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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?

#331

Post by ephbit »

Manuel_D wrote: post #215
pfdietz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. NPPs as backup to wind would be horribly expensive. Wind droughts don't happen often; even the current price during them would not make a NPP pay off. What would make sense is larger local stores of hydrogen, to be burned in combustion turbines during the rare wind outages.

Are there any commercial operators of electric grid storage using hydrogen? I can only find prototype or demonstration projects. Most of the time, people saying grid-scale storage is feasible point to technologies that exist in the prototyping phase. The reality is that we don't know whether these solutions will be feasible at scale, or if they'll hit bottlenecks or poor scalability that drives up cost when deployed…

Hydrogen is relatively inconventient/difficult to handle except when transported via pipeline.

There appear to be no dense long range pipeline networks (for hydrogen) connecting multiple countries (yet).

Pipeline networks for natural gas aren't designed to safely transport pure (or high concentrations of) hydrogen, so over a certain concentration hydrogen would have to be converted into synthetic natural gas. The latter conversion appears to not yet be deployed at very large scales.

Seems to me that the reason why there is no large scale hydrogen generation yet (though there are medium-large/industrial scale projects now), is simply that until now large scale wasn't economically feasible. With hydrogen strategies and more pressure from a price on CO2 on their way we'll definitely see more of it soon.

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

#332

Post by Manuel_D »

pfdietz wrote: post #322
Manuel_D wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many places are already seeing energy surpluses. California and Hawaii are consistently reaching excess daytime energy production. If we really can store electricity in hydrogen $1/KWh, then we should be seeing hydrogen storage being built to profit off these intervals of negative energy prices. But we aren't. Is it because people fail to see this market opportunity? Or, maybe, it's because writing a white paper clai…

Natural gas is really hard to displace here, and won't happen until it becomes and stays expensive. It may now be above that price level in Europe, but it has to stay there to enable the capital investment in large scale green hydrogen production.

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 their investment cost in less than a week of operation, with an average price of $0.30/KWh in the state. It's basically free money.

The reality is that hydrogen storage costs nowhere near $1/KWh. People making predictions about what a technology will cost and actually building it are two totally different things.

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

#333

Post by ephbit »

cbmuser wrote: post #165
PeterisP wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have gigawatt-sized gaps to fill in non-fossil generation, then it doesn't matter that something doesn't scale down, it's a problem if something doesn't scale up. It doesn't matter how much a single wind turbine costs, it matters how much a gigawatt of wind turbines costs and where you will place all of them.

Exactly. Cheap wind and solar electricity is useless if it isn’t produced on-demand. It still blows my mind that so many have such a hard time grasping such a simple and fundamental concept.

Add enough storage to the system and the on-demand problem is solved.

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

#334

Post by oezi »

cbmuser wrote: post #162
Retric wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear is just as bad in terms of following demand the capacity factor is at best 90% but involves weeks of downtime for refueling etc. Worse the economics only work out when production is kept close to 100% when available limiting adoption in a wider electric grid. France dealt with sub 70% capacity factors even with massive exports that’s roughly a 0.9/0.7 = 30% price hike per kWh. You can use batteries to level o…

All nuclear power plants in Germany are capable to be operated in load-follow mode, see: > https://www.ktg.org/ktg-wAssets/docs/fg-bet-rph-lastfolgebet... Also, nuclear power was never subsidized in Germany: > https://dserver.bundestag.de/btd/14/080/1408084.pdf (page 16, answer 27)

> Also, nuclear power was never subsidized in Germany

The German government took over responsibility for managing final storage of nuclear waste for something like 20bn EUR from the industry but is already projecting that it might cost more like 50bn EUR to actually find such a place.

Nuclear's price will still haunt tax payers long down the road.

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

#335

Post by kragen »

lbriner wrote: post #103
kragen wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe French generators are free to export their production to those who are willing to pay higher prices, rather than selling it domestically, just as LNG exporters are free to export their LNG to China instead of France if the Chinese can pay more. In that case, energy shortages in Germany would raise prices in France.

In an energy market, contracts are signed for months an/or years. If France thinks it has plenty of gas supply, it can agree to sell electricity capacity to other countries, when the gas goes away, they can't just cancel the contracts.

There do exist multi-year and even multi-decade PPAs, but an enormous amount of power is bought and sold in the day-ahead and even 15-minute spot markets. The article we're commenting on actually has a graph of prices in the day-ahead market; maybe you missed that.

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

#336

Post by skrause »

whiskyant wrote: post #329
in3d wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will go down to 0% in Germany in several months. Germany is shutting down its last six nuclear power plants and no new ones can be built. Italy, Switzerland and Belgium also want to shut down their nuclear power plants. Shameful, unscientific public opinion in Western Europe despite more people realizing the danger of global warming.

What's the purpose in shutting them down?

They're mostly old and EOL.

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

#337

Post by ephbit »

Factorium wrote: post #71
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.

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.

Even with HVDC I'm very sceptical that we'll soon see enough transmission capacity (electrical) from northern africa to europe or other regions in the world for that to become a relevant part of the eurafrican grid.

Why? Because we'd need lots of these.

Take this project as a reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Hami%E2%80%93Zhengzho...

Capacity: 8 GW Cost: ~ 3 billion EUR

Assuming 10 kW each, with one such HVDC connection you could charge/discharge 800000 cars simultaneously. That is quite a lot less than the current number of cars and 10 kW is a lot less than the charging speeds which are currently being offered.

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

#338

Post by pfdietz »

ephbit wrote: post #331
Manuel_D wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any commercial operators of electric grid storage using hydrogen? I can only find prototype or demonstration projects. Most of the time, people saying grid-scale storage is feasible point to technologies that exist in the prototyping phase. The reality is that we don't know whether these solutions will be feasible at scale, or if they'll hit bottlenecks or poor scalability that drives up cost when deployed…

Hydrogen is relatively inconventient/difficult to handle except when transported via pipeline. There appear to be no dense long range pipeline networks (for hydrogen) connecting multiple countries (yet). Pipeline networks for natural gas aren't designed to safely transport pure (or high concentrations of) hydrogen, so over a certain concentration hydrogen would have to be converted into synthetic natural gas. The lat…

For grid storage, hydrogen would not need to be transported at all (although the option to do so is there if it's favorable). It could be made above the storage caverns, pumped into them, then extracted and consumed there.

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

#339

Post by pfdietz »

Manuel_D wrote: post #332
pfdietz wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Natural gas is really hard to displace here, and won't happen until it becomes and stays expensive. It may now be above that price level in Europe, but it has to stay there to enable the capital investment in large scale green hydrogen production.

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 entirely volcanic.

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

#340

Post by beezischillin »

djrogers wrote: post #211
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.

What percentage of living costs is gas normally during winter there? A 40% increase in 3% of your expenses isn't a big deal, but if it's 30% that would really hurt...

I can’t tell you from recent personal experience because I heat my house with firewood and IR panels but a winter’s worth of wood cost me twice the minimum wage.

My gas heating costs were minimal when I lived in an apartment because it was really well insulated, surrounded by neighbours with similarly well-insulated apartments; I could heat that up with my desktop pc mining ethereum on a 290X back when that was profitable. ;)

As an approximation, heating costs might rise for people less fortunate to close to 30-35% of their income if things end up as bad as I hear them expect.

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