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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?

#201

Post by shakow »

calcifer wrote: post #161
shakow wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can build a single wind turbine for what, $100K? Even a basic nuclear power plant is now around $50B A modern wind turbine will typically feature a 20 years lifetime and cost a few million dollars to produce a handful of MWs. On the other hand, we see nuclear power plants happily going over 50 years of service while producing power in the magnitude of a few GWs -- and they do not cost $50B to build, but somewhe…

> they do not cost $50B to build, but somewhere in the ballpark of a few $B Which reactors are those? Hinkley Point C in the UK is £22.9 billion so far and is years away from completion. Likewise, Olkiluoto Unit 3 in Finland is up to €11 billion so far and also years from completion.

Those two examples are innovative sister projects (the EPRs) which are infamous in the nuclear community for having gone far overboard regarding both delays and over budget, and are much more representative of France fucking up its industrial know-how than anything else. Prices of more conventional designs (https://www.synapse-energy.com/sites/default/files/SynapsePa...) stand in the aforementioned mentioned ballpark.

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

#203

Post by hokkos »

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.

In France nuclear + water + wind + solar, all low marginal cost, cover the consumption at 99%+ timestep in the day-ahead market, but there is like 18GW of interconnect, so gas + fuel + coal are running to power our neighbours, in the electricity market the last called capacity in the cost curve set the same price for the whole time step (with some provision for interconnect capacities). Without interconnect French day ahead power price would be at like 17€/MWh, but thanks to our neighbours it is at 150. But still the day ahead market doesn't set the price paid by the consumer, there is long term futures, and 100TWh/year of nuclear offered at 42€.

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

#204

Post by dv_dt »

korantu wrote: post #129
dv_dt wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In this case 'proven' means was ever deployed at scale and worked successfully. Nuclear has track record of decarbonizing entire industrial economy in just 10 years. We dont have storage solution with such track record.

Nuclear is in an awkward place. All of the proven last gen designs are considered too risky to build new now. But it also seems that the next gen designs are not proven at all in terms of construction timelines or buildability. For example, many next gen US nuclear projects were canceled after continuous schedule and budget overshoots. The completed next gen French reactor in China, for example is showing unexpected behavior and has been temporarily taken offline for review, and other next gen French design builds are, like the US designs and projects, behind schedule and over budget.

That's just the direct industry. The support industry for nuclear plant construction materials has also lost maturity and scale between first gen and new gen, as evidenced by the failure of upgrade materials in the So Cal Edison San Onofre plant. This is after decades of investment.

Because its so much less complicated to scale, my bet is on storage before any next round of new nuclear plants are built at scale. But we don't even need that much storage in the next decade, we mostly need far more renewable energy acceleration in very proven and fast, reliable rollouts.

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

#205

Post by simonebrunozzi »

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.

Large quantities of energy (e.g. from Nuclear) are bought in advance (between countries, and less often between companies), and with multiple years contracts. That's why you don't see a huge difference.

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

#207

Post by oezi »

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…

Sorry, but Nuclear is just proven to fail. Even if we would reverse course on Nuclear today it would be 20 or 30 years until the plants would be build. By that time solar and wind will another magnitude cheaper.

The way forward is wind and solar. Everything else shouldn't be focused on.

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

#208

Post by google234123 »

calcifer wrote: post #161
shakow wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can build a single wind turbine for what, $100K? Even a basic nuclear power plant is now around $50B A modern wind turbine will typically feature a 20 years lifetime and cost a few million dollars to produce a handful of MWs. On the other hand, we see nuclear power plants happily going over 50 years of service while producing power in the magnitude of a few GWs -- and they do not cost $50B to build, but somewhe…

> they do not cost $50B to build, but somewhere in the ballpark of a few $B Which reactors are those? Hinkley Point C in the UK is £22.9 billion so far and is years away from completion. Likewise, Olkiluoto Unit 3 in Finland is up to €11 billion so far and also years from completion.

The reactor we stopped building 30 years ago didn't cost near that.

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

#209

Post by lopis »

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.

Nuclear is not as clean as people try to green wash it out to be, nor is it ethical. https://meta.eeb.org/2017/10/18/french-state-owned-company-c...
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