It also makes sense for Germany to have at least two, since North and South are very different in terms of production and consumption but have limited interconnect. Any fix for that is endlessly blocked by NIMBYs who don't feel the cost of their decisions.
The main causes are the gas crisis and the fact that France has shut down around half of its nuclear reactors due to corrosion and cooling problems, so Germany now has to burn even more gas and coal for electricity exports to France.
> And why Italians always manage to be first in the worst ranking?
in this specific case 3 reason:
- Italy relies on natural gas, we had long standing relationships with Libya and Algeria for that, unfortunately France bombed Libya to kill Gheddafi (to claim control of the area mainly) and that destabilized the area [1]
- Italy relies on close countries to buy electricity, especially France. Now that they have switched off nuclear plants, electricity from France costs more.
- we are in electoral campaign, elections are next month, a good chunk of the right wing political landscape supports (or doesn't strongly oppose) Putin, they hope that by creating an energy crisis in Italy, people will vote for them. Which is probably what's really going to happen, for Putin's delight. [2]
[1] WikiLekas has a lot of documents on it, it's also one of the interventions that costed Hillary Clinton the elections.
I've read somewhere that Czechs (day ahead price of 463EUR/MWh) produce electricity at 0.1EUR/MWh, then sell it to an exchange in Germany and buy it back for the "market" price. Somebody over there is getting extremely rich for no reason and I am wondering why nobody is doing anything about it...
I have no clue about Czechia but that’s basically happening in Austria. Austria mainly produces energy from renewables which did not go up in price buy since the price on the exchanges is determined by the most expensive source we still pay exorbitant prices. Producers are making all the money right now.
By “producers” of course you mean “those producers that invested in sovereign energy sources (nuclear, solar, wind, …)”
Sounds like good investments are paying off, and bad investments (Germany collaborating with Putin despite Trump’s prescient advice & mockery) are not.
Capitalism at it’s finest! Too bad average people are paying the price, but in democracy, that’s literally what they voted for (non-sensical top-down EU bureaucratic green energy mandates, instead of investments into better tech & bottom-up sovereign energy investments).
I’m not sure what you are trying to say. The reasons for the energy prices have nothing to do with any European bureaucracy. If anything more investments into green energy would have put us into a better position.
The European bureaucracy is what dismantled all the old cheap energy production and forced massive investment and massive subsidies in renewable energy that can't actually cope with the real load.
Isn't the inability of nuclear plants to keep production up part of the problem? If anything, the screwed up electricity markets in Germany killed oil and gas plants by favoring flexible production costs. And there it is solar/eind followed by hydro and coal on third. Germany even built new coal plants, the latest of which didn't get a legal construction permit and thus operations oermit in the first place. Bad environmentalists, paid by Putin to push for any energy source other than gas for electricity!
The drivers of high prices are broken nuclear power plants, high gas prices due to a war and record draughts causing issues for hydro. None of these are caused by European bureaucracy.
To use your words, Germany already collaborated with the good old old communist USSR under Brechnev. Thing is, so, Germany isn't using Russian gas (which was delivered reliably since the 60s) to produce electricity but for heating, industry and chemicals.
Funny, I remember when we had similar discussions about negative electricity prices and people mockes those capital intensive legacy producers. Well, history is so old and context too complex to bother if polemism does as well.
Considering most Europeans won’t be able to afford electricity and there is no increased investments into renewables as a result of this insanity it looks like an abysmal outcome. In fact it’s so bad that very likely it will slowly set into motion all kinds of bad workarounds that will utterly destroy the economy.
The marginal cost of production didn’t go up for renewables, but that’s not the price setting mechanism, the Austrian people demanded more electricity than renewables could provide, so the price rose until it was high enough to justify turning on the gas fired plants and where the Czechs and Germans would be willing to sell power to the Austrians…
Also the people that are “making all the money” now that power prices are super high, stood to loose money if power prices were super low, why shouldn’t they be compensated for bearing that risk?
> the Austrian people demanded more electricity than renewables could provide, so the price rose until it was high enough to justify turning on the gas fired plants and where the Czechs and Germans would be willing to sell power to the Austrians…
That’s not what is happening. If Austria was an isolated market the prices were significantly lower at the moment. But I would not want to separate the markets just because it works out better to us at the moment.
It has been happening here in Romania for more than a decade now, our previous president even called them out as “the smart guys from the power industry” (where “smart” was used in a derogatory way), of course that nothing came out of it all.
There were also a couple of curious deaths happening in the industry (the head of our State-owned hydro company, who died in his late 30s, the local boss of a power utility, who just threw himself from his balcony), but nothing came out of that, either.
Most probably part of the huge proceeds end up in the accounts connected to our intelligence agencies (the heirs of the former Securitate, which have split into several agencies after 1990).
Is that a recoil from the Eastern-Bloc era worship of intellectuals, or is it completely separate, or something else? Americans are often accused of undervaluing people who pursue intellectual professions and propping up "Joe the Plumber," which is why I ask.
OK, what's the truth then? I am not an expert on this, though just today I saw some LinkedIn post of some trader explaining merit price on energy market and in the chart the nuclear power was two orders of magnitude cheaper than gas/combined power but the final price was at the level of gas/combined power.
In Spain (and according to a sister comment, in Austria too, so maybe it's EU-wide) the price of every MWh is set by the last MWh that enters the market (apparently it works like an auction). The last to be sold is the most expensive, thus renewables are being priced like combined due to this rule. In fact there was some scandal in Spain I seem to remember because apparently energy companies were doing the expected according to the incentives set, which is manipulating production so that combined is always used, increasing profit by doing nothing.
Sure, more or less. But there are real costs and financial costs of getting the power to the other market, and they are probably being forced by regulation to buy the power at all (prices won't always be tipped in the one direction).
EDF, the French electricity provider is able to produce electricity at about 20€/MWh. It is forced to sell it to leeches (read: "competition"), up to 100TWh, at 42€/MWh through a mechanism called ARENH. Should they need this 100TWh (and they do), they are forced to buy it at current market prices, or anywhere between 530 and 715€/MWh.
The "competition" are resellers that have not installed a single MW of production, essentially leading to starving what used to be the most talented and biggest energy producer in Europe, all under the pretense of the free market. The resellers are actively dropping clients so they do not have to not buy on the open market.
It is happening, and is happening with the blessing of our leaders just greasing billionaire pockets.
Because of delayed checkups caused by COVID, and thanks to the independence of the ASN who could unilaterally stop the plants to fix unplanned corrosion. Most of them are starting to come back up, and 90% of usual production is planned to be back by December.
Or, said in other ways, it took an extremely rare event that lasted long enough to throw off plans that are made on the scale of years, in addition with a bit of bad luck, and lasts a few months. I'd say they damn well can produce electricity in normal times, yes. But indeed, their need to buy electricity is compounded by that.
EDF is owned at 80% by the state, and the state has instituted the ARENH through law. Needless to say, EDF not going into this would mean someone else is replaced at the head and it still goes on. It's a classic starve the beast play.
No idea about the Czech, but that's exactly what's happening in Norway. Due to trade agreements with the EU, we can not discriminate between national and EU customers when selling electricity. To be completely accurate, we aren't selling on a German exchange, we're selling on local ones, but those local exchanges are experiencing price pressure from EU customers due to export capacity recently being increased due to the completion of several new power cables to the EU and UK.
The grandparent could have done a better job explaining what she meant. You've explained it much better. EU rules forbid discrimination between domestic and EEA customers in electricity markets. Therefore, any significantly interconnected country to the rest of the EU will have similar prices.
Countries like Norway, which have abundant, cheap, generation, are paying EEA prices in its highly interconnected bidding zones (NO1,NO2). The next few months, if prices persist, are likely to see lots of pressure from Norwegians to curtail exports (i.e. close off transmission capacity to EEA). This would significantly decrease prices for Norwegians, but damage the EU's integrity. The same can be said of other countries with abundant, cheap generation that are suffering the consequences of other EEA countries' actions w.r.t their electricity supply.
I say this as a supporter of the EU, but the integrated electricity market's future is in peril this winter.
That's how a market works. You say "Czechs" but it's Czech producers and Czech consumers (respectively) making those transactions. Where the market is situated is irrelevant.
If you're making electricity that cheaply right now you are indeed getting rich, and so you should.
The market is what is doing something about it. Prices will moderate over time as inefficient producers are pushed out and as consumers reduce their usage due to high prices.
> Prices will moderate over time as inefficient producers are pushed out and as consumers reduce their usage due to high prices.
Electricity isn't optional. "The market" didn't make water, or housing, or waste, or healthcare, or telecoms, etc, cheaper once privatized. In fact, it didn't make energy cheaper in the countries that privatized it.
food isn't optional either. How well did nationalized food production work out?
>"The market" didn't make water, or housing, or waste, or healthcare, or telecoms, etc, cheaper once privatized.
I can get the source for each of those claims? Some of them seem dubious, eg. housing. Was housing ever not privatized?
>In fact, it didn't make energy cheaper in the countries that privatized it.
well if we're talking about "energy" in general (ie. not just electricity), I can point out a counter-example of PDVSA going to shit after it was nationalized.
Many successful governments subsidize food production and delivery in many, many ways. Your talking points are tired and debated to death; mostly by people who don't actually have much interest in learning anything and would rather invent straw-men to pwn.
If you really want to challenge your view, I'm sure you can read a book that lays it out better than I could in a quick YC comment.
For example, here's Chomsky's take:
"Privatization does not mean you take a public institution and give it to some nice person. It means you take a public institution and give it to an unaccountable tyranny. Public institutions have many side benefits. For one thing they may purposely run at a loss. They're not out for profit. They may purposely run at a loss because of the side benefits. So, for example if a public steel industry runs at a loss it's providing cheap steel to other industries. Maybe that's a good thing. Public institutions can have a counter cyclic property. So that means that they can maintain employment in periods of recession, which increases demand, which helps you to get out of recession. Private companies can't do that in a recession. Throw out the work force because that's the way you make money."
You talk of OP's tired points - which I agree with - then cite Chomsky... can both "stupid extreme capitalism" and "stupid surrender leftism" be put to rest finally.
I have no idea what "surrender leftism" is supposed to mean, in relation to Noam or otherwise.
However, if we'd paid a little more attention to Noam's points about war (clandestine and overt, economic and military) and the media a few decades ago, we the people would be tens of trillions of dollars better off.
Millions of brown skinned folk would still be alive, tens of millions wouldn't have had to become refugees, and South America would be immeasurably better off.
If you have some kind of beef with Chomsky I suggest you take it up with him; I hear he's quite good at responding to people.
You missed the step where the public institution gets broken up into many smaller private competitors who are then incentivized to provide better/cheaper service to gain marketshare. The Soviet Union missed that step too when it collapsed. Monopolies are trouble whether private or public. Unfortunately, energy markets have a tendency to be dominated by local monopolies of both the public and private variety.
Rules for this market are a lot more complex than a straightforward producer / consumer one though. That give a lot of room for biased / non-optimal behaviors
For example, only gaz-based electricity producers « needs » to be paid such a high price. Nuclear or renewable would be perfectly fine with much lower price.
Or, if we had not one market, but one market per type of energy used to produce electricity, we would also have a « market driven » pricing, however the end-result would likely be much much different.
There's one market for grid delivered electricity because within the grid, electricity is mostly fungible. There's details of course, but if I need X kW @ 240VAC to run my house, business, or factory, my equipment doesn't care if it's from wind, solar, nuclear, or lemon batteries, as long as it's within the specifications, well synchronized and continuous.
There's some amount of market preference for different generation types, but that's a small portion of the load, so it's handled outside of the grid operation marketplace. It's also true that grids with limited interconnection have separate markets.
You could run a grid on a cost plus basis, but you lose the benefits of market economics as well as the negatives.
Yes but it's a multi-buyer multi-seller simultaneous auction for a required electricity load.
Some sellers will get more than they offered, but that's how the auction works, there can only be one market price to secure the given quantity of electricity.
Purely speculative but sounds more like greenwashing to me: sell grey energy on market at loss, buy back mixed or even green due to some loophole, collect subsidies which cover the difference or even more.
You must have omitted something in your example because it makes no sense.
>Czechs produce electricity at 0.1EUR/MWh
so far so good. Now you have -0.1EUR and 1MWh of power.
>then sell it to an exchange in Germany
suppose the market price is 400EUR. after selling it to an exchange you have 399.9EUR and 0 MWh of power
>and buy it back for the "market" price.
so you buy it back at the market price. Now you have -0.1EUR and 1MWh of power. That leaves you off... in the same position as step 1? What's the point in selling it to the exchange and buying it back?
Moreover, I don't see anything interesting happening here. You can replace "electricity" with "oil" and you basically describe how petro states work (ie. pump oil out of the ground, sell it on the global market for far more than it costs for you to pump it out of the ground).
the OP meant that the producer is allowed to sell to the higher priced exchange, rather than being forced to sell it at a low price to the consumer. Therefore, the OP is assuming that someone at the exchange is going to profit nicely without having done any work by arbitraging the sale of electricity.
I'm guessing that the missing variable is "cost plus" pricing for consumers? By selling the electricity on the market and then buying it back they can increase the price for consumer.
There are several energy markets, not just one. The most energy is bought and sold on private contracts on very long term. Then there is the "next-day" market, which is what this app shows. Then there is an hourly market to match instant demand and supply variations.
It is possible Czech producers sold energy to Germany for a very low price a few years ago on a let's say 5 year contract which is still valid. Now Czech Republic needs to buy at a high price the energy from Germany because it cannot meet its own demand. Again, this is speculation on how that could work.
That would almost certainly be the price per kilowatt-hour, not megawatt-hour, which would make a MWh ~100EUR. Anybody that is getting rich on the energy markets right now is either because they're better at betting on future energy prices than their rivals, or they have the ability to produce electricity when demand for it is extraordinarily high (both of which would qualify as 'a reason').
Thanks, will need to find the source again and see if it was indeed 0.1/kWh and not MWh (talking about production costs at a cheaper country with nuclear power plants fully paid for in the past).
EDIT: Just found out production costs from another source:
10 cents for a megawatt of electricity is an unheard of marginal cost in any situation.
your local costs in the US range from 5-25 cents per kilowatt hour (1/1000 of that), with ideal solar being the cheapest amortized at roughly 3 cents/kwh
This suggests that either the MP is incorrect, or they were misquoted, or some sort of accounting shenanigans are going on (infrastructure costs already paid for, etc.)
Some politicians in Latvia are using the same rhetoric: our hydro plants have a production cost of 0.1x/MWh, but nordpool price is xMWh. Somebody is stuffing their pockets!!
What they don't say is: some of our hydro plants are being maintained and the rest are capable of generating a fraction of country's needs.
Sure, some of the money goes to small privately owned plants, but the most goes to large state-owned plants, who are (ideally) using the money to upgrade their equipment and the rest goes to government as dividends, which will probably be spent to support heating expenses in winter..
I was starting to wonder the same. Are prices essentially going up, filling state coffers, so that politicians can promise subsidies to voters? What a weird way to make cash flow.
It's only partly true and the difference is not that extreme. The reason for this is simple: (to my knowledge) in EU electricity is traded via central stock in Germany. See e.g. this debunk article https://www.irozhlas.cz/zpravy-domov/overovna-energie-elektr...
(Czech national radio / in Czech)
Assuming that these statements are entirely true (sibling comments suggest otherwise), then "somebody over there" had the foresight or luck to install generating capacity ahead of tremendous demand.
If they hadn't done so, someone else might be getting even-more rich (per kWhr) by charging higher prices across an even wider geography.
That very much sounds like you're calling for the collapse of the integrated european energy market. This is not meant as an attack on you, just an observation that these nationalistic calls will continue growing louder from every part of the continent, and it is not even September yet. Already Norway has publicly commented on the possibility of rationing exports.
We have yet to even scratch the surface of the effects of this crisis
During the time of energy crisis why would the integrated energy market be the highest priority? Is it more important to trade, or to keep economy running utilizing whatever local advantages available?
That is true, and why not also ignore the frictions created by a single currency, free movement of labour and people, or the harmonization of judicial systems during times of crisis. Surely under such strain, it is only fair that Germany no longer subsidizes Italian public debt, institute border controls for the transport of gas and oil, eventually instituting controls for all energy-derived products of any kind where a pricing inefficiency is being exploited by any neighbour. It would mean Putin responded to our sanctions by destroying 70 years of European cooperation, and doing so without even so much as firing a single bullet.
Energy is the economy, and the failure of an integrated energy market means the failure of so much more.
That sounds like a fallacy of composition. Energy market is just one part of the whole and right now a very weak part. Capping the profits/restructuring the market temporarily would benefit the whole more than keeping running the same old approach that is literally destroying the economy right now.
There is an energy crisis across all regions of Europe; disrupting trade may help some places but hurt others much more and would make it worse in aggregate, so EU treaties prohibit that.
I mean, whenever electricity is being exported at high cost, that high cost is an indication that this other place has it even worse; and blocking trade would make electricity cheaper at the exporting place, but cause a larger spike (and possibly even blackouts with the associated economic disruption) at the importing place and also remove the economic incentives to increase surplus production at places who can do it cheaper than others.
That's in theory; in practice there is a bunch of resellers that are making crazy amount of money due to "merit pricing" that makes sense in a stable market, but not now. The places you mention are much worse off than by a simple price ceiling per electricity type.
This is really a contentless comment. It sounds like they are doing something that you deem problematic and nefarious according to your own ideology? So what?
>I've read somewhere that Czechs (day ahead price of 463EUR/MWh) produce electricity at 0.1EUR/MWh
No, that's entirely unrealistic. 0.1EUR per KWh is realistic, so my guess is that you misremembered the units. The price per MWh would then be 100 EUR. But not even that is realistic anymore for the Czech Republic, given they produce most energy from fossil fuels[1], and the prices recently have skyrocketed.
Now you may ask why they'd be selling to an exchange and buying it back for more (if that actually happens to a degree that matters). One reason is of course profit. Although one must not confuse the production price with the final consumer price or even the exchange price. Production is one thing, getting the power to where it's needed is another thing, accounting, taxes and so on.
Another reason for putting it into exchanges, is that they might at times produce more than needed, so selling off excess production seems somewhat reasonable as the kind of plants they are running cannot be started and stopped at will. At other times, they might not be producing enough, and then need to buy at exchanges.
It's not as easy as assuming somebody is just grabbing a lot of money. Although some money grabbing is most likely part of the answer as well.
Germany is selling energy as well, by the way. Germany has thus far net exported around 20 TWh this year[2]. The entire energy need of Germany is around 540 TWh per annum. That would suggest Germany (thus far) has exported a little over 5% of it's energy production to other European nations in this crisis year. It may have something to do with France currently having temporarily shut down 32 of its 56 nuclear reactors[3], with a net 10 TWh being exported from Germany in the direction of France. And it probably has something to do with Germany producing a lot more energy than it needs when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing nicely.
The Czech Republic on the other hand exported 6 TWh net to Slovakia and another 4 TWh to Austria. But in turn Slovakia exported almost 9 TWh to Hungary[4].
At least the scandinavian prices are from Nordpool. And they are only 24h averages while the real price of course varies every hour. I merely checked the price for Finland and it was correct.
That data centres in Sweden pay almost no electricity tax (5 SEK/MWh if I remember correctly) while consumers pay 36 is not popular with everyone. The map doesn't show that Sweden is divided into four areas. SE1 and SE2, the northernmost two and where some data centres are, have prices that most days are in the single-SEK/MWh range while in SE3 the prices might be tens of times higher. SE4, the southernmost area, has even higher prices due to the fact that (1) power is exported to markets where it is even more expensive and (2) because plants have closed down. The transmission capacity between SE3 and SE4 tends to be maxed out (as evidenced by the fact that prices differ).
AWS is in SE3, where the electricity is tens to a hundred times more expensive than for Facebook in SE1.
AFAIK Spain prices are not "real" in the sense that gas prices have been "capped" and electricity users have to pay generation companies that use gas a variable fee to compensate that cap.
Real end-user price is likely double
At the current electricity prices, break even point for household PV installations even in coldish climate (Latvia, Eastern Europe) is on the order of 3-4 years without subsidies.
Granted, it does not solve the problem that the energy I'll spend in the fall/winter has to come from somewhere but financially it is at the very least closer to being balanced out.
Also, this is in a country, where the net metering system is favorable to households (one can spend the full amount that has been fed to grid).
Not in Latvia- it's an online application, you get a decision (=does the grid have generation capacity in your location), and then submit an installation report signed by electrician.
Getting building permits for installations was waived this year (before that it varied by city).
At least here, the heatpump and installer availability seems to be the biggest bottlenecks.
I'm not looking forward to it, but I may end up having to install (ground source) heat pump myself (assuming it will be delivered this season at all- quote delivery date was June).
A solar charged EV will keep your house going for several days. Other storage solutions are available. With the right amount of square meters and storage, you could disconnect from the grid entirely. For most people that would be too expensive but it's perfectly feasible in large parts of the world. Especially the US. With the exception of Alaska, most of it is much further south than most of Europe. Plenty of sun hours throughout the year. Even in winter.
So, even in winter you'd be able to squeeze some kilowatt hours out of a few solar panels. Just install more of them until you have enough to charge up your batteries during the darkest part of the winter and you are good to go. Maybe add some wind to diversify.
