Live data from Hacker News

Day ahead electricity prices for EU

euenergy.live

101–110 of 596 posts

Re: Day ahead electricity prices for EU

#101

What are the main causes for these differences? And why Italians always manage to be first in the worst ranking?

> And why Italians always manage to be first in the worst ranking?

in this specific case 3 reason:

- Italy relies on natural gas, we had long standing relationships with Libya and Algeria for that, unfortunately France bombed Libya to kill Gheddafi (to claim control of the area mainly) and that destabilized the area [1]

- Italy relies on close countries to buy electricity, especially France. Now that they have switched off nuclear plants, electricity from France costs more.

- we are in electoral campaign, elections are next month, a good chunk of the right wing political landscape supports (or doesn't strongly oppose) Putin, they hope that by creating an energy crisis in Italy, people will vote for them. Which is probably what's really going to happen, for Putin's delight. [2]

[1] WikiLekas has a lot of documents on it, it's also one of the interventions that costed Hillary Clinton the elections.

[2] https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/08/10/italy-election-russia-u...

EDIT: I understand that on HN people don't like political opinions, but these are not my opinions. added notes.

Re: Day ahead electricity prices for EU

#102
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Prices will moderate over time as inefficient producers are pushed out and as consumers reduce their usage due to high prices. Electricity isn't optional. "The market" didn't make water, or housing, or waste, or healthcare, or telecoms, etc, cheaper once privatized. In fact, it didn't make energy cheaper in the countries that privatized it.

>Electricity isn't optional food isn't optional either. How well did nationalized food production work out? >"The market" didn't make water, or housing, or waste, or healthcare, or telecoms, etc, cheaper once privatized. I can get the source for each of those claims? Some of them seem dubious, eg. housing. Was housing ever not privatized? >In fact, it didn't make energy cheaper in the countries that privatized it. we…

Many successful governments subsidize food production and delivery in many, many ways. Your talking points are tired and debated to death; mostly by people who don't actually have much interest in learning anything and would rather invent straw-men to pwn.

If you really want to challenge your view, I'm sure you can read a book that lays it out better than I could in a quick YC comment.

For example, here's Chomsky's take:

"Privatization does not mean you take a public institution and give it to some nice person. It means you take a public institution and give it to an unaccountable tyranny. Public institutions have many side benefits. For one thing they may purposely run at a loss. They're not out for profit. They may purposely run at a loss because of the side benefits. So, for example if a public steel industry runs at a loss it's providing cheap steel to other industries. Maybe that's a good thing. Public institutions can have a counter cyclic property. So that means that they can maintain employment in periods of recession, which increases demand, which helps you to get out of recession. Private companies can't do that in a recession. Throw out the work force because that's the way you make money."

Re: Day ahead electricity prices for EU

#103
post #92
post #4

I've read somewhere that Czechs (day ahead price of 463EUR/MWh) produce electricity at 0.1EUR/MWh, then sell it to an exchange in Germany and buy it back for the "market" price. Somebody over there is getting extremely rich for no reason and I am wondering why nobody is doing anything about it...

That very much sounds like you're calling for the collapse of the integrated european energy market. This is not meant as an attack on you, just an observation that these nationalistic calls will continue growing louder from every part of the continent, and it is not even September yet. Already Norway has publicly commented on the possibility of rationing exports. We have yet to even scratch the surface of the effect…

During the time of energy crisis why would the integrated energy market be the highest priority? Is it more important to trade, or to keep economy running utilizing whatever local advantages available?

Re: Day ahead electricity prices for EU

#104
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No matter what magic plan anyone comes up with it would take years to implement. Nuclear, more insulation, hydrogen, new gas fields. It's almost winter already.

More insulation is double edge sword. I moved into a super-energy-efficient house here in north/east Europe. Heating in winter is damn cheap. But retention works in summer too… so I had to get air conditioner :( And electrical ventilation is a must all year round to get air fresh, keep module at bay ant not loose energy living with open windows. Energy saving in bottom line will be abysmal :(

> But retention works in summer too… so I had to get air conditioner

It's the opposite. Insulation protects you from heat as well. That's why refrigerators are very much insulated.

Re: Day ahead electricity prices for EU

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because not all electricity costs the same to produce, but the price is the same, determined by the most expensive producer. There is a shortage of electricity because France is generating a lot less than normal and this is made up by other countries. I would guess the UK is impacted by higher demand as well, thus the more expensive producers are delivering jacking up the prices for everyone.

> determined by the most expensive producer That's wrong. The price is determined by demand and supply, which in turn is determined by what prices producers are willing to sell at and consumers are willing to buy at, plus other traders in the market.

That’s not entirely true. The prices of the underlying different electricity sources is different but they can’t be traded separately. As a result the market is very dysfunctional.

Re: Day ahead electricity prices for EU

#106
post #88

Current spot price in northern Norway is €10.16/MWh, while it is €745.08/MWh in southern Norway (73x the price), largely due to limitations in transport networks between the electricity zones. The price in the northern zone is so low that some hydro plants have stopped producing electricity as they would be losing money at the current price level. https://www.skandiaenergi.no/dagens-spotpriser/ Electricity Maps has a…

Are there any plans to build an infrastructure to connect both networks? It seems like a great idea in the current situation

Already exists. The main limitation is the number of cables and GW capacity.Also ramping up cable production has a bit of latency and installing them even more. And it's capital intensive and only makes sense when electricity prices are high. They are right now but that's not a permanent situation.

Re: Day ahead electricity prices for EU

#107
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No matter what magic plan anyone comes up with it would take years to implement. Nuclear, more insulation, hydrogen, new gas fields. It's almost winter already.

the magic plan should be to consume less and less and less. If we would consume 20% less, which should be absolutely doable, these problems would alleviate itself quite fast (well, we still should invest as much as we can in renewables). However, for that to happen we would need to have governments that are not afraid and act.

I have doubts.

Re: Day ahead electricity prices for EU

#108
post #62

To put this into context: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/eu-natural-gas I call this “the Greta curve”.

What your funny name for France, where we pay as much (if not more) than Germany for our electricity since the start of the year? More than half the country's nuclear power capacity has been shut down, mostly due to safety concerns https://nuclear-monitor.fr/#/mix.

Re: Day ahead electricity prices for EU

#110

This is nothing. If you want to panic, check the futures markets for the next 2 quarters, especially France. So I think short term we are pretty screwed. But I think if you can produce electricity at 1/10 or even 1/20 of the price, wouldn't you be adding new capacity now? The only fast option are renewables, so my wild guess is that there will be so much new capacity added in the next years, the bottleneck will not b…

The thing about "short term screwed" is that in some countries the "screwed" is actually "people having to pay more than 100 % of their income for electricity".

Theoretically, long term, this could all work out nicely and steer more people and governments towards renewables and decentralized generation, but the short term consequences are starting to look brutal.

Post reply on HN