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?

#231

Post by jhgb » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 6:02 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #108

tjansen wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sce…

> The production would need an increase by several orders of magnitude. Yes, but that doesn’t itself seem like an implausible economic shift given how large the existing fossil fuel sector is. Challenging, sure — perhaps it is politically impossible, I wouldn’t know as I’m not at all politically astute — but physically it seems fine. > Are there enough raw materials for this? That part at least is fine. Earth is big,…

> while lithium is in the category “rare Earths”

No, it's not. Where did you get that from? Surely not from elementary school chemistry lessons, where you're taught that lithium is an alkali metal.

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

#232

Post by wonderwonder » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 6:04 PM UTC

Didn't see it in the article but what % has consumer prices increased by? How do people survive inflation on food prices, massively inflated housing costs and now massive power increases while living on wages that have essentially not increased for a very long time?

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

#233

Post by adrianN » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 6:04 PM UTC

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…

As far as I know, few people suggest (Lithium-)batteries for long term storage. Electrolysis, optionally followed by turning the Hydrogen into Methane, seems like a much more scalable solution. That works at scale today, it's just too expensive to make sense at this point. Then there are other types of batteries that might become much cheaper in the future, perhaps redox-flow batteries or something like that.

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

#234

Post by Manuel_D » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 6:05 PM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #224

Manuel_D wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Many places are already seeing energy surpluses. California and Hawaii are consistently reaching excess daytime energy production. If we really can store electricity in hydrogen $1/KWh, then we should be seeing hydrogen storage being built to profit off these intervals of negative energy prices. But we aren't. Is it because people fail to see this market opportunity? Or, maybe, it's because writing a white paper claiming an extremely cheap cost is not remotely the same thing as actually building an energy storage facility at said cost.

I agree, we should tighten screws to eliminate fossil fuels. But hydroelectricity is the only scalable form of grid storage we currently have, and that's limited to the right geography. Expecting some unproven technology to be a silver bullet for storage is extremely wishful thinking. We need to be honest about technologies like hydrogen, compressed air, flywheels, etc: These are experimental technologies that might operate cheaply at scale, but we have no real-world experience to back up these claims. I could just say "storage is irrelevant because fusion will deliver energy at $1/MWh" and while nobody can technically disprove it, since they can't see into the future, it's also dishonest to claim this as fact for the same reason.

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

#235

Post by jhgb » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 6:05 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #157

adrianN wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Electrolysis is extremely inefficient. It's unlikely to be a practical means of grid scale energy storage any time soon.

It's not just a means of energy storage; it's a method for producing a vital chemical feedstock. If your main alternative is processing natural gas, building more electrolysers is a no-brainer. You'll have to do it no matter what the efficiency, since we just don't have a better way.

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

#236

Post by adrianN » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 6:05 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #151

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…

While intercontinental HVDC interconnects are technically feasible, no major world power would ever depend on those for essential power supplies. It's just too risky if foreign countries can cut off your electricity during a war or other crisis. Energy independence is strategically critical in a way that transcends economics.

Then why do countries rely on foreign oil, gas, and coal all the time?

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

#237

Post by asdff » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 6:09 PM UTC

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.

Whenever nuclear fails you can trace it directly to poor policymaking rather than any faults with the underlying technology, unlike something like coal which is flawed from the drawing board due to pollution.

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

#238

Post by jhgb » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 6:13 PM UTC

cbmuser wrote: post #171

bcrosby95 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean financially risky.

Actually, it’s the opposite. It’s absolutely low risk because the electricity production can be sold years in advance if you want. Nuclear electricity has the highest of all capacity factors and is therefore almost 100% planable, so there is virtually zero risk.

If your average cost overrun is around 100%, then it absolutely is financially risky. And selling years in advance is not just possible but necessary for nuclear plants - people would never agree on such prices 10-20 years from now so the have to be locked in even as the plant is being built.

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

#239

Post by monkeydust » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 6:13 PM UTC

I am in the UK. I pay roughly 20c down and get 5c up for excess solar per kWh.

I really want to see an regulatory and technical environment where I can trade my excess with my neighbors at mid.

Sure I could store excess but can't justify the battery cost at present. This type of trading, as I understand, is happening in places like Australia.

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

#240

Post by post_break » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 6:14 PM UTC

jeffbee wrote: post #188

mjburgess wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We usually pay 15-20p

I get that it's more, but I clicked through to read the article expecting something insane like the $9/kWh rates in Texas earlier this year.

Texan here, that's the wholesale rate. Only people on wholesale plans (now banned I believe) would have paid that. I paid 9c per kWh during the whole ordeal while wholesale pegged at $9 per kWh. My price is fixed at 8.9c per kWh for 2 years.