https://strom-report.de/medien/strompreis-
| deutschland-2021.j...
| rsj_hn wrote:
| So according to your logic, taxes used to subsidize
| electricity production should not be included when
| calculating the cost of electricity, which can only give
| rise to a meaningless cost. Germany imposes such high
| taxes because they have such massive subsidies for
| producers. That is why electricity costs so much more in
| Germany -- because it costs so much more to produce. But
| being fungible, the cost of wholesale electricity on the
| transnational exchanges will of course tend to the law of
| one price. It is the taxes that bring this in line with
| reality as to the fully loaded cost of generation, which
| in Germany is much higher.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Do these countries trade energy in the same markets? If so,
| that would explain it, wouldn't it?
| dan-robertson wrote:
| That's the question I ask in the second paragraph. It only
| explains it if the interchange is sufficiently large.
| Another explanation could be that there is some EU
| mechanism to charge the same wholesale price even if there
| is not sufficient interchange capacity.
| filmor wrote:
| All relevant mechanisms (day-ahead auction and intraday
| continuous auction) take the interconnector capacities into
| account.
|
| The dayahead mechanism is described at length here:
| https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/globalassets/download-
| center/s...
|
| During the intraday auctions, the left-over capacities are
| considered live, i.e. if there is 100MW of capacity left for
| France to Germany, you get the first 100MW of the French
| orderbook merged into the German one. If a trade happens,
| this capacity is updated. This is called SIDC (Single
| Intraday Coupling), https://www.emissions-euets.com/internal-
| electricity-market-..., used to be called XBID.
| kindle-dev wrote:
| France is the the largest nuclear energy exporter, but it
| only exports about 12% of its nuclear energy, which might be
| enough to move the domestic price.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| If that 12% is the annual average, also keep in mind that
| it's presumably ~25% sometimes and ~0% at other times.
|
| Now suppose the domestic production is 100 GW, the domestic
| consumption is 90 GW and you're not exporting anything.
| Compare this to when the domestic production and
| consumption are still the same but you're exporting 20 GW.
| You go from having 10 GW to spare to being 10 GW short and
| having to bid for it against the foreign market.
|
| And the prices aren't linear. In oversupply you could be
| paying barely anything. At 10% undersupply you could be
| paying twenty times as much if that's how much it takes to
| reduce demand by 10%.
| Darmody wrote:
| And when the wind stops blowing, Spain has to buy nuclear
| energy at a premium price from France.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| That's because market prices are what they are, they don't
| depend on whether it's "gas electricity" or "nuclear
| electricity".
|
| Now, if you produce electricity by burning gas that you
| import and gas prices go through the roof then your
| production costs follow and your stuck.
|
| In the meantime, production costs of nuclear plants have not
| moved at all. Which makes controlling consumer prices much
| more doable and less costly, for instance, you can sell that
| electricity with improved profit margins (and France does
| export a lot of electricity).
| shakow wrote:
| > but my assumption is that they cannot carry enough power
|
| Right now (https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/DE), Germany
| is importing from France alone the equivalent of a bit under
| two French nuclear power plants at full power.
| fundatus wrote:
| Might be, but in total Germany is a net exporter of
| electricity.
| cbmuser wrote:
| That's irrelevant since Germany is often exporting
| electricity at cheap or even negative prices.
|
| The net value also doesn't buy you anything if you have
| to import electricity due to lack of local production.
|
| France can self-supply itself with electricity.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| But it can't self supply with Kiwis. Whereas Isreal is
| self suffient on Kiwis but not on cars.
| shakow wrote:
| 1. That's not the point, the point being to illustrate
| how interconnected the EU grid is.
|
| 2. Regarding your comment, I personally don't see Germany
| importing 72 gCO2/MW power to export 399 gCO2/MW power as
| a good thing for anyone but coal companies, but whatever
| floats your boat.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| "the point being to illustrate how interconnected the EU
| grid is."
