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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?

#341

Post by beezischillin »

bserge wrote: post #54
beezischillin wrote: post #26

They've been signalling a 40%+ gas price increase for the winter in the news here in Romania. For the poor people and pensioners who often live month to month this is tragic news. They don't know how they'll make it when they'll have to choose between food and medicine or heat.

The answer is firewood. Often illegally acquired. But that's only for the rural folk.

Firewood is not cheap and is becoming increasingly harder to acquire. 10 cubic meter of processed and ready to use wood was around 750 or more euros this year and will be even more in the future.

I put in an order at a mill in June and didn’t end up receiving anything due to bureaucracy shutting down businesses shipping out this year’s production. I don’t know if they ended up getting past that or not as I haven’t heard back on my reservation and I cancelled it. I managed to find the last of last year’s production at a local building supply store. They told me they will not be bringing new stock next year due to high costs and decreasing profit margins. I might have to completely transition to electric heating in 2022.

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

#342

Post by beezischillin »

Ekaros wrote: post #312
bserge wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer is firewood. Often illegally acquired. But that's only for the rural folk.

And they are thinking of banning that in cities... Not that it is wrong, particulate emissions can be real issue.

Cities tend to have central gas heating or communal here. Gas tends to be the cheapest option and electric the most expensive.

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

#343

Post by pfdietz »

jhgb wrote: post #231
ben_w wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There was a propaganda effort trying to paint renewables as dirty, pointing to environmental problems with Chinese REE refining. Shellenberger was hawking this at one point, claiming PV uses rare earth elements. One still hears echoes.

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

#344

Post by pfdietz »

adrianN wrote: post #247
nradov wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The two storage modes are complementary. Batteries would be good for diurnal storage, hydrogen for longer term and rare event backup.

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

#345

Post by pfdietz »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #314
korantu wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 has never decarbonized an entire industrial economy, so by that definition, nuclesr is nkt "proven technology". It probably could have, if you priced carbon appropriately 50 or 60 years ago, but no one did so cars and various industrial processes never made the shift and other random things like cow burps it cant even theoretically fix. Now it's too expensive to bother trying even for the bits it's suited to.…

And if you wanted to power the world with nuclear, you'd need breeder reactors or seawater U extraction. Burner reactors powering the world would go through a megaton of natural uranium each year.

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

#346

Post by Manuel_D »

pfdietz wrote: post #339
Manuel_D wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet the condition you claim will give rise to widespread adoption of energy storage already exist in Hawaii: fossil fuels have to be imported making it expensive, and daytime energy prices regularly go negative due to widespread solar adopt. These conditions have existed for years. Yet people aren't storing and reselling this energy. Why not? If hydrogen storage really costs only $1/KWh then a company can reclaim the…

That storage cost is in salt formations, a technology that is already widely used to store megatons of natural gas. A single salt formation in Delta, Utah could store enough hydrogen to supply the entire US average grid power for 30 hours (and efforts to exploit this formation for hydrogen storage are ongoing). Salt formations exist in ample supply in Germany and Europe, but there are none in Hawaii, which is entirel…

The same excess of energy during peak renewable production exists in California, and parts of Europe. So this problem is more than just Hawaii's geology. There are costs in electrolysis, compressions, decompression, and conversion back to electricity that are just being hand-waved away.

Can you point me to a developer that's actually offering to build hydrogen electric grid storage at $1/KWh? As in, if I give them $1 million they will build 1 GWh of hydrogen electric storage for me. Are there any enterprises actually willing to provide grid storage at this cost? If so, please point them my way. I'll make a massive amount of money. But I doubt I'll have anyone taking this offer.

The storage costs your citing are absolutely incredible. As in, I genuinely do not believe them. You're claiming that the entirety of the US's grid storage (which cost billions of dollars to build, mostly in the form of hydroelectric storage) can be matched by only $20 million in hydrogen storage. This is a cost estimate totally disconnected from reality. Until enterprises are actually building hydrogen electric grid storage for $1/KWh then this figure is meaningless.

If not then what's your explanation as to why people are missing out on the opportunity to become billionaires or trillionaires by construction hydrogen electric storage? Bill Gates alone could build enough storage for 24 hours of the USA's electricity consumption with only 10% of his net worth. This would be a rounding error on the national budget.

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

#347

Post by ___luigi »

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.

+ This map shows these statistics https://www.electricitymap.org/map

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

#348

Post by pfdietz »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #34
legulere wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Were those comparisons made with current prices for natural gas? Probably not.

Even at current NG prices in Europe, combined cycle is still probably cheaper than new nuclear.

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

#349

Post by stavros »

Oof, I see a lot of infighting in this thread over whether nuclear or wind/solar is better. It's so sad to see proponents of renewables fight amongst themselves while we keep burning fossil fuels.

Can we agree to build as much nuclear AND renewables as we can first, and then fight over which ones to keep after fossil fuels are dead?

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

#350

Post by pfdietz »

asdff wrote: post #241
Factorium wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pointing to Ivanpah is disingenuous, as solar thermal of that kind is has failed to compete. PV is much cheaper now, and PV needs no cooling water.
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