French generation is ~70% nuclear (10% wind/solar) and German is ~10% (~40% wind/solar). Yet their prices track each other closely. So I think this explanation is too simplistic.
Possibly there are large interconnects between the French and German grids levelling out wholesale prices, but my assumption is that they cannot carry enough power for this imagined scenario where nuclear makes a big difference.
There's no "French and German grids", most of EU is a single grid (see map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta...) and there's no meaningful difference between "interconnects" linking France and Germany and power lines within France, though there are a bit fewer of them than internal lines.
There are some limited interconnects linking continental EU with UK and Scandinavia with some trade happening over them.
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.
> but my assumption is that they cannot carry enough power
Right now (https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/DE), Germany is importing from France alone the equivalent of a bit under two French nuclear power plants at full power.
France is the the largest nuclear energy exporter, but it only exports about 12% of its nuclear energy, which might be enough to move the domestic price.
During the intraday auctions, the left-over capacities are considered live, i.e. if there is 100MW of capacity left for France to Germany, you get the first 100MW of the French orderbook merged into the German one. If a trade happens, this capacity is updated. This is called SIDC (Single Intraday Coupling), https://www.emissions-euets.com/internal-electricity-market-..., used to be called XBID.
If by "track each other closely", you mean prices in Germany are reliably 50% higher than those in France[1], then yes, they "track each other" closely. German energy policy has been an unmitigated disaster, creating by far the most expensive electricity prices in the OECD and of course the highest in Europe, whereas prices in France are below the EU average.
That's because market prices are what they are, they don't depend on whether it's "gas electricity" or "nuclear electricity".
Now, if you produce electricity by burning gas that you import and gas prices go through the roof then your production costs follow and your stuck.
In the meantime, production costs of nuclear plants have not moved at all. Which makes controlling consumer prices much more doable and less costly, for instance, you can sell that electricity with improved profit margins (and France does export a lot of electricity).
Large quantities of energy (e.g. from Nuclear) are bought in advance (between countries, and less often between companies), and with multiple years contracts. That's why you don't see a huge difference.
Or, if you want: Not building twice as many (wind/anything) was a major mistake.
Nuclear power plants fail sometimes, just like the wind fails. In 2016 almost a third of the plants in France were offline at the same time, some for planned maintenance, some unplanned, and the peak prices were higher than now.
All these things are fixable by overbuilding enough. There's nothing special or magic about nuclear.
Apart from the technology, safety profile and generally being the cleanest source of energy ever discovered. And being able to stockpile enormous amounts of energy in a small heap if necessary ^^.
And if we could just convince people to accept it only causing say, half as much damage as coal it would be ridiculously cheap too. These appallingly high safety standards are expensive.
^^ EDIT Which would really help if there was some sort of large, unexpected event which disrupted the world's logistic chains for a few years. Unlike natural gas. Longer term supply rather than short term spot markets, lots of room to recover from surprises.
Whenever nuclear fails you can trace it directly to poor policymaking rather than any faults with the underlying technology, unlike something like coal which is flawed from the drawing board due to pollution.
They are also enormously expensive to construct and don't scale down. You can build a single wind turbine for what, $100K? Even a basic nuclear power plant is now around $50B, which is a large chunk of change to take away from taxpayers leaving even less money to research more renewable/sustainable alternatives.
I do think that a better policy decision over the past 30 years would be to be more strict on building regulations to ensure good levels of insulation at construction time, which is much cheaper than retro-fitting. Also making sure it is done properly, I've seen plenty of builds where a few sections of insulation are missing because the builder ran out and no-one really checked.
> You can build a single wind turbine for what, $100K? Even a basic nuclear power plant is now around $50B
A modern wind turbine will typically feature a 20 years lifetime and cost a few million dollars to produce a handful of MWs.
On the other hand, we see nuclear power plants happily going over 50 years of service while producing power in the magnitude of a few GWs -- and they do not cost $50B to build, but somewhere in the ballpark of a few $B.
Taking the very very rough estimate of twice 1000 wind turbines vs. one nuclear power plant to produce a few GWs over half a century, we arrive at $2B for the wind turbines vs. e.g. $5B for the nuclear plants. Of course, this does not take into account the fact that the wind turbines must be supported by another power source for when there is no wind, that maintaining a nuclear plant is much more expensive than maintaining wind turbines, that 1000 WT require manifold more ground space than a NPP, etc.; but we are still very far away from $100K vs. $50B. And that is also without taking into account the commonly cited load factors of 0.25-0.4 for WTs vs. 0.85-0.95 for NPPs, which would require building at least twice as many WTs in locations complementary w.r.t. exposition to winds to be palliated.