|
| Which is a good thing. Very few countries are self
| sufficient regarding cars for example, or Kiwis. So
| humanity invented trading and people trade things they
| don't have for things they have - so good interconnection
| is a good thing.
| shakow wrote:
| > Which is a good thing
|
| Absolutely.
| Retric wrote:
| Germany is a net exporter of electricity to France 13.7TWh
| in 2017. But they trade a lot of power back and forth.
| https://www.agora-
| energiewende.de/fileadmin/Projekte/2018/Ja...
| cbmuser wrote:
| Yes, _net_ exporter. But we are often exporting at low or
| even negative prices.
| plater wrote:
| That's right. Germany exports when the sun is shining and
| the prices are low to Switzerland and Austria who use it
| to pump water up the Alps. When there is no sun in
| Germany, they buy it back at a high price from
| Switzerland and Austria who convert the stored water to
| electricity.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Or, in other words, they hire some battery services?
| Retric wrote:
| The accounting gets tricky. France is generally paying
| more per kWh of nuclear than they generally get it from
| exporting it. However, the marginal costs per kWh is
| below what their receiving.
|
| French nuclear power is such a bad deal for the country
| they try really hard to avoid showing the public how
| massive the subsidies are. Oddly enough this seems to
| have worked, and meanwhile they significantly reduced
| emissions which is a win for the environment.
| wott wrote:
| The only bad deal is a crazily reactive interconnected
| market, which, when combined with solar/wind production,
| destroys long-term investments.
|
| Solar/wind, when it products, crashes market prices.
| Nuclear is supposed to produce at those hours too, except
| that if it does, it sells at a loss; and if it doesn't,
| it blows its load factor which is supposed to be its
| strong point. In both cases, because of the
| destabilisation of the production equilibrium, caused by
| solar and wind, the balance of nuclear is endangered.
|
| Yet nuclear is needed to deal with the very common lacks
| of solar/wind. Hence the global result: prices getting
| higher. The irony is that the State itself subsidies
| solar/wind, both directly, and indirectly by forcing the
| electrical company (which is mostly State-owned, and
| which also owns the nuclear plants) to buy solar/wind
| electricity at ridiculously high prices, which is killing
| its balance and forces it to raise consumer prices.
|
| There was no such problem when there was not a market
| like the present one, and when there was no solar/wind.
| Production was OK, prices were low. All was going fine.
| The problem was introduced by a liberalisation dogma that
| "had" to be applied to everything and the kitchen sink +
| a pro-renewable/anti-nuclear dogma (renewable is not bad
| per se, but the consequences of its rushed development
| have been ignored, despite being very foreseeable).
| Retric wrote:
| The wholesale inflation adjusted price of electric has
| been falling in the US over the last 40 years. https://ww
| w.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/electricity-...
| Prices are spiking vs 2020, but are still down inflation
| adjusted from 2019.
|
| Which is in part an outgrowth of bringing cheaper wind
| and solar electricity sources online combined with
| inexpensive natural gas. The headline ultra low wind and
| solar prices hide the fact they are still profitable to
| bring online meaning it's selling enough energy at
| positive prices to add more. It is also profitable to add
| batteries to the electric grid in California which should
| offset other peaking sources like natural gas. The
| question of what becomes of nuclear may simply be it's
| largely phased out with some being kept around as a
| combination of energy source _and_ useful isotope
| generator.
| shakow wrote:
| They are a net exporter because they have to sell their
| wind/solar power for cheap when they have too much of it,
| but are then forced to buy nuclear/hydro power from their
| neighbors when their coal power plants are not enough to
| compensate the ramp-up in demand and/or the lack of
| wind/sun.
|
| France could be electrically self-sufficient, Germany
| couldn't -- whether they would depend on FR/BE/NL/...
| being irrelevant.
| Retric wrote:
| France exports a lot of nuclear power on nights and
| weekends while importing power during peak demand. Their
| actually further from self sufficiency.
|
| It gets more complicated on a euro per kWh basis as
| Frances nuclear is much more expensive so economically
| their losing money even if it looks better in terms of
| cash flows.