For heating there are thermal storage solutions that use cheap materials like sand or basalt. Charge in the summer, heat in the winter. All you need is some pipes, mass, insulation and a way to dump energy in the system. There are various prototype systems operational already and they work as advertised. You might wonder about the cost of a silo of locally sourced sand. I'd say it's probably going to be dirt cheap.
EV batteries are going to be great for balancing the grid. Vehicle to grid charge connectors are already being standardized and multiple vehicles that support that are being produced already. Millions on the road in the next few years. Twh of power. A very tempting target for would be virtual power plant companies. Like Tesla.
The main challenge with wind and solar is bridging the few weeks a year where production of both may drop dramatically in the winter for more than a day. The combination of no wind, low sun and little amount of sun hours, and overcast skies is kind of deadly. In northern Europe that might last as long as a month. The rest of the year there is going to be either or both enough solar and wind.
Mostly the real challenge the rest of the time is actually what to do with the growing amounts of excess power. Plenty of answers to that but it's not a fully resolved issue. Mostly current wind operators seem to regularly disable their wind mills by weather-vaning them instead. They're not broken, they've been turned off because they are producing more than needed.
We're going to end up with way more power than what we need. People are installing solar panels on their roof that generate much more power than they need, even when aggregated over time. The current crisis is actually going to result in even more people doing that. This poses a serious challenge for energy produces still dumb enough to depend on burning fossil fuels. Most of the time they'll be selling at a loss or completely shutting down operations. And a few weeks a year they suddenly have to deliver a little bit of power. Not a great business to be in.
Green without a proper plan? Germany/Europe will be the green poster children on how not to do it. Guess who will damage the environment more in the end.
No matter what magic plan anyone comes up with it would take years to implement. Nuclear, more insulation, hydrogen, new gas fields. It's almost winter already.
Exactly, because it was all done without a proper plan. And they have been warned multiple times, laughter and sarcasm is unfortunately all they had as a reply.
Now this.
the magic plan should be to consume less and less and less. If we would consume 20% less, which should be absolutely doable, these problems would alleviate itself quite fast (well, we still should invest as much as we can in renewables). However, for that to happen we would need to have governments that are not afraid and act.
> If we would consume 20% less, which should be absolutely doable, these problems would alleviate itself quite fast (well, we still should invest as much as we can in renewables). However, for that to happen we would need to have governments that are not afraid and act.
Act how exactly? How do you propose on forcing everyone, citizens and enterprises, to consume less energy? Why would they want to do that? Transition to less energy intensive alternatives sure (like LEDs), but that's not easy, will require massive investments and is by the way already in progress.
More insulation is double edge sword. I moved into a super-energy-efficient house here in north/east Europe. Heating in winter is damn cheap. But retention works in summer too… so I had to get air conditioner :( And electrical ventilation is a must all year round to get air fresh, keep module at bay ant not loose energy living with open windows. Energy saving in bottom line will be abysmal :(
Removing insulation means house cools down fast once sun goes down. Which is important for sleeping. While there're myriad of ways to handle heat during the day.
That house would be much worse without the insulation. That's why it's unbearably hot in summer in say a shack made of out sheet metal (such shack would be much more bearable if it was insulated).
Metal shack would be worse in the middle of the day. Insulated house retains heat at night. Spending day outside is an option, spending a night is much worse.
During the night, you can... open windows and create draft? Unless the night is very hot, it should be enough to bring temperature inside down to manageable levels.
Long summer days up here mean that evenings stay hot. So „managable level“ is in the middle of the night at best. Obviously solution could be go to bed after midnight and then sleep in :)
You should leave the windows open at night to let the cooler air in and cool the insulation from the inside. Once you let the heat inside by opening windows in the heat, you have lost, that's true.
The key is not to let the heat in in the first place during the summer.
Thick external shutters do wonders in that regard.
Well insulated windows alone will let in the heat (in form of light) but not out again (IR).
I really wonder why these shutters are not way more common than they are.
You're probably missing thermal mass in the house. Comes with bio-sourced insulating material, but usually not with rock/glass whool or polystyrene & the like.
Thermal mass doesn't help if it's hot for a days. Then it just keeps the heat.
In winter, the house works great to retain heat. But as I learned during construction when I had to prepare for laying flooring, it took a while to heat it up.
My personal dream is house built into a slope. So earth around half-ish of the house can be used as thermal mass all year round.
Currently roof becomes heated. And there's crapton of insulation in the attic. Which heats up during the day in sunlight.. And then takes it's sweet time to cool down at night. And, if heat lasts several days, it doesn't even cool down by the morning.
Another solution would be a full-sized attic like in old houses. Now we didn't even bother to install crawl doors, because there's next-to-no space. Insulation takes up whatever is there. But large attic would be inefficient in winter. Unless we'd double-insulate it to keep heat in living quarters. But I wonder how long it'd take to recoup €€€€ and kwh/co2/etc spent for extra building materials/work wit lower energy usage.
Germany has been exporting electricity to France all summer, because they had to shut down more than half their nuclear power plants for maintenance and due to heat.
Why single out Germany when there are 14 countries on that list with higher prices?
Gas as a transitionary energy source is something lots of countries have bet on. Meanwhile France is doing a great job showcasing the problems of Nuclear during heat waves (they will be the ones laughing in the Winter though)
Hello from zone 4. Indeed, people here are pretty pissed about this. Basically, if an exporting transmission line got damaged, zone 4 prices would drop instantly.
Facebook will have a much lower price anyway. Large industries (like steel plants, mining operations, paper mills, saw mills, and, yes, data centers) in Sweden have not been affected yet since they are not normally directly exposed to the spot price due to different price protection strategies[0]. There is no way Facebook pays consumer spot prices. Plus Sweden has the lowest electricity tax in the EU[1] for these companies. They raised it from 0 in 2019 due to EU regulations to 0.005 SEK/kWh. Consumer electricity tax today is 0.45 SEK/kWh including VAT. I believe there is also a way to write off a part of the electricity costs.
My move to Sweden continues to pay unexpected dividends. And what the map shows is I suppose based on the average for the whole country - it's several times cheaper in the north (the "real" Sweden with auroras and stuff) than in the south.
Let's be real though, the society will fall apart before energy costs become a big problem for people working in tech.
Poland. As an EU citizen working online, it was as easy as buying a plane ticket, renting an AirBNB, registering a company, and waiting over a year until I got connected to the healthcare / social security system and such.
Is there ever a problem with everyone wanting to move to all the good places haha? I wonder if they will get really expensive to live in like California and New York. Not that I’m saying CA and NY are the “good” places of USA but many perceive it that way.
The house price inflation has been staggering across Sweden, but not so much in the rural north where I live. I don't think many people will ever want to move here, but for those with more mainstream idea of what a "good place" is, yeah, it's getting ever harder.
Language barriers prevent that to a large degree. People mostly move for better jobs, often only temporarily (for a couple of years), and largely only if their current area is econmically depressed.
I came here when I was 8 years old, and to me the "real" Sweden is everything from south to north, not just some single isolated part. I don't find the notion offensive, but it's contusive and somewhat foreign.
It's great that your small urban household can take the hit. It's becoming a real problem for single parents in the south.
I didn't mean to come off as offensive in this particular post, it was just an attempt at humour, hard to pull off online. I am actually completely oblivious as to whether this idea may or may not be offensive or strange to locals. Most people - even the Swedes - find the north rather harsh.
> It's great that your small urban household can take the hit. It's becoming a real problem for single parents in the south.
Meh, no bank wanted to give me a mortgage so I bought a cheap rural house. I am already subsidising the leveraged people's interest rates in my massive taxes, so excuse me if my sympathies do not extend very far.
In Denmark electric power consumption of homes have decreased by 10% in 2022. Apps that provide the variable hourly rate today and tomorrow are increasingly popular, and they are used to plan the best time to perform tasks that require electricity.
Current spot price in northern Norway is €10.16/MWh, while it is €745.08/MWh in southern Norway (73x the price), largely due to limitations in transport networks between the electricity zones. The price in the northern zone is so low that some hydro plants have stopped producing electricity as they would be losing money at the current price level.
All energy problem reduce to problems of energy transportation. We have a huge fusion reactor in the sky. The challenge is capture and transit. The problem is not incidental; it's fundamental.
Tell that to the proposed EuroAsia link (Greece-Cyprus-Israel) [1], or the proposed Australia-Singapore link [2]. Interconnector are getting longer and longer with each new generation.
The electrical loss through HVDC cable is approximately 3% per 1000 km of cable, far less than with AC grids. The physics do work out, the only real barriers are economics and politics.
Exactly, just like always before: only interconnects through oceans work because otherwise one government is entrusting its fate to another. In the best case that ends with countries paying tax to other countries' governments, in the worst case that ends in war.
The physics works out just fine. Where did you get your information from?
See also:
"On the technology front we have covered significant ground in the past two decades. We have raised power capacity from 50MW to more than 1,400MW – enough to power several million households. We have enhanced voltage levels from 80kV to 525kV, thereby increasing distance capability from 70km to over 1,000km. And at the same time we have continually brought down transmission losses which are now at less than 1 percent."
https://eepower.com/news/abb-doubles-hvdc-capacity-and-celeb...
Global power transfer (~2e7 meters) with current standard HVDC cables would lose 64%, which is still worth doing.
The cables are designed for crossing relatively small bodies of water such as the Mediterranean or the North Sea, and can be tweaked for more efficiency if the goal is to cross the Pacific Ocean, but even without that, it would still work.
There are many ways electricity can be converted to transportable chemical energy. We just haven’t yet done so cheaper than petroleum yet. The physics works fine, the economics not so fine (yet).
Remember that "transport" includes "to storage", which in turn includes some of the most efficient batteries in the form of connected reservoirs located at different heights so that gravity does the discharging work.
Also remember that there is a limited supply of single-use, liquid battery that was pre-charged long ago, but unfortunately it's exhaust is hopelessly harmful.
What are you talking about? Gravity batteries are literally two lakes at different heights, connected with pipes. You pump water up when you have an electricity surplus, and let it drain down through turbines when you need power. They're about as far opposite from "single use" as you can get =)
Since, as of today, electriciry cannot be stored, but is consumed the moment it is generated, we have all those problems. Base and peak load, PV and wind being less (not completely unusable as real life data shows) in line with eletricity consumption... The list goes on. And that fact is part of the reason why prices are going haywire.
I think you might not understand how a gravity battery works. You use the electricity to move water from a low basing up a mountain to a high basin. You then release that water and have it run through turbines to regenerate (a significant part of) the electricity you used to pump the water up. You don't store electricity, you store energy.
Oh, we call those things Pumpspeicher. Sure, and just how mucj of the total produced and consumed electricity is stored that way? The amount is negligible and the theoretical capacity limited.
Did you really think that the actual crisis is due to a single man choice?
Try a small game, put PR and the emotion they push aside: who need a war today? If you are honest you have to admit that the most in need of a war are UK first, USA second. UK need a war outside to avoid a civil war inside. Having essentially lost their "empire" status they are simply unable to live anymore. A war would compact people and if won give resource of the looser. USA need a war for similar reasons, mitigated by the fact that USA can actually live on it's own, even alone, "only" correcting it's crazy economy. Not easy at all, but technically possible, so practically when crisis really bite.
China do not need, but like, a war. They have a hyper big food issue, they need to conquer south America to eat. To do so they need to overpower the USA. To do so they need Russia's tech and natural resources, something Russia, a China's historic enemy, do not like that much to share to such a big & powerful giant.
Russia do not like a war at all. It's something that impose agreements with China, imbalanced. EU similarly do not need a war. It simply destroy EU itself due to the lack of natural resources.
A bottomline: saying that UK and USA need a war means their oppressive ruling classes need it, of course NOT the people, unfortunately as most people in the world those who do need the opposite of their ruling class are the last to understand they are fighting for their own enemy that's not those on the opposite front, but those who march at their head.
UK lost their "empire" status in early 20th century and seems to be able to live without it. USA is oleophillic in nature but definitely does not need war. So does nobody else.
Russia may not like a war but Russia needs resources since it wants to be the only store in neighborhood, and unfortunately, Ukraine does have resources. War was not expected outcome of the initial scare tactic but here we are.
That's is, that's what I do not understand the partisanship reaching a fanatic state to the point of completely distort reality. Yes, UK have lost the "empire" status in the 20th century BUT the Commonwealth is still there. They are still a talassocracy even if their grip on some of the most important colonies (Canada, Australia) is faded. Now they start facing a real threat to them and can't defend them in any way. China overpower Australia to a point UK can't logically even try to defend it. Russia overpower Canada to a very similar point. So far both power have no reasons to go to war, of course, but they can and UK know it very well. USA are the sole former colony very able to defend itself but is also the less keen to serve UK.
However both UK and USA are failed states, their extreme capitalism put too much of their population in poverty and without immigration they simply fall on their own weight.
As before they NEED a war to overthought the table and start over. And they have actually created that, it's not a secret, it's written black on white if only you read their publications from RAND to G8. They use a slightly strange vocabulary but it's clear what they state. They call themselves "the international community" or "the civilized world" but it's clear they just mean their fragmented former colonies. The same have happened in the recent past with the Korea war, as it happened their former colonies start to decide it's time to detach a bit, like SK an Japan themselves https://asiatimes.com/2022/08/japan-korea-defy-us-with-big-r... and even New Zealand https://thediplomat.com/2022/07/new-zealand-will-not-join-th... Australia itself suffering the submarines scam the UK and USA essentially have imposed to them ditching modern but limited French subs to exactly nothing since for a decade at least that's what they'll get (less than nothing since they have payed compensation for the late choice) start to falter undecided witch side to take. Only high treason neoliberal government in the EU keep the USA/UK side against their own Citizens interests.
The above are NOT political or ideological positions but simply facts anyone observing with honesty no matter the personal political position can't avoid to see.
It was Russia who started war in 2014, and - now officially nazi - escalated in February. None of your links claim or suggest otherwise. What they describe is just politics - and does not on any way give Russia the right to invade.
What is the right to invade for you? Something like pretending there are hidden mass disruption weapons you know are not there but you want to invade because the about-to-be-invaded country decide to sell oil in € instead of dollars? Or pretending that a country you want to control hide someone you look for? Or pretending there is a repressive government while you just pursue United Fruits co private interest?
All of the situations you've mentioned were crimes against humanity. One day Americans will realise that. But those wars are over, while the Rashist invasion is taking place as we speak. Also, look at the scale: Russians killed over hundred thousand civilians in Mariupol alone.
Are you telling me that Sweden, a country of 10 million people, which has wildly differing electricity prices within that same small country¹, could simply use copper conductors to solve this problem, but chooses not to for political reasons?
If I had to guess — and it would be a guess, I'm a software engineer not an economist or a politician — I'd just give the usual catch-phrases that seem to cover everything in politics: is it popular? How much would it cost and what else can we spend that money on? Will this be finished in my term? How likely is the situation which makes this useful (without the benefit of hindsight)?
Men även med så intetsägande och generiska uttalanden betyder det faktum att jag inte kan någonting om svensk politik att jag kanske saknar något som någon svensk väljare skulle anse som "sunt förnuft".
I'm honestly curious about a thing, that might sound not so in-topic, but that is, actually: HN is supposed to be a technically sound community, however when someone post about some trendy neoliberals-related topics a certain part of the community instead of remain technical start to be partisan, sometimes at fanatic levels.
The in-topic part is for instance about p.v.: if you think a global electricity grid as a solution you dream something that seems to be logic, if you are a manager but is a totally crazy idea because we are not AT ALL a global community. Even if some neoliberals call themselves World Government [1] the reality is that we are various States with different interests and NOTHING at a certain scale can work simply because of that, any other thing aside.
Not only: the idea that we have the production capacity, substitution included, to build and run such monster is another dream, with the same realism of those who say "hey, I produce 130% of my consumption from p.v.". It's an old classic of those who "try and fix on the go", who typically create hyper-big disasters and survive thanks to those who do not work as them. If the entire world take this path such a big fail will not be solved by anyone.
This is why, although I prefer a global power grid, I suspect storage is going to be the main solution to energy being wanted in a different time or place than it is generated.
If we can have it of course, it's a godsend. BUT we can't. I have a small lithium storage, I see how fast it get depleted and how quick performance degrade. In 8-9 years I expect it will be just rubbish. If I compute how it's produced, how much energy, pollution, it need to exists brand new in my home, and how so far we can't recycle...
We have some effective storage, like pumped hydro, yes, but we have them where we can, we do not build mountains so far, for instance. Compressed air storage prove to be possible at a certain scale, but so far is just a promise with some experiments and honestly I doubt the actual push is ONLY for environmental and economical reasons. I think we start suspecting that oil is at the end, and we have just 2 decades or so remaining so we need to rush finding alternatives...
> If I compute how it's produced, how much energy, pollution, it need to exists brand new in my home, and how so far we can't recycle...
Recycling is possible — even the absolute dumbest way I can imagine, which is grind the battery into dust and put that dust into the process used to separate rocks into their constituent elements, is still better than mining the actual rocks you'd otherwise get them from.
Recycling facilities better than that necessarily only scale to whatever battery quantity existed x years ago.
But also, the pollution mostly comes from energy, so making the grid greener makes the batteries greener which makes the grid greener etc.
However, you're missing one of the cheapest storage systems: hydrogen. The round-trip efficiency isn't great, but given how cheap PV is, this isn't bad enough to be a problem.
Yes, recycling is possible, but so far it's almost not done because it's still far more expensive than mining... Perhaps a day things will be different, but seen the actual progress I'm not such optimistic...
About hydrogen... Well... How much it costs an hydrolysis plant with relevant compression system and storage PLUS the needed fuel-cell to use it once milked? Personally I've already spent for a new house, with relevant not-that-cheap systems, heat-pumps included, who might last 10 years as well (compressor), in the near future an EV who might last 10 years but 5 to 8 seems to be more realistic... Adding the price of a smaller house to add hydrogen start to be REALLY expensive. Long story short: if the Green New Deal demand such big investments I think just 2-3% of the total population in the western countries can afford it, witch does not make anything ecological just for mere scale. If we try bigger scale... So far I see nothing really big (beside old scams). Yes, some p.v. plants pops up continuously but they are small in classic PP scale terms and just grid-connected systems. Only a handful of projects do differently around the world and seems to be in a really early stage of experimentation...
I have nothing against pay to be a pre-alpha tester BUT there is a limit for that honestly...
The typical power capacity of a gas/coal/nuclear power plant vs the typical capacity of a p.v. one. In general flourishing p.v. plants are far smaller than typical fossil/nuclear power plant. Some big projects in exotic places do exists, in early stage, like the recent Uzbekistan push (who already made unrest and armed revolts) like the old Desertec scam. But real-world active p.v. power plant offer a nominal far little mean power respect of the others.
> And are you aware the combined nameplate capacity of all global PV is now close to one terawatt?
How does it count? I can state equally that the actual uranium collected in human hands can produce far far far more, but that's just a statement simply because "nominal" count nothing. What count is that so far no one is autonomous with p.v. alone, living a normal life, running business etc and so few are partially autonomous with very expensive and little lasting batteries. I'm one of them, since I have a small p.v. with lithium storage. Oh with the artificially skyrocketed electricity prices perhaps (still unsure) it will pay back. But I still need the grid for 50% of my consumption, while some state enthusiastically that "hey you can produce 130% of your energy needs", witch is formally true, practically false because I can't shift my consumption just when the Sun shine AND use it at 100%. I call it the difference between the beancounter computed reality and the physical world reality. Seeing that, and the actual climate I suspect we have the same issue with Green New Deal claims.
> In general flourishing p.v. plants are far smaller than typical fossil/nuclear power plant.
Why do you consider this important, rather than the aggregate output of all of them together?
As you say later, you've got PV on your own roof. If everyone in a small city does that, it's the same output as a nuclear plant, if they do that with a battery pack each (and I add a caveat about installation costs which I'm told are needlessly high in some places such as the US) then it can also be the same cost and reliability as a nuclear plant.
(Nuclear is expensive, so batteries backing PV is not (yet) no-brainer cheap, this is part of why I suggest hydrogen and/or global grid whenever the topic comes up).
> Some big projects in exotic places do exists, in early stage, like the recent Uzbekistan push (who already made unrest and armed revolts) like the old Desertec scam.
What Uzbekistan push? What are the rioters supposed to do with any of this?
What Desertec scam? The investors backing out? Because that's just normal for business, and the organisation of that name is still around.
> offer a nominal far little mean power respect of the others.
I have no idea what this is trying to say.
> How does it count? I can state equally that the actual uranium collected in human hands can produce far far far more, but that's just a statement simply because "nominal" count nothing.
What do you mean "how does it count"? It's a significant contributor to the global electricity supply.
> I'm one of them, since I have a small p.v. with lithium storage. Oh with the artificially skyrocketed electricity prices perhaps (still unsure) it will pay back.
Given lithium batteries are the most expensive storage option, and despite that cost it's still something close enough you're unsure about, and it's still getting cheaper, why are you so pessimistic?
> Why do you consider this important, rather than the aggregate output of all of them together?
It's important in term of national grid design: we have a grid designed to push large amount of power from a single areas to many consumers, not ones designed to move amps around a country... It's not hyper-important especially respect with the variability of the output who impose hyper-quick generators to compensate oscillations quick enough to keep the grid on, but it's still relevant because it strain the grid significantly creating locally problematic frequency perturbation.
