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

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

#91

Post by refurb »

dan-robertson wrote: post #77
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.

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.

If you have interconnects, energy is fungible - just like oil or other commodities.

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

#92

Post by ben_w »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #81
ben_w wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pr…

> Do we have the lithium/etc reserves to meet the storage needs for the entire planet?

Yes. There are basically so many different chemistries (and non-chemical storage methods) that the important question is “which type should we prefer” rather than “can we even do it”.

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

#93

Post by adamc »

zohch wrote: post #27
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #19

We're working on reducing gas dependency, shortages and price fluctuations are one factor, but dependency on Russia is another. I do wonder how much our gas import from Russia is helping us keep the peace.

> I do wonder how much our gas import from Russia is helping us keep the peace. And keeping Russians and their "dominion" oppressed. Just shows how morally bankrupt Europe is, and with how smug Europe is that is really cringey.

I want to upvote the first sentence, but the second is so pointlessly judgmental as to be pretty cringey itself.

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

#94

Post by _-david-_ »

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.

>There's nothing special or magic about nuclear.

Except it can run at peak efficiency when it is cloudy and not windy. This is one of the biggest selling points with dirty energy.

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

#95

Post by jabl »

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 retailing is, AFAICS, a very low fixed cost business. You don't need to own any expensive infrastructure. You just buy electricity from the wholesale market (usually time-varying, although careful operators can of course hedge their positions), and sell at fixed price to consumers. You essentially need a web site and a bunch of annoying telemarketers.

It seems what has happened is that many of these retailers are some small fly-by-night operations. When wholesale prices are low, they make a lot of hay (making sure to store that somewhere that regulators can't get their hands on them), when the wholesale price rises, well, declare bankruptcy, and start a new company doing the same. Rinse and repeat.

Regulators should really step up the game, making sure that retailers are properly hedged etc. Or then forget this idea of "deregulated" electricity markets.

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

#96

Post by waynesonfire »

dan-robertson wrote: post #86
ToJans wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yes, the dynamics of course. brilliant.

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

#97

Post by modo_mario »

pfdietz wrote: post #45
FartyMcFarter wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Absolutely. Hydrogen can be stored underground for maybe $1/kWh of storage capacity. There would also be power related costs, but those don't matter nearly as much for rare event backup. 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...

Creating hydrogen with excess power is really inefficient energy wise and also tips the scales of cost a lot.

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

#98

Post by foepys »

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.

Considering what the US and Australia did to France a few days ago, the EU might not want to depend on LNG from the US. With Russia they know with whom they are dealing.

France and Germany are the EU's most influential countries and the US is continuing to meddle in EU matters even after Trump left. From the EU point of view there is next to no change since Biden took office and now even France is questioning NATO.

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

#99

Post by gumby »

dan-robertson wrote: post #77
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.

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.

Actually it appears that this is how it works, though in this case it’s more purchases from Czech than France.

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

#100

Post by AnthonyMouse »

kindle-dev wrote: post #79
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.

France is the the largest nuclear energy exporter, but it only exports about 12% of its nuclear energy, which might be enough to move the domestic price.

If that 12% is the annual average, also keep in mind that it's presumably ~25% sometimes and ~0% at other times.

Now suppose the domestic production is 100 GW, the domestic consumption is 90 GW and you're not exporting anything. Compare this to when the domestic production and consumption are still the same but you're exporting 20 GW. You go from having 10 GW to spare to being 10 GW short and having to bid for it against the foreign market.

And the prices aren't linear. In oversupply you could be paying barely anything. At 10% undersupply you could be paying twenty times as much if that's how much it takes to reduce demand by 10%.

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