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Energy Prices in Europe Hit Records After Wind Stops Blowing

wsj.com

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Re: Energy Prices in Europe Hit Records After Wind Stops Blowing

#71

Post by randomdata »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #66
randomdata wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The prevailing nuclear designs are not an option. They are only suitable for base load production, whereas wind is only suitable for peak load production. They serve entirely different purposes on the grid and are not meaningfully interchangeable. When the wind stops blowing you need another technology that is suitable for peak load production (batteries, natural gas, etc.).

Current-design nuclear plants themselves are perfectly capable at ramping up and down on demand on the order of 10s of minutes. They usually just choose not to because fuel is a small fraction of their total cost and so the current (and adjustable) markets pressure them into selling as much electricity as possible by staying near 100%.

Yes, the economics is why they are not suitable.

Re: Energy Prices in Europe Hit Records After Wind Stops Blowing

#72

Post by joshuaheard »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #7
28511524 wrote: post #2

“Options include reserve thermal power plants, battery storage or cables for importing electricity from other markets.” Or nuclear. Sad that this isn’t seen as an option any longer.

> Or nuclear. Sad that this isn’t seen as an option any longer Is anti-nuclear sentiment consistent across Europe?

France gets 70% of its power from safe nuclear energy.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/462535/nuclear-share-ele....

Re: Energy Prices in Europe Hit Records After Wind Stops Blowing

#73

Post by bildung »

em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #39

ElectricityMap is a nice live view of current energy generation and consumption by type of energy. Unfortunately right now https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/DE shows Germany is generating most energy from Coal. It is sad that they didn't embrace nuclear like neighboring France.

Decisions like these seldomly are about engineering alone.

France didn't embrace nuclear out of the goodness of their hearts - they wanted to become a nuclear power, and needed the infrastructure and specialists and so on to become one (establish study paths, and give those students the prospect of jobs so that they actually choose the new paths etc.).

Now that this isn't of strategic importance anymore, France lost interest in nuclear plants (just look at what gets built in recent decades in France). Because nuclear power by itself isn't that interesting, mostly because it is so hugely expensive and inflexible.

Germany was never allowed to get nuclear infrastructure because they started two world wars, and at the time no one was interested in Germany having nukes for the third attempt. Even research alone wasn't allowed for decades after the end of WW2. That's also the reason why Germany has no capacity for processing used fuel rods and does this in France to this day - its dual use tech.

Re: Energy Prices in Europe Hit Records After Wind Stops Blowing

#74

Post by PeterisP »

ip26 wrote: post #53
PeterisP wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be surprised that if this trend increases and the push comes to shove, then the voters - especially those on marginal incomes - might decide that actually they much prefer lower energy prices instead of supporting renewables and CO2-neutral energy; and in democratic countries it's the general public who are entitled to make that choice for their country instead of accepting the decisions of elites/experts…

In some sense a clean environment and less dangerous future are "luxury goods" The people who can least afford to pay for clean energy etc are the ones who will also be most impacted by heat waves, declining air quality, and natural disasters. So it's a similar "luxury good" as "functioning healthcare".

I agree that it's a similar "luxury good" as "functioning healthcare". And the poorer countries - especially a few decades earlier - were (and are) "choosing" not to buy functioning healthcare before they can afford it - they do devote their limited resources in a balanced manner to various other priorities as well despite paying a price literally with blood and the lives of their children instead of devoting all their resources to more healthcare. As the society grows wealthier, they can and do fix basic healthcare issues (e.g. child mortality) as soon as they can afford to, but simply saying "functioning healthcare needs X money, do that now" is not helpful.

If a person can't afford adequate dental care, they usually don't sacrifice their rent and food to get it, they generally do without, even knowing that it would cause their future self much suffering. The same applies for global warming. As you say, the people who can least afford to pay for clean energy etc are the ones who will also be most impacted by heat waves, declining air quality, and natural disasters - and that's it, they will choose not to pay for clean energy despite the potential of being impacted by heat waves, declining air quality, and natural disasters some decades later. That's the choice they are going to make because that's the reasonable choice in their situation, they can't afford to sacrifice today for the sake of tomorrow.

Re: Energy Prices in Europe Hit Records After Wind Stops Blowing

#75

Post by addicted »

StreamBright wrote: post #70
pydry wrote: post #46

This article seems to be trying to turn a story about unprecedented highs in natural gas prices (mirroring surging post-covid commodity prices all over) into a story about the wind sometimes not blowing. Alternative article : https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/expensive-winter-ahe...

