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

economist.com

411–420 of 435 posts

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

#411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even if we ask South Korea to please build us world of nuclear, it would be long time before uranium would be an issue - it is very small part of overall price.

You have just said nuclear cannot scale up fast enough to help with climate change.

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

#412
post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds about right. See https://model.energy/ for a toy model that gives about that number, when you solve the optimization problem for Germany. The optimal solutions still have some renewable curtailment, though.

Trying to get usable values for Warsaw area, it gives me the result that we need 8x overbuilding (curiously it suggests solar power mostly), and I'm not sure if we could decarbonize heating on that.

Poland is one of the worst places on Earth for renewables. If nuclear still has a shot, it's around there.

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

#413
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should probably prefer pumped hydro before stored h2.

Molten Salts powering the old coal plants in a closed system.

Hot sand looks even better (much higher storage temperature):

https://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2021-03/07%20D...

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

#414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you must also remember that it was Poland that allied with Hitler before anyone else, in hope that Germany will help it to attack Russia. But Hitler had other plans. Why you always forget about this part of the history? I guess it's not illustrated well in your media blaming Russia for all of your miseries.

You cannot take anyone seriously, who writes "conquest of Poland". Do they even know, what territory they are talking about and how Poland conquered it 20 years earlier? The same Poland, who had their government officials attending NSDAP conferences.

You are denying the conquest of the sovereign nation of Poland in World War II?

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

#415

It would take about 115k square miles of normal solar panels to cover the world energy use (23000TW), this translates to about 340 miles side square of land, I'm sure we could split this to various solar efficient locations and just close the deal with all this hydrocarbons Et al. BS. And can be solar parabolic-through systems instead of PV, no efficiency loss and night thermal storage built in. But of course we'll n…

I don't really think that's the right approach to solar. Centralized power generation makes for unbalanced power. If we put this in the Sahara, for example, who is in charge of the exports? Egypt? What about a big terrorist attack on it? Or a war, where the power lines are a prime target to cut Europe off from its energy?

Best to have decentralized grids. Every country and state having 100 solar farms is better than 1 fucking huge one.

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

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot take anyone seriously, who writes "conquest of Poland". Do they even know, what territory they are talking about and how Poland conquered it 20 years earlier? The same Poland, who had their government officials attending NSDAP conferences.

You are denying the conquest of the sovereign nation of Poland in World War II?

Conquest by whom?

Certainly not by USSR. By the time USSR took their territories back - are you still forgetting, that Poland had conquered their territories mere 20 years earlier? - Poland didn't exist anymore and the Polish government was in exile in Romania. There was nothing to conquest. USSR took back what was taken from them.

And let's not forget that Pilsudski government, while it lasted, was fascist, just like the Germans. They played a game and they lost. Unlike Austria and Czechoslovakia, which were also thrown over the board for the Germany, they were not innocent here and had their own imperial ambitions (did you forget that they took their part in partitioning of Czechoslovakia, just months earlier?)

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

#417
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the more likely outcome is that personal and commercial travel will just be illegal for people outside of political leadership. The mineral resources to replace all vehicles with EVs don’t exist. Sort of Holodomor repeated as farce.

The mineral resources to replace all vehicles with EVs, in fact, do exist.

USGS states there are 7M tons of Cobalt reserves in the world. An EV battery needs about 15lbs of Cobalt. That means, in a fantasy scenario of perfect recovery of all known Cobalt, we have 930M batteries which last, maybe 100K miles. That means we get to replace, in a fantasy scenario, 2/3 of the world’s vehicles once. Then that number declines with recycling efficiency, which appears to optimistically be about 75% recovery.

So no, and state-imposed poverty (lots of examples) seems much more likely than a successful extraterrestrial mining industry (no examples).

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

#418
post #400
post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Its not imagination, you can quantify these things. There have been thousands of studies showing the economic damage of something like a polluting coal plant and its not like we pass these costs on to the polluter ever, so of course the price of a coal plant looks low when you ignore the hospital bills and the loss of biodiversity. I'm not going to do your book report for you though.

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

#419
post #398
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

It's not pointless. It goes to show that there are good policies undertaken by certain groups in regards to managing nuclear power (such as the U.S. navy that has operated reactors longer than anyone without much incident), and bad ones (like Chernobyl).

On the other hand, for these other energy sources there are serious faults with the underlying technology that policy can't do anything about. Take a coal plant. The entire mechanics of that technology rely upon taking a block of solid carbon and converting it to a gas and expelling it into the atmosphere where it lowers air quality and increases the greenhouse gas effect. There is no way to policy your way out of that inherent fault with this underlying technology where you need to add more carbon into the air in order to produce any energy.

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

#420
post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they at least can store months worth of gas/oil/coal on their own territory.

You can store months worth of hydrogen from electrolysis too.

You can't really store bulk hydrogen nearly as easily as natural gas, liquid fossil fuels, or coal. Hydrogen is less volumetrically efficient, leaks out faster, and causes embrittlement in common alloys.
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