> As you say later, you've got PV on your own roof. If everyone in a small city does that, it's the same output as a nuclear plant, if they do that with a battery pack each (and I add a caveat about installation costs which I'm told are needlessly high in some places such as the US) then it can also be the same cost and reliability as a nuclear plant.
So far it's only in my garden, having a east-west root, but the real issue is that I'm FAR from being autonomous... To be almost autonomous (witch means no grid usage most of the year) I'll need something like 200kWh storage with the needed p.v. to recharge at least 40kWh in 3-4 hours + supply in the same amount of time enough peak power to run most home appliances like 3kW (absorption) heat-pump to quickly heat enough water to pass the rest of the day, night and new early morning in cold winter days, +5-6kW of various home appliances (dishwasher, washing machine, ...) to been able to very quickly do most high power usages in few hours of sunny days in winter dedicating the rest just to basic self-consumption to strain batteries the minimum possible and passing the night with no more than 15% daily DoD. That's means something impossible in essentially all EU cities (too dense) and possible only for some not-so-small homes around the EU south. Nothing more.
Oh, if I add H₂ to the game, something not on sale so far and then something I can't add anyway no matter how much money I put on the table, the price and needed equipment skyrocket even more... Perhaps in France just 2-3% of total population can do something like the only lithium + p.v. + hot water storage. All the rest can't economically and most of them even physically constrained by their homes and terrain sizes.
> What Uzbekistan push? What are the rioters supposed to do with any of this?
http://www.desertec-uk.org.uk/reports/DII/DPP_2050_Study.pdf Desertec was, partially is, since partially was founded and some little PP was made, by a classic private-public mafia-aggregation ranging from major Germans banks, Siemens, ABB, Cevital, ... others from energy sectors, even the Morocco's Royal funds and others big names from Ignacio Campino, Fritzhjof Fi...
EU countries are actually interconnected, but when it's night in Berlin it's also night in Paris, Lisbon, Madrid, Rome, ... so all EU p.v. do not produce, while the whole EU keep consuming.
So no, if you want a world that run on p.v. you need a global grid to harvest enough energy AND I doubt even if such monster can be done in a snap and work flawlessly that we can even harvest enough power at ground level.
Harvesting from orbit beside the fact it's so far mere theory have various major issues, not just in environmental terms (a catastrophic impact, probably higher than a nuclear war on ground) but in mere technical terms: without the atmospheric shield anything in orbit at a certain scale have a very short life span. Substitute them demand a very big quantity of fossils and an industrial capacity we do not have in the entire world so far.
Nuclear fusion on ground is the most promising tech but so far it's far from being ready, seen the actual status PERHAPS we can have it at an initial general availability around 2060-2070. Before we have just fission. Now if we invest in fission witch is far from cheap and simple to build on scale it's a nonsense also investing in p.v. witch is far less expensive but for what? Once a reactor is started you consume uranium anyway, producing energy from steam or not. p.v. might play a role in averaging the load, theoretically, that means "please all loads that can be run just when the Sun shine do run them only with it", but doing so for now is pure theory and at a nationwide grid scale it's already almost impossible. Beside that we have an enormous issue: climate change. Did you know how vulnerable are infra on ground?
We try the small reactor path NOT because they are safe (it's the opposite), not because they are cheap (again, it's the opposite), but because they are flexible: instead of depend on LARGE infra we can deploy small one so reducing the impact of any outage.
In the nearer future we have the nightmarish problem of replace oil and gas sparing them for the use we do not know how to do without them. In the mid-term future we need resiliency and nuclear fission, another nightmare. In a mid-long term we hope for fusion, but we do not really know and we anyway need to essentially rebuild the changing world coping with sea levels rises, floods, landslides etc that push people in altitude locally and world-scale migration in general. That's the actual sore reality for what we can see directly and read from so many sources with contrasting interest to being able to call them very likely true.
> doubt even if such monster can be done in a snap and work flawlessly that we can even harvest enough power at ground level.
While it would take a while to build a global power grid, we have the capacity to produce approximately ten thousand times our current global power usage from ground-level PV.
> we have the capacity to produce approximately ten thousand times our current global power usage from ground-level PV.
I'm a bit skeptical, but in any case consider a thing: we need to count an initial construction BUT also a regular substitution of old modules, managing their disposal (witch actually is just shred and bury in most cases) and in doing so we need to count the life cycle: if we construct something slowly things reach EOL in small batches so we can keep a regular production since the initial demand is not hyper-big and the future substitution rate start BEFORE the initial demand finished and keep a slow rate. If we are quick:
- we need a monster production to satisfy the demand
- then the demand drops equally sharply and you get hyper-big factories who do almost nothing
- the the demand skyrocket again
If you think it's theoretical see actual Italy: a gazillion of CA infra was built quickly in few years after WWII, now are en equal batch EOL... There is a reason, more than one, why almost any big project end up badly while most small succeed...
1.740 × 10^17 W ≈ total power received by Earth from the Sun
1.91 × 10^13 ≈ average total power consumption of the human world in 2019
> If we are quick
I don't know about the growth of batteries other than "factories are being made as fast as they can be, and car companies are investing in mines now", the growth of PV is still approximately exponential. Also, if PV production switches from growth to fixed output at the end of this year, given how long the stuff lasts, it would end up in a steady state of about 8 TW nameplate capacity; given what the capacity factor is like, in practice that would be enough to make all electricity green but not enough to electrify everything else.
I'm not expecting the exponential to come to a sudden stop at the end of this year.
> most small succeed...
Do they, though? I think you're just not hearing about most of the small failures because they're boring.
The estimated total energy Sun push toward Earth have little to do with the potential fraction of p.v. we can really deploy. There are enormous constraints from water, too hot places, areas subject to floods, wildfires, ... without counting the real capacity to build and replace solar panels and batteries witch so far no one really know.
About projects, in any field, big, complex projects normally never get done well, smaller normally succeed. That's is. Since it's valid from IT to A&D why it should be different for something else?
Those things don't add up to a factor of ten thousand.
Off topic, but why do you consistently spell "which" as "witch"? I sympathise if it's ESL, but if so: the latter refers to pointy hats and pentagrams, not a determiner.
Have people considered battery trucks? I don't mean battery-powered trucks, but trucks full of batteries. It seems kind of silly when you can use hydrogen or natural gas in your trucks instead, but battery trucks may be the lowest-loss form of long-distance electricity transport.
Without thinking too hard about the efficiency, it's clearly just not a _safe_ proposition with our current best (most energy-dense per weight) batteries.
Why not then just charge batteries where you need them and keep them at place for when the Sun goes to sleep?
Why would you transport batteries around?
Because some places have excess amounts of hydropower and other places have huge energy shortfalls. Not everyone is using solar/wind power. It is a pretty straightforward arbitrage. I have no idea if it's worth doing, though.
It’s pretty obvious that it isn’t at least not with lithium batteries. They are way to expensive and heavy. e.g. assuming an around 36 000 kg total payload the truck would have to use up 1/3 of all the electricity it stores just to travel around 600km. This combined with general inefficiency of batteries and the extreme cost would make it an absolutely terrible alternative to HVDC.
Some Battery train companies include this in their plans.
Even non Battery electric trains can speed up or slow down at different points (while still staying on schedule) to act as a variable demand for the local grids. Batteries just extend that.
> The analysis becomes very interesting when the researchers leave freight behind and start thinking about what could be done with many big, mobile batteries. Even without moving them, freight companies could use their capacity to provide grid stabilization services or sell back power when the price gets high. In extreme cases, this system could actually pay for the entire infrastructure.
> "Preliminary estimates of the most expensive 90 hours per year in the ERCOT [Texas] market, for example, show that batteries could be discharged at $200/kWh, potentially generating enough revenue to pay for the upfront battery cost in a single year," the study says.
> The batteries could also be moved to locations that have been struck by power outages or natural disasters, towed there by locomotives running on diesel instead of draining the batteries.
Hot water heaters are the the low hanging fruit here. Australian water heaters have been using overnight coal power for decades with very basic systems.
It's not an (isolated) incident, it's fundamental (part of the foundation, a core part of) to energy management. What that means is that the issue is expected; it's always been an issue when dealing with energy and always will be.
"You don't have a white/silver roof on your house? Fuck you."
I am one of your fuckees. The house I bought was expensive enough as it was. I am not changing a brand new dark roof for a different one for an exorbitant price right now, because budget. A perfectly new roof going down (isn't that actually waste?) for saving, say, 10 of 30 days when the AC is really needed?
(I am also not even sure if roof colors are regulated by the local authorities or not. There are over thirty houses in the same project, with the same roofs. Maybe I wouldn't even be allowed to.)
I'm talking people building or renovating and then bitching about expensive AC. Talk about idiotic.
I'm in a town where more than half the roofs are black. BLACK! It has been over 30 degrees and sunny for two months of summer. Guess what complaints I kept hearing?
Reflective paint helps in summer much more than it hurts in winter.
But beyond that, I just hate people going "Reeee we need to do something about the climate change" who do absolutely nothing themselves.
You don't have to replace the roof. You can coat it in a white, "elastomeric" paint like [1]. Each bucket can do about 450 sq ft (40 sq m) and is ~$100 for the supplies.
In California, roof color isn't regulated, but reflectivity (or rather energy absorption) is by Title 24. You're basically required on new construction to have a fairly efficient roof.
I have a new all-electric home and a p.v. system with lithium storage, ALSO living in a sunny place (French Alps of the south, in altitude) I'm FAR from being autonomous. But really far.
If I want to go fully autonomous I have to spend in batteries like the same price of a Lamborghini, for zero re-sale value, to be demolished in 10 years in theory, in practice more likely 7-8 years if I use them with significant daily important DOD. I also doubt we are even able to produce enough battery and panels to everyone. And I'm not alone: https://www.economie.gouv.fr/files/files/directions_services... essentially the governmental, non-interested report state: we can't run on renewable. That's is.
What I'm curious is another thing: why some on a technically sound community like HN with certain topics became totally partisan of this or that topic at fanatic levels. It's not you, it's a trend I see in the last months at least, for various topics: anytime there is a post with a neoliberal agenda hot topic such behaviors appear.
My honest review:
- I spent a very big amount of money to build a new home, witch will not pay back ever in monetary terms, only pay back in comfort terms;
- I spent more for renewables NOT because they are ecological (they are pollutant) but as a protection against future disruption I imaging we will suffer, again in economical terms money dumped to the bin;
- I'll spend more in the near future for an BEV because I expect diesel/gasoline supply issues and artificially skyrocketed prices.
The synthesis? Well: those who have done such investments will be far less wealthy then before. Those who have not done that or can't will be far poorer. Those who gain are ONLY those who push such evolution for almost pure financial reasons, not "green" at all in ecological terms, green just in dollar and stereotypical toxic waist terms. Since it's clearly NOT sustainable nor extendable on scale the obvious results will be a very big disaster and another global war.
To be autonomous? Seeing the actual meteo I need something like 40kWp p.v., 10k liter of hot water as a reserve, subdivided in 500l batch to being able to re-heat only some reservoirs depending on the meteo, around 400kWh storage since to make it last I should not normally go more than 85-90% SOC every day.
Did you ever try the real autonomy game? Just consider that in winter you can count on few hours of Sun let's say one day yes and one no, if you live like me in France south. In those hours you need to run anything together. You have postponed dishwasher, washing machine, you have to cook, heat both sanitary water and reserve for night and early morning home heating, recharge the batteries, car's battery included etc.
For instance to heat enough water to heat my home a single day (~2000 liters at 60℃ to get in the morning at 32-33℃) I need a powerful heat pump, let's say 3kW absorbed. I need ~2kW per home appliance (dishwasher, washing machine, coffee maker, induction for a single pot etc) I might have good enough Sun from 9.30 in the morning to let's say 14.30. Some appliance are very quick (like a coffee maker) but some are not (the dishwasher heat water few times for 8-10' a time over 90' timeframe, the washing machine normally only one time) recharging a massive battery demand both a certain amount of sustained power to avoid unbalanced cells, demand little power for a not that short time to balance them at the end of the charge etc. Essentially I need around 25kW for around 4+ hours per day. Being able to count casually passing clouds in the meantime. Not only. Such system need to be constantly managed to lower quickly and mount quickly the load following p.v. production. Some appliance can potentially and practically (for instance modern heat-pump water heaters are already made to be controlled by some modbus/mqtt automation), some can just potentially (nothing on sale do that, but it's possible), some can't.
Really try the game, including home heating in winter, NOT counting on the grid even for small loads.
This is why the real magic of fossil fuels isn't the energy they contain, but their energy density.
An efficient, large scale global economy is only possible with incredibly high energy density (and easy to transport and convert into usage energy) energy sources.
And, to your point, even global food supply is ultimately an issue of transporting energy from the sun to human bodies largely in the form of plant based carbohydrates. Human's ability to expand around the globe is predicated on the ability to transport the caloric requirements efficiently.
Solar energy isn't the panacea that people make it out to be. Where it is abundant, it makes sense. A lot of places do not have that luxury, yet countries like Germany made foolish investments in solar power which is 10% efficient compared to its full potential in Southwestern USA.
Is an investment foolish if it has a positive ROI? I live in Belgium, and even without subsidies and before the current increases in electricity prices, solar panels had a payback period of ~ 10 years (while they generally last ~ 25 years). Why would it be foolish to invest in this?
You say that they would be 10x as efficient in Southwestern USA. But how would you transport the electricity from the USA to Germany? Isn't that exactly the problem that the previous commenter is pointing out? I.e. production is not the problem, transportation is.
The same thing which transfers electricity from a distant nuclear reactor to your home can also transfer it from a distant solar panel.
This means that two different houses each with PV can support each other when one is sunny and the other cloudy.
In principle that would scale to the world; in practice that's the domain of politics rather than technology, and politics may push for one of many other solutions.
Not really true. Power from distant nuclear reactor or any other big generator comes over high voltage lines with small loses. Power from your panels go straight in the low voltage network which has high loses and is used for very short distances. That means you cannot support other houses which have clouds over them.
Your statement about transformers makes little sense within a context of power grids. You start by pushing power into 230 V system, which has a maximum tolerance of around 250V, after that you can damage electrical equipment connected to those line. That alone will limit how much power you can push out into the grid. An then through how many transformers and miles of wires will the electricity you produce go before it reaches high voltage lines, which are needed to transfer power over distances?
On the other hand the nuclear power station turbine generates power with a voltage of 20 KV feeding it to a high voltage transformer, which steps up the voltage to 200KV and is connected directly to the transmission lines.
Is there a point to your rhetorical question or do you have troubles understanding the difference between an ideal component vs a real component in a live system?
The sun is responsible for a lot more of our energy than just solar. Photosynthesis, wind, solar (of course), hydro, are all energy sources that directly capture energy from the sun, which we then use. Like the parent poster said, it's about transportation. Sometimes nature does that transportation for us.
Absolutely, Sun is also responsible for oil and natural gas if you stretch the horizon longer. Perhaps the only source of energy we have not capture from the Sun is nuclear, which may have been a result of supernova explosions. This pedantry aside, Germany needs better energy policy that is grounded in fundamental resource economics, not driven by ideology/potitical will, but with a stern look at their national energy security (or lack there of) and secure it by the means that's necessary.
Cost of energy has multitude of secondary effects on GDP and food security; the importance of which cannot be understated.
Already exists. The main limitation is the number of cables and GW capacity.Also ramping up cable production has a bit of latency and installing them even more. And it's capital intensive and only makes sense when electricity prices are high. They are right now but that's not a permanent situation.
And the problem with building massive interconnects that are rarely used is that it’s not economical to do so. They need to be encouraged by outside means.
A political issue with this is that Northern Norway has been exempt from the 25% VAT as one of many measures to make living in Northern Norway more attractive. Until now the cost of power in both north and south has been pretty much the same, meaning people in power zone NO4 have paid about the same price for power, but not the VAT.
But now that the price has gone up by such an enormous amount in the south, connecting north and south will not reduce the price in the other zones, it will likely just cause NO4 to go up to the same level as in the rest of Norway. This is mainly due to the NO4 being basically not connected to the the synchronous grid of Continental Europe, while the other regions are to a much larger extent due to underwater cables going to the UK, Denmark and Germany. This means that the price of power in Europe directly influences the price of electricity in NO1-3, but not NO4. At least not to the same extent, although Sweden makes a killing buying cheap power from NO4 and selling it to mainland Europe, or even straight back to southern Norway. As such, connecting NO4 to the rest of Norway and by extention the European grid, would not be very popular in the north, but to be fair, the price increase has not exactly been popular in the south either.
The industry in Norway is highly electrified and some sectors are very energy intensive, such as aluminium production, which due to using electrolysis, runs almost entirely off the grid. Manufacturing used almost 37% of all power consumed in Norway in 2017, with power-intensive manufacturing accounting for over 80% of total energy use in the manufacturing sector that year.[0] This is also an issue which will need to be considered when talking about increasing transfer capacity between the two zones.
I hope this gives some insight, even if I rambled a bit and touched on a lot of different aspects. I'm by no means an expert, but have become interested in the subject as so many other Norwegians have lately. I'd love to answer more questions if you have any!
This is a great post. This part: <<This is mainly due to the NO4 being basically not connected to the the synchronous grid of Continental Europe>> and this part: <<Sweden makes a killing buying cheap power from NO4 and selling it to mainland Europe, or even straight back to southern Norway.>>
Ouch! Is this not enough to push for interconnect? Or will the electricity price increases prevent such a change?
Alternatively, why hasn't more heavy industry been built in NO4 zone? Or is it not possible due to winter weather?
I also heard that in Norway, a high percentage of electricty is generated from gravity (water dams). That would make aluminium production ideal. I have heard this is one reason why Iceland, with excelent geothermal energy sources, is also a major aluminium producer.
Never say electricity is generated from gravity, that is an instant reveal that you don't know much physics. It's hydro power, water power, or hydroelectric power. Gravity is everywhere, water is not. Energy can be extracted only where the water is.
Hey, apologies for not seeing your reply before now.
I agree the selling of power to ourselves via Sweden seems weird, but I suppose it's better to do just that instead of having to drain the dam without producing electricity at all, and it's a solution which works at this moment instead of waiting for an interconnect to be built. I would hazard a guess that it does slightly reduce the cost of power in other regions whenever we do sell to Sweden from NO4, but I have no data. I haven't really heard much about this exact issue being discussed though, so I don't have much information regarding that. But the issue with prices jumping to European levels would be relevant here too.
There is a lot of heavy industry in the north, such as petroleum, mining, refining and others. Norway does have a large aluminium industry which does rely more or less exclusively on hydro power, and seems to be in the top ten of aluminium producing countries, just above Iceland.
Limitations in transport capacity is only one part of it, a large part is that the northern zone have had rain most of the summer, much more than usual, while the south have had a dry summer. We did basically get all the rain the rest of Europe have been missing this summer
Neither investment in EVs and repairing transmission issues live in isolation and both can be invested in at the same time. Solving one issue might also help solve the other (e.g. charging EVs can occur at non-peak times which balances energy demands, and in future EVs could be used as batteries to discharge into the grid during peak times).
Backlash is probably because such argument can sound like “better give up on EVs and go back to ICE” rather than “let’s invest more in the energy infrastructure”.
If you call people fanatics, they won’t believe you’re making a good faith argument.
California has to shut down their grid occasionally just because it's in such poor repair that wildfires are a risk. I can't imagine how they are going to handle everyone getting EVs.
Solar and distributed storage help fight this. A significant amount of charging off peak also actually reduces the load, making things more reliable and cleaner.
Fire related grid shutdowns are usually hyperlocal, meaning the few who need to charge during that time can just run a town over. (keep in mind that EVs can be charged just less than once a week for average use)
Street-level and medium-voltage distribution, sure, but nobody wants to bury 100+ kV lines unless they really have to, because it's hugely expensive and also has much higher losses.
This isn’t true. In most places I’ve been, electrical lines have all been elevated on poles. Where I currently live, there is a pretty intensive line clearing program each spring to keep the lines clear. Even in places where house level lines were buried, the middle transmission lines were still elevated.
And I believe all high voltage transmission lines are above ground.
The difference is that California historically has fire prone conditions. It’s not like the rest of the country is doing something different and California has done something inherently wrong. It’s that California did what the rest of the country was doing, but without conditions to support it.
This is a very common way to setup power lines in the US.
It is significantly cheaper than burying lines from an initial cost point of view, so as long as the cost of preventive maintenance is low enough, it is a viable option. Particularly if the cost to fix lines is also low.
As an added bonus, it then also becomes easier to hang other lines (telephone, cable, fiber) on the same poles. This more difficult to do with buried lines, even if the lines are in conduit.
I’d prefer my electrical lines to be buried too, but I at least understand why they aren’t.
The transmission issues will be solved: more and more HVDC interconnections start construction in Europe every year. Grids that still rely heavily on coal and natural gas can, and will, be improved.
An EV bought today will only get cleaner as the grid gets cleaner. A new fossil-fuel vehicle today will always be dependent on fossil fuels, and will always pollute at least as much as the day it was purchased.
We don't have perfectly impact-free ways of creating energy. So using less energy to achieve the same goal is always better. And carbon dioxide is not the only pollutant that cars emit.
Technically correct but missing the point. Conventionally, burning things, PV, wind, etc. are all classified as "creating energy" even if it makes thermodynamics pedants unhappy.
it’s a more practical solution for right now though. we can’t expect the world to switch its entire infrastructure overnight, or even quickly. yes, the rich nations might get a head start, but they represent such a small fraction of emissions.
and automotive emissions account for ~10% of all CO2 emissions. 20% if you want to include all transport (e.g. sea shipping, planes, etc.)
there’s been a lot of media attention on how individuals need to make an effort to beat climate change, but the reality is that industry is the only sector able to make a meaningful impact.
