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Energy Prices in Europe Hit Records After Wind Stops Blowing

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Re: Energy Prices in Europe Hit Records After Wind Stops Blowing

#91
post #21
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is here in Germany. Nobody here likes nuclear. My ex is a PhD in bioinformatics and argues against nuclear using quite outdated information, even. Nuclear is a non-starter for many. Too many people afraid of another Chernobyl or nuclear waste handling without understanding what caused the former or not being informed about how we deal with the latter, today.

You must mean tomorrow, because today, we just keep the stuff around in intermediate facilities.

We can currently refine waste down to levels safe enough to keep out of containment facilities, and can dispose of it by landfill in a way that will have zero ecological risk or impact, forever.

So no, not "tomorrow".

Re: Energy Prices in Europe Hit Records After Wind Stops Blowing

#92
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be surprised that if this trend increases and the push comes to shove, then the voters - especially those on marginal incomes - might decide that actually they much prefer lower energy prices instead of supporting renewables and CO2-neutral energy; and in democratic countries it's the general public who are entitled to make that choice for their country instead of accepting the decisions of elites/experts…

> In some sense a clean environment and less dangerous future are "luxury goods" that societies and people want to buy if they can afford to, but should not be forced if they can't afford the expense. While I sympathize with this view on a certain level, applying it to policy consistently and literally is a likely path towards chaos and immense death and suffering 70 years from now. That's a high cost to pay to consi…

A big problem is the international aspect and the requirement for what effectively are wealth transfers.

Countries often are willing to bribe part of the voters to make some universal policies tolerable, having internal transfer payments for the benefit of the country as a whole.

The world is (IMHO clearly) very, very limited in its willingness to bribe part of foreign voters to make some global policies tolerable, having international transfer payments for the benefit of the world as a whole. There are some examples, but they're very limited in scale compared to intra-country wealth transfers.

It's plausible to convince voters for some reallocation between themselves, even if many specific voters would not individually benefit - but it's a hard sell to convince voters to assign significant resources (as opposed to current international aid/charity) to primarily benefit people in another country, which IMHO seems to be necessary because there's so big country-to-country variation in the actions needed to reduce global warming, the ability to afford these actions, and the severity of local consequences of global warming.

Re: Energy Prices in Europe Hit Records After Wind Stops Blowing

#93
post #2

“Options include reserve thermal power plants, battery storage or cables for importing electricity from other markets.” Or nuclear. Sad that this isn’t seen as an option any longer.

Nuclear isn’t on demand, you still need a place to bank energy when you don’t need it since the plant is going to produce a constant load that (given high capital and operating costs of the plant itself) you’ll want to use productively. Natural gas instead would really shine as a backup power source.

There's lots of things to do with extra electricity, it's just a question of whether or not it's economical. Here in California, for example, I could imagine the excess being used to opportunistically desalinate water and refill reservoirs. If water and emissions were priced appropriately, it might be worthwhile? It's not exactly a battery, but it's a way to make overbuilding more palatable.

Alternatively if the grid is unreliable, end-use customers will install their own batteries and generating capacity. Voila, problem solved on someone else's dime!

Re: Energy Prices in Europe Hit Records After Wind Stops Blowing

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or nuclear. Sad that this isn’t seen as an option any longer Is anti-nuclear sentiment consistent across Europe?

France gets 70% of its power from safe nuclear energy. https://www.statista.com/statistics/462535/nuclear-share-ele... .

So does Switzerland, but the opinion is already shifting against it.

Re: Energy Prices in Europe Hit Records After Wind Stops Blowing

#95
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is here in Germany. Nobody here likes nuclear. My ex is a PhD in bioinformatics and argues against nuclear using quite outdated information, even. Nuclear is a non-starter for many. Too many people afraid of another Chernobyl or nuclear waste handling without understanding what caused the former or not being informed about how we deal with the latter, today.

> how we deal with the latter, today News and images like this https://www.thelocal.de/20141010/one-third-of-barrels-leak-a... (2014) don't exactly help restore confidence. (If you can't get that to load, here's the same in German https://www.n-tv.de/politik/Loechrige-Atom-Faesser-entdeckt-... ) Edit to add, the infamous old picture of a loader dumping barrels into a pit in the Asse II salt mine: https://static.dw.co…

From the first article:

> “The chambers are secure and there is no danger for the personnel or the local population,” Vattenfall said in a statement released on Thursday

I don't see how that has... anything to do with anything. Proper inspection revealed this problem and it's been rectified. Mission accomplished.

> the infamous old picture of a loader dumping barrels into a pit in the Asse II salt mine

> while this happened decades ago

Right, again, I don't see how this is relevant to modern nuclear handling. That's a cleanup effort from poor procedures from decades ago, and it's been pretty well contained. Compare that to the current cleanup efforts of decades of fossil fuel burning, and the effects that has had.

I don't see how any of this is an argument against nuclear.

Re: Energy Prices in Europe Hit Records After Wind Stops Blowing

#96
post #2

“Options include reserve thermal power plants, battery storage or cables for importing electricity from other markets.” Or nuclear. Sad that this isn’t seen as an option any longer.

