31–40 of 435 posts
* 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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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
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
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Building more nuclear helps de-risk wind droughts. This isn’t specific to nuclear; building more of a different kind mitigates the risk.
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.
Would this work when there's little wind for a week or more?
The strike price for nuclear power from Hinkley Point C when it becomes operational will be £92.50/MWh. This has received a lot of criticism for being too high. With current wholesale rates at £385/MWh, suddenly Hinkley Point C doesn't look so expensive any more.
Index linked.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Building more nuclear helps de-risk wind droughts. This isn’t specific to nuclear; building more of a different kind mitigates the risk.
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 incre…
The upside is that these fluctuations are kind of mitigated and smoothed out.