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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?

#241

Post by asdff »

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.

You need access to millions of gallons of water a year to run a huge solar plant like Ivanpah, not to mention there probably aren't a lot of great roads for bringing in materials for heavy construction in the sahara vs the American west where in a days drive you are in the container yards at the Port of Los Angeles, so its not as easy as just plopping solar panels in the middle of the desert all over the world.

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

#242

Post by autoliteInline »

tjansen wrote: post #69
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.

We are decades away from having enough storage to make wind and power a reliable power source. There is not even technology that would scale up enough to store a country's power for weeks or at least a few days. China just has announced ambitious plans to install storage for 100 GWh by 2030. China's electric power generation capacity is 2200 GW (in 2020). That's not even enough to provide electricity for 5 minutes...…

>There is not even technology that would scale up enough to store a country's power for weeks or at least a few days.

My bet is that the Japanese will build some huge newfangled storage facility. There'll be a big earthquake. The storage will meltdown/burn/whatever somehow. It'll cause a great big semi-permanent problem. Everyone will declare victory and shout 'at least it wasn't nuclear'.

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

#243

Post by marvin »

mrweasel wrote: post #42
hanoz wrote: post #31

A combination of: * Post lockdown firing up of the economy * No investment in nuclear * Broken interconnect * Winter is coming * A spell of the doldrums * Reliance on imported gas * And last but not least, there's no hiding a debauched currency when you're using it to buy something the rest of the world needs too.

Yes, but also no. Interconnects are fine in Scandinavia, but a dry summer means less hydro to pick up in a period of less wind. So you need to fire up the coal plant once again, and they are slowly being dismantled. It’s really an unfortunate combination of circumstances, and it affects areas which doesn’t rely on imported gas and nuclear, with working interconnects as well.

It would be super funny if the result of the increased interconnectedness of Scandinavia and Europe, sold as a measure to decrease the risk of extreme events causing power disruption, actually caused power disruption as we've now sold off all our generation capacity.

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

#244

Post by asdff »

legulere wrote: post #32
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.

That doesn’t make sense. Building new nuclear plants is among the most expensive forms of electricity generation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

Factor in all the externalities that these other forms of energy bring in and nuclear is probably one of the cheapest. If you could put a figure on the economic damage from an entire city of millions breathing in fumes from pollutants every day on their lives, it would probably be astronomical.

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

#245

Post by splistud »

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.

By all means go to current financial markets and ask for huge loans in this low-interest-rate high-inflation market. It isn't even about risk (though risks caused by regulation/government oversight are manifold). It's about return, or the lack thereof.

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

#246

Post by jhgb »

cbmuser wrote: post #169
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.

The fixed priced negotiated for Hinkley Point C is something like 90 GBP per MWh for the next 35 years. The market spot price in the UK is at 150-200 GBP per MWh now.

> is something like 90 GBP per MWh

...in 2012 value of GBP. Right now the inflation-adjusted value is something like 112 GBP per MWh or so. You'll have to do the math yourself for future inflation.

Also the spot price remaining like this for the next 35 years is obviously out of question. These levels of prices will attract investments in generator technologies that can be scaled up very quickly.

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

#247

Post by adrianN »

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.

Yeah round trip efficiencies are very bad, but at scale it's cheaper than batteries as far as I know.

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

#248

Post by [deleted] »

ben_w wrote: post #72
tjansen wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are decades away from having enough storage to make wind and power a reliable power source. There is not even technology that would scale up enough to store a country's power for weeks or at least a few days. China just has announced ambitious plans to install storage for 100 GWh by 2030. China's electric power generation capacity is 2200 GW (in 2020). That's not even enough to provide electricity for 5 minutes...…

> 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…

[deleted]

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

#249

Post by shakow »

Retric wrote: post #230
shakow wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

> 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

Indeed, which is why I wrote “The worst peak being at around 80GW during the winter [...]”.

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

#250

Post by omegalulw »

wonderwonder wrote: post #232

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?

The increase is in the first paragraph of the article.
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