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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

#111

Post by realusername »

cinntaile wrote: post #110
realusername wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climate-change-eu-transit... That's maybe how they are trying to spin it yeah.

I'm confused, I thought we were talking about France? The above makes sense though, nuclear power plants are a bit too expensive to build compared to other alternatives. You get more bang for your buck by investing it elsewhere. I wonder what their definition of green is, it's clearly not CO2-based. Nuclear energy is not renewable so maybe that's their angle?

I'm going to tell you the truth nobody want's to hear in the EU, a lot of EU countries bet very big on renewables and they can't afford to fail so they are doing everything they can to go their way, this includes clever definitions of subsidizing & so-called "green" funds.

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

#112

Post by seanmcdirmid »

derefr wrote: post #78
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

An array of small modular [nuclear] reactors (SMRs) could be set up to switch parts of the array on and off over the course of the day to scale with load. Small plants have shorter ramp-up and ramp-down times, as they move around smaller amounts of working fluid, and power lighter turbines which thus have proportionately higher friction/lower inertia. Of course, this is a lot less efficient than having one big nuclea…

As long as we are going there, backing a traditional nuclear power plant with a reservoir for pumped storage would work as well. But the land needed for such is immense and limited (though great for recreation opportunities). Nuclear could also be coupled with a desalinization plant that would use excess energy to produce clean water for later use (but there are other challenges there).

If liquid hydrogen fuel was ever useful, it could produce that with excess capacity also (but again, other issues).

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

#113

Post by krab »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #7
28511524 wrote: 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.

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

In Czech republic, there is an ongoing project to extend one of the two nuclear power plants. Although there is some debate whether to do it at all, it focuses most on the high costs.

The bigger issue in the public debate are the national safety and strategic concerns. At the moment, it seems Russian and Chinese companies will be banned from bidding.

So, the sentiment is definitely not consistent. CZ is much more favorable towards nuclear than DE or AT, but it's still a complicated topic.

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

#114

Post by Dma54rhs »

ojosilva wrote: post #44

In Spain, the government chose to, temporarily, lower taxes on electric energy from +27% to a (not yet there) target of around 10%. Some (but not all) countries in Europe also have high energy taxes that can be lowered to mitigate the impact of high prices on mid and lower-income citizens. Definitely not a long term solution, but hopefully it has the intended effect. However, lowering taxes could also end up pushing…

If we want the greener future the prices have to reflect the reality. We want people to use less energy, doesn't make sense lowering the prices like that. Obviously going green means paying more.

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

#115

Post by hackeraccount »

lm28469 wrote: post #28
kohlerm wrote: 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/

I've always thought Germany's energy prices were by design - I think it's a round about way of engaging in financial repression. Germany is an exporting country and reducing domestic consumption helps with that strategy.

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

#116

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

junon wrote: post #95
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 h…

The inspections caught it after almost half the barrel was gone from rust. That doesn't inspire confidence. Neither does the way Asse II is being handled currently.

People also tend to not believe "no danger" claims - such claims, especially when coming from the companies running those plants, provide very little information, as we have learned that we should expect to hear the same claims even if a reactor core is currently melting its way through the containment (both in Chernobyl and Fukushima, false reassurances were given long after the people in charge knew of the seriousness of the accident).

Likewise, officials claim that nothing is leaking from Asse and it is safe, yet there is an unexplained but very significant (pEven if this was just feelings (and I disagree with that - seeing partial failures that get caught by other layers of a multi-layered safety system does provide information about the risk that one day the "holes in the Swiss cheese" [1] will line up), it explains why people in Germany are so opposed to nuclear.

Fukushima was particularly devastating for public trust, because Japan is seen as a developed, industrialized, "orderly" nation, so if it can happen there, it can happen anywhere. Additionally, nuclear power plants in developed countries were portrayed as absolutely safe, so it's a "fool me once, fool me twice" situation. (Since this is usually countered by "they couldn't expect the Tsunami": that just means that when an unexpected event - e.g. a 300 year flood event, as has recently happened in Germany - comes, we should expect a similar outcome and similar attempts from the people in charge to weasel out of the blame. Again, not helpful for trust.)

In short, people - me included - don't believe that the plants will be operated to the claimed safety standards. The trust in the industry is gone, and people don't want to take the gamble, even if rationally, it may be the lesser evil than e.g. coal.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model

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

#117

Post by tehsauce »

dagw wrote: post #63
tehsauce wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

realistically building batteries or thermal storage at that scale will probably take as long as nuclear plants

With batteries and thermal storage you can scale up over time. You can have a new small thermal storage or battery facility up and running in 2-3 years and slowly build it out over the next 20 years, with the option to change technology or capacity as needed during that time. With nuclear you have 20 years of 'nothing' before you have anything to show for your efforts.

It’s true you can start small and scale up, but it still would probably take many years to accumulate enough batteries to make a significant difference. Secondly, it doesn’t make 20 years to build a modern nuclear power plant, 5 years is a better estimate. So nuclear is still easily the cheaper/faster/proven method compared to batteries or thermal.

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

#118

Post by bjourne »

littlestymaar wrote: post #108
pydry wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you include solar energy, energy imports or demand shaping in your model?

Oops I forgot to put the link to my model. For your specific questions: - Solar energy: sort of, I did three variants (100% solar, 100% wind, an the current Wind/solar ration) - energy import: I kept the same energy import profile as of today. It would have made the model much bigger (I would have needed to simulate the entire European grid instead of just the French one, making me deal with tons of different data so…

But the whole point of 100% renewables is that you rely on imports when there little domestic production. It's not true that international power connections are tiny. In the Nord Pool market which integrates the Scandinavian and Baltic countries electricity markets over 5 GW is at this moment being exported/imported.

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

#119

Post by Ekaros »

pydry wrote: post #101
littlestymaar wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot go full renewable though, at least not if you power supply comes from wind. Even offshore fields have big periods without productions (because there is not enough wind, but also because there is too much). I did the calculation for France a few years ago: if you wanted to run on wind + battery, on a typical year you'd need two weeks of storage! Nobody considers this realistic, and gas is expected to cover…

Did you include solar energy, energy imports or demand shaping in your model?

Are energy imports realistic solution if we don't go intercontinental scale?

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

#120

Post by fomine3 »

bildung wrote: post #73
em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #39

ElectricityMap is a nice live view of current energy generation and consumption by type of energy. Unfortunately right now https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/DE shows Germany is generating most energy from Coal. It is sad that they didn't embrace nuclear like neighboring France.

Decisions like these seldomly are about engineering alone. France didn't embrace nuclear out of the goodness of their hearts - they wanted to become a nuclear power, and needed the infrastructure and specialists and so on to become one (establish study paths, and give those students the prospect of jobs so that they actually choose the new paths etc.). Now that this isn't of strategic importance anymore, France lost…

Japan is also loser for WW2 but their lab/company do nuclear development from 1950s, thanks to relationship to US.
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