| shakow wrote:
| France is now close to its daily subpeak
| (https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/electricity-
| consumptio...) and exports
| (https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/FR) 11.5GW while
| importing 1GW, i.e. a surplus of >10GW, with over 50GW to
| spare in hydro and nuclear alone. The worst peak being at
| around 80GW during the winter, they should do good should
| they be independent at some point for whatever reason.
| Retric wrote:
| Self sufficiency is really about the delta between demand
| and available supply. It's the worse case not average
| that's the issue so you normally need to look at the
| coldest and hottest days not September which is when a
| lot of production is taken offline because demand is so
| low. Even that's not the full picture individual power
| plants may be taken offline for a wide range of reasons.
|
| That said, self sufficiency is expensive and generally
| not worth the costs involved.
| shakow wrote:
| > It's the worse case not average that's the issue so you
| normally need to look at the coldest and hottest days not
| September
|
| Indeed, which is why I wrote "The worst peak being at
| around 80GW during the winter [...]".
| jhgb wrote:
| > France could be electrically self-sufficient, Germany
| couldn't
|
| According to what arbitrary criterion?
| beerandt wrote:
| Buy high and sell low is not a strategy that's improved
| buy scaling it up.
| PeterisP wrote:
| There's no "French and German grids", most of EU is a single
| grid (see map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_
| of_Continenta...) and there's no meaningful difference
| between "interconnects" linking France and Germany and power
| lines within France, though there are a bit fewer of them
| than internal lines.
|
| There are some limited interconnects linking continental EU
| with UK and Scandinavia with some trade happening over them.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That may be so but there is a tremendous difference in
| quality and capacity to absorb fluctuations between the
| various interconnected national grids. At the physical
| level they are still very much separate.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Or see https://www.entsoe.eu/data/map/ for a map of the
| transmissions lines.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| Large quantities of energy (e.g. from Nuclear) are bought in
| advance (between countries, and less often between
| companies), and with multiple years contracts. That's why you
| don't see a huge difference.
| gumby wrote:
| Actually it appears that this is how it works, though in this
| case it's more purchases from Czech than France.
| bsd44 wrote:
| Sure nuclear is all good until something goes wrong and you
| need 30k years to inhabit the area again, but that can't ever
| happen...oh wait. You need to weigh cons as much as pros.
| giantg2 wrote:
| We also need to be using up to date data about reactor
| designs that are safer rather than the older and more
| dangerous ones (eg FAST, slow wave).
| tomtheelder wrote:
| Although I'm generally pro more nuclear, this argument
| isn't massively compelling to me. The failed reactors of
| the past were considered safe when they were built.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "The failed reactors of the past were considered safe
| when they were built."
|
| Honestly, this is a terrible argument. It's like saying
| 'a few people died from eating bad apples, so we should
| ban oranges for fear that they are the same'. The
| technologies being discussed are fundamentally different.
| Not to mention that we don't apply this 'past performance
| as an indicator of future performance for different
| systems' paradigm to any other area of life.
|
| The main difference is that they were not considered
| fundamentally safe. The newer, safer designs utilize the
| laws of physics for passive safety. The older ones relied
| on systems that had to function to prevent failure. It
| was an engineering design assumption that was wrong (that
| the systems would always function). That's a huge
| oversight to not run through emergency scenarios to see
| what would happen.
|
| If you really want to look at historical data, then we
| can look the precursor to FAST that was tested for the
| past 60 years at Los Alamos and the numerous emergency
| scenario testing of the next gen FAST reactors.
| p_l wrote:
| The two large scale events involved a) known problematic
| design with a _lot_ bad process (Chernobyl, the RBMK, and
| especially the condition into which the overall system
| was put _before start of the event_ , would have _failed
| a safety inspection under then-current Soviet rules_ ) b)
| a plant where owners ignored multiple reports about
| dangers of tsunami capable of overcoming the defenses,
| and ultimately failed to contain due to loss of power to
| run the pumps (especially since all reactors scammed in
| the area). Again, failing requirements to keep running
| safely.
| goguy wrote:
| That's the problem though isn't it. Reliance on humans.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Which is not a problem in designs that incorporate
| passive safety (FAST, slow wave).
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Of course, if thet had built them the price of electricity
| would be even higher...
| legulere wrote:
| That doesn't make sense. Building new nuclear plants is among
| the most expensive forms of electricity generation:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
| google234123 wrote:
| It was the cheapest just 10 years ago.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| Were those comparisons made with current prices for natural
| gas? Probably not.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Even at current NG prices in Europe, combined cycle is
| still probably cheaper than new nuclear.
| _ph_ wrote:
| Probably not, but the gas price is peaking for several,
| mostly temporal reasons. Especially if the overall gas
| usage drops due to more renewable electricity, the gas
| price will drop also.
|
| But the real competition for nuclear energy shouldn't be
| gas (which is expensive even in better times), but
| renewables. We need much more of them.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Winter is yet ahead, in the coming 6 months gas usage is
| only going to increase, so I don't think that this peak
| will decrease any time soon.
| _ph_ wrote:
| When we talk about possible new nuclear plans, we are not
| talking about the next months but years. Short term not
| much can rectify the situation other than trying to buy
| more gas. Ironically, the much criticized north stream 2
| pipeline has just become ready to put into operation.
| asdff wrote:
| Factor in all the externalities that these other forms of
| energy bring in and nuclear is probably one of the cheapest.
| If you could put a figure on the economic damage from an
| entire city of millions breathing in fumes from pollutants
| every day on their lives, it would probably be astronomical.
| pigeonhole123 wrote:
| Only in the west. In Korea it's about the same price as other
| clean energy forms.
| corban1 wrote:
| I'd happily pay the price for nuclear in exchange for it's
| cleanness.
| cbmuser wrote:
| That's only when you compare the levelized costs of
| electricity and ignore the huge system costs of volatile
| renewables.
|
| You don't gain anything from cheap wind power if it's not
| available when you actually need it.
| wazoox wrote:
| Exactly. Rosatom trolled EU on twitter:
|
| "So apparently you cannot build your entire electricity system
| on weather-dependent energy sources. Who would have thought?"
|
| https://twitter.com/RosatomGlobal/status/1438395621648572418
| pydry wrote:
| Lots of people blaming the shockingly high gas prices on the
| wind not blowing these days it seems.
| Factorium wrote:
| What about building huge solar plants in Western Sahara and
| Morocco? The Moroccan Government seems pretty friendly and
| stable.
|
| If we then configure all our electric cars to charge during the
| day, and discharge from 6pm onwards, we can address a lot of
| the evening peak.
| asdff wrote:
| You need access to millions of gallons of water a year to run
| a huge solar plant like Ivanpah, not to mention there
| probably aren't a lot of great roads for bringing in
| materials for heavy construction in the sahara vs the
| American west where in a days drive you are in the container
| yards at the Port of Los Angeles, so its not as easy as just
| plopping solar panels in the middle of the desert all over
| the world.
| ben_w wrote:
| All depends on the cost and the timescale. You can do both of
| those things, and while neither could be built at a scale to
| be a complete substitute _overnight_ , they're probably both
| faster to build than modern nuclear plants.
|
| (I'd go for these _and_ nuclear myself, but nuclear isn't
| generally popular and I don't see that changing).
| MayeulC wrote:
| What about Spanish deserts for starters?
|
| Germany might get more kWh per euro invested in the panels it
| it was to construct them there, though of course it wouldn't
| be with german workers.
| ephbit wrote:
| Even with HVDC I'm very sceptical that we'll soon see enough
| transmission capacity (electrical) from northern africa to
| europe or other regions in the world for that to become a
| relevant part of the eurafrican grid.
|
| Why? Because we'd need lots of these.
|
| Take this project as a reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wi
| ki/Southern_Hami%E2%80%93Zhengzho...
|
| Capacity: 8 GW Cost: ~ 3 billion EUR
|
| Assuming 10 kW each, with one such HVDC connection you could
| charge/discharge 800000 cars simultaneously. That is quite a
| lot less than the current number of cars and 10 kW is a lot
| less than the charging speeds which are currently being
| offered.
| vfclists wrote:
| What happens in severe storms?
| dukeyukey wrote:
| Then you rely on turbines instead, or turn on your nuclear
| reactors, or import from neighbours.
| fy20 wrote:
| Nord Pool has historical prices for a number of European
| countries:
|
| https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/Market-data1/Dayahead/Area-Pri...
|
| In my country the price this month is around twice that of the
| historical average. Switching to a electricity plan last month
| that is based upon these prices, instead of fixed, probably
| wasn't a smart idea :D
| tacobelllover99 wrote:
| I can not take anyone serious on green energy if they oppose
| nuclear energy.
| teekert wrote:
| I'm in the Netherlands, if I fix my prices for a year now (I just
| finished my last year contract, usage: 4200kWh and 1200 m3 gas),
| they go up about 33% (135 to about 180 eur/month). It's a lot,
| but hardly eye-watering.. yet. 2 year contracts go up less (about
| 22%). Not sure what to do now. It's like the stock market but
| it's forced onto everybody.
|
| Btw, I see gasoline is now 1.99 eur/litre at many stations along
| the highway, yet I've never seen the 2 eur mark crossed! It's
| like they are really reluctant to do that.
| siliconunit wrote:
| It would take about 115k square miles of normal solar panels to
| cover the world energy use (23000TW), this translates to about
| 340 miles side square of land, I'm sure we could split this to
| various solar efficient locations and just close the deal with
| all this hydrocarbons Et al. BS. And can be solar parabolic-
| through systems instead of PV, no efficiency loss and night
| thermal storage built in. But of course we'll never unite and
| forget about profit and petty arguments just for once...World
| mechanics are just broken.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| jsilence wrote:
| In the process of moving the mobility towards electrically
| powered vehicles all of Europe is going to need a lot more
| capacity. So all the disscussions about the hence and forth
| between France and Germany are quite moot.
| sk2020 wrote:
| I think the more likely outcome is that personal and commercial
| travel will just be illegal for people outside of political
| leadership. The mineral resources to replace all vehicles with
| EVs don't exist. Sort of Holodomor repeated as farce.
| chess_buster wrote:
| The mineral resources to replace all vehicles with EVs, in
| fact, do exist.
| ciconia wrote:
| https://archive.ph/cmHkE
| [deleted]
| teekert wrote:
| Why would these links never work for me? "Can't find a server
| with the specified host name"
| josephcsible wrote:
| What DNS provider do you use?
| teekert wrote:
| Hmm, good point, I guess my ISPs standard one (on my
| iPhone? Not sure if Apple forces one.. I use DDG browser)
| it does work on my laptop indeed. Strangely that should use
| the same DNS... But maybe not, I'll do some testing later,
| thanx.
| ur-whale wrote:
| If 1.1.1.1 is in your DNS resolution path, archive.is won't
| resolve.
| jjj3j3j3j3 wrote:
| EU could be described as a lightweight Soviet Union. A bit less
| communisms, less weapons, but still many similarities. Let's see
| how long will it take until a complete collapse. UK is already
| out...
| Proven wrote:
| This is laughable analysis - one of the reasons given is the lack
| of wind. WTF.
|
| Right, it's not because the government, greens and crony
| capitalists made sure the money had to be burned on wind power
| plants.
|
| Why don't you also blame it on climate changes and call for more
| public investment in solar or some shit. Maybe that's what they
| did by the end of the article....
| lenkite wrote:
| Falling wind power is likely one major culprit
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/europe-electricity-idUSL8N2K...
| [deleted]
| squarefoot wrote:
| I wonder how much of the huge new demand of energy can be
| attributed to cryptocurrencies mining. Does it have some
| significant impact compared to the rest?
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