Exactly. If we could cut global emissions by even 10%, it would make a pretty meaningful dent in climate change. Unfortunately, as of now, global emissions are still rising!
Its not practical. The extra energy costs act like a high tax.
It might make sense, for a while with aircraft, or for a classic car that rarely gets used, but would be too expensive for developing nations to use when they have other options. They'd save lots of money by using the same energy directly in newly built (or converted) EVs.
I really hate this "overnight" argument, because it's used to avoid starting. Nobody claims that we can switch to EVs over night. We could however switch to only producing EVs in like two to five years and fifteen to twenty years later almost all cars could be EVs. That's plenty of time to fortify the electric grid for the extra demand and build adequate numbers of charging points for people without garages.
All of them? The typical car is moved less than 100km per day and is parked upwards of twenty hours a day. With a kilowatt or two you car charge the car.
There's 10 houses on my street, if every house had 2 cars and each drove 50 miles a day at 3 miles per kWh, and the cars are parked 10 hours overnight, that's 3kW per house
As we can all boil a kettle (3kW), or have a shower (10kW), or cook a sunday roast (5kW), and indeed do those at the same time, it's not a problem.
This response is correct. Be sure to forward it to the folks in the EU this winter when they're unable to charge their cars or heat their homes.
We should be thinking long term, but we can't forget about the present and the path to the glorious future. I think in hindsight we'll soon admit that we botched the transition to a greener world and caused needless suffering by putting ideologies before engineering.
You’ve got it backwards. The current energy problems in Europe are due to a reduction in the supply of imported natural gas, nothing to do with renewables.
By reducing Europe’s dependence on imported fossil fuels, renewables are part of the solution to energy security.
Germany’s obsession with solar and wind is absolutely baffling. It takes very little to know that Germany simply does not have the conditions for large scale solar.
Yet it was pushed so heavily in lieu of nuclear power. Absurd.
Yeah but nuclear fuel can be sourced from elsewhere - it does not have the steep physical barriers of nat gas. And any existing nuclear power issues can be solved.
The amount of sunlight your receive, however, will always be the same.
This meme has to end, there’s only one nuclear power plant in France (Blayais) that has no cooling towers, and another 4 have to occasionally throttle power output due to ecological concerns (used water is too hot, they currently have temporary exceptions).
The water is never too hot to cool the reactors, it's too hot to release back into the river, for environmental reasons. Evaporative cooling solves that problem, but then you "lose" water, which is never great in a heat wave.
A nuclear plant using sea water never stops due to heat waves, because it can dilute any amount of hot water.
The water can get too hot and/or short in supply to cool the nuclear plant.
It's not magic, it's a machine with design limits that extreme weather events can push up against.
It also can pollute rivers and kill fish before it gets to that level.
Sea cooled reactors have issues with jellyfish.
Having said that, the EU needs more gas in winter when it's cold, so doing the maintenance/refueling in the summer makes sense.
Still doesn't change the basic facts that a mix of solar/wind etc. is cheaper and better than nuclear and the annoying 'nuclear isn't affected by the weather' meme is wrong.
You forgot storage or massive long distance transportation that nuclear future does not require, but solar/wind future does. That changes the "cheaper and better" to "there is no cheap solution, we need both solar/wind and nuclear".
> It's not magic, it's a machine with design limits that extreme weather events can push up against.
We have yet to see 80°c water in the rivers upstream. As I said earlier, the issue is never cooling the reactor, it's always about the state of the environment downstream.
> Nuclear isn't going well for France right now. And most of the EU uran comes from Russia
Even not doing well it's better then Germany's wind and solar - it's rare to see Germany electricity polluting going below 4x France - not to mention coal whose transportation is also affected by low water levels
Meanwhile over here in the UK, the press is blaming the energy crisis partly on the fact that our government didn't spend loads of money on solar and onshore wind like Germany. We're even worse situated to benefit from solar than they are. (The renewable program here is mostly focused on offshore wind, which is the least-bad option given our geography, plus attempts at nuclear that are widely criticized by the press as wastes of money given how much cheaper onshore wind and solar are.)
Britain is the best position country in Europe for wind and tidal power.
There was a project to pay down cable to import reliable, cheap 24/7 power from Iceland and hobernment said 'nah'. They also cancelled a 340 MW tidal project
We don't see large tidal power installations because they are not every economical so far. In theory there's a lot of energy to be won, but the salt water causes corrosion issues, and maintenance gets expensive quickly
This is a very good post. I never before considered the issue of corrosion. To that point, does this also affect offshore wind power generation (turbines)? I guess the difference will be: the turbine is not underwater!
Is wind power even worth the investment? From disposal issues to wind turbines killing birds and bird habitats to sheer unreliability, wind seems to have a ton of issues.
You wrote "disposal issues": As I understand, the current generation of windmill blades are not recycled. Rather, they are sent to landfill (at least in United States -- can someone please comment for other countries that they know about? UK?). Two things to consider: (1) Fiberglass mostly inert and safe to bury. Please correct me if wrong. (2) Can future designs be recycled? I assume yes.
wind mills kill way
fewer birds than mining does. wind has a few incredibly minor issues, but so does everything, and wind is green and cost effective.
In an ideal world countries like Spain and Greece invest in solar but they're completely incompetent.
So you get the absurd situation that the Netherlands is European leader in solar energy lol. Most densely populated country in Europe has solar parks for fuck sake.
From what I've read, in Spain there was for a long time (may still be?) pretty effective/expensive legislation against installing solar panels anywhere. Reason? Regulatory capture, with energy companies lobbying hard against anything that might weaken their position or profiteering opportunities.
I wouldn't call that necessarily incompetence. Corruption and cronyism, yes.
Yes, for a few years we had what was popularly called "Sun tax" in order to disincentivise people from installing solar panels in their homes. It was removed in 2018, though.
Although corruption was probably present, I would say that this kind of politics is precisely what we would expect from pro-business parties (in this case, the People's Party). They do have a long history of eschewing environmental policies as soon as any big company has money to lose because of them.
I live in Cyprus which experiences sunshine almost 365 days a year and has an isolated power grid from the rest of the world. We also suffer from the incompetency of Greece and Spain but I believe solar parks are not the solution. Building solar parks is a waste of land which could be used for other purposes (agriculture for example). A much better solution is to ensure every single building has solar panels on its roof. Until recently there was no incentive or motivation for this but during the past 6 months with increasing electricity costs there has been a shift to PV to the point that cost of setup has almost doubled but people are still installing them. We're heading in the right direction but it will take years for energy independence.
You wrote: <<Building solar parks is a waste of land which could be used for other purposes (agriculture for example).>> From a stricly economic view, many times a solar park in a very sunny place is more economically efficient than agriculture. That said, including social and political views, of course, we need enough agriculture to feed our societies!
I have unfortunately witnessed fields of orange trees being cut down and replaced with PV panels. Our local market has indeed an oversupply of oranges (to the point that sometimes it's more cost effective not to cut fruit rather than pay employees to do it) but I can't help to think if removing fully grown trees is better for the environment.
Your comment is flame. You really don't believe that competence is the only reason solar/wind didn't scale up right? If you remember, those countries were/are almost bunkrupt, since 2010 or so. Where would these massive investments come from? I mean the north didn't even want to move away from Russia, certainly they wouldn't care for funding solar in Greece, Spain or Italy.
The "Green new deal" however is a step in that direction. But IMO its theatrics. EU money to buy green German cars and green German infra with no plan on longevity or strategic change. Truth is, that if EU wanted energy independece, they could have it many years now. Be it nuclear or Mediterranean natural gas (the same gas now Israel is going to sell to EU).
Not that the respective governments are competent. They are not, thats a given. But the "competent" part of Europe is only so in a stupidly myopic level.
I agree with the sentiment of this post. The finance required for green energy production is often over looked. After all, India has huge deserts in the north west of their country. Yes, they have some of the largest solar parks in the world, but why isn't 25% of it covered with solar panels? Financing.
You wrote: <<But the "competent" part of Europe is only so in a stupidly myopic level.>> Can you explain this more? (Zero trolling.) I don't understand what you mean.
Financing has generally been a positive for renewables.
The ability to predict output years in advance and lock in prices works well with finance to build up front.
The reason they've not built more is because the whole globe needs to work together or else one nation can save money by not bothering and just polluting instead.
If that politics got fixed (which it has slowly) then renewables would be rolled out more.
I mean that what we call the "competent part of Europe" is only competent in a myopic level. When it comes to their own local economy as if it is operating in vacuum. I argue that most of the foreign policy decisions of these members where made with short-term view of their own country economy, completely F'ing up their long term prospects by ignoring the potential and the dynamics of the periphery.
The EU could have invested in solar in Greece, Italy and Spain and Cyprus and interconnects further north, and likewise offshore wind in Denmark, pumped storage in Sweden, Austria and Greece
But it failed in securing energy resilience. I hope it has learned its lesson.
The EU (meaning both the individual countries and together as the EU) did all these things. They could and should have done more, but generally have been world leaders in this.
After a solid start everything stalled around 10 years ago -- once Russia saw the threat and hooked europe on cheap gas.
Growth in Solar in Spain was negligible for 6 years from 2013 to 2019.
Italy likewise increased less than 10%
Greece has hardly any solar, with nothing built from 2013 until this year. That plant cost 130m for 350m kWh a year - that's 4c/kWh over 10 years, plus operating costs.
Painfully slow delivery that was needlessly stalled for financial reasons
I don't think it was financial reasons (or at least not in the sense that it was costing the country as a whole money).
The fossil fuel industry spent Billions on propaganda. Politicians had the option of fighting that, or using it to become more popular and so get rich.
This cost their countries Billions more than they ever earned. They're still doing it, but they might wake up soon. Still a total waste of time, energy and money though.
> That, in
combination with the downward pressure on wholesale electricity prices, threatened the
finances of the major utilities. Particularly hard hit were the 26 GW of natural gas-fired combined
cycle (GFCC) plants built after 2000 in anticipation of substantial growth in Spain’s electricity
demand, making gas the single largest source of installed capacity. This brand new fleet saw its
overall load factor drop from around 50 percent in the mid-2000s to below 20 percent in 2011
and then continue to fall, almost to single digits in 2014
> As a result of these developments, the promotion of renewable power went, in just a few
years, from enjoying broad public support, or at least tolerance, to facing substantial opposition.
Particularly outspoken in their criticism were large electricity consumers and the major utilities,
whose returns on investment in non-renewable generating capacity was being put at risk
(Linares and Labandeira 2013). These various pressures in turn prompted similar policy
responses by successive governments led by different parties.
So prices went down, country made money, big interests lost money, specifically natural gas wasn't being burnt enough for their liking, renewables got paused for a while.
Russia (and several other authorotarian regimes) benefitted, but it was mostly Spanish people conning other Spanish people for money.
Spain has the 3rd installed capacity of solar power in Europe[1] and 2nd position in wind power[2]. It could be much better but also much worse :)
The previous government in Spain halted lots of funding for new power plants but as far as I know there is a lots of projects going on now. I expect to see a significant increment in the next years.
Also, in the Netherlands most of solar is installed in roofs, while in Spain is almost anecdotal. The previous government made difficult for individuals to install solar at home. Now that's gone but there is no subsidies, so individuals have to pay most of the installation from their own pockets, which are much more shallow than the dutch.
I notice similar in Tokyo, Japan. There is so little rooftop solar installations, it is crazy. I assume it is a combination of economic and regulatory factors. At the very least, most of the outdoor train stations have very long platform coverings / roofs. These could certainly be covered with solar panels.
Essentially, there’s plenty of installed solar capacity but most of it can’t be utilized fully unless its a perfect day. So you have to essentially rely on backup and keep installing more and more solar capacity beyond your needs because those perfect solar days are so rare in Germany.
This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who has ever spent even two days in Germany - the country isn’t exactly brimming with sunlight.
Your article says Germany started off well but politicians were too scared to continue and other nations caught up.
In particular they dragged their heels on ICE to EV transition, which I agree with.
Luckily they shifted from a conservative towards a green government and all that stuff is moving forward again.
> Politicians have ignored other elements, like industrial production, building efficiency and, especially, vehicle traffic. Involving those areas and coming up with an overarching concept, that's the hard part that must now be addressed. And it will determine whether Germany will once again become a model of sustainable economic production or whether the entire experiment will end in failure.
It wouldn't change much in this map, German nuclear plants always had cooling issues in hot summer. No open-loop cooling to prevent water from getting too hot for the fish, and plants capable of closed loop cooling eventually get issues with the river's water level. France has the same issues right now with their nuclear plants.
I’m just exhausted from arguing with the electrically illiterate.
HVDC makes transmission from state to state trivial at almost no loss. We should have a national HVDC grid so that a breeze in Texas might power a toaster in Connecticut.
Instead we have another $XX Billion for Ukraine. Another $13B here for a new carrier we’ll never need etc etc. So much waste everywhere while fundamental problems go unsolved.
The fall of Ukraine will mean the beginning of the new Soviet Union (but even _more_ evil), and most probably a world war, so it should be prevented at all costs possible. Not event to mention that the invasion is plainly evil, and should be repealed.
Any reason to think this? Did Soviet Union form by Russia invading and conquering another country? No, it was a result of fall of the Russian empire and the Russian civil war.
The conditions now are very different. Fall of Ukraine would mean political win for Putin and his acolytes, maybe another invasion later on. But Soviet Union? More like stronger Russia, a revert to the Russian Empire.
That's possible, but I think they just use the rhetoric to activate old people nostalgia and bring more support for the regime. Soviet union respawning does not seem likely, nobody except Russia wants that.
It's not a matter of cost, there's no political desire for a national HVDC grid so that a breeze in Texas might power a toaster in Connecticut - Texas has explicitly refused connecting to the rest of the country for many years.
Literally the whole West's defense spending for the last 70 years has been to counter Russia. Supporting Ukraine is the single most cost-effective thing any Western government can do right now...
A ballpark calculation - ignoring any infrastructure and time for charging/offloading, assuming you get the batteries and the electricity for free, using Tesla batteries as an example, a MWh of them would weigh more than 6 tons; so freight truck can carry at most 2-3 MWh worth of batteries (density is likely to be an issue) and the sale price of that truck full of electricity even at the current outrageous prices is just 1000 eur, perhaps 2000 if you drive all the way across Europe. Shipping cargo on such trucks costs something like 1.5 eur/km nowadays (we don't have cheap self-driving electric trucks yet..) so if you'd have to drive more than a few hundred km (and you have to drive the batteries back!), you'd be better off using these trucks to ship something else than electricity.
At this 6km/20 mins long ferry crossing the electric ferry containing 1MWh of batteries can charge at €10/MWh on the north side of the fjord, with the price on the south side at approximately €500/MWh... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Ampere
And do what when you get there? Sell them by the roadside like fresh vegetables? A few tons of batteries' worth of electricity is hardly worth a utility company's time.
Remember that, while prices have soared, electricity generation has not become more expensive. The "electricity crisis" is a crisis for European consumers but a massive windfall for producers. This is a market failure - not an electricity failure.
Can anybody explain why that is? Why a country that generates 99+% of its own electricity like UK is seeing price increases?
Everybody blames the war, but AFAIK UK imports 1% of its gas from Russia, and its electricity is generated locally, so why are prices increasing? I would expect grain and wheat to increase 500%, not power.
Electricity is very inelastic, which means that a tiny change in supply can massively affect the price. Only when it gets super expensive do people to start cutting down on their consumption, and supply and demand come into balance.
It's because not all electricity costs the same to produce, but the price is the same, determined by the most expensive producer. There is a shortage of electricity because France is generating a lot less than normal and this is made up by other countries. I would guess the UK is impacted by higher demand as well, thus the more expensive producers are delivering jacking up the prices for everyone.
That's wrong. The price is determined by demand and supply, which in turn is determined by what prices producers are willing to sell at and consumers are willing to buy at, plus other traders in the market.
That’s not entirely true. The prices of the underlying different electricity sources is different but they can’t be traded separately. As a result the market is very dysfunctional.
You're stating that without evidence, but the kind of auctions that the electricity market requires are similar to opening auctions for stocks. Would you claim they're very dysfunctional?
The kind of trades that are currently happening in Europe for electricity are removed from the reality on the ground. You can look through this Twitter thread for some good commentary on what is happening: https://twitter.com/yakutsavas/status/1563529006997450752?s=...
Probably, but that's evidence of a free market in operation, craziness happens sometimes but it sorts itself out. There is a massive supply squeeze, these things are to be bound to happen.
Which is to say that it's determined by both the supply and demand side: if the price were lower there would be people willing to buy at that price but not enough to sell them, and if it were higher there would presumably be people willing to sell at that price but not enough buyers. It is, in some fairly fundamental sense, the actual market price of electricity at that point in time.
Yes but renewables & nuclear suppliers would be willing to deliver for a lot less money. The question I answered was, why is it so expensive when we don't use so much gas. The price however gets set by the most expensive supplier. As soon as you need to use gas to deliver electricity, the price skyrockets.
> The price however gets set by the most expensive supplier.
Because that's how the auction works, but it's misleading, it's the cheapest supplier that can deliver the final GW hour required to satisfy the projected load. Other multiparty auctions with a volume requirement work the same way.
The parent is providing valuable and spesific information on how energy market works, you are incorrecting him by reciting a generic market principle that everyone learns at school, without any insight of how it applies to situation at hand.
Hardly. Merit Order is just a particular way of setting the price similar to an auction, it still creates a normal(ish) market for electricity and demand and supply still largely determine the price, albeit not in the exact same way as a completely free market.
Saying that price is "determined by the most expensive producer" without further context is still wrong.
Is a 'completely free market' if not a spherical cow in a vacuum on a frictionless surface i.e. a purely theoretical concept that can never exist in real life?
Presumably a 'completely free market' allows cartells, bribes are not illegal, and there is no authority to throw me in jail if I lie about my product? So either it would collapse into a cesspool of fraud, or you have to introduce rules and then it's not free any more?
UK stopped mining coal mostly in the 1980s when Russia was still the Soviet Union. The cause was not Russian gas which isn't a direct substitute for coal anyway and especially not back then, but rather that the NUM destroyed the domestic coal industry, which became totally uncompetitive relative to more or less any foreign producers. It wasn't Russia specifically, it was that UK mining became dysfunctional and unreliable.
is it fair to call it disfunctional? Are you expecting to compete on price with countries where workers have no rights, no health and safety and live a dog's life?
Perhaps I'm mis-remembering but I was certain that the abundance of cheap gas was one of the main arguments for closing down a lot of mines that were considered to uneconomical as a result.
Maybe we were also importing cheaper coal from elsewhere?
> but rather that the NUM destroyed the domestic coal industry, which became totally uncompetitive relative to more or less any foreign producers. It wasn't Russia specifically, it was that UK mining became dysfunctional and unreliable.
If you think miners should not be fairly compensated for their work you're free to go work as one for one of those foreign producers that less "dysfunctional" and more "reliable"
This may be true but until there is a suitable alternative most of the developed world will continue to use it.
Europe is now at a critical point where choosing not to burn coal is going to have a high economic cost that many people are not going to be able or willing to pay.
Because electricity is sold across the entire European market. Low cost producers are going to sell to those who pay the most, to maximise profit, unless they're unable to move the electricity ( or more likely 'contra' it) to where it is intended to be consumed.
Just like oil. The US has cheap oil but it's a global market, so everyone pays the (more or less) the same price regardless of how close they are to the oil.
Also because electricity market is bit special how it operates. Suppliers tell what price they will sell and and then buyer at what price they will buy. And the price for all transactions will be set at highest match of supply to demand.
Because demand side has no upper price limit the whole market price can raise to very high.
Ofc, this ignores cases of own production, futures and so on.
You're describing an auction principle. It's called merit-order.
It is very efficient at creating a transparent market and finding the "natural" market price. The same price that a free and transparent market would converge to.
The alternative are price caps. Which could be considered. But it's a choice between free and non-free markets.
What makes gas different from wheat? US is a huge exporter of wheat, that doesn’t mean us farmers/traders don’t have their eye on what Ukrainian shortfalls imply for global balances?
Same thing for gas, uk is competing with their neighbors for a resource that just got a whole lot more scarce (locally), causing prices to rise
Gas is, well, a gas. The only way to transport it in the absence of pipelines is liquifying it. LNG infrastructure is very hard to build, and right now there's no additional LNG capacity to ship gas to Europe. It takes a while to build.
> The United Kingdom has the second-largest LNG regasification capacity in Europe (4.7 Bcf/d), and it can export up to 2.5 Bcf/d of natural gas to the European Union via the Interconnector pipeline into Belgium and the BBL pipeline into the Netherlands. Regasified LNG volumes in the United Kingdom averaged 2.9 Bcf/d from January through May 2022, and regasification facilities ran at a 63% utilization rate, up from 30% last year. Exports from the United Kingdom via interconnecting pipelines to the European Union have run at close to maximum rates since March 2022.
That is predicated on the rational market hypothesis: that all agents have perfect information, make perfectly rational decision, there is no market friction, and goods are perfectly elastic. Of course, neither of these assumptions are true in this case.
