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Europe is in danger of rolling electricity shortages

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Re: Europe is in danger of rolling electricity shortages

#371

Post by locallost »

izacus wrote: post #279
locallost wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're in the process of being started for months now. It's even mentioned in the tweets that EdF has a poor track record of keeping their word. How much I would know if I would only read the material properly. Reliability is a word and it has a meaning. With that in mind nothing beats renewables because the tech just works and they're so decentralized that a glitch of huge proportions would be needed to make them n…

>They're in the process of being started for months now Of course they are, that's how they work. 6 of them came online in last two weeks. But that's not what you were honestly implying there, is it? > Reliability is a word and it has a meaning. With that in mind nothing beats renewables because the tech just works and they're so decentralized that a glitch of huge proportions would be needed to make them not work as…

I am not implying anything at all, I am stating it explicitly, as is the author on Twitter. Here's a quote:

> To deliver 315TWh, EDF needs to bring back significant capacity, i.e. solve some of its corrosion issues. Can it?

> We will see. EDF has a way to over-promise and under-deliver over the years. So this "major, not minor" - make no mistake.

> 32/n

The tweet also contains a list of 8 reactors that were supposed to be back earlier but got "delayed". So we can pretend that there's no problem or danger of further delays, but that's just wishful thinking. The market certainly doesn't buy it, the futures prices for France were 2x any other country in Europe for early next year last time I checked.

Reliability is in fact a word that has nothing to do with drawbacks of something else. The only thing that matters is, is it delivering on what it said it would do. The issue is you're interpreting what I said based on your assumptions. The word you are maybe thinking of for renewables output is not reliability, but predictability. But even here you'd be wrong since their output can be predicted pretty accurately based on weather forecasts. So they are both reliable and predictable. Nuclear is neither as it was made quite clear this year (and clear in other ways in decades before). You could call renewables variable, since their output, well, varies. But it does so in a predictable and reliable way.

Re: Europe is in danger of rolling electricity shortages

#372

Post by sofixa »

retinaros wrote: post #359
sofixa wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not reduce by 50%, reduce to 50% from the current 50%. With the increasing electric consumption, it's barely a reduction in real terms at all.

it was 70% in 2021 not 50%. so you can take my sample and apply the reduce to 20% if you want and get the same outcome: it still sends the signal that they going away from nuclear. any kind of shareholder would vote against investing in the field… dont understand what you dont understand there.

Yeah, that's a typo, 70%, as you can see from the rest of my comment about the fact that with the increasing electricity consumption it's barely a reduction in net terms.

So it's not reducing by 20%, it's "with projected growth it will only account for 50% instead of 70%, so capacity will stay roughly the same, only refreshed".

And again, shareholders don't matter, EDF has always been majority state owned.

So I don't understand what you don't understand there. There was barely any reduction to speak of, a full refresh was needed anyways due to age, and was planned for the future 50% of the grid, and private shareholders were never asked.

Re: Europe is in danger of rolling electricity shortages

#373

Post by pjmlp »

panick21_ wrote: post #217
pjmlp wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most countries need their electrical heaters and cooking stoves as well during the night.

Yes but lights are turned off, factories are turned off, trains aren't running and many other things as well. And most people don't cook during the night.

Still not enought to power all cars during the night, given the charging time.

Anyway that isn't an issue, because only a few elected ones can charge their Teslas on their private parkings.

Re: Europe is in danger of rolling electricity shortages

#374

Post by nasmorn »

kennend3 wrote: post #272
toast0 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Charge higher rates for essential. Offer rebates for certain users with life safety requirements for uninterrupted power.

> Charge higher rates for essential. This makes ZERO sense.. I live in a cold climate.. Our furnace is "essential" to prevent my family and i from freezing to death. Under your plan we should pay more for this? And those who cant afford it? Let me guess, government rebates, making a complex program even more complex? Any time your solution requires "rebates".. it is flawed from the start.

Your furnace will either use very little electricity if it burns something else or it is exactly the kind of thing to shut off since your home can already buffer heat quite effectively. Allowing room temperature to drop by 1 or 2 degrees is preferable to blackouts.

