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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?

#391

Post by haxnewsben »

kzrdude wrote: post #258
hanoz wrote: post #57

Several UK domestic energy suppliers are now on the verge of bankruptcy it seems, and seeking emergency loans from the government. At this time of year almost all of their customers will be many hundreds of pounds in credit with them. That money is supposed to be protected, but still it's a bit of a worry.

Why are the suppliers struggling?

There's also a price cap for how much suppliers are legally allowed to sell their energy for in the UK (set by ofgem). If the price of energy exceeds this value, every supplier will be selling energy at a loss till ofgem increases the cap.

To get around this, most suppliers purchase their energy a few months in advance, but the ones who haven't will be in trouble currently.

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

#392

Post by looki »

rsj_hn wrote: post #327
looki wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So according to your logic, taxes used to subsidize electricity production should not be included when calculating the cost of electricity, which can only give rise to a meaningless cost. Germany imposes such high taxes because they have such massive subsidies for producers. That is why electricity costs so much more in Germany — because it costs so much more to produce. But being fungible, the cost of wholesale elec…

>Germany imposes such high taxes because they have such massive subsidies for producers.

Even without the EEG, the electricity price would be among the highest in all of Europe. Also, given how much public money coal for example receives in Germany, I think it is a very reasonable argument that the EEG subsidy should not really be considered a fixed part of the electricity price that could not be moved elsewhere.

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

#393

Post by pydry »

PeterisP wrote: post #141
_ph_ wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not, but the gas price is peaking for several, mostly temporal reasons. Especially if the overall gas usage drops due to more renewable electricity, the gas price will drop also. But the real competition for nuclear energy shouldn't be gas (which is expensive even in better times), but renewables. We need much more of them.

Winter is yet ahead, in the coming 6 months gas usage is only going to increase, so I don't think that this peak will decrease any time soon.

Prices now are largely based on projections for winter.

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

#394

Post by Woodi »

Didn't googled it but what about lighting catching ? Any technology trying this ?

And yes, I know it's hard, not everyone can catch it into the bottle ;) - it brakes everything connected before breakers even notice. But looks like it's free and no waste to store for thousands years.

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

#395

Post by ElFitz »

maurycy wrote: post #358
ElFitz wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still remember the teacher in med school showing us how exclusively eating mushrooms and wild boars[1] while living in a poorly ventilated granite house (radon gas) in eastern France still wouldn’t reach the levels of exposure one would get from the soil in some western parts of France. It was enlightening, to say the least. But then, it isn’t really a risk worth taking in any case. [1]: because one can’t just live…

Do you mean the other way around? This map suggests that western France is fine: https://www.wsl.ch/en/2020/07/new-map-for-radioactive-soil-c...

No, just as I meant it. But I honestly don’t remember what the causes where; it was over 10 years ago and lessons were dense in information.

I can only recall a few tidbits here in there, including the specifications of a, as of now probably outdated, surgery probe meant to detect isotopes.

It was awesome! Swappable tips, a main unit on a wheeled stand giving it great mobility and awesome battery life! A great tool! Still don’t get the point of learning about it in first year though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Oh, and throwing dwarves in nightclubs is unethical, even with the dwarf's consent, because human dignity is inalienable.

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

#396

Post by denton-scratch »

sudosysgen wrote: post #279
pydry wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> battery chemistries

Ah, you're focused on chemical batteries.

Hauling a lot of water up a mountain at times of low demand, and releasing it through a turbine at times of high demand, is a type of battery; it seems to me a reasonable approach to smoothing supply and demand for wind/solar.

I agree that it's going to be a long time before grid-scale chemical batteries can help much with demand-smoothing.

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

#397

Post by rualca »

dageshi wrote: post #126
modo_mario wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creating hydrogen with excess power is really inefficient energy wise and also tips the scales of cost a lot.

If the energy is basically free which under certain circumstances (lots of wind) could happen, does it matter how inefficient it is?

> If the energy is basically free which under certain circumstances (lots of wind) could happen, does it matter how inefficient it is?

There are two sides to this cost: energy production, and storage.

The part which is argued to be essentially free is the production, which is not synchronized with energy consumption patterns.

Renewable's main challenge is how to store energy cheaply in order to be able to be used reliably to supply the baseline. Until that happens, everyone is required to employ non-renewable energy sources that can and do meet the baseline.

It matters nothing is production is free if storing it to supply the baseline is more expensive and thus wasteful than conventional non-renewable sources.

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

#398

Post by rualca »

asdff wrote: post #237
Arnt wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Whenever nuclear fails you can trace it directly to poor policymaking rather than any faults with the underlying technology (...)

This line of argument is pointless because policymaking is not something that you can remove from the equation or even ignore the risk that it fails. It's a kin to claiming that a machine mostly fails because of human error when human interaction is mandatory and a critical part of the process.

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

#399

Post by denton-scratch »

korantu wrote: post #129
dv_dt wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the number of abandoned nuclear projects in the west, it’s not proven.

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.

I'm not aware of any nuclear power plant anywhere having been fully decommissioned, with all waste safely stowed away, safe from earthquakes and plane-crashes.

As far as I'm aware, even the 1st-generation MAGNOX reactors in the UK have longer to go to full decommissioning than the time that's passed since they were built.

"Proven" doesn't just mean "deployed at scale"; it also means "fully decommissioned". It's not fair to claim that nuclear is "clean", while leaving it to future generations to figure out how to actually clean up.

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

#400

Post by rualca »

asdff wrote: post #244
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

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.

> Factor in all the externalities that these other forms of energy bring in and nuclear is probably one of the cheapest.

There's a lot of handwaving in that personal assertion. The fact is that nuclear is by far more expensive than any alternative source of energy, baseless assertions on how with some imagination you can inflate cost of alternatives does nothing to change that.

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