Windmills can be very nifty ancillary power sources, but they do not hold a candle to NPPs in the context of a(n) (inter)national power grid.
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.
Factor in all the externalities that these other forms of energy bring in and nuclear is probably one of the cheapest. If you could put a figure on the economic damage from an entire city of millions breathing in fumes from pollutants every day on their lives, it would probably be astronomical.
Assuming that's true so what? Do we have any other choice? What other low carbon options do we have? Germany already has enough wind and solar that it's causing issues on bad weather days. Battery technology needs another decade or two the bare minimum to get close to being viable.
All depends on the cost and the timescale. You can do both of those things, and while neither could be built at a scale to be a complete substitute overnight, they’re probably both faster to build than modern nuclear plants.
(I’d go for these and nuclear myself, but nuclear isn’t generally popular and I don’t see that changing).
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.
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.
You need access to millions of gallons of water a year to run a huge solar plant like Ivanpah, not to mention there probably aren't a lot of great roads for bringing in materials for heavy construction in the sahara vs the American west where in a days drive you are in the container yards at the Port of Los Angeles, so its not as easy as just plopping solar panels in the middle of the desert all over the world.
Isn't offshoring power a major security risk? Terrorists cut the cables or the external nation prioritises power to themself or others in some time of crisis.
I'm all for global trade but as we saw with medical supplies in the early covid days, core services for society to function should to some base minimum be held and produced domestically. I'd think this includes power, medicine and food.
Sure nuclear is all good until something goes wrong and you need 30k years to inhabit the area again, but that can't ever happen...oh wait. You need to weigh cons as much as pros.
A NPP is an order of magnitude more expensive than a combined cycle power plant of the same power output. So even if electricity prices are high now because of gas constraints, that doesn't mean a NPP would have been a good idea.
Europe should perhaps have diversified their gas suppliers, with more LNG.
At this point nuclear is the most expensive per mw. And the vast majority of that expense is upfront. So almost no one wants to invest in these things because they're incredibly risky.
(Some) Advantages of nuclear power in comparison to 'renewables':
- EROI (energy return on energy invested)
- ratio of land required / energy produced
- much lower flow of materials (rare earth etc.)
- constant and very high power output (no storage needed)
The face that merely "thousands" of people are impacted by France's uranium mining isn't testament to a large ecological impact, but the opposite: Nuclear's ecological impact is far less than renewables. Hydroelectricity - by far the largest renewable energy source, more than wind and solar combined - has displaced hundreds of thousands of people. The Three Gorges Dam alone displaced 140,000 people [1]. Lithium and cobalt extraction will need to increase by orders of magnitude to provide the necessary storage for intermittent renewables.
The immense energy density of nuclear fuel means far less of it needs to be extracted to provide energy.
For the UK it's a tripple whammy right now: high gas prices, a fire at an interchange to France and with Brexit they left the EU’s internal energy market. As a result the prices for electricity are skyrocketing at certain times of the day.
I mean, £1/kWh is pretty high, but it's not totally outrageous and it appears to have been capped by some kind of regulatory limit. 42¢/kWh is the standard retail price in California during peak demand hours, and that's not a huge difference.
You pay $0.42/kWh real time peak price in CA on a normal day? That's an absolutely bonkers number to me. Normal peak real time prices in Texas are like $0.12/kWh
The strike price for nuclear power from Hinkley Point C when it becomes operational will be £92.50/MWh. This has received a lot of criticism for being too high. With current wholesale rates at £385/MWh, suddenly Hinkley Point C doesn't look so expensive any more.
Well, the price for HPC is very expensive. The stupid thing is that by structuring the subsidy in a smarter way the UK could have gotten it at half the price. I've seen no reason why they did it how they did except adherence to some ideological dogma. Or putting my conspiracy glasses on, maybe some politically well-connected bankers in London made off like robbers at the expense of the public at large.
TVO in Finland managed to get similar plant for final price of 5,7 milliard euros. Though it is not yet producing energy. So, UK did somewhat worse in the process.
Cost of capital is a thing though. Much easier to raise money for a wind turbine or solar panel than a nuclear reactor. They're very efficient once running, but at that point they have investors and insurers to pay back.