Re: Europe is in danger of rolling electricity shortages

#375

Post by ZeroGravitas »

tmikaeld wrote: post #128
trasz wrote: post #43

It’s sad when you look at China building 20 new reactors at the moment and then comparing to what we have in EU.

While simultaneously investing billions in EU wind-farms [0] [0] https://www.politico.eu/article/chinese-wind-farm-investment...

They built more wind generation, and more solar generation, and more hydro generation than they did nuclear, in their own country.

So its not some conspiracy that they were supporting building wind in europe too. They now have the most experience with this cutting edge energy technology.

Re: Europe is in danger of rolling electricity shortages

#377

Post by argulane »

jotm wrote: post #116
fxtentacle wrote: post #12

Most likely, Italy and eastern Europe, who are net importers. Germany is a net exporter, so they would only have blackouts out of solidarity.

What Eastern Europe? Romania (pretty balanced and not reliant on gas) and Poland (mostly coal, locally mined) are self sufficient. Baltics maybe?

Baltics are mostly self-sufficient. But the problem is that baltic countries are still syncronized to the russian grid. Russians could disconnect us any time and make our power grid unstable until we sync up with rest of the Europe.

https://news.err.ee/1608726511/estonia-grid-connected-to-eur...

Re: Europe is in danger of rolling electricity shortages

#378

Post by wizofaus »

petre wrote: post #368
wizofaus wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely the main issue with winter in more northern regions is the significantly reduced period of the day for which any solar-generation is even possible. During the daylight hours there's still more than enough total insolation to heat the small amount of air we need to inside our houses, but you obviously need some form of storage (or incredibly good insulation, arguably a form of storage too) to ensure buildings c…

> During the daylight hours there's still more than enough total insolation to heat the small amount of air we need to inside our houses I sold solar panel for 10 years. Both solar thermal and PV. This is simply not true. You need to greatly oversize your panels (≥6x) and also have a passive house with a huge storage buffer (>5000 liters). In the summer you end up having to pump the waste heat into a pool. There are…

That would seem to be essentially agreeing with my point - there's enough insolation but it's not necessarily economical to capture it with home PV systems.

Re: Europe is in danger of rolling electricity shortages

#379

Post by krageon »

izacus wrote: post #222
locallost wrote: post #211

I read the whole thread. At one point he goes on and on how France is shaky because their nuclear plants are offline caused by corrosion issues etc. On the very next tweet he blasts Germany for prematurely shutting down "the most reliable energy source nuclear". Well if they're reliable, why is France in this world of hurt right now? I agree about one thing, and that it really is a perfect storm of issues, and that t…

> Well if they're reliable, why is France in this world of hurt right now? This an exceedingly intellectually lazy argument which shows that you're either horribly biased (and never engaged with the reading material properly) or didn't even spend a minute thinking through what you're asking. It's somewhere on the level of "well, why is there snow in New York if global warming is happening HUUUUH?!". (Not to mention t…

The reading material is essentially an entire twitter thread saying "nuclear is the beginning and the end of the answer and everyone who is against it is not thinking right. Anti-nuclear sentiment is rampant and the problem". I found it profoundly uninteresting so if you feel I should have gotten something else from it, perhaps you can enlighten me with what that was.

Re: Europe is in danger of rolling electricity shortages

#380

Post by origin_path »

kken wrote: post #83
origin_path wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multiple gas pipelines from Russia are closed because European governments refuse to allow them to run. That's gas sanctions, why do you argue otherwise? For example Germany refuses to open Nord Stream 2, and Nord Stream 1 is broken due to sanctions on equipment repair - the turbines are made by Siemens and several are sitting in UK factories unable to be re-exported back due to sanctions. Although the troubles with…

>Nord Stream 1 is broken due to sanctions on equipment repair It's well known that this is not true. You are perpetuating russian propaganda.

The broken turbines in question were sent to western factories which repaired them. If they weren't broken it would have been noticed. And recall, the whole point of sanctions was to degrade Russia's industrial capacity by preventing them from repairing things that depended on western parts, so this is very likely a priori.

Anyway it doesn't matter. NS2 is there ready and waiting to go, but Germany won't switch it on ... due to sanctions.

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