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

Post by tjansen » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 12:24 PM UTC

gabaix wrote: post #15

Arnt wrote: post #12

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.

Post by Wildgoose » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 12:36 PM UTC

mdp2021 wrote: post #59

Wildgoose wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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') )

Post by Arnt » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 12:37 PM UTC

Chris2048 wrote: post #55

Arnt wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 coul…

Post by albertopv » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 12:48 PM UTC

PJ_Maybe wrote: post #25

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…

Post by tjansen » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 12:56 PM UTC

adrianN wrote: post #64

tjansen wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true, but when does it make sense to include plants that do not deliver reliable power? Wind power makes a lot of sense as long as you are still using fossil fuels. Every watt generated by wind power means that you can reduce fossil fuel, and thus lower your CO2 emissions. But once you got rid of fossil fuels and you have a reliable source of power without CO2 emissions, you can get rid of the unreliable ones.

Wind and solar are pretty cheap and storage keeps getting cheaper, that's why they make sense.