Why has the price of electricity in Europe reached record highs? • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by throwaway894345 » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 2:47 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #72

tjansen wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are decades away from having enough storage to make wind and power a reliable power source. There is not even technology that would scale up enough to store a country's power for weeks or at least a few days. China just has announced ambitious plans to install storage for 100 GWh by 2030. China's electric power generation capacity is 2200 GW (in 2020). That's not even enough to provide electricity for 5 minutes...…

> There is not even technology that would scale up enough to store a country's power for weeks or at least a few days. Don’t mistake a manufacturing limit for a tech scaling limit. While it may take decades to get there, batteries could do that; in the mean time, intercontinental HVDC connections could substitute for some of that storage (not all the storage all at once unless mining increases, but certainly plausibl…

Do we have the lithium/etc reserves to meet the storage needs for the entire planet? Nuclear is proven and if we claim to believe that climate change is an existential threat I don’t know why we would pin all our hopes on solar and wind and some to-be-discovered storage solution. To be clear, I’m not against solar and wind—on the contrary, I want a diverse clean energy portfolio. But wasting time emitting while we pray for a storage solution for wind/solar seems utterly foolish.

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

#82

Post by tjansen » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 2:52 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #72

tjansen wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are decades away from having enough storage to make wind and power a reliable power source. There is not even technology that would scale up enough to store a country's power for weeks or at least a few days. China just has announced ambitious plans to install storage for 100 GWh by 2030. China's electric power generation capacity is 2200 GW (in 2020). That's not even enough to provide electricity for 5 minutes...…

> There is not even technology that would scale up enough to store a country's power for weeks or at least a few days. Don’t mistake a manufacturing limit for a tech scaling limit. While it may take decades to get there, batteries could do that; in the mean time, intercontinental HVDC connections could substitute for some of that storage (not all the storage all at once unless mining increases, but certainly plausibl…

I guess a manufacturing limit is bad enough. The global battery production is expected to reach 2063 GWh/year by 2028 [0]. That wouldn't be enough to store China's electricity consumption for a single hour. The production would need an increase by several orders of magnitude. Are there enough raw materials for this? How much waste would there be, given the limited lifespan of those batteries?

What about a no-wind scenario? I don't know what wind in the UK is like, but in Germany this happens quite often. In November 2015 wind output dropped to 0.2 GW (0.5% of its 40GW power rating) [1]. Hydro doesn't help in such a scenario ([0] https://energycentral.com/c/ec/world-battery-production

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute (German)

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

#83

Post by adrianN » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 2:55 PM UTC

tjansen wrote: post #69

adrianN wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We are decades away from having enough storage to make wind and power a reliable power source. There is not even technology that would scale up enough to store a country's power for weeks or at least a few days. China just has announced ambitious plans to install storage for 100 GWh by 2030. China's electric power generation capacity is 2200 GW (in 2020). That's not even enough to provide electricity for 5 minutes...…

We're also pretty far away from the kinds of renewable penetration where you actually need a lot of storage, so we have plenty of time left to build more batteries and electrolyzers.

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

#84

Post by dan-robertson » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 2:55 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #22

wrnr wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dunno about grain mills, but sailers have long known about trade winds and the doldrums.

Including the ability to develop sails that allow taking advantage of Wind in the opposing direction. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateen

What is the relevance of sailing upwind to the doldrums (where there was little wind) or to trade winds (which reasonably consistently blew in the same direction as the trade)?

Even the article you linked suggested that early modern sailors would change to a square rigging once they got out of the changing winds of the Mediterranean. So clearly there were some advantages to square rigs (perhaps they could be made larger than triangular or gaff rigs with technology of the time.) And it would likely be foolish to plan a route to beat up a trade wind even if you could sail close to it, as you would likely be much slower than following the winds.

On contemporary boats, it seems that Bermudan rigs win as they can sail close to the wind and can also be large. But most people who go sailing today are not taking large ships across oceans so their requirements as well as their technology will be different.

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

#85

Post by dv_dt » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 2:58 PM UTC

tjansen wrote: post #69

adrianN wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We are decades away from having enough storage to make wind and power a reliable power source. There is not even technology that would scale up enough to store a country's power for weeks or at least a few days. China just has announced ambitious plans to install storage for 100 GWh by 2030. China's electric power generation capacity is 2200 GW (in 2020). That's not even enough to provide electricity for 5 minutes...…

By recent performance, if we build nuclear we are decades away.

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

#86

Post by dan-robertson » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 2:58 PM UTC

ToJans wrote: post #33

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.

My best guess is that the energy providers speculated on the energy trading market and lost, creating a huge gap. There's almost no risk for them, because when they win, they make a lot of profit, and when they lose they can just tell consumers there is a shortage in energy. Ofc. this market is highly regulated, but if I understood correctly there's a lot of room in between the whitespace for interpretations. (Note :…

Energy generation (at least in Europe) has changed a lot in the last 20 years. So have many financial markets. I would strongly suspect that the dynamics of energy markets are quite different today to how they were 20 years ago.

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

#87

Post by dan-robertson » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 3:00 PM UTC

throwaway894345 wrote: post #78

dan-robertson wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

French generation is ~70% nuclear (10% wind/solar) and German is ~10% (~40% wind/solar). Yet their prices track each other closely. So I think this explanation is too simplistic. Possibly there are large interconnects between the French and German grids levelling out wholesale prices, but my assumption is that they cannot carry enough power for this imagined scenario where nuclear makes a big difference.

Do these countries trade energy in the same markets? If so, that would explain it, wouldn’t it?

That’s the question I ask in the second paragraph. It only explains it if the interchange is sufficiently large. Another explanation could be that there is some EU mechanism to charge the same wholesale price even if there is not sufficient interchange capacity.

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

#88

Post by tjansen » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 3:02 PM UTC

dv_dt wrote: post #85

tjansen wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are decades away from having enough storage to make wind and power a reliable power source. There is not even technology that would scale up enough to store a country's power for weeks or at least a few days. China just has announced ambitious plans to install storage for 100 GWh by 2030. China's electric power generation capacity is 2200 GW (in 2020). That's not even enough to provide electricity for 5 minutes...…

By recent performance, if we build nuclear we are decades away.

Even if that's true, at least we would be betting on proven technology. What makes you think that unproven technology for storage can be built faster?

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

#89

Post by dv_dt » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 3:10 PM UTC

tjansen wrote: post #88

dv_dt wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By recent performance, if we build nuclear we are decades away.

Even if that's true, at least we would be betting on proven technology. What makes you think that unproven technology for storage can be built faster?

By the number of abandoned nuclear projects in the west, it’s not proven.

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

#90

Post by jabl » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 3:14 PM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #18

adrianN wrote: post #14

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.

> Europe should perhaps have diversified their gas suppliers, with more LNG.

If climate change is supposed to be an existential threat, we shouldn't be doing major investments into fossil infrastructure.

Anyway, if we spend all that money to build LNG infrastructure, like terminals, ships, and having contracts with suppliers etc. just for the few and far between situations where the price of LNG drops below Russian gas, the price/kWh is going to be pretty high as well due to all that capital sitting idle most of the time.

A bit like this, per se sensible, argument someone in this thread made that keeping a nuclear plant around just to balance wind/solar output is pretty expensive.