They did. Not getting your harvest in while the weather was favourable was a real problem. Mill capacity was one part of that, there were several others.
In my country the price this month is around twice that of the historical average. Switching to a electricity plan last month that is based upon these prices, instead of fixed, probably wasn't a smart idea :D
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.
Firewood is not cheap and is becoming increasingly harder to acquire. 10 cubic meter of processed and ready to use wood was around 750 or more euros this year and will be even more in the future.
I put in an order at a mill in June and didn’t end up receiving anything due to bureaucracy shutting down businesses shipping out this year’s production. I don’t know if they ended up getting past that or not as I haven’t heard back on my reservation and I cancelled it. I managed to find the last of last year’s production at a local building supply store. They told me they will not be bringing new stock next year due to high costs and decreasing profit margins. I might have to completely transition to electric heating in 2022.
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...
Really depends on the type of house you live in. Typical heating costs for 50m^2 apartments in “Khrushchevka” type buildings (probably the dominant housing situation across most post soviet states) should be around 50 Euros per month this heating season in Lithuania. Average state pension is around 400 euros, so on average, heating should be 12.5% of that.
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.
I’ll assume poor and pensioners live in one of two situations: a house where they have a wood stove, or in a building block where heating isn’t a huge cost because you’re surrounded on most sides by adjacent units, not the outside.
Of course, the windows may have visible gaps/be single paned and there may not be any insulation, iunno.
My Canadian new condo experience is that if you have a south facing view, you may not need to turn on your in-unit heat unless it’s -20C and windy. But that’s when built to modern standards.
In Norway, where hydro powers most of the country's energy demands, consumer energy prices are now around 100-130% above July-August rates. The explanation is apparently partly milder weather, with less rainfall and less wind. The other part of the explanation is that Norway is connected to the continental grid, and is affected by higher rates in Europe.
He was top on the income lists every year (they are public in Norway). From trading electricity futures, he was seemingly very very good at it for years. But suddenly a big swing wiped out his entire fortune with a margin call. Almost bankrupting the Nasdaq insurance fund in the process.
It was argued much recently that connecting us with the rest of Europe through ACER would increase the prices since other markets would pay more. But that it would also lead to higher profits for those delivering the fixed costs part of the power bill, thus that part should be cheaper and it was supposed to even out somewhat.. ?
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Possibly there are large interconnects between the French and German grids levelling out wholesale prices, but my assumption is that they cannot carry enough power for this imagined scenario where nuclear makes a big difference.
There are some limited interconnects linking continental EU with UK and Scandinavia with some trade happening over them.
Thus, if electricity is scarse and expensive across Europe, French wholesale prices rise as well.
FWIW, the French government forces EDF to sell the electricity to its national competitors at a fixed price of around 50 Euro/MWh, IIRC.
Right now (https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/DE), Germany is importing from France alone the equivalent of a bit under two French nuclear power plants at full power.
The dayahead mechanism is described at length here: https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/globalassets/download-center/s...
During the intraday auctions, the left-over capacities are considered live, i.e. if there is 100MW of capacity left for France to Germany, you get the first 100MW of the French orderbook merged into the German one. If a trade happens, this capacity is updated. This is called SIDC (Single Intraday Coupling), https://www.emissions-euets.com/internal-electricity-market-..., used to be called XBID.
If by "track each other closely", you mean prices in Germany are reliably 50% higher than those in France[1], then yes, they "track each other" closely. German energy policy has been an unmitigated disaster, creating by far the most expensive electricity prices in the OECD and of course the highest in Europe, whereas prices in France are below the EU average.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Now, if you produce electricity by burning gas that you import and gas prices go through the roof then your production costs follow and your stuck.
In the meantime, production costs of nuclear plants have not moved at all. Which makes controlling consumer prices much more doable and less costly, for instance, you can sell that electricity with improved profit margins (and France does export a lot of electricity).
Nuclear power plants fail sometimes, just like the wind fails. In 2016 almost a third of the plants in France were offline at the same time, some for planned maintenance, some unplanned, and the peak prices were higher than now.
All these things are fixable by overbuilding enough. There's nothing special or magic about nuclear.
Apart from the technology, safety profile and generally being the cleanest source of energy ever discovered. And being able to stockpile enormous amounts of energy in a small heap if necessary ^^.
