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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?

#221

Post by plater »

cbmuser wrote: post #150
Retric wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's right. Germany exports when the sun is shining and the prices are low to Switzerland and Austria who use it to pump water up the Alps. When there is no sun in Germany, they buy it back at a high price from Switzerland and Austria who convert the stored water to electricity.

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

#222

Post by danmaz74 »

betaby wrote: post #214
in3d wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are no nuclear plants in Italy producing commercially available electricity AFAIK.

A referendum after Chernobyl forced the Italian government to shut down all nuclear power plants in Italy before the 90s

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

#223

Post by jhgb »

shakow wrote: post #154
Retric wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

They are a net exporter because they have to sell their wind/solar power for cheap when they have too much of it, but are then forced to buy nuclear/hydro power from their neighbors when their coal power plants are not enough to compensate the ramp-up in demand and/or the lack of wind/sun. France could be electrically self-sufficient, Germany couldn't -- whether they would depend on FR/BE/NL/... being irrelevant.

> France could be electrically self-sufficient, Germany couldn't

According to what arbitrary criterion?

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

#224

Post by pfdietz »

Manuel_D wrote: post #215
pfdietz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. NPPs as backup to wind would be horribly expensive. Wind droughts don't happen often; even the current price during them would not make a NPP pay off. What would make sense is larger local stores of hydrogen, to be burned in combustion turbines during the rare wind outages.

Are there any commercial operators of electric grid storage using hydrogen? I can only find prototype or demonstration projects. Most of the time, people saying grid-scale storage is feasible point to technologies that exist in the prototyping phase. The reality is that we don't know whether these solutions will be feasible at scale, or if they'll hit bottlenecks or poor scalability that drives up cost when deployed…

Why should any exist yet, when natural gas has been so cheap? Tighten the screws enough to eliminate fossil fuel dispatchable sources and you'll start to see it (or something else that can solve the same problem better).

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

#225

Post by jhgb »

jules wrote: post #124
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.

Batteries are so expensive that it is unclear whether they will ever solve the large scale storage problem: yes they're getting cheaper, but they have to continue to get cheaper for a long time before they're suitable, and it's unclear whether fundamental limits will be hit before that. If battery technology improves to the extent that it becomes viable for large scale storage, then wind and solar can become our main…

Batteries are not supposed to solve the large scale storage problem. They're best at solving the small scale storage problem. Recently they solved the problem of small scale storage on wheels.

> If battery technology improves to the extent that it becomes viable for large scale storage, then wind and solar can become our main source of energy.

Batteries are not the only way of storing electricity.

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

#226

Post by throwaway894345 »

oezi wrote: post #207
throwaway894345 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Nuclear is just proven to fail ... the way forward is wind and solar

Nuclear is the only proven clean technology for base load generation. The only hiccup is political (i.e., people decided they don't like nuclear), and while it's a big political problem, the whole climate crisis is an enormous political problem. Yes, there's the waste to be disposed of, but we already have to manage some waste and once you have to safely manage a little nuclear waste it's a marginal increase in cost to manage a whole lot of nuclear waste.

Further, innovations in nuclear are making it cheaper, safer, and faster to build. Moreover, as another commenter pointed out, if we were willing to ease some of our restrictions on nuclear such that our nuclear plants didn't need to be a thousand times safer than our coal plants (but merely, say, twice as safe), then nuclear could be even less expensive and facilities built more rapidly.

Yes, wind and solar will play a major role in the future, but we incur tremendous risk by ignoring nuclear.

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

#227

Post by jhgb »

foxfluff wrote: post #212
oezi wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's driving the price decrease in wind?

Economies of scale, largely.

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

#228

Post by chefkoch »

cbmuser wrote: post #162
Retric wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear is just as bad in terms of following demand the capacity factor is at best 90% but involves weeks of downtime for refueling etc. Worse the economics only work out when production is kept close to 100% when available limiting adoption in a wider electric grid. France dealt with sub 70% capacity factors even with massive exports that’s roughly a 0.9/0.7 = 30% price hike per kWh. You can use batteries to level o…

All nuclear power plants in Germany are capable to be operated in load-follow mode, see: > https://www.ktg.org/ktg-wAssets/docs/fg-bet-rph-lastfolgebet... Also, nuclear power was never subsidized in Germany: > https://dserver.bundestag.de/btd/14/080/1408084.pdf (page 16, answer 27)

>Also, nuclear power was never subsidized in Germany:

Haha, that's a good joke.

>Direct and indirect German government subsidies alone, including research grants and tax credits, since the mid-1950s have added up to €287bn, FÖS has calculated. Another €9bn were spent on other costs for the state, such as police operations during anti-nuclear protests, or follow-up costs from nuclear operations in former Eastern Germany.

“Great part of these costs never had been included in the electricity price, which is why atomic energy wrongly was considered as a cheap power source,”

https://www.rechargenews.com/transition/no-higher-cost-energ...

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

#229

Post by sk2020 »

jsilence wrote: post #216

In the process of moving the mobility towards electrically powered vehicles all of Europe is going to need a lot more capacity. So all the disscussions about the hence and forth between France and Germany are quite moot.

I think the more likely outcome is that personal and commercial travel will just be illegal for people outside of political leadership. The mineral resources to replace all vehicles with EVs don’t exist. Sort of Holodomor repeated as farce.

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

#230

Post by Retric »

shakow wrote: post #191
Retric wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

France exports a lot of nuclear power on nights and weekends while importing power during peak demand. Their actually further from self sufficiency. It gets more complicated on a euro per kWh basis as Frances nuclear is much more expensive so economically their losing money even if it looks better in terms of cash flows.

France is now close to its daily subpeak ( https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/electricity-consumptio... ) and exports ( https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/FR ) 11.5GW while importing 1GW, i.e. a surplus of >10GW, with over 50GW to spare in hydro and nuclear alone. The worst peak being at around 80GW during the winter, they should do good should they be independent at some point for whatever reason.

Self sufficiency is really about the delta between demand and available supply. It’s the worse case not average that’s the issue so you normally need to look at the coldest and hottest days not September which is when a lot of production is taken offline because demand is so low. Even that’s not the full picture individual power plants may be taken offline for a wide range of reasons.

That said, self sufficiency is expensive and generally not worth the costs involved.

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