Yeah the two things are related. You need a battery or a gas turbine if you have windmills in the energy mix. This is why ultimately wind (or any other uncontrollable energy source) is tough to integrate into any energy grid.

Or rather, as is the case in any transition, as you move to the new you still continue to rely on the old, so the entire system continues to fail if the old fails.

This stops being a problem once the transition is complete.

But that’s to a great extent the definition of a transition.

Re: Energy Prices in Europe Hit Records After Wind Stops Blowing

#76

Post by stkdump »

fsflover wrote: post #29
olau wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Fukushima killed much of the remaining enthusiasm, but really it's the high cost of building new nuclear plants across Europe that's keeping it from being an option. If building a new plant was cheap, I'm sure you'd see a lot more happening.

> it's the high cost of building new nuclear plants https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html If markets valued the low-CO2 nature of nuclear, they’d be doing better

So would renewables, but even without that they are becoming the cheapest option.

Re: Energy Prices in Europe Hit Records After Wind Stops Blowing

#77

Post by tjansen »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #66
randomdata wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The prevailing nuclear designs are not an option. They are only suitable for base load production, whereas wind is only suitable for peak load production. They serve entirely different purposes on the grid and are not meaningfully interchangeable. When the wind stops blowing you need another technology that is suitable for peak load production (batteries, natural gas, etc.).

Current-design nuclear plants themselves are perfectly capable at ramping up and down on demand on the order of 10s of minutes. They usually just choose not to because fuel is a small fraction of their total cost and so the current (and adjustable) markets pressure them into selling as much electricity as possible by staying near 100%.

Once you have them, is there any reason why you would want to ramp it down, other than trying to justify the existence of wind turbines?

Re: Energy Prices in Europe Hit Records After Wind Stops Blowing

#78

Post by derefr »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #51
28511524 wrote: post #2

“Options include reserve thermal power plants, battery storage or cables for importing electricity from other markets.” Or nuclear. Sad that this isn’t seen as an option any longer.

Nuclear isn’t on demand, you still need a place to bank energy when you don’t need it since the plant is going to produce a constant load that (given high capital and operating costs of the plant itself) you’ll want to use productively. Natural gas instead would really shine as a backup power source.

An array of small modular [nuclear] reactors (SMRs) could be set up to switch parts of the array on and off over the course of the day to scale with load. Small plants have shorter ramp-up and ramp-down times, as they move around smaller amounts of working fluid, and power lighter turbines which thus have proportionately higher friction/lower inertia.

Of course, this is a lot less efficient than having one big nuclear reactor pumping huge turbines; but it’s possibly more efficient than other forms of peak-load generation, which is the key issue.

Plus, any given individual SMR would produce a low-enough wattage to be able to reasonably divert/“dump” power from it into an practical-to-construct-anywhere sink or battery (e.g. building-sized pumped storage, rather than huge dam-sized pumped storage) for handling ramp-down discontinuities.

Re: Energy Prices in Europe Hit Records After Wind Stops Blowing

#79

Post by ip26 »

marvin wrote: post #60
PeterisP wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be surprised that if this trend increases and the push comes to shove, then the voters - especially those on marginal incomes - might decide that actually they much prefer lower energy prices instead of supporting renewables and CO2-neutral energy; and in democratic countries it's the general public who are entitled to make that choice for their country instead of accepting the decisions of elites/experts…

> In some sense a clean environment and less dangerous future are "luxury goods" that societies and people want to buy if they can afford to, but should not be forced if they can't afford the expense. While I sympathize with this view on a certain level, applying it to policy consistently and literally is a likely path towards chaos and immense death and suffering 70 years from now. That's a high cost to pay to consi…

bribing part of the voters with some sort of climate tax dividend is a sensible policy

It's not really a bribe. If running your leaf blower pollutes the air that others breathe, is a (tiny) payment from you to those people not simply compensation for (tiny) harm you've caused? A carbon tax dividend simply manifests this concept (though aimed at carbon instead of pm2.5)

It's always seemed like a really promising policy that drives many of the right incentives, but getting it passed seems impossible.

Re: Energy Prices in Europe Hit Records After Wind Stops Blowing

#80

Post by tjansen »

kohlerm wrote: post #20

hmm not sure I can follow the logic. Germany does have quite a lot of wind power doesn't it? Also AFAIK prices in Germany went up because of higher demand for Gas. And then somehow it is expected, as soon as there is a big enough crisis energy prices will go up exponentially.

> Germany does have quite a lot of wind power doesn't it? Yes, but just not every week. The amount of energy produced per year by wind power is fine. But you'd need the capability to store it for weeks or even months to use it as a reliable energy source.
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