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Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid

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Re: Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid

#41

Post by EcommerceFlow »

robertlagrant wrote: post #30
EcommerceFlow wrote: post #26

What I never understood was how France gets 70-75% of their electricity from Nuclear, yet their energy prices aren't "too cheap to meter", and while cheaper than their neighbors, don't really raise any eyebrows. Wouldn't this be a major example of why Nuclear is NOT the future?

I'm confused. The way you've phrased this certainly doesn't sound like it couldn't be the future.

I've heard for years that if we just had "tons" of Nuclear plants, our energy costs would essentially be too cheap to meter. Yet France is not experiencing this even at 75% Nuclear.

Re: Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid

#42

Post by thecosas »

topper-123 wrote: post #25
andrewxdiamond wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And de-incentivizes supply. A real solution need to be available to balance the supply and demand of power such that the rates on both ends are predictable. A market where a good fluctuates between profitable and not is not one very attractive to investment. Playing the video game Victoria 3 has taught me a lot about healthy markets. You have to play both sides of supply and demand to get to the prices you need

Negative prices do incentivize storage, because storage will alliw sellers to sell at a time with higher prices (i.e. when demand is greater relative to supply).

I could see this then pushing more consumers to have their own batteries to store energy when it's inexpensive. Interesting market playing out with energy storage :-)

Re: Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid

#43

Post by throw0101c »

pydry wrote: post #11
toomuchtodo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

French reactors are built to load follow [1]. It is harder on the valves, but they do it ("maneuvering capabilities"). Regardless, it would be better if they could run flat out to push out fossil generation in adjacent grids (Germany, the UK, and Northern Italy) with sufficient interconnector capacity. France also still has a bit of coal and fossil gas generation to retire [2] [3]. TLDR More interconnector capacity,…

Which theyve actually used very very rarely. Nuclear reactors are already very cost ineffective when used as baseload. Theyre ridiculously cost ineffective when used for load following since it's basically curtailment. This is why most countries tend to use gas or hydro/pumped storage for load following (or, increasingly, batteries as theyve been plummeting in price).

> Nuclear reactors are already very cost ineffective when used as baseload.

Ontario, Canada would disagree with you: nuclear is 10.1¢/kWh, hydro is 6.2¢, (methane/natural) gas is 11.4¢; see Table 2:

* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2023...

Of course hydro-electric dams typically flood many hectares of land for the reservoir. The current ones are getting refurbished:

* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/niagara-ontario-power...

Ontario's nuclear fleet are also in the middle of a bunch of refurbs:

* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-nuclear-power...

Some of which are finished:

* https://www.opg.com/releases/opg-celebrates-the-early-comple...

Live data on Ontario's grid:

* https://ieso.ca/power-data § "Supply" tab

Re: Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid

#44

Post by risyachka »

Neil44 wrote: post #29

This happens frequently in the UK too, if you have a compatible supplier you can set it up to charge your EV or some batteries during negative spikes. Ultimately if enough people were set up that way then prices would not get negative I suppose. * https://octopus.energy/smart/agile/

I wonder how many people need to do that in order for it to become not negative.

Re: Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid

#45

Post by littlestymaar »

Econ 101: with a marginal cost equal to zero, a competitive electricity market (with a price driven to marginal cost because of competition) cannot be sustainable because electricity price it cannot pay for the fixed costs.

Solution: we must stop electricity pricing based on energy produced (which made sense when using fossil fuel) and switch to a pricing mechanism where you pay for available power because that's where the marginal cost is increasing.

Re: Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid

#47

Post by digdugdirk »

EcommerceFlow wrote: post #26

What I never understood was how France gets 70-75% of their electricity from Nuclear, yet their energy prices aren't "too cheap to meter", and while cheaper than their neighbors, don't really raise any eyebrows. Wouldn't this be a major example of why Nuclear is NOT the future?

Their grid was still constructed on a capitalistic model. Investment in electricity generation stations in return for payments from electricity consuming users over time. Build too much nuclear (or any other power generation) and you lower the returns of the previous investors.

The easy answer is that financiers don't want it, so it won't happen.

Re: Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid

#48

Post by [deleted] »

EcommerceFlow wrote: post #26

What I never understood was how France gets 70-75% of their electricity from Nuclear, yet their energy prices aren't "too cheap to meter", and while cheaper than their neighbors, don't really raise any eyebrows. Wouldn't this be a major example of why Nuclear is NOT the future?

[deleted]

Re: Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid

#49

Post by toomuchtodo »

jerf wrote: post #38
paulsutter wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Negative prices make storage very practical

Unfortunately you've got a massive term mismatch. You have negative prices today, but a lot of reason to believe that by the time you could bring your storage online the problem will already have resolved itself. Oil briefly went negative a few years ago. If you decided to build a storage business dependent on negative oil prices for profit, you might just be coming online around now, and very much poorer than you we…

OP is correct. Negative prices stokes battery storage deployment. See California and their ~52GW storage target (currently @ ~10GW), because of negative prices and the duck curve. California utility scale storage soaks up solar during the day (when spot prices approach zero or go negative), and discharges most profitably right after sunset for ~4 hr (but occasionally, right before sunrise when demand is ramping before the sun is up). If spot prices rise during daylight hours, you add more solar generation to push them back down.

https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/04/25/california-achieves-major-...

https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...

https://cleantechnica.com/2024/06/02/solar-passes-100-of-pow...

https://futurism.com/the-byte/california-solar-electricity-p...

https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-CAL-CISO?wind=false&...

Re: Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid

#50

Post by more_corn »

johnzim wrote: post #39
EcommerceFlow wrote: post #26

What I never understood was how France gets 70-75% of their electricity from Nuclear, yet their energy prices aren't "too cheap to meter", and while cheaper than their neighbors, don't really raise any eyebrows. Wouldn't this be a major example of why Nuclear is NOT the future?

I mean.. They literally just became too cheap to meter by application of 33% more generation? Functionally they could get there by just building a few more reactors.

The “just” word is doing a lot of work here and masking multiple billion euro investments, decades long planning and build projects, risk and opportunity cost. How about instead we “just” invest in grid scale and distributed battery storage and double down on wind and solar?
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