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

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

#271

Post by jeffbee »

vel0city wrote: post #265
jeffbee wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, £1/kWh is pretty high, but it's not totally outrageous and it appears to have been capped by some kind of regulatory limit. 42¢/kWh is the standard retail price in California during peak demand hours, and that's not a huge difference.

You pay $0.42/kWh real time peak price in CA on a normal day? That's an absolutely bonkers number to me. Normal peak real time prices in Texas are like $0.12/kWh

That’s the summer price between 4pm and 9pm in PG&E territory, yes. Avoiding this rate is pretty straightforward.

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

#272

Post by filmor »

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.

All relevant mechanisms (day-ahead auction and intraday continuous auction) take the interconnector capacities into account.

The dayahead mechanism is described at length here: https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/globalassets/download-center/s...

During the intraday auctions, the left-over capacities are considered live, i.e. if there is 100MW of capacity left for France to Germany, you get the first 100MW of the French orderbook merged into the German one. If a trade happens, this capacity is updated. This is called SIDC (Single Intraday Coupling), https://www.emissions-euets.com/internal-electricity-market-..., used to be called XBID.

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

#273

Post by wcoenen »

Seanambers wrote: post #217
_ph_ wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By having other power sources as well. Starting with offshore wind, then of course, solar cells. Build up more storage (both biological gas and synthetic gas, water, batteries), strengthen the European networks. The chance is very good that on windless days in Germany, there will be quite a bit of wind in France. Same with solar. A 1 GW DC line to Norway was put into operation just recently. And of course, we can kee…

Yeah.. Lets base a large amount of our energy generation capacity on a resource that require a large amount of space and has a non zero chance of not producing anything, and lets back that up with excess power generation capacity which can mitigate this and does not exhibit this flaw. Windmills are f.king stupid for anything other than local production. Solar, Nuclear + Gas and grid storage seems like a way better ap…

Wind turbines that need to deal with ice typically have an internal de-icing system, with electrical heaters[1].

The meme about de-icing with chemicals was spread by oil and gas consultant Luke Legate. The picture he shared was actually showing a helicopter using plain hot water to de-ice a wind turbine in 2015[2]. This is sometimes used as a backup de-icing method.

[1] https://www.iqpc.com/media/1001147/37957.pdf

[2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/02/18/fac...

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

#274

Post by vetinari »

thehappypm wrote: post #220
anticodon wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do wonder how much our gas import from Russia is helping us keep the peace. I'm really afraid that high gas prices would be the tipping point when US and EU would turn from funding internal revolution in Russia (figures like Navalny) to a hot war. Europe always needed and wanted our resources. Just read German documents from WWII: only part of it was hatred and desire to genocide Russians. The most serious motivati…

WWII? You mean the war that Russia started, allied with Germany?

Now that's pretty nasty rewriting of history. Did you forget that it was Drang nach Osten in the first place?

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

#275

Post by looki »

rsj_hn wrote: post #256
dan-robertson wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Yet their prices track each other closely. If by "track each other closely", you mean prices in Germany are reliably 50% higher than those in France[1], then yes, they "track each other" closely. German energy policy has been an unmitigated disaster, creating by far the most expensive electricity prices in the OECD and of course the highest in Europe, whereas prices in France are below the EU average. https://ec.eu…

The source refers to retail electricity prices and thus doesn't apply here. The German electricity price is subject to lots of different taxes and fees; energy generation makes up less than a quarter of it [1]. These taxes do not need to exist and even the "EEG" which subsidizes renewables could be paid via the general budget. Like, for example, power plants could be paid for by the state. The comparison of household prices therefore makes little sense, as it implies the governments are in a race to offer the lowest rates to its population.

[1]: https://strom-report.de/medien/strompreis-deutschland-2021.j...

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

#276

Post by pydry »

wazoox wrote: post #266
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.

Exactly. Rosatom trolled EU on twitter: "So apparently you cannot build your entire electricity system on weather-dependent energy sources. Who would have thought?" https://twitter.com/RosatomGlobal/status/1438395621648572418

Lots of people blaming the shockingly high gas prices on the wind not blowing these days it seems.

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

#277

Post by pydry »

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…

Battery backed solar/wind is cheaper than nuclear these days.

It's not been that way for long though. Economic grid scale batteries are here but still relatively new.

It makes sense to continue running old nuclear plants but not to build new ones. Much too expensive.

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

#278

Post by _ph_ »

Seanambers wrote: post #217
_ph_ wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By having other power sources as well. Starting with offshore wind, then of course, solar cells. Build up more storage (both biological gas and synthetic gas, water, batteries), strengthen the European networks. The chance is very good that on windless days in Germany, there will be quite a bit of wind in France. Same with solar. A 1 GW DC line to Norway was put into operation just recently. And of course, we can kee…

Yeah.. Lets base a large amount of our energy generation capacity on a resource that require a large amount of space and has a non zero chance of not producing anything, and lets back that up with excess power generation capacity which can mitigate this and does not exhibit this flaw. Windmills are f.king stupid for anything other than local production. Solar, Nuclear + Gas and grid storage seems like a way better ap…

It is stupid not to have windmills in the mix. In Germany they contribute more electricity than solar cells. Especially at night, in the winter. So one should have both solar and wind, the mix depending on the local conditions. In southern Germany there is more solar, in the north more wind, especially near the coast. Wind power also doesn't require much space, you can farm or grow forests below them.

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

#279

Post by sudosysgen »

pydry wrote: post #277
jules wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Battery backed solar/wind is cheaper than nuclear these days. It's not been that way for long though. Economic grid scale batteries are here but still relatively new. It makes sense to continue running old nuclear plants but not to build new ones. Much too expensive.

Is it? Are you taking into account battery degradation from 1 cycle every day? The vast majority of battery chemistries won't last more than 3-4 years under those circumstances, and those that would are either much more expensive or experimental.

As of now storing 10kWh at 1kW costs around 1000$ from the cells alone. If you're changing them every 3 years then you have to spend 10 000$/kW over 30 years whereas nuclear is the same price per kW for a 30 year period.

If you don't take that into account then sure.

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

#280

Post by p_l »

adrianN wrote: post #233
jules wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

According to people I talked with, who did analysis for "Green hydrogen" as storage method, assuming Poland - we would need something along the line of 150% peak production, locally, before it started moving the needle at all - and I'm not sure of this wasn't in combination with nuclear (though limited by the idiotic free market on electricity).

All of that assumes that the demand doesn't go up... Which is not compatible with things like climate goals

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