Back in the real world, we can look at hard data. Margins for energy producers and retailers have increased massively in the latest quarter. Also, we know that markets don't react directly (and exclusively) to fundamentals. They react to panics, they react to extremely complex interactions of manual and automatic trading algorithms. Reality is far from the simple "supply and demand" that economics 101 textbooks portray.
2. That does not apply here since we are talking cost/profit and not share price
> The efficient market hypothesis (EMH), alternatively known as the efficient market theory, is a hypothesis that states that share prices reflect all information and consistent alpha generation is impossible.
Nothing you say is about EMH. Nor does EMH predict that markets react only to "fundamentals", only in that shares reflect the whole set of information.
>Why has natural gas become more expensive when it has not become more expensive to produce?
Price is a function of supply and demand. Supply was massively reduced by sanctions and war, so price goes up, simple as that.
>This is price gouging.
If electricity producers had enough pricing power to set the price to whatever they wanted without competition they'd already have done so years ago. Again, price is a function of supply and demand, cost of production is only one component.
No, the EU wholesale market uses a marginal price, that does not reflect the cost of generation (supply), but the highest cost available at any moment sets the price for everyone (at least as far as i understand). It s a free market but prices are set by a very inflexible rule.
that would work only if non-gas sources generated enough so that gas is not needed at all. As it is right now, solar producers are getting a bonanza in profits because they are being paid at exorbitant prices. At this level, they have no incentive to ramp up production to remove gas from the equation.
> At this level, they have no incentive to ramp up production
In a monopoly situation, yes. Luckily there is competition, and at this level their competition has a great incentive to ramp up capacity. Which, frankly, is going to make them ramp up production so they can capture a bigger piece of the market when the situation isn't quite as ridiculous as it is today anymore.
There's no single "they" for "solar producers". No matter what the existing producers do, even if they would all illegally collude, the current prices make it attractive for individual households to install solar panels and thus add new solar capacity.
The marginal price of any good is the cost to produce one additional unit of that good. That applies to electricity too.
Saying "the highest cost available at any moment sets the price for everyone" is misleading, it's also the lowest marginal price required to satisfy the total load required to supply the market.
i meant that in the EU wholesale market , everyone gets the marginal price. It is not the cost of an additional unit, a mwh of renewables is practically free (if paid-as-bid) but gets paid as natgas (because it gets paid-as-cleared)
Yeah but that's how the market pricing works, it's a function of the auction process. Everyone pays the price required to satisfy the demand. See stock opening and closing auctions for a similar process. It feels odd that sellers get the higher price but it makes sense ultimately.
The margin price in that market is the marginal cost of a GW hour by for the last GW that satisfies the load required (demand).
> Price is a function of supply and demand. Supply was massively reduced by sanctions and war, so price goes up, simple as that.
But this is not true. Price is a function of whatever price the seller sets. Look at the actual circumstances rather than on mathematical models with no bearing on reality.
> Price is a function of whatever price the seller sets.
Only if customers are willing to buy at that price. Which is only true now because there are no cheaper competitors to turn to, which in turn is because the entire system is operating at capacity.
Over time the high prices incentivizes bringing more power generation and transport online, which is exactly what we are seeing - new/reopened nuclear, coal, and nat gas plants are all planned or coming online across Europe and imports have spiked from places like the US. No one likes high prices but it does incentivize building more capacity that might lose money when prices are low, but make up for that when prices are high. This process doesn't happen over night but sanctions + war (roughly) did. Europe was lulled into complacency by consistent and cheap Russian gas for years.
Also, don't overlook those transport costs. Networks across all energy types are severely constrained and underinvested in. Doesn't matter how cheap you can produce energy if you can't get it to your customers cheaply.
> Only if customers are willing to buy at that price. Which is only true now because there are no cheaper competitors to turn to, which in turn is because the entire system is operating at capacity.
In other words, the price is the marginal price: at the very edge. What is the highest price consumers want to pay for X amount of electricity. You should split it up: say price of electricity is 5$. That means:
Electricity produced at 1$: sells for 5$
Electricity produced at 2$: sells for 5$
Electricity produced at 3$: sells for 5$
Electricity produced at 4$: sells for 5$
Electricity produced at 5$: sells for 5$
Electricity produced at 6$: does not sell, plants get paused
Which is exactly how I would expect it to work. Now if producers expect prices to remain high, or for there to be repeated spikes in price, I would expect the $1, $2, $3, and maybe $4 producers to invest in additional production or storage over time to capture additional marketshare and thereby profits. Of course the "over time" part is important since that process can't happen overnight and is constrained by labor and components.
Yes, of course there are no cheaper alternatives to turn to. The European electricity market is dominated by a small number of giants which essentially have no competition and does not compete with each other. It's not different from the housing market. Housing isn't freakishly expensive because it has become too expensive to build houses. It is because those who control the market have figured out how to screw over people who need a home to live in (which is almost everyone).
It was the European Commission that designed the integrated electricity market because it was believed that a free market would guarantee low electricity prices for everyone. It seems very naive to believe that this system will function better in the future. For the energy giants it is more profitable to limit supply and jack up prices than to build more capacity.
Depends on the country. Certainly this applies to a country like France that produces most of its electricity through nuclear, which they are in the process of fully nationalising.
This gives them a lot of leeway to control prices without actually costing them anything.
Of course it costs them! Nationalisation just means the losses of the nuclear industry are born by the taxpayer, which will surface in worse services in other areas.
What I'm saying is that since production costs are stable, as long as they set a price that covers actual costs then this price control does not actually cost them money, only potential profits, so it is sustainable.
It leads to shortages instead as people find ways to arbitrage the price - buy French nuclear power cheap then export it for profit.
Fundamentally you can have high prices, shortages or you can disconnect France from the rest of the European grid but you cannot just have cheaper prices in France.
This is absurd in several levels - you can't move electricity in a box, there are only a few interconnects, all of them regulatable and controllable, they can only move like 15% of tital supply and prices are different for business and for home use.
And nothing you've said seems to have relevance to shortages
There are already electricity price controls in France, which still also exports at market prices.
As ClumsyPiloy said electricity is not something you can easily trade under the radar of the regulator. Technical limitations and regulation do change everything.
It's not a market failure. Markets are not supposed to keep a steady profit margin regardless of demand.
Production cannot be scaled up and down infinitely and immediately.
The price is a market signal.
The fact that production cannot be immediately scaled to serve the customer demand and bring prices (and therefore profits) back down to a "normal" level is not a market failure either; it's simply a physical reality.
Ekaros is correct. Lots of people pay a fixed cost for their electricity whether it is generated at peak time with lots of gas or in the middle of the night with wind and nuclear.
We don't currently do a good job of responding to price signals. We have some plans to expand this, which are being rushed into service after being neglected for a long time.
The problem is the huge role government has had in this, which means regular market mechanisms won't work for a while.
1. The Western governments have spent a decade demonizing fossil and nuclear energy. For that whole time, big funds have divested, and investors punished. No major fund is going to touch this sector, especially not if the intent is a capital project. Nuclear is just seeing a turnaround as some governments regain their rationality (e.g. Japan), but others seem to be utterly hopeless (Canada, Germany).
2. The above means that schools stopped offering the programs necessary to train the workers for the industry. There is an entire generational gap now in oil and gas trades, from the roughneck to the engineers.
3. The government's incompetence has caused rampant inflation which, affects these industries too. Suddenly you have to deal with the labour shortage, there being no raw inputs (the year supply of anything from pipe to mud was sold out in most markets by Q1 of '22), and you have no idea what great ideas government will pass by next quarter so you have to price high to build a buffer. All of this leads to huge uncertainty.
The worst part in my eyes, is that we're only really seeing the beginning of this. Governments are still on their ESG-above-reality stance. Approval from their UN SDG and WEF cronies is still more important than their constituents well-being.
I honestly feel for the Europeans that saw this coming and voted accordingly - but more for the Africans and Asians who will be bid out by Europe and be faced with starvation of freezing. They had no say in this and they will pay the steepest price for Europe's ESG hubris.
If that were true countries that don't depend on russia would not be affected. Greece uses little natgas, and only only 4% of it is russian, yet it sees some of the most steep rises.
Lots of countries import gas using LNG terminals. Those gas ships can go to any country that has import terminals and they set sail for the highest bidder. So gas is like oil, there's only a few global prices.
It's not the Russian gas that is expensive, it's the intentional lack of supply of Russian gas that makes the market price for all gas go up (plus some other general market tightness due to COVID).
Capacity has decreased - mainly due to a lot of french nuclear reactors offline for scheduled and (correlated) unscheduled maintenance. France went from Europe's largest exporter to largest importer of power this year. Add to that a dry summer woth historically low water levels in rivers, disrupting cooling as well as things like coal transport for power plants.
And natural gas, which usually covers the more elastic power demands is dramatically more expensive.
Not to mention Germany (largest economy in Europe) and their nuclear debacle. They could have spent the last 20 years building additional nuclear power and reducing dependency on Russia, instead of doing the opposite. 15+ years ago it was obvious what Putin was and the direction Russia was heading.
Germany should be a super exporter of energy to the EU/Eurozone (they are a big electricity exporter, they should and could be considerably more so). They land border nine other nations (and are of course very close to Italy). They have the technical and financial ability to do it.
Market price is based on the price of the most expensive megawatt produced. The price moves up and down to balance production with consumption, a necessity for every grid, and producers set prices at which they are willing to inject quantities.
The current problem is that in europe a lot of the electricity is made by gas plants and those plants are seeing their costs rise. They therefore increase the price at which they are willing to inject capacity, and that means the market price moves up because that power is needed to satisfy demand. Gas plant operators are not making a lot of profit.
Because every party injecting power at market rates (some of it is actually locked up in long term contracts) is paid the market rate, those not using gas to produce power are actually the ones making record profits. Wind is literally making windfall profits. There are talks of having an excess profit tax because right now governments are going into debt to finance energy subsidies that line the pockets of wind and nuclear operators (and of vladimir putin).
It's not a market failure, this is how marginal pricing is supposed to work. This incentivizes market participants to build out production thus pushing prices down again.
> The "electricity crisis" is a crisis for European consumers
Well. I don't know where you live, but I'm not paying more than last year.
I read about soaring prices being an issue in the UK. Prices, here, in France are fixed twice a year by the energy commission. Right now, residential electricity increased by 4% last February and remained unchanged at the start of August. So it means that whatever is happening in the market, is not affecting us. Actually, I will probably have 2-3 months of cash back at the end of the year.
Not really a crisis, to be honest.
However I would be very interested to know what is the situation like for my fellow European citizens !
You do you, but it has little to do with her? Specifically, Greta Thunberg had nothing to do with invading Ukraine or, if we want to ignore the most obvious cause, the decision to phase out nuclear power.
What your funny name for France, where we pay as much (if not more) than Germany for our electricity since the start of the year? More than half the country's nuclear power capacity has been shut down, mostly due to safety concerns https://nuclear-monitor.fr/#/mix.
Who is paying more for electricity in France? To my knowledge, the majority of French residential subscribe to the state-fixed "Tarif bleu", which hasn't increased price at all since February, and is still well below the German average. It is, in fact, for added ridiculousness, well below the retail prices of most of the countries we import energy from.
Am I missing something, or does the price still not seem that high in USD? I'm used to paying like $.15 per kWh which is half roughly of the prices in Europe? It's big but... Idk
I'm pretty sure this price is before taxes (and maybe more payments) and german taxes are pretty heavy, ca. 30% of the consumer price is taxes and stuff, ~25% go to the network operator and only ~45% are power generation[1](~the prices in the visualization). So you have to roughly double that to get consumer €/kWh (ofc daily prices are a bit different than a contract over a whole year).
North of Norway has almost free electricity while the south is quite expensive. The only link between the two regions are through Sweden for now. A new power line will connect the two regions in Norway eventually. So the north will pay more and the south the same since everything will be absorbed by other European countries.
The electricity companies in the south also follow well the business strategy of privatising the benefits and socialising the losses. The water level in the lakes in the south are too low especially considering the difficult winter to come, yet they sometimes empty them to export to Scotland to make money now.
It’s a bit annoying but at least I get push notifications when the price is very high or very low.
Poland has an interesting story behind the price: the government passed legislation which switched from net-metering to net-billing with the start of April, so people rushed to build as many home PV installations as possible to get grandfathered into the previous scheme.
A whopping 4-5GW estimated was added to the grid in this period, almost doubling the installed capacity, creating a unique mix of coal and solar in the summer.
Now during the day it's what's keeping prices below €250/MWh because even with net-metering the price of this electricity is closer to €175/MWh.
In 2019 that would have been horribly expensive, but it's safe to say those times are gone for good.
This is nothing. If you want to panic, check the futures markets for the next 2 quarters, especially France.
So I think short term we are pretty screwed. But I think if you can produce electricity at 1/10 or even 1/20 of the price, wouldn't you be adding new capacity now? The only fast option are renewables, so my wild guess is that there will be so much new capacity added in the next years, the bottleneck will not be production, but skilled labor to install it. That's the way a real market economy should react.
The thing about "short term screwed" is that in some countries the "screwed" is actually "people having to pay more than 100 % of their income for electricity".
Theoretically, long term, this could all work out nicely and steer more people and governments towards renewables and decentralized generation, but the short term consequences are starting to look brutal.
No, we agree here. I'm not trying to minimize the impact. Factories will shut down, leading to job loses, shortages which will again cause inflation etc.
But we can't change that anymore. What we can do is build more capacity.
> Factories will shut down, leading to job loses, shortages which will again cause inflation etc
Not necessarily. The same thing (forced closures of factories) was handled gracefully without job losses during the pandemic through various unemployment schemes. I see no reason why the same can't happen again.
Those schemes are responsible for tremendous inflation which is part of the reason why energy prices are high compared to incomes today. There is no free lunch.
They might have contributed, a bit (all they did was replace income from salaries with equivalent income in unemployment money, and cover some enterprise's expenses; the only monetary difference was coming from those who used to spend a lot of money going out to bars and stuff, who couldn't anymore), but let's not kid ourselves. The main reason for the booming inflation is Russia's invasion of Ukraine and resulting boom in prices of many raw materials, including very important ones like foodstuffs and energy, which are factored in the prices of pretty much everything. I don't understand the people who are hell bent on ignoring that and pinning all the blame on monetary policy. If you really want to blame someone, blame Putin.
Several prominent economists at Harvard looked at inflation in countries that did and didn't send out stimulus checks. The numbers ranged from 4% to 8%, with stimulus checks strongly correlating with higher inflation. The math disagrees: there was going to be high inflation due to the pandemic and the Ukraine war, but stimulus policies accounted for the majority of the damage.
Do send out the study. The fact that you're talking about stimulus checks means either you or them are talking about the US, which couldn't be farther in how it handled the pandemic from the EU, which is the topic of the discussion. There are no checks here, we aren't stuck in the past. And all was handled at another layer by preventing layoffs by covering payroll and other expenses for companies instead of allowing layoffs and then sending checks through the mail like it's the 1950s.
And yes, the delayed spending and the some extra money will result in inflation, of course. But the impact from the prices of all sorts of crucial raw materials is probably much higher.
There is obviously another option that people don't want to point out - start buying Russian gas again. The idea they're resisting to sell it is wrong. There's a whole pipeline lying idle ready to go the moment sanctions are lifted.
People are acting like this is a natural crisis. It's not, it's an artificial one created by political choices. This will lead to political extremism as voters realize they are freezing or bankrupted because politicians like "standing with Ukraine" more than they like their own citizens. Not every politician will be like that. Some will say, we send weapons and it's not our war anyway. Citizens first, foreigners second. And suddenly that will be mainstream politics.
I'm afraid Europe bought a one-way ticket. Dependence on Russian energy is no longer a hypothetical issue, but a demonstrated concern. Freezing is not great, but giving the thermostat back to Putin is worse.
I expect some major support programs will be put in place to address this. And it will probably involve a bit of money printing. No sane government is going to let its citizens deal with going bankrupt because of massively higher energy prices. So Germany, France, etc. will do whatever needs doing to prevent that.
The real problem will be industry having to shut down or minimize operations. They'll be the ones bearing the real cost. This winter will be brutal in terms of its economical impact on industry. The next one, countries will be better prepared. It's Russia that will be suffering the consequences long term. I doubt any country in Europe wants to ever be dependent on them again to the extent that they have in the past.
> I expect some major support programs will be put in place to address this. And it will probably involve a bit of money printing.
One of the two Tory lunatics^Hhopeful candidates for PM confirmed there's not much they can do to ease the energy price crisis without creating a massive hole in the British budget. But that's what countries will have to do, and it's not going to be pretty.
The Western world just went on a massive printing spree two years ago because of COVID, a further temporary injection of capital and 2008 will pale in comparison to the next recession.
I've seen a report or two talking about how fertilizer plants are being shutdown or run at reduced capacity across Europe because of gas costs. Electricity is the least of our problems.
Oh, It is much more then just fertilizer plants. Fertilizer plants stoped this week all over EU. (Yara Norway, Azoty Poland etc.)
The moment you stop fertilizer plants you stop supplies of CO2 and NO2 industry gases and that stops dairy plants, meat factories, breweries etc... Basically you stop food production and distribution. And after cows get culled and you have 2-3 years before production can come back to initial levels.
It is going to be rather tough decade for Europe.... And not just Europe...
Because their nuclear power plants are currently going belly up one after another.
Many of them are the same model, with parts from the same factory. That factory made some bad parts. They need to be exchanged. It takes a lot of time, many months.
Heat wave. The water used for cooling the plant is usually released into nearby rivers which due to the current heat waves are too hot already; to avoid the rivers boiling & dying the power plants can't release any more water. No cooling possible, and the plants have to put in standby.
At least that's my understanding of the situation.
To a house that is not heated by direct electricity (nor by gas), or to one where you have installed some other source of heating such as heat pumps or district heating.
These don't mean you'd be completely de-risked, but your electricity bill will be a fraction of what it would be otherwise and you'll end up relatively well off.
My district heat comes from a giant heat pump that extracts energy from waste water etc. Some other typical district heat sources are biomass and coal. If it's typical to rely on gas, perhaps check that they have a plan to convert to some other energy sources if needed.
Helsinki's utility company today announced its district heating prices for the winter: +30% increase compared to last winter. This is in contrast to market prices +400% for electricity and +300% for gas. https://www.helen.fi/en/news/2022/significant-increase-in-co...
Time to go to Tromsø. Forget about autobahn or even seeing the sun in the winter. Time for us to emigrate in northern norway where the electricity is still cheap.
On a tangent, I read that 500 Russian soldiers die daily. Given that they are 19-22 old, I expect a huge gender disbalance in the coming generation. So yeah, pressure on Russian women to be "beautiful" (whatever that means to the dating market) will increase. Kind of cynical to advertise a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The only fast option is another: arrest those who control the current energy market for crime against humanity and re-nationalize the sector. Really. With them in jail FOR LIFE other like them will do their best to avoid getting equally in jails and States have nothing to deal with "prices".
For instance in France more than half of the national NPP are offline due to needed maintenance the private owners postpone at maximum to maximize their profit. Arrange the result take time. Jail the aforementioned owners telling anyone in the private sector that if they committed criminal business they can choose to be silent and cooperative of face an equal fate will suffice.
Private sector is THE SOLE responsible of the current prices, they do not came from war or natural scarcity. Telling them that "good times are passed" for them not for the Citizens at a whole as they want instead suffice for a quick U-turn since they know they are unarmed.
Renewables can't be nor fast nor an option simply because the sole that can live on them at unbearably high prices in the actual market are single private NEW homes in places where p.v. is effective enough and climate is not that cold. In a city, a dense European one, there is no room for renewables to really produce energy, you can only make some show for commercial purposes. Oh, I say that as one who actually have built a new home five years ago, with p.v. and small lithium backup, so to speak.
The quickest way is one: telling those who profit that revenge sentiments start to be in the air and they will FAIL to ride them to push a new hoax this time. However since people are not in that mood, actually many have thirst for blood but not for positive actions energy giants and their public friends are not startled at all. That's is.
We're not screwed. We're just witnessing the accelerated death of the fossil fuel based power generation industry and it's making renewable power extremely lucrative. Prices are high because of gas prices. Except it's August and Europe is producing a lot of solar power and a fair bit of wind power. That's why there are no blackouts. There is no power shortage; just a gas shortage. Europe has plenty of reserves to generate power. It's just not going to be cheap to use those reserves. The current crisis is not a capacity crisis but a fuel cost crisis. Anybody who was complacent about renewables is going to be paying the price for that this winter. Anybody who wasn't is going to reap the rewards.
High prices for electricity and no production cost for renewables basically means whomever produces using that is making a lot of money right now. More than 5x of what they could reasonably expect normally. Probably closer to 10x. That's great news because that will be invested in even more renewable power. Solar and wind are the closest thing to a perpetuum mobile that you can get right now.
Electricity prices are high because all the gas and coal production is being kept at a minimum rate because of the high cost of fuel. Companies still in the business of burning that have to pay such high prices for fuel that it's cheaper for them to shut down operations. Unless they are absolutely needed in which case they'll charge for the fuel cost of course.
However, most of Europe is relying on renewables and topping up gas supplies for the winter instead. E.g. Germany hit their 80% reserves target ahead of schedule a few days ago, So, any gas plant that doesn't absolutely have to be on right now has probably been idling for months. No reason to turn those on.
