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Why has the price of electricity in Europe reached record highs?

economist.com

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Re: Why has the price of electricity in Europe reached record highs?

#51

Post by Scoundreller »

beezischillin wrote: post #26

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.

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.

Re: Why has the price of electricity in Europe reached record highs?

#52

Post by pfdietz »

Scoundreller wrote: post #47
pfdietz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

The price of NG in Europe is now well above the price of LNG.

Re: Why has the price of electricity in Europe reached record highs?

#53

Post by kragen »

mdp2021 wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Re: Why has the price of electricity in Europe reached record highs?

#54

Post by bserge »

beezischillin wrote: post #26

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.

The answer is firewood. Often illegally acquired. But that's only for the rural folk.

Re: Why has the price of electricity in Europe reached record highs?

#55

Post by Chris2048 »

Arnt wrote: post #39
gabaix wrote: post #15

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.

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 ⓐ why they're expensive ⓑ that they are more reliable than the Japanese operators at Fukushima and c) why they still require public subsidy of their liability insurance.

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".

Re: Why has the price of electricity in Europe reached record highs?

#56

Post by pydry »

mhandley wrote: post #10

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.

Grid scale battery banks also make sense at that price.

Re: Why has the price of electricity in Europe reached record highs?

#57

Post by hanoz »

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.

Re: Why has the price of electricity in Europe reached record highs?

#58

Post by tjansen »

Arnt wrote: post #12
mem0r1 wrote: post #6

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.

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?

Re: Why has the price of electricity in Europe reached record highs?

#59

Post by mdp2021 »

Wildgoose wrote: post #44
pjc50 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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. 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

(If you are looking for the angled quotes ('«', '»'), depending on your system and layout, try [RightAlt]+[]. There are keyboard layouts using four layers - regular, shifted, alternate and shifted-alternate, together with the combinations (e.g. [RightAlt]+[:], [u] → 'ü') )

Re: Why has the price of electricity in Europe reached record highs?

#60

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

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

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