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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
After the fire an electricity interconnector running under the English Channel was "not operating", the National Grid said in a statement.>>
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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?
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/S03603...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But also in terms of cost? Nuclear power plants are not exactly cheap.
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.
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
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.