And if we could just convince people to accept it only causing say, half as much damage as coal it would be ridiculously cheap too. These appallingly high safety standards are expensive.
^^ EDIT Which would really help if there was some sort of large, unexpected event which disrupted the world's logistic chains for a few years. Unlike natural gas. Longer term supply rather than short term spot markets, lots of room to recover from surprises.
This isn’t specific to nuclear; building more of a different kind mitigates the risk.
On November 3, 2015, German wind power generated only 0.2 GW. Its power rating at that time was over 40 GW. How do you want to compensate for that?
Except it can run at peak efficiency when it is cloudy and not windy. This is one of the biggest selling points with dirty energy.
"So apparently you cannot build your entire electricity system on weather-dependent energy sources. Who would have thought?"
https://twitter.com/RosatomGlobal/status/1438395621648572418
I do think that a better policy decision over the past 30 years would be to be more strict on building regulations to ensure good levels of insulation at construction time, which is much cheaper than retro-fitting. Also making sure it is done properly, I've seen plenty of builds where a few sections of insulation are missing because the builder ran out and no-one really checked.
A modern wind turbine will typically feature a 20 years lifetime and cost a few million dollars to produce a handful of MWs.
On the other hand, we see nuclear power plants happily going over 50 years of service while producing power in the magnitude of a few GWs -- and they do not cost $50B to build, but somewhere in the ballpark of a few $B.
Taking the very very rough estimate of twice 1000 wind turbines vs. one nuclear power plant to produce a few GWs over half a century, we arrive at $2B for the wind turbines vs. e.g. $5B for the nuclear plants. Of course, this does not take into account the fact that the wind turbines must be supported by another power source for when there is no wind, that maintaining a nuclear plant is much more expensive than maintaining wind turbines, that 1000 WT require manifold more ground space than a NPP, etc.; but we are still very far away from $100K vs. $50B. And that is also without taking into account the commonly cited load factors of 0.25-0.4 for WTs vs. 0.85-0.95 for NPPs, which would require building at least twice as many WTs in locations complementary w.r.t. exposition to winds to be palliated.
Windmills can be very nifty ancillary power sources, but they do not hold a candle to NPPs in the context of a(n) (inter)national power grid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
You don’t gain anything from cheap wind power if it’s not available when you actually need it.
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.
(I’d go for these and nuclear myself, but nuclear isn’t generally popular and I don’t see that changing).
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.
I'm all for global trade but as we saw with medical supplies in the early covid days, core services for society to function should to some base minimum be held and produced domestically. I'd think this includes power, medicine and food.
Germany might get more kWh per euro invested in the panels it it was to construct them there, though of course it wouldn't be with german workers.
Europe should perhaps have diversified their gas suppliers, with more LNG.
Dead Comment
The immense energy density of nuclear fuel means far less of it needs to be extracted to provide energy.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam#Environmental...
That's what weekend pricing looked yesterday: https://i.imgur.com/U275C5r.png
Index linked.
I wonder what folks in the past would have thought about the concept of ‘wind draughts’. Maybe they experienced similar things with their grain mills?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateen
Deleted Comment
https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/Market-data1/Dayahead/Area-Pri...
In my country the price this month is around twice that of the historical average. Switching to a electricity plan last month that is based upon these prices, instead of fixed, probably wasn't a smart idea :D
I put in an order at a mill in June and didn’t end up receiving anything due to bureaucracy shutting down businesses shipping out this year’s production. I don’t know if they ended up getting past that or not as I haven’t heard back on my reservation and I cancelled it. I managed to find the last of last year’s production at a local building supply store. They told me they will not be bringing new stock next year due to high costs and decreasing profit margins. I might have to completely transition to electric heating in 2022.
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.
Of course, the windows may have visible gaps/be single paned and there may not be any insulation, iunno.
My Canadian new condo experience is that if you have a south facing view, you may not need to turn on your in-unit heat unless it’s -20C and windy. But that’s when built to modern standards.
He was top on the income lists every year (they are public in Norway). From trading electricity futures, he was seemingly very very good at it for years. But suddenly a big swing wiped out his entire fortune with a margin call. Almost bankrupting the Nasdaq insurance fund in the process.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17997823
It was argued much recently that connecting us with the rest of Europe through ACER would increase the prices since other markets would pay more. But that it would also lead to higher profits for those delivering the fixed costs part of the power bill, thus that part should be cheaper and it was supposed to even out somewhat.. ?