The reason France has a tough few quarters ahead is that quite a few of their aging nuclear power plants are down for maintenance right now. They'll be importing power from abroad and probably at high rates. A perfect little storm of overdue maintenance and an international gas/oil market that suddenly shifted. They'll be fine. But it will cost them.
Are you sure? Is Europe technically capable of importing enough gas to offset what is no longer coming from Russia? Our abilities to import natural gal from outside UE (LNG terminals and pipelines) have limited throughput - not to mention, someone needs to be willing and able to fill them with gas first.
This link is only about LNG, i.e. natural gas in its liquid form. I suspect that's why Germany is missing from the chart altogether. In any case, it does not show the whole picture.
What is missing? Germany doesn't have LNG terminals, so obviously they're not on there. LNG is regasified to export to Germany through European countries that do have LNG terminals. Much of the increased LNG import is going to Germany.
I'm not sure where you're expecting natural gas in gaseous state to come from. It's generally transported in LNG form unless there's a pipeline (like between Germany and Russia). There aren't a lot of those connecting Europe to gas producers outside Europe, which is one reason why we're in this mess.
LNG imports to Europe are up significantly compared to before the war. The link shows that. I feel like you don't really understand what's happening.
You said "we're currently importing far more gas that we did before the war", but gave a link that only covers gas imports in LNG form, not in gaseous form. So, it doesn't include the Nord Stream, Yamal–Europe and other pipelines.
I agree with all that, but in the short term things are going to be very expensive. As I already wrote, I see it as an opportunity to do what you said - ditch fossil fuels for good. There's no point in doing anything else, like whining. But if you think the landing will be anything other than rough, then we'll have to disagree.
Announce a $1 trillion nuclear build-out plan for the EU, to build at least 50-60 new nuclear power plants. Go big, really big, and get started on it soon. Why can't Europe go Manhattan Project / Apollo big for such a critical matter? It's cowardice, a lack of daring, if they choose not to. They have the expertise, they have the financial capability, they are lacking the will (so far).
To an extent you can scare markets into providing cheaper prices in a variety of ways.
That goes for scaring Russia, which is still living in a fantasy bubble about the context. They do not believe the rest of Europe can or will become independent of their supply.
Yep, too little too late. Nuclear is going to miss this party. By the time any of this would feasibly be ready this crisis will be ancient history.
The smart move is to completely ignore nuclear and go straight to renewables. Proven technology that is being deployed orders of magnitude faster and at an orders of magnitude larger scale already.
The greens, which don't even want to extend the usage of 3 of the 6 available nuclear plants (supposed to "slowly" shut down at the end of this year).
And now you come and say "hey sorry but we need more nuclear reactors"? Sure. Much better to go to countries which are barely respecting human rights, bow and buy their fuel and gas, because finally who cares, we don't see what they do in their countries.
The greens have approximately 14% of the vote and 16% of the seats of the legislative, and are a minority partner in the executive. It does seem quite a stretch to say "they are in charge of Germany".
They have 118/416 seats of the current government, which is more than 16%, and that's what actually matters. If SPD and FDP tomorrow want to bring nuclear energy back, good luck doing that on such a controversial topic (if nobody else in the parliament backs you up).
One way or another, they are in charge and they can make things happen or not.
Clearly, my "in charge" is absolutely not the same as in dictatorships or similar, but always in a democratic context.
> They have 118/416 seats of the current government
That is exactly what makes them a minority partner.
> and that's what actually matters
No, it does not in a democracy. It's still 16% of the legislative body.
> but always in a democratic context.
I would really like to know which democratic context translates 14% of the vote into "in charge of the country". They _may_ have more influence in the executive than the opposition parties, depending on the details of the coalition, but it is still a long stretch to claim "in charge" of the government much less of the country. A coalition is in charge of the executive branch, of which the greens are not the majority by any metric.
> If SPD and FDP tomorrow want to bring nuclear energy back
If a majority of the voters (or at least 50%+1 of the seats in the legislative body) want to bring nuclear energy back tomorrow, let me know how the greens are going to stop them.
It's going to be a rough ride; at least the coming winter for sure. But I'm very optimistic about the long term effects. In fact, I see this as setting Europe up for a period of economic growth. Getting rid of fossil fuels decades ahead of schedule is going to involve a lot of public spending and there is going to be a massive return on investment. Big public spending is generally great for economies. Once that starts working, there are going to be a lot of other countries that will want in on the action. Countries investing massively in serving that need are going to do well in the next decades.
Germany, which hasn't done much public spending in decades has just unlocked hundreds of billions for investment in military and energy. Other countries are doing similar things. That started happening within weeks of the invasion and it's just the beginning. This will soon add up to trillions in spending.
And of course there is the notion that Russia might eventually decide that they want to sell some gas again after all. Gas prices are high currently and that compensates for the loss in export volume for them. But those prices are inevitably going to come down eventually as other energy sources become more available and the world adjusts. Russia seems to have no good plan economically other than selling gas to Europe. This winter is going to suck a lot harder for them than for anyone else (well except for Ukraine) and it's debatable if their exports will ever recover to the pre-war level.
No you would only add capacity if you thought the long term trends supported it. Building large power generation facilities is expensive and takes time. If prices go back to normal in the spring those new builds could end up as massive money losers.
The functioning market will decimate industry and impact the poor. It’s a long term disaster.
This is something where China has done a good job. The EU should plan who gets the energy available and how much to charge. Otherwise the EU will be dealt a blow to industry so large it might not ever recover.
595 comments
[ 849 ms ] story [ 5805 ms ] threadin this specific case 3 reason:
- Italy relies on natural gas, we had long standing relationships with Libya and Algeria for that, unfortunately France bombed Libya to kill Gheddafi (to claim control of the area mainly) and that destabilized the area [1]
- Italy relies on close countries to buy electricity, especially France. Now that they have switched off nuclear plants, electricity from France costs more.
- we are in electoral campaign, elections are next month, a good chunk of the right wing political landscape supports (or doesn't strongly oppose) Putin, they hope that by creating an energy crisis in Italy, people will vote for them. Which is probably what's really going to happen, for Putin's delight. [2]
[1] WikiLekas has a lot of documents on it, it's also one of the interventions that costed Hillary Clinton the elections.
[2] https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/08/10/italy-election-russia-u...
EDIT: I understand that on HN people don't like political opinions, but these are not my opinions. added notes.
> I've read somewhere
Before wondering why someone, somewhere is not doing something, confirm that the thing is actually happening in the first place.
Sounds like good investments are paying off, and bad investments (Germany collaborating with Putin despite Trump’s prescient advice & mockery) are not.
Capitalism at it’s finest! Too bad average people are paying the price, but in democracy, that’s literally what they voted for (non-sensical top-down EU bureaucratic green energy mandates, instead of investments into better tech & bottom-up sovereign energy investments).
Funny, I remember when we had similar discussions about negative electricity prices and people mockes those capital intensive legacy producers. Well, history is so old and context too complex to bother if polemism does as well.
Doesnt seem like a bad outcome tbh.
Also the people that are “making all the money” now that power prices are super high, stood to loose money if power prices were super low, why shouldn’t they be compensated for bearing that risk?
That’s not what is happening. If Austria was an isolated market the prices were significantly lower at the moment. But I would not want to separate the markets just because it works out better to us at the moment.
There were also a couple of curious deaths happening in the industry (the head of our State-owned hydro company, who died in his late 30s, the local boss of a power utility, who just threw himself from his balcony), but nothing came out of that, either.
Most probably part of the huge proceeds end up in the accounts connected to our intelligence agencies (the heirs of the former Securitate, which have split into several agencies after 1990).
* I choose energy provider x
* Friend has bought a part of those remote solar plants and also connected to provider x
* Friend sells his surplus energy to provider x at low price
* Provider x can now sell the power to:
a) His customers (me), and make next to nothing
b) Sell it to the international grid and make bank, then proceed to buy energy for me at going rates making me foot the whole bill.
Guess what happens, and who gets rich. This is market liberalization at work. You reap what you have sown.
Sorry if this is a dumb question but why can't he sell at the going rate for international grid?
So in essence, because they can't get it there.
The "competition" are resellers that have not installed a single MW of production, essentially leading to starving what used to be the most talented and biggest energy producer in Europe, all under the pretense of the free market. The resellers are actively dropping clients so they do not have to not buy on the open market.
It is happening, and is happening with the blessing of our leaders just greasing billionaire pockets.
Or, said in other ways, it took an extremely rare event that lasted long enough to throw off plans that are made on the scale of years, in addition with a bit of bad luck, and lasts a few months. I'd say they damn well can produce electricity in normal times, yes. But indeed, their need to buy electricity is compounded by that.
By whom?
Countries like Norway, which have abundant, cheap, generation, are paying EEA prices in its highly interconnected bidding zones (NO1,NO2). The next few months, if prices persist, are likely to see lots of pressure from Norwegians to curtail exports (i.e. close off transmission capacity to EEA). This would significantly decrease prices for Norwegians, but damage the EU's integrity. The same can be said of other countries with abundant, cheap generation that are suffering the consequences of other EEA countries' actions w.r.t their electricity supply.
I say this as a supporter of the EU, but the integrated electricity market's future is in peril this winter.
https://www.nei.org/news/2018/cost-of-nuclear-generation-rea...
If you're making electricity that cheaply right now you are indeed getting rich, and so you should.
The market is what is doing something about it. Prices will moderate over time as inefficient producers are pushed out and as consumers reduce their usage due to high prices.
Electricity isn't optional. "The market" didn't make water, or housing, or waste, or healthcare, or telecoms, etc, cheaper once privatized. In fact, it didn't make energy cheaper in the countries that privatized it.
Any sufficiently big scam can waived away with "the market has spoken". It's like a religious belief
food isn't optional either. How well did nationalized food production work out?
>"The market" didn't make water, or housing, or waste, or healthcare, or telecoms, etc, cheaper once privatized.
I can get the source for each of those claims? Some of them seem dubious, eg. housing. Was housing ever not privatized?
>In fact, it didn't make energy cheaper in the countries that privatized it.
well if we're talking about "energy" in general (ie. not just electricity), I can point out a counter-example of PDVSA going to shit after it was nationalized.
If you really want to challenge your view, I'm sure you can read a book that lays it out better than I could in a quick YC comment.
For example, here's Chomsky's take:
"Privatization does not mean you take a public institution and give it to some nice person. It means you take a public institution and give it to an unaccountable tyranny. Public institutions have many side benefits. For one thing they may purposely run at a loss. They're not out for profit. They may purposely run at a loss because of the side benefits. So, for example if a public steel industry runs at a loss it's providing cheap steel to other industries. Maybe that's a good thing. Public institutions can have a counter cyclic property. So that means that they can maintain employment in periods of recession, which increases demand, which helps you to get out of recession. Private companies can't do that in a recession. Throw out the work force because that's the way you make money."
However, if we'd paid a little more attention to Noam's points about war (clandestine and overt, economic and military) and the media a few decades ago, we the people would be tens of trillions of dollars better off.
Millions of brown skinned folk would still be alive, tens of millions wouldn't have had to become refugees, and South America would be immeasurably better off.
If you have some kind of beef with Chomsky I suggest you take it up with him; I hear he's quite good at responding to people.
For example, only gaz-based electricity producers « needs » to be paid such a high price. Nuclear or renewable would be perfectly fine with much lower price.
Or, if we had not one market, but one market per type of energy used to produce electricity, we would also have a « market driven » pricing, however the end-result would likely be much much different.
There's some amount of market preference for different generation types, but that's a small portion of the load, so it's handled outside of the grid operation marketplace. It's also true that grids with limited interconnection have separate markets.
You could run a grid on a cost plus basis, but you lose the benefits of market economics as well as the negatives.
Some sellers will get more than they offered, but that's how the auction works, there can only be one market price to secure the given quantity of electricity.
>Czechs produce electricity at 0.1EUR/MWh
so far so good. Now you have -0.1EUR and 1MWh of power.
>then sell it to an exchange in Germany
suppose the market price is 400EUR. after selling it to an exchange you have 399.9EUR and 0 MWh of power
>and buy it back for the "market" price.
so you buy it back at the market price. Now you have -0.1EUR and 1MWh of power. That leaves you off... in the same position as step 1? What's the point in selling it to the exchange and buying it back?
Moreover, I don't see anything interesting happening here. You can replace "electricity" with "oil" and you basically describe how petro states work (ie. pump oil out of the ground, sell it on the global market for far more than it costs for you to pump it out of the ground).
It is possible Czech producers sold energy to Germany for a very low price a few years ago on a let's say 5 year contract which is still valid. Now Czech Republic needs to buy at a high price the energy from Germany because it cannot meet its own demand. Again, this is speculation on how that could work.
EDIT: Just found out production costs from another source:
Dukovany Nuclear Power Plant - 20.31EUR/MWh
Temelin Nuclear Power Plant - 34.52EUR/MWh
your local costs in the US range from 5-25 cents per kilowatt hour (1/1000 of that), with ideal solar being the cheapest amortized at roughly 3 cents/kwh
Best not to believe everything you read :)
What they don't say is: some of our hydro plants are being maintained and the rest are capable of generating a fraction of country's needs. Sure, some of the money goes to small privately owned plants, but the most goes to large state-owned plants, who are (ideally) using the money to upgrade their equipment and the rest goes to government as dividends, which will probably be spent to support heating expenses in winter..
If they hadn't done so, someone else might be getting even-more rich (per kWhr) by charging higher prices across an even wider geography.
We have yet to even scratch the surface of the effects of this crisis
Energy is the economy, and the failure of an integrated energy market means the failure of so much more.
I mean, whenever electricity is being exported at high cost, that high cost is an indication that this other place has it even worse; and blocking trade would make electricity cheaper at the exporting place, but cause a larger spike (and possibly even blackouts with the associated economic disruption) at the importing place and also remove the economic incentives to increase surplus production at places who can do it cheaper than others.
No, that's entirely unrealistic. 0.1EUR per KWh is realistic, so my guess is that you misremembered the units. The price per MWh would then be 100 EUR. But not even that is realistic anymore for the Czech Republic, given they produce most energy from fossil fuels[1], and the prices recently have skyrocketed.
Now you may ask why they'd be selling to an exchange and buying it back for more (if that actually happens to a degree that matters). One reason is of course profit. Although one must not confuse the production price with the final consumer price or even the exchange price. Production is one thing, getting the power to where it's needed is another thing, accounting, taxes and so on.
Another reason for putting it into exchanges, is that they might at times produce more than needed, so selling off excess production seems somewhat reasonable as the kind of plants they are running cannot be started and stopped at will. At other times, they might not be producing enough, and then need to buy at exchanges.
It's not as easy as assuming somebody is just grabbing a lot of money. Although some money grabbing is most likely part of the answer as well.
Germany is selling energy as well, by the way. Germany has thus far net exported around 20 TWh this year[2]. The entire energy need of Germany is around 540 TWh per annum. That would suggest Germany (thus far) has exported a little over 5% of it's energy production to other European nations in this crisis year. It may have something to do with France currently having temporarily shut down 32 of its 56 nuclear reactors[3], with a net 10 TWh being exported from Germany in the direction of France. And it probably has something to do with Germany producing a lot more energy than it needs when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing nicely.
The Czech Republic on the other hand exported 6 TWh net to Slovakia and another 4 TWh to Austria. But in turn Slovakia exported almost 9 TWh to Hungary[4].
That is to say... it's complicated.
[1] https://www.iea.org/countries/czech-republic
[2] https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&...
[3] https://www.france24.com/en/france/20220825-france-prolongs-...
[4] https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/import_export/chart.ht... (might be lagging behind a little)
I don't like it but if that's the system we need to accept the pros and cons.
AWS is in SE3, where the electricity is tens to a hundred times more expensive than for Facebook in SE1.
The compensation adds 243.57eur/MWh to the final price for Spain.
https://www.omie.es/es/market-results/daily/average-final-pr...
BTW spain's prices are more "real" in the sense that they better reflect the cost of generation. It's the EU market's prices that are fake.
Granted, it does not solve the problem that the energy I'll spend in the fall/winter has to come from somewhere but financially it is at the very least closer to being balanced out.
Also, this is in a country, where the net metering system is favorable to households (one can spend the full amount that has been fed to grid).
Getting building permits for installations was waived this year (before that it varied by city).
I'm not looking forward to it, but I may end up having to install (ground source) heat pump myself (assuming it will be delivered this season at all- quote delivery date was June).
So, even in winter you'd be able to squeeze some kilowatt hours out of a few solar panels. Just install more of them until you have enough to charge up your batteries during the darkest part of the winter and you are good to go. Maybe add some wind to diversify.
For heating there are thermal storage solutions that use cheap materials like sand or basalt. Charge in the summer, heat in the winter. All you need is some pipes, mass, insulation and a way to dump energy in the system. There are various prototype systems operational already and they work as advertised. You might wonder about the cost of a silo of locally sourced sand. I'd say it's probably going to be dirt cheap.
EV batteries are going to be great for balancing the grid. Vehicle to grid charge connectors are already being standardized and multiple vehicles that support that are being produced already. Millions on the road in the next few years. Twh of power. A very tempting target for would be virtual power plant companies. Like Tesla.
The main challenge with wind and solar is bridging the few weeks a year where production of both may drop dramatically in the winter for more than a day. The combination of no wind, low sun and little amount of sun hours, and overcast skies is kind of deadly. In northern Europe that might last as long as a month. The rest of the year there is going to be either or both enough solar and wind.
Mostly the real challenge the rest of the time is actually what to do with the growing amounts of excess power. Plenty of answers to that but it's not a fully resolved issue. Mostly current wind operators seem to regularly disable their wind mills by weather-vaning them instead. They're not broken, they've been turned off because they are producing more than needed.
We're going to end up with way more power than what we need. People are installing solar panels on their roof that generate much more power than they need, even when aggregated over time. The current crisis is actually going to result in even more people doing that. This poses a serious challenge for energy produces still dumb enough to depend on burning fossil fuels. Most of the time they'll be selling at a loss or completely shutting down operations. And a few weeks a year they suddenly have to deliver a little bit of power. Not a great business to be in.
Act how exactly? How do you propose on forcing everyone, citizens and enterprises, to consume less energy? Why would they want to do that? Transition to less energy intensive alternatives sure (like LEDs), but that's not easy, will require massive investments and is by the way already in progress.
It's the opposite. Insulation protects you from heat as well. That's why refrigerators are very much insulated.
That's why you need aircon. Removing insulation doesn't magically make your home cooler.
I really wonder why these shutters are not way more common than they are.
In winter, the house works great to retain heat. But as I learned during construction when I had to prepare for laying flooring, it took a while to heat it up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_mass#Thermal_mass_for_...
https://www.yourhome.gov.au/passive-design/thermal-mass
Currently roof becomes heated. And there's crapton of insulation in the attic. Which heats up during the day in sunlight.. And then takes it's sweet time to cool down at night. And, if heat lasts several days, it doesn't even cool down by the morning.
Another solution would be a full-sized attic like in old houses. Now we didn't even bother to install crawl doors, because there's next-to-no space. Insulation takes up whatever is there. But large attic would be inefficient in winter. Unless we'd double-insulate it to keep heat in living quarters. But I wonder how long it'd take to recoup €€€€ and kwh/co2/etc spent for extra building materials/work wit lower energy usage.
Gas as a transitionary energy source is something lots of countries have bet on. Meanwhile France is doing a great job showcasing the problems of Nuclear during heat waves (they will be the ones laughing in the Winter though)
Zone 1: 14,25 cents/kWh
Zone 2: 14,25 cents/kWh
Zone 3: 108,64 cents/kWh
Zone 4: 201,63 cents/kWh
1 Swedish krona is 0,094 USD. So between 1,3 and 20 American cents per kWh.
Most people live in Zone 3 followed by Zone 4. Facebook's datacenter is in Zone 1.
[1]: https://elen.nu
It's already starting to bankrupt businesses in Zone 4, that are calling for immediate changes [0].
[0] https://www.di.se/live/efter-elprissmockan-skanska-foretag-v...
[0] https://www.sydsvenskan.se/2022-08-18/regeringen-kan-bana-va...
The electricity companies and the socialist state earn billions [1] (2021), they have no incentives to change how it currently works.
[1] https://www.tn.se/hallbarhet/kritiken-staten-tjanar-miljarde...
So this means to charge it, at home, would cost between $0.75, $2.25, and $15.
A normal air conditioner uses about 3.5kw. So if it runs for 6 hours a day, so 21kwh/day. $0.21/day, $0.63/day, and $4.2/day.
small typo - air conditioner should be 3.5kw not kwh
[0]: https://www.svd.se/a/rE0R9R/elpriserna-nar-inte-industrin-ha... (paywall)
[1]: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/lagst-elpriser-till-indus...
Let's be real though, the society will fall apart before energy costs become a big problem for people working in tech.
Is there ever a problem with everyone wanting to move to all the good places haha? I wonder if they will get really expensive to live in like California and New York. Not that I’m saying CA and NY are the “good” places of USA but many perceive it that way.
It's great that your small urban household can take the hit. It's becoming a real problem for single parents in the south.
> It's great that your small urban household can take the hit. It's becoming a real problem for single parents in the south.
Meh, no bank wanted to give me a mortgage so I bought a cheap rural house. I am already subsidising the leveraged people's interest rates in my massive taxes, so excuse me if my sympathies do not extend very far.
https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/penge/danskernes-stroemforbrug-er-...
https://www.skandiaenergi.no/dagens-spotpriser/
Electricity Maps has an excellent visualization showing breakdowns of each electricity zone, with imports/export to each neighbor zone etc:
https://app.electricitymaps.com/
Don't make us tap the sign.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EuroAsia_Interconnector
[2] https://www.powerengineeringint.com/smart-grid-td/td-infrast...