Nuclear isn’t on demand, you still need a place to bank energy when you don’t need it since the plant is going to produce a constant load that (given high capital and operating costs of the plant itself) you’ll want to use productively. Natural gas instead would really shine as a backup power source.

France is a nice counterexample to this. Nuclear is usually used as a buffer for needs and production variations.

In fact, modern Combined cycle natural gas plants are less controllable than nuclear ones.

(That being said, given that the cost of a nuclear plant is mostly independent from its energy output, why would you build wind farms if you already have nuclear plant? Except for political reasons of course)

Re: Energy Prices in Europe Hit Records After Wind Stops Blowing

#97
post #6

Subhead: "...coupled with a shortage of natural gas..."

And "...record high rights of CO2 emissions..."

I hate that the headline, which they know is the only thing a lot of people read, implies "high prices due to eolic/renewables", when the true underlying cause is that gas and coal cost a lot more than 5 years ago.

And they left the "abundant wind power has at times led to periods of cheap electricity" to the bottom of the article, where nobody would read it. I guess some people would rather pay $100 every month of the year than $150 one month and $30 the other 12.

Re: Energy Prices in Europe Hit Records After Wind Stops Blowing

#98
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that it's a similar "luxury good" as "functioning healthcare". And the poorer countries - especially a few decades earlier - were (and are) "choosing" not to buy functioning healthcare before they can afford it - they do devote their limited resources in a balanced manner to various other priorities as well despite paying a price literally with blood and the lives of their children instead of devoting all the…

Yes; however, as with human-caused desertification, sacrificing tomorrow for today ultimately leads all of us to doom, so those of us who aren't in those circumstances have a moral imperative to figure this out :)

My perspective on this is that in some aspects we're asking some people to sacrifice their today in order to save some other people from doom tomorrow, which is a quite different tradeoff than general sacrificing tomorrow for today.

My presumption is that "leads us all to doom" is a slight exaggeration and rather we would seeing "merely very bad" consequences (i.e. they're something for which we should be willing to pay a lot but not something to be prevented at literally any cost) that are furthermore very unequally distributed.

And the result of this are populations who would suffer a lot but can't afford to fix the issue, and there are other populations who can afford to spend resources on a better tomorrow, but for those groups perhaps it might be more efficient to allocate that money to mitigating the local consequences (e.g. flooding protection, urban redesign, restructuring of agriculture and pest control) instead of slightly slowing down (since they can't prevent it) the global warming as such. And, crucially, there's no shared understanding of these choices and tradeoffs among the people who could/should/would allocate these resources.

What I read in your comment is that the people who can afford to fund the changes ("who aren't in those circumstances") have a moral imperative to fix this for everyone. That seems desirable, but IMHO unrealistic; both because those people are a minority and can't fix the global issues if the developing world continues to develop and grow emissions; and also because those people (on average) won't be willing to sacrifice their own welfare (e.g. reducing it to global median) in order to fix the global issues; we're far from a post-scarcity world and every country, including the richest, still has a multitude of local problems that scream for funding.

Re: Energy Prices in Europe Hit Records After Wind Stops Blowing

#99
post #28
post #20

hmm not sure I can follow the logic. Germany does have quite a lot of wind power doesn't it? Also AFAIK prices in Germany went up because of higher demand for Gas. And then somehow it is expected, as soon as there is a big enough crisis energy prices will go up exponentially.

Germany always had bad prices, it's been twice the French's price for as long as I can remember https://strom-report.de/electricity-prices-europe/

Germany messed up, because instead of phasing out coal before anything else (like they did in UK or Spain), they phased out nuclear plants. Spain or UK, both at only 20% nuclear but without coal, have the same prices than France, thanks to the renewables keeping it low.

Re: Energy Prices in Europe Hit Records After Wind Stops Blowing

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The prevailing nuclear designs are not an option. They are only suitable for base load production, whereas wind is only suitable for peak load production. They serve entirely different purposes on the grid and are not meaningfully interchangeable. When the wind stops blowing you need another technology that is suitable for peak load production (batteries, natural gas, etc.).

Current-design nuclear plants themselves are perfectly capable at ramping up and down on demand on the order of 10s of minutes. They usually just choose not to because fuel is a small fraction of their total cost and so the current (and adjustable) markets pressure them into selling as much electricity as possible by staying near 100%.

This is why we need to consider energy demand, as well as supply.

Specifically, if we had a whole continent's worth of electric cars charging during the day to soak up excess solar production (8am - 6pm);

And allowed them to offload the same energy back into the grid from 6pm - 8am.

To deal with the duck curve: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sam-Milshtein/publicati...

The simplest way to solve this is to mandate EV charging points at all workplaces and commuter parking lots, and require all new EVs include the UI and functionality necessary to upload to the grid interactively, and adjust regulations to actually allow and encourage that.

We could also build giant solar farms in Morocco and Western Sahara, a comparatively stable and friendly part of Northern Africa, where peak solar times conveniently align with the evening peak of Central Europe.

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