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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?

#141

Post by PeterisP »

_ph_ wrote: post #113
FartyMcFarter wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were those comparisons made with current prices for natural gas? Probably not.

Probably not, but the gas price is peaking for several, mostly temporal reasons. Especially if the overall gas usage drops due to more renewable electricity, the gas price will drop also. But the real competition for nuclear energy shouldn't be gas (which is expensive even in better times), but renewables. We need much more of them.

Winter is yet ahead, in the coming 6 months gas usage is only going to increase, so I don't think that this peak will decrease any time soon.

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

#142

Post by pfdietz »

ben_w wrote: post #135
dageshi wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the energy is basically free which under certain circumstances (lots of wind) could happen, does it matter how inefficient it is?

Depends how expensive the electrolyser is. Just because I did make something when I was 9 years old that could fill up a small jamjar with hydrogen, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s economically viable. (I have no idea either way if this is an important limit or not. Just that it can have other sources of downside besides merely using otherwise wasted energy).

There have been reports of cheap mediocre efficiency alkaline electrolyzers in China for under $200/kW. This is indeed a key area for hydrogen from intermittent renewables to be successful, but I think there's great room for cost decline here as volume ramps up.

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

#143

Post by mdp2021 »

rjsw wrote: post #76
Wildgoose wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, but sadly doesn't work on this laptop, (UK keyboard), hence taking the lazy option.

You are writing in English and quoting an English statement, why not use the native ("") quoting style ?

They are ambiguous as used for both quotation and figurative rhetoric. So some prefer to disambiguate: '«veni, vidi, "vici"», said the epigone of Pyrrhus'.

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

#144

Post by vfclists »

Factorium wrote: post #71
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.

What about building huge solar plants in Western Sahara and Morocco? The Moroccan Government seems pretty friendly and stable. If we then configure all our electric cars to charge during the day, and discharge from 6pm onwards, we can address a lot of the evening peak.

What happens in severe storms?

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

#145

Post by pfdietz »

pfdietz wrote: post #29
me_me_me wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its more expensive to build because you know... a nuclear meltdown is a thing to avoid.

And also because combustion turbines are a seriously nice technology. Heat exchangers are expensive. A NPP transmits heat across many fluid/solid interfaces: fuel rods to coolant, primary to second coolant heat exchanger, secondary loop to steam generators, and steam to cooling water in the condenser after the turbines. A simple cycle combustion turbine avoids all that. Even a combined cycle power plant puts much les…

Correction: I added an extra loop there. Silly -- the primary loop drives the steam generators. I may have been thinking of MSRs, which have a sterile salt loop between the steam generator and the fuel bearing salt.

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

#146

Post by bcrosby95 »

brabel wrote: post #132
bcrosby95 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point nuclear is the most expensive per mw. And the vast majority of that expense is upfront. So almost no one wants to invest in these things because they're incredibly risky.

> they're incredibly risky. Nuclear is risky?? I've heard the opposite, nuclear power plants tend to be extremely safe. You probably think it's risky because of 2 or 3 large scale accidents in the last 50 years or so. While those have a large impact, I don't think I would consider nuclear "extremely risky" just because of those.

I mean financially risky.

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

#147

Post by in3d »

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.

It will go down to 0% in Germany in several months. Germany is shutting down its last six nuclear power plants and no new ones can be built. Italy, Switzerland and Belgium also want to shut down their nuclear power plants. Shameful, unscientific public opinion in Western Europe despite more people realizing the danger of global warming.

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

#148

Post by cbmuser »

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.

France is supplying electricity to all of its neighbors and they’re trading in the same market.

Thus, if electricity is scarse and expensive across Europe, French wholesale prices rise as well.

FWIW, the French government forces EDF to sell the electricity to its national competitors at a fixed price of around 50 Euro/MWh, IIRC.

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

#150

Post by cbmuser »

Retric wrote: post #140
shakow wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but my assumption is that they cannot carry enough power Right now ( https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/DE ), Germany is importing from France alone the equivalent of a bit under two French nuclear power plants at full power.

Germany is a net exporter of electricity to France 13.7TWh in 2017. But they trade a lot of power back and forth. https://www.agora-energiewende.de/fileadmin/Projekte/2018/Ja...

Yes, _net_ exporter. But we are often exporting at low or even negative prices.
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