The electrical loss through HVDC cable is approximately 3% per 1000 km of cable, far less than with AC grids. The physics do work out, the only real barriers are economics and politics.
The physics works out just fine. Where did you get your information from?
See also:
"On the technology front we have covered significant ground in the past two decades. We have raised power capacity from 50MW to more than 1,400MW – enough to power several million households. We have enhanced voltage levels from 80kV to 525kV, thereby increasing distance capability from 70km to over 1,000km. And at the same time we have continually brought down transmission losses which are now at less than 1 percent." https://eepower.com/news/abb-doubles-hvdc-capacity-and-celeb...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331959599_A_compreh...
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/building-a-2... (2 billion seems too cheep)
The cables are designed for crossing relatively small bodies of water such as the Mediterranean or the North Sea, and can be tweaked for more efficiency if the goal is to cross the Pacific Ocean, but even without that, it would still work.
The rest of the day works though.
¹https://wttr.in/Moon
Electricity isn't stored, it is consumed.
Try a small game, put PR and the emotion they push aside: who need a war today? If you are honest you have to admit that the most in need of a war are UK first, USA second. UK need a war outside to avoid a civil war inside. Having essentially lost their "empire" status they are simply unable to live anymore. A war would compact people and if won give resource of the looser. USA need a war for similar reasons, mitigated by the fact that USA can actually live on it's own, even alone, "only" correcting it's crazy economy. Not easy at all, but technically possible, so practically when crisis really bite.
China do not need, but like, a war. They have a hyper big food issue, they need to conquer south America to eat. To do so they need to overpower the USA. To do so they need Russia's tech and natural resources, something Russia, a China's historic enemy, do not like that much to share to such a big & powerful giant.
Russia do not like a war at all. It's something that impose agreements with China, imbalanced. EU similarly do not need a war. It simply destroy EU itself due to the lack of natural resources.
So the plan is? Well. USA declare it essentially in the far 2004: https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Global%20Trends_Mapping%... oh, they are formally just acritical prediction from the intelligence to the politicians. But sounds really accurate. In more modern terms: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_briefs/R...
A bottomline: saying that UK and USA need a war means their oppressive ruling classes need it, of course NOT the people, unfortunately as most people in the world those who do need the opposite of their ruling class are the last to understand they are fighting for their own enemy that's not those on the opposite front, but those who march at their head.
Russia may not like a war but Russia needs resources since it wants to be the only store in neighborhood, and unfortunately, Ukraine does have resources. War was not expected outcome of the initial scare tactic but here we are.
However both UK and USA are failed states, their extreme capitalism put too much of their population in poverty and without immigration they simply fall on their own weight.
As before they NEED a war to overthought the table and start over. And they have actually created that, it's not a secret, it's written black on white if only you read their publications from RAND to G8. They use a slightly strange vocabulary but it's clear what they state. They call themselves "the international community" or "the civilized world" but it's clear they just mean their fragmented former colonies. The same have happened in the recent past with the Korea war, as it happened their former colonies start to decide it's time to detach a bit, like SK an Japan themselves https://asiatimes.com/2022/08/japan-korea-defy-us-with-big-r... and even New Zealand https://thediplomat.com/2022/07/new-zealand-will-not-join-th... Australia itself suffering the submarines scam the UK and USA essentially have imposed to them ditching modern but limited French subs to exactly nothing since for a decade at least that's what they'll get (less than nothing since they have payed compensation for the late choice) start to falter undecided witch side to take. Only high treason neoliberal government in the EU keep the USA/UK side against their own Citizens interests.
Some in US and UK have already understood that their war is lost and they menace them to go nuclear in that case, see https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/liz-truss-nuc... and https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11110441/Henry-Kiss... but the rest of the world, the BRICS start to unite knowing that it's freedom or death for them. They have all tested the "freedom" neoliberal nazi means, to a point in eastern Europe many would welcome back Soviet Union...
The above are NOT political or ideological positions but simply facts anyone observing with honesty no matter the personal political position can't avoid to see.
Long story short: yes, is Russia that have crossed the border, but no, it's not it who start the war in reality.
Care to link to some?
c. 1869: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water
1897: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction
Antiquity or 1835: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror
1882: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32618798
Might not even be wrong to have made this choice, I can't tell — economics (which is an important part of politics) is outside my domain.
Men även med så intetsägande och generiska uttalanden betyder det faktum att jag inte kan någonting om svensk politik att jag kanske saknar något som någon svensk väljare skulle anse som "sunt förnuft".
The in-topic part is for instance about p.v.: if you think a global electricity grid as a solution you dream something that seems to be logic, if you are a manager but is a totally crazy idea because we are not AT ALL a global community. Even if some neoliberals call themselves World Government [1] the reality is that we are various States with different interests and NOTHING at a certain scale can work simply because of that, any other thing aside.
Not only: the idea that we have the production capacity, substitution included, to build and run such monster is another dream, with the same realism of those who say "hey, I produce 130% of my consumption from p.v.". It's an old classic of those who "try and fix on the go", who typically create hyper-big disasters and survive thanks to those who do not work as them. If the entire world take this path such a big fail will not be solved by anyone.
[1] https://www.worldgovernmentsummit.org/
We have some effective storage, like pumped hydro, yes, but we have them where we can, we do not build mountains so far, for instance. Compressed air storage prove to be possible at a certain scale, but so far is just a promise with some experiments and honestly I doubt the actual push is ONLY for environmental and economical reasons. I think we start suspecting that oil is at the end, and we have just 2 decades or so remaining so we need to rush finding alternatives...
Sounds about right.
> If I compute how it's produced, how much energy, pollution, it need to exists brand new in my home, and how so far we can't recycle...
Recycling is possible — even the absolute dumbest way I can imagine, which is grind the battery into dust and put that dust into the process used to separate rocks into their constituent elements, is still better than mining the actual rocks you'd otherwise get them from.
Recycling facilities better than that necessarily only scale to whatever battery quantity existed x years ago.
But also, the pollution mostly comes from energy, so making the grid greener makes the batteries greener which makes the grid greener etc.
However, you're missing one of the cheapest storage systems: hydrogen. The round-trip efficiency isn't great, but given how cheap PV is, this isn't bad enough to be a problem.
About hydrogen... Well... How much it costs an hydrolysis plant with relevant compression system and storage PLUS the needed fuel-cell to use it once milked? Personally I've already spent for a new house, with relevant not-that-cheap systems, heat-pumps included, who might last 10 years as well (compressor), in the near future an EV who might last 10 years but 5 to 8 seems to be more realistic... Adding the price of a smaller house to add hydrogen start to be REALLY expensive. Long story short: if the Green New Deal demand such big investments I think just 2-3% of the total population in the western countries can afford it, witch does not make anything ecological just for mere scale. If we try bigger scale... So far I see nothing really big (beside old scams). Yes, some p.v. plants pops up continuously but they are small in classic PP scale terms and just grid-connected systems. Only a handful of projects do differently around the world and seems to be in a really early stage of experimentation...
I have nothing against pay to be a pre-alpha tester BUT there is a limit for that honestly...
In particular:
> Yes, some p.v. plants pops up continuously but they are small in classic PP scale terms and just grid-connected systems.
What's "PP scale"?
And are you aware the combined nameplate capacity of all global PV is now close to one terawatt?
The typical power capacity of a gas/coal/nuclear power plant vs the typical capacity of a p.v. one. In general flourishing p.v. plants are far smaller than typical fossil/nuclear power plant. Some big projects in exotic places do exists, in early stage, like the recent Uzbekistan push (who already made unrest and armed revolts) like the old Desertec scam. But real-world active p.v. power plant offer a nominal far little mean power respect of the others.
> And are you aware the combined nameplate capacity of all global PV is now close to one terawatt?
How does it count? I can state equally that the actual uranium collected in human hands can produce far far far more, but that's just a statement simply because "nominal" count nothing. What count is that so far no one is autonomous with p.v. alone, living a normal life, running business etc and so few are partially autonomous with very expensive and little lasting batteries. I'm one of them, since I have a small p.v. with lithium storage. Oh with the artificially skyrocketed electricity prices perhaps (still unsure) it will pay back. But I still need the grid for 50% of my consumption, while some state enthusiastically that "hey you can produce 130% of your energy needs", witch is formally true, practically false because I can't shift my consumption just when the Sun shine AND use it at 100%. I call it the difference between the beancounter computed reality and the physical world reality. Seeing that, and the actual climate I suspect we have the same issue with Green New Deal claims.
Why do you consider this important, rather than the aggregate output of all of them together?
As you say later, you've got PV on your own roof. If everyone in a small city does that, it's the same output as a nuclear plant, if they do that with a battery pack each (and I add a caveat about installation costs which I'm told are needlessly high in some places such as the US) then it can also be the same cost and reliability as a nuclear plant.
(Nuclear is expensive, so batteries backing PV is not (yet) no-brainer cheap, this is part of why I suggest hydrogen and/or global grid whenever the topic comes up).
> Some big projects in exotic places do exists, in early stage, like the recent Uzbekistan push (who already made unrest and armed revolts) like the old Desertec scam.
What Uzbekistan push? What are the rioters supposed to do with any of this?
What Desertec scam? The investors backing out? Because that's just normal for business, and the organisation of that name is still around.
> offer a nominal far little mean power respect of the others.
I have no idea what this is trying to say.
> How does it count? I can state equally that the actual uranium collected in human hands can produce far far far more, but that's just a statement simply because "nominal" count nothing.
What do you mean "how does it count"? It's a significant contributor to the global electricity supply.
> I'm one of them, since I have a small p.v. with lithium storage. Oh with the artificially skyrocketed electricity prices perhaps (still unsure) it will pay back.
Given lithium batteries are the most expensive storage option, and despite that cost it's still something close enough you're unsure about, and it's still getting cheaper, why are you so pessimistic?
It's important in term of national grid design: we have a grid designed to push large amount of power from a single areas to many consumers, not ones designed to move amps around a country... It's not hyper-important especially respect with the variability of the output who impose hyper-quick generators to compensate oscillations quick enough to keep the grid on, but it's still relevant because it strain the grid significantly creating locally problematic frequency perturbation.
> As you say later, you've got PV on your own roof. If everyone in a small city does that, it's the same output as a nuclear plant, if they do that with a battery pack each (and I add a caveat about installation costs which I'm told are needlessly high in some places such as the US) then it can also be the same cost and reliability as a nuclear plant.
So far it's only in my garden, having a east-west root, but the real issue is that I'm FAR from being autonomous... To be almost autonomous (witch means no grid usage most of the year) I'll need something like 200kWh storage with the needed p.v. to recharge at least 40kWh in 3-4 hours + supply in the same amount of time enough peak power to run most home appliances like 3kW (absorption) heat-pump to quickly heat enough water to pass the rest of the day, night and new early morning in cold winter days, +5-6kW of various home appliances (dishwasher, washing machine, ...) to been able to very quickly do most high power usages in few hours of sunny days in winter dedicating the rest just to basic self-consumption to strain batteries the minimum possible and passing the night with no more than 15% daily DoD. That's means something impossible in essentially all EU cities (too dense) and possible only for some not-so-small homes around the EU south. Nothing more.
Oh, if I add H₂ to the game, something not on sale so far and then something I can't add anyway no matter how much money I put on the table, the price and needed equipment skyrocket even more... Perhaps in France just 2-3% of total population can do something like the only lithium + p.v. + hot water storage. All the rest can't economically and most of them even physically constrained by their homes and terrain sizes.
> What Uzbekistan push? What are the rioters supposed to do with any of this?
http://intellinews.com/sun-drenched-uzbekistan-on-the-verge-... or https://thediplomat.com/2022/08/solar-energy-project-leaves-...
something similar happen in Australia https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/bold-steps-needed-to-power...
Azerbaijan https://bbj.hu/economy/energy/green-energy/hungary-joins-aze... and others sunny and not much inhabited lands... All with similar plots.
> What Desertec scam?
http://www.desertec-uk.org.uk/reports/DII/DPP_2050_Study.pdf Desertec was, partially is, since partially was founded and some little PP was made, by a classic private-public mafia-aggregation ranging from major Germans banks, Siemens, ABB, Cevital, ... others from energy sectors, even the Morocco's Royal funds and others big names from Ignacio Campino, Fritzhjof Fi...
So no, if you want a world that run on p.v. you need a global grid to harvest enough energy AND I doubt even if such monster can be done in a snap and work flawlessly that we can even harvest enough power at ground level.
Harvesting from orbit beside the fact it's so far mere theory have various major issues, not just in environmental terms (a catastrophic impact, probably higher than a nuclear war on ground) but in mere technical terms: without the atmospheric shield anything in orbit at a certain scale have a very short life span. Substitute them demand a very big quantity of fossils and an industrial capacity we do not have in the entire world so far.
Nuclear fusion on ground is the most promising tech but so far it's far from being ready, seen the actual status PERHAPS we can have it at an initial general availability around 2060-2070. Before we have just fission. Now if we invest in fission witch is far from cheap and simple to build on scale it's a nonsense also investing in p.v. witch is far less expensive but for what? Once a reactor is started you consume uranium anyway, producing energy from steam or not. p.v. might play a role in averaging the load, theoretically, that means "please all loads that can be run just when the Sun shine do run them only with it", but doing so for now is pure theory and at a nationwide grid scale it's already almost impossible. Beside that we have an enormous issue: climate change. Did you know how vulnerable are infra on ground?
We try the small reactor path NOT because they are safe (it's the opposite), not because they are cheap (again, it's the opposite), but because they are flexible: instead of depend on LARGE infra we can deploy small one so reducing the impact of any outage.
In the nearer future we have the nightmarish problem of replace oil and gas sparing them for the use we do not know how to do without them. In the mid-term future we need resiliency and nuclear fission, another nightmare. In a mid-long term we hope for fusion, but we do not really know and we anyway need to essentially rebuild the changing world coping with sea levels rises, floods, landslides etc that push people in altitude locally and world-scale migration in general. That's the actual sore reality for what we can see directly and read from so many sources with contrasting interest to being able to call them very likely true.
While it would take a while to build a global power grid, we have the capacity to produce approximately ten thousand times our current global power usage from ground-level PV.
I'm a bit skeptical, but in any case consider a thing: we need to count an initial construction BUT also a regular substitution of old modules, managing their disposal (witch actually is just shred and bury in most cases) and in doing so we need to count the life cycle: if we construct something slowly things reach EOL in small batches so we can keep a regular production since the initial demand is not hyper-big and the future substitution rate start BEFORE the initial demand finished and keep a slow rate. If we are quick:
- we need a monster production to satisfy the demand
- then the demand drops equally sharply and you get hyper-big factories who do almost nothing
- the the demand skyrocket again
If you think it's theoretical see actual Italy: a gazillion of CA infra was built quickly in few years after WWII, now are en equal batch EOL... There is a reason, more than one, why almost any big project end up badly while most small succeed...
1.740 × 10^17 W ≈ total power received by Earth from the Sun
1.91 × 10^13 ≈ average total power consumption of the human world in 2019
> If we are quick
I don't know about the growth of batteries other than "factories are being made as fast as they can be, and car companies are investing in mines now", the growth of PV is still approximately exponential. Also, if PV production switches from growth to fixed output at the end of this year, given how long the stuff lasts, it would end up in a steady state of about 8 TW nameplate capacity; given what the capacity factor is like, in practice that would be enough to make all electricity green but not enough to electrify everything else.
I'm not expecting the exponential to come to a sudden stop at the end of this year.
> most small succeed...
Do they, though? I think you're just not hearing about most of the small failures because they're boring.
About projects, in any field, big, complex projects normally never get done well, smaller normally succeed. That's is. Since it's valid from IT to A&D why it should be different for something else?
Off topic, but why do you consistently spell "which" as "witch"? I sympathise if it's ESL, but if so: the latter refers to pointy hats and pentagrams, not a determiner.
Sorry, I'm Italian living in France, my English is far from good...
Even non Battery electric trains can speed up or slow down at different points (while still staying on schedule) to act as a variable demand for the local grids. Batteries just extend that.
https://arstechnica.netblogpro.com/science/2021/11/can-we-ru...
> The analysis becomes very interesting when the researchers leave freight behind and start thinking about what could be done with many big, mobile batteries. Even without moving them, freight companies could use their capacity to provide grid stabilization services or sell back power when the price gets high. In extreme cases, this system could actually pay for the entire infrastructure.
> "Preliminary estimates of the most expensive 90 hours per year in the ERCOT [Texas] market, for example, show that batteries could be discharged at $200/kWh, potentially generating enough revenue to pay for the upfront battery cost in a single year," the study says.
> The batteries could also be moved to locations that have been struck by power outages or natural disasters, towed there by locomotives running on diesel instead of draining the batteries.
I want this for everything with a battery, it’s own internal thermal mass or things I don’t need to complete as quickly as possible.
E.g.: laptop, washing machine (clothes or dishes), dryer, refrigerator, hot water heater, hvac, etc.
It just seems so underdeveloped on the consumer side.
https://es.catapult.org.uk/project/consumer-insight-unlockin...
WTF does that mean?
Fundamental is core to the problem, incidental is stuff we add because of our imperfect solutions.
Such a simple design, can be used for at least heating water for 3-6 months. But nah.
Same for which the roofs. You don't have a white/silver roof on your house? Fuck you.
On that note, you like cruise ships? Also fuck you.
Why?
I do need heating in the winter though.
I am one of your fuckees. The house I bought was expensive enough as it was. I am not changing a brand new dark roof for a different one for an exorbitant price right now, because budget. A perfectly new roof going down (isn't that actually waste?) for saving, say, 10 of 30 days when the AC is really needed?
(I am also not even sure if roof colors are regulated by the local authorities or not. There are over thirty houses in the same project, with the same roofs. Maybe I wouldn't even be allowed to.)
I'm talking people building or renovating and then bitching about expensive AC. Talk about idiotic.
I'm in a town where more than half the roofs are black. BLACK! It has been over 30 degrees and sunny for two months of summer. Guess what complaints I kept hearing?
Reflective paint helps in summer much more than it hurts in winter.
But beyond that, I just hate people going "Reeee we need to do something about the climate change" who do absolutely nothing themselves.
In California, roof color isn't regulated, but reflectivity (or rather energy absorption) is by Title 24. You're basically required on new construction to have a fairly efficient roof.
[1] https://www.homedepot.com/p/Henry-4-75-Gal-Acrylic-Reflectiv...
Circumstances might not be as simple as you you think they are.
If I want to go fully autonomous I have to spend in batteries like the same price of a Lamborghini, for zero re-sale value, to be demolished in 10 years in theory, in practice more likely 7-8 years if I use them with significant daily important DOD. I also doubt we are even able to produce enough battery and panels to everyone. And I'm not alone: https://www.economie.gouv.fr/files/files/directions_services... essentially the governmental, non-interested report state: we can't run on renewable. That's is.
What I'm curious is another thing: why some on a technically sound community like HN with certain topics became totally partisan of this or that topic at fanatic levels. It's not you, it's a trend I see in the last months at least, for various topics: anytime there is a post with a neoliberal agenda hot topic such behaviors appear.
My honest review:
- I spent a very big amount of money to build a new home, witch will not pay back ever in monetary terms, only pay back in comfort terms;
- I spent more for renewables NOT because they are ecological (they are pollutant) but as a protection against future disruption I imaging we will suffer, again in economical terms money dumped to the bin;
- I'll spend more in the near future for an BEV because I expect diesel/gasoline supply issues and artificially skyrocketed prices.
The synthesis? Well: those who have done such investments will be far less wealthy then before. Those who have not done that or can't will be far poorer. Those who gain are ONLY those who push such evolution for almost pure financial reasons, not "green" at all in ecological terms, green just in dollar and stereotypical toxic waist terms. Since it's clearly NOT sustainable nor extendable on scale the obvious results will be a very big disaster and another global war.
how? considering 75 kwh tesla is ~50K. Do you really need more than 75 kwh of storage?
Did you ever try the real autonomy game? Just consider that in winter you can count on few hours of Sun let's say one day yes and one no, if you live like me in France south. In those hours you need to run anything together. You have postponed dishwasher, washing machine, you have to cook, heat both sanitary water and reserve for night and early morning home heating, recharge the batteries, car's battery included etc.
For instance to heat enough water to heat my home a single day (~2000 liters at 60℃ to get in the morning at 32-33℃) I need a powerful heat pump, let's say 3kW absorbed. I need ~2kW per home appliance (dishwasher, washing machine, coffee maker, induction for a single pot etc) I might have good enough Sun from 9.30 in the morning to let's say 14.30. Some appliance are very quick (like a coffee maker) but some are not (the dishwasher heat water few times for 8-10' a time over 90' timeframe, the washing machine normally only one time) recharging a massive battery demand both a certain amount of sustained power to avoid unbalanced cells, demand little power for a not that short time to balance them at the end of the charge etc. Essentially I need around 25kW for around 4+ hours per day. Being able to count casually passing clouds in the meantime. Not only. Such system need to be constantly managed to lower quickly and mount quickly the load following p.v. production. Some appliance can potentially and practically (for instance modern heat-pump water heaters are already made to be controlled by some modbus/mqtt automation), some can just potentially (nothing on sale do that, but it's possible), some can't.
Really try the game, including home heating in winter, NOT counting on the grid even for small loads.
An efficient, large scale global economy is only possible with incredibly high energy density (and easy to transport and convert into usage energy) energy sources.
And, to your point, even global food supply is ultimately an issue of transporting energy from the sun to human bodies largely in the form of plant based carbohydrates. Human's ability to expand around the globe is predicated on the ability to transport the caloric requirements efficiently.
Solar energy isn't the panacea that people make it out to be. Where it is abundant, it makes sense. A lot of places do not have that luxury, yet countries like Germany made foolish investments in solar power which is 10% efficient compared to its full potential in Southwestern USA.
You say that they would be 10x as efficient in Southwestern USA. But how would you transport the electricity from the USA to Germany? Isn't that exactly the problem that the previous commenter is pointing out? I.e. production is not the problem, transportation is.
This means that two different houses each with PV can support each other when one is sunny and the other cloudy.
In principle that would scale to the world; in practice that's the domain of politics rather than technology, and politics may push for one of many other solutions.
On the other hand the nuclear power station turbine generates power with a voltage of 20 KV feeding it to a high voltage transformer, which steps up the voltage to 200KV and is connected directly to the transmission lines.
Cost of energy has multitude of secondary effects on GDP and food security; the importance of which cannot be understated.
The reason the southern areas have high prices is because they are connected to other markets.
Connect the northern stuff better and it'll equalise the price but not substantially. High cost low gain compared with cheap new wind generation.
But now that the price has gone up by such an enormous amount in the south, connecting north and south will not reduce the price in the other zones, it will likely just cause NO4 to go up to the same level as in the rest of Norway. This is mainly due to the NO4 being basically not connected to the the synchronous grid of Continental Europe, while the other regions are to a much larger extent due to underwater cables going to the UK, Denmark and Germany. This means that the price of power in Europe directly influences the price of electricity in NO1-3, but not NO4. At least not to the same extent, although Sweden makes a killing buying cheap power from NO4 and selling it to mainland Europe, or even straight back to southern Norway. As such, connecting NO4 to the rest of Norway and by extention the European grid, would not be very popular in the north, but to be fair, the price increase has not exactly been popular in the south either.
The industry in Norway is highly electrified and some sectors are very energy intensive, such as aluminium production, which due to using electrolysis, runs almost entirely off the grid. Manufacturing used almost 37% of all power consumed in Norway in 2017, with power-intensive manufacturing accounting for over 80% of total energy use in the manufacturing sector that year.[0] This is also an issue which will need to be considered when talking about increasing transfer capacity between the two zones.
I hope this gives some insight, even if I rambled a bit and touched on a lot of different aspects. I'm by no means an expert, but have become interested in the subject as so many other Norwegians have lately. I'd love to answer more questions if you have any!
[0] https://energifaktanorge.no/en/norsk-energibruk/energibruken... (Source in English and published by the Norwegian Ministry of Petroleum and Energy)
Ouch! Is this not enough to push for interconnect? Or will the electricity price increases prevent such a change?
Alternatively, why hasn't more heavy industry been built in NO4 zone? Or is it not possible due to winter weather?
I also heard that in Norway, a high percentage of electricty is generated from gravity (water dams). That would make aluminium production ideal. I have heard this is one reason why Iceland, with excelent geothermal energy sources, is also a major aluminium producer.
I agree the selling of power to ourselves via Sweden seems weird, but I suppose it's better to do just that instead of having to drain the dam without producing electricity at all, and it's a solution which works at this moment instead of waiting for an interconnect to be built. I would hazard a guess that it does slightly reduce the cost of power in other regions whenever we do sell to Sweden from NO4, but I have no data. I haven't really heard much about this exact issue being discussed though, so I don't have much information regarding that. But the issue with prices jumping to European levels would be relevant here too.
There is a lot of heavy industry in the north, such as petroleum, mining, refining and others. Norway does have a large aluminium industry which does rely more or less exclusively on hydro power, and seems to be in the top ten of aluminium producing countries, just above Iceland.
Anytime you mention energy transmision issues - you get total backlash.
We wasted EU money on pointless stuff while we could have upgraded our transit cables etc.
If you call people fanatics, they won’t believe you’re making a good faith argument.
Fire related grid shutdowns are usually hyperlocal, meaning the few who need to charge during that time can just run a town over. (keep in mind that EVs can be charged just less than once a week for average use)
And I believe all high voltage transmission lines are above ground.
The difference is that California historically has fire prone conditions. It’s not like the rest of the country is doing something different and California has done something inherently wrong. It’s that California did what the rest of the country was doing, but without conditions to support it.
Most countries don’t have regular residential streets with power lines up in the air.
It is significantly cheaper than burying lines from an initial cost point of view, so as long as the cost of preventive maintenance is low enough, it is a viable option. Particularly if the cost to fix lines is also low.
As an added bonus, it then also becomes easier to hang other lines (telephone, cable, fiber) on the same poles. This more difficult to do with buried lines, even if the lines are in conduit.
I’d prefer my electrical lines to be buried too, but I at least understand why they aren’t.
An EV bought today will only get cleaner as the grid gets cleaner. A new fossil-fuel vehicle today will always be dependent on fossil fuels, and will always pollute at least as much as the day it was purchased.
Far better to just send the power via grid to an EV @95% then toss 60% or more of it to make a gallon of gas
Not really for automotive emissions. The US alone accounts for almost half the world's road CO2 emissions.
there’s been a lot of media attention on how individuals need to make an effort to beat climate change, but the reality is that industry is the only sector able to make a meaningful impact.
It might make sense, for a while with aircraft, or for a classic car that rarely gets used, but would be too expensive for developing nations to use when they have other options. They'd save lots of money by using the same energy directly in newly built (or converted) EVs.
As we can all boil a kettle (3kW), or have a shower (10kW), or cook a sunday roast (5kW), and indeed do those at the same time, it's not a problem.
We should be thinking long term, but we can't forget about the present and the path to the glorious future. I think in hindsight we'll soon admit that we botched the transition to a greener world and caused needless suffering by putting ideologies before engineering.
By reducing Europe’s dependence on imported fossil fuels, renewables are part of the solution to energy security.
Yet it was pushed so heavily in lieu of nuclear power. Absurd.
The amount of sunlight your receive, however, will always be the same.
https://min.news/en/tech/30bdf6748162428883857d361132e177.ht...
A nuclear plant using sea water never stops due to heat waves, because it can dilute any amount of hot water.
It's not magic, it's a machine with design limits that extreme weather events can push up against.
It also can pollute rivers and kill fish before it gets to that level.
Sea cooled reactors have issues with jellyfish.
Having said that, the EU needs more gas in winter when it's cold, so doing the maintenance/refueling in the summer makes sense.
Still doesn't change the basic facts that a mix of solar/wind etc. is cheaper and better than nuclear and the annoying 'nuclear isn't affected by the weather' meme is wrong.
We have yet to see 80°c water in the rivers upstream. As I said earlier, the issue is never cooling the reactor, it's always about the state of the environment downstream.
Even not doing well it's better then Germany's wind and solar - it's rare to see Germany electricity polluting going below 4x France - not to mention coal whose transportation is also affected by low water levels
There was a project to pay down cable to import reliable, cheap 24/7 power from Iceland and hobernment said 'nah'. They also cancelled a 340 MW tidal project
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-she...
Just not as cost effective as wind, which got to piggyback of onshore turbine development.
I wouldn't call that necessarily incompetence. Corruption and cronyism, yes.
Although corruption was probably present, I would say that this kind of politics is precisely what we would expect from pro-business parties (in this case, the People's Party). They do have a long history of eschewing environmental policies as soon as any big company has money to lose because of them.
The "Green new deal" however is a step in that direction. But IMO its theatrics. EU money to buy green German cars and green German infra with no plan on longevity or strategic change. Truth is, that if EU wanted energy independece, they could have it many years now. Be it nuclear or Mediterranean natural gas (the same gas now Israel is going to sell to EU).
Not that the respective governments are competent. They are not, thats a given. But the "competent" part of Europe is only so in a stupidly myopic level.
You wrote: <<But the "competent" part of Europe is only so in a stupidly myopic level.>> Can you explain this more? (Zero trolling.) I don't understand what you mean.
Financing has generally been a positive for renewables.
The ability to predict output years in advance and lock in prices works well with finance to build up front.
The reason they've not built more is because the whole globe needs to work together or else one nation can save money by not bothering and just polluting instead.
If that politics got fixed (which it has slowly) then renewables would be rolled out more.
I mean that what we call the "competent part of Europe" is only competent in a myopic level. When it comes to their own local economy as if it is operating in vacuum. I argue that most of the foreign policy decisions of these members where made with short-term view of their own country economy, completely F'ing up their long term prospects by ignoring the potential and the dynamics of the periphery.
But it failed in securing energy resilience. I hope it has learned its lesson.
HVDC interconnects are not hard. We have them already. Allocating land isn't hard, it's a law in the Spanish parliament.
It just requires political will to survive. Which apparently isn't a thing people have.
Growth in Solar in Spain was negligible for 6 years from 2013 to 2019.
Italy likewise increased less than 10%
Greece has hardly any solar, with nothing built from 2013 until this year. That plant cost 130m for 350m kWh a year - that's 4c/kWh over 10 years, plus operating costs.
Painfully slow delivery that was needlessly stalled for financial reasons
The fossil fuel industry spent Billions on propaganda. Politicians had the option of fighting that, or using it to become more popular and so get rich.
This cost their countries Billions more than they ever earned. They're still doing it, but they might wake up soon. Still a total waste of time, energy and money though.
> That, in combination with the downward pressure on wholesale electricity prices, threatened the finances of the major utilities. Particularly hard hit were the 26 GW of natural gas-fired combined cycle (GFCC) plants built after 2000 in anticipation of substantial growth in Spain’s electricity demand, making gas the single largest source of installed capacity. This brand new fleet saw its overall load factor drop from around 50 percent in the mid-2000s to below 20 percent in 2011 and then continue to fall, almost to single digits in 2014
> As a result of these developments, the promotion of renewable power went, in just a few years, from enjoying broad public support, or at least tolerance, to facing substantial opposition. Particularly outspoken in their criticism were large electricity consumers and the major utilities, whose returns on investment in non-renewable generating capacity was being put at risk (Linares and Labandeira 2013). These various pressures in turn prompted similar policy responses by successive governments led by different parties.
https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=110...
So prices went down, country made money, big interests lost money, specifically natural gas wasn't being burnt enough for their liking, renewables got paused for a while.
Russia (and several other authorotarian regimes) benefitted, but it was mostly Spanish people conning other Spanish people for money.
I don't know how much is from solar parks? About 20% of all houses in the Netherlands have solar panels according to some sources so that adds up.
The previous government in Spain halted lots of funding for new power plants but as far as I know there is a lots of projects going on now. I expect to see a significant increment in the next years.
Also, in the Netherlands most of solar is installed in roofs, while in Spain is almost anecdotal. The previous government made difficult for individuals to install solar at home. Now that's gone but there is no subsidies, so individuals have to pay most of the installation from their own pockets, which are much more shallow than the dutch.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_European_Un... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_European_Uni...
Sure it would be better if it was a sunnier place, still...
At the same time, 49% of nuclear in France is being used today and 62% of nuclear in the UK
So, it's "bad" but not everything is used 100% all the time
But that perfect day is rare, largely because of Germany’s climate.
So you have a situation where you have to essentially install over 100% of your needs in solar. You’re overspending for suboptimum results.
https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-failure-...
Essentially, there’s plenty of installed solar capacity but most of it can’t be utilized fully unless its a perfect day. So you have to essentially rely on backup and keep installing more and more solar capacity beyond your needs because those perfect solar days are so rare in Germany.
This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who has ever spent even two days in Germany - the country isn’t exactly brimming with sunlight.
In particular they dragged their heels on ICE to EV transition, which I agree with.
Luckily they shifted from a conservative towards a green government and all that stuff is moving forward again.
> Politicians have ignored other elements, like industrial production, building efficiency and, especially, vehicle traffic. Involving those areas and coming up with an overarching concept, that's the hard part that must now be addressed. And it will determine whether Germany will once again become a model of sustainable economic production or whether the entire experiment will end in failure.
Winter is of course a different issue
HVDC makes transmission from state to state trivial at almost no loss. We should have a national HVDC grid so that a breeze in Texas might power a toaster in Connecticut.
Instead we have another $XX Billion for Ukraine. Another $13B here for a new carrier we’ll never need etc etc. So much waste everywhere while fundamental problems go unsolved.
Any reason to think this? Did Soviet Union form by Russia invading and conquering another country? No, it was a result of fall of the Russian empire and the Russian civil war.
The conditions now are very different. Fall of Ukraine would mean political win for Putin and his acolytes, maybe another invasion later on. But Soviet Union? More like stronger Russia, a revert to the Russian Empire.
Maybe that will come down over time?
Load up a truck with several tons of batteries, charge them, and ship the electricity south.
A ballpark calculation - ignoring any infrastructure and time for charging/offloading, assuming you get the batteries and the electricity for free, using Tesla batteries as an example, a MWh of them would weigh more than 6 tons; so freight truck can carry at most 2-3 MWh worth of batteries (density is likely to be an issue) and the sale price of that truck full of electricity even at the current outrageous prices is just 1000 eur, perhaps 2000 if you drive all the way across Europe. Shipping cargo on such trucks costs something like 1.5 eur/km nowadays (we don't have cheap self-driving electric trucks yet..) so if you'd have to drive more than a few hundred km (and you have to drive the batteries back!), you'd be better off using these trucks to ship something else than electricity.
Everybody blames the war, but AFAIK UK imports 1% of its gas from Russia, and its electricity is generated locally, so why are prices increasing? I would expect grain and wheat to increase 500%, not power.
That's wrong. The price is determined by demand and supply, which in turn is determined by what prices producers are willing to sell at and consumers are willing to buy at, plus other traders in the market.
You're stating that without evidence, but the kind of auctions that the electricity market requires are similar to opening auctions for stocks. Would you claim they're very dysfunctional?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merit_order
Because that's how the auction works, but it's misleading, it's the cheapest supplier that can deliver the final GW hour required to satisfy the projected load. Other multiparty auctions with a volume requirement work the same way.
Saying that price is "determined by the most expensive producer" without further context is still wrong.
Is a 'completely free market' if not a spherical cow in a vacuum on a frictionless surface i.e. a purely theoretical concept that can never exist in real life?
Presumably a 'completely free market' allows cartells, bribes are not illegal, and there is no authority to throw me in jail if I lie about my product? So either it would collapse into a cesspool of fraud, or you have to introduce rules and then it's not free any more?
This is why we originally stopped mining coal - because Russian gas was so cheap at the time that it was a no-brainer.
What could possibly go wrong?
Maybe we were also importing cheaper coal from elsewhere?
If you think miners should not be fairly compensated for their work you're free to go work as one for one of those foreign producers that less "dysfunctional" and more "reliable"
Europe is now at a critical point where choosing not to burn coal is going to have a high economic cost that many people are not going to be able or willing to pay.
Just like oil. The US has cheap oil but it's a global market, so everyone pays the (more or less) the same price regardless of how close they are to the oil.
Because demand side has no upper price limit the whole market price can raise to very high.
Ofc, this ignores cases of own production, futures and so on.
It is very efficient at creating a transparent market and finding the "natural" market price. The same price that a free and transparent market would converge to.
The alternative are price caps. Which could be considered. But it's a choice between free and non-free markets.
Blaming merit-order is shooting the messenger.
Same thing for gas, uk is competing with their neighbors for a resource that just got a whole lot more scarce (locally), causing prices to rise
See https://doomberg.substack.com/p/have-fun-staying-cold
From last November
You still haven’t addressed WHY the fundamental price setting mechanism of nat gas would be any different from any other commodity.
> The United Kingdom has the second-largest LNG regasification capacity in Europe (4.7 Bcf/d), and it can export up to 2.5 Bcf/d of natural gas to the European Union via the Interconnector pipeline into Belgium and the BBL pipeline into the Netherlands. Regasified LNG volumes in the United Kingdom averaged 2.9 Bcf/d from January through May 2022, and regasification facilities ran at a 63% utilization rate, up from 30% last year. Exports from the United Kingdom via interconnecting pipelines to the European Union have run at close to maximum rates since March 2022.
I would assume because of this.
A lot of generation in Europe is using gas, so it very much has. It's more or less a normal market experiencing a jump in price on inputs.
If you can produce cheaper than the market price then you make lots of money. That's normal.
The market is telling buyers to use less electricity and sellers to produce more. It's how markets work.
Back in the real world, we can look at hard data. Margins for energy producers and retailers have increased massively in the latest quarter. Also, we know that markets don't react directly (and exclusively) to fundamentals. They react to panics, they react to extremely complex interactions of manual and automatic trading algorithms. Reality is far from the simple "supply and demand" that economics 101 textbooks portray.
2. That does not apply here since we are talking cost/profit and not share price
> The efficient market hypothesis (EMH), alternatively known as the efficient market theory, is a hypothesis that states that share prices reflect all information and consistent alpha generation is impossible.
Nothing you say is about EMH. Nor does EMH predict that markets react only to "fundamentals", only in that shares reflect the whole set of information.
Price is a function of supply and demand. Supply was massively reduced by sanctions and war, so price goes up, simple as that.
>This is price gouging.
If electricity producers had enough pricing power to set the price to whatever they wanted without competition they'd already have done so years ago. Again, price is a function of supply and demand, cost of production is only one component.
In a monopoly situation, yes. Luckily there is competition, and at this level their competition has a great incentive to ramp up capacity. Which, frankly, is going to make them ramp up production so they can capture a bigger piece of the market when the situation isn't quite as ridiculous as it is today anymore.
It instead makes sense for me to buy a new second panel for $100 after 10 days and then I can make $20 a day, then 5 days later buy a 3rd.
30 days into this I'll have made $45, and be making $30 a day instead of $10.
Saying "the highest cost available at any moment sets the price for everyone" is misleading, it's also the lowest marginal price required to satisfy the total load required to supply the market.
The margin price in that market is the marginal cost of a GW hour by for the last GW that satisfies the load required (demand).
But this is not true. Price is a function of whatever price the seller sets. Look at the actual circumstances rather than on mathematical models with no bearing on reality.
Only if customers are willing to buy at that price. Which is only true now because there are no cheaper competitors to turn to, which in turn is because the entire system is operating at capacity.
Over time the high prices incentivizes bringing more power generation and transport online, which is exactly what we are seeing - new/reopened nuclear, coal, and nat gas plants are all planned or coming online across Europe and imports have spiked from places like the US. No one likes high prices but it does incentivize building more capacity that might lose money when prices are low, but make up for that when prices are high. This process doesn't happen over night but sanctions + war (roughly) did. Europe was lulled into complacency by consistent and cheap Russian gas for years.
Also, don't overlook those transport costs. Networks across all energy types are severely constrained and underinvested in. Doesn't matter how cheap you can produce energy if you can't get it to your customers cheaply.
In other words, the price is the marginal price: at the very edge. What is the highest price consumers want to pay for X amount of electricity. You should split it up: say price of electricity is 5$. That means:
Electricity produced at 1$: sells for 5$
Electricity produced at 2$: sells for 5$
Electricity produced at 3$: sells for 5$
Electricity produced at 4$: sells for 5$
Electricity produced at 5$: sells for 5$
Electricity produced at 6$: does not sell, plants get paused
Sometimes that means: Electricity produced at x$: sells for -5$ (I pay you to use it)
Buyers are willing to pay $5 to secure 100GW of power. Sellers are: 80GW Solar at $3 and 20GW Coal at $5.
At 100GW the price is $5 because it's the price that will secure 100GW. If buyers only needed 80GW the price would be $3.
There is only one market price and it's the price that gets the required quantity of power (as you say).
It was the European Commission that designed the integrated electricity market because it was believed that a free market would guarantee low electricity prices for everyone. It seems very naive to believe that this system will function better in the future. For the energy giants it is more profitable to limit supply and jack up prices than to build more capacity.
This gives them a lot of leeway to control prices without actually costing them anything.
Fundamentally you can have high prices, shortages or you can disconnect France from the rest of the European grid but you cannot just have cheaper prices in France.
And nothing you've said seems to have relevance to shortages
As ClumsyPiloy said electricity is not something you can easily trade under the radar of the regulator. Technical limitations and regulation do change everything.
Production cannot be scaled up and down infinitely and immediately.
The price is a market signal.
The fact that production cannot be immediately scaled to serve the customer demand and bring prices (and therefore profits) back down to a "normal" level is not a market failure either; it's simply a physical reality.
I don't think anyone is meaningfully wasting electricity in Europe currently. Demand can't go to zero. Supply dropped significantly.
We don't currently do a good job of responding to price signals. We have some plans to expand this, which are being rushed into service after being neglected for a long time.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61949246
And even that has to lie about "it not being about rationing" because price signals are so foreign to the consumer energy market.
1. The Western governments have spent a decade demonizing fossil and nuclear energy. For that whole time, big funds have divested, and investors punished. No major fund is going to touch this sector, especially not if the intent is a capital project. Nuclear is just seeing a turnaround as some governments regain their rationality (e.g. Japan), but others seem to be utterly hopeless (Canada, Germany).
2. The above means that schools stopped offering the programs necessary to train the workers for the industry. There is an entire generational gap now in oil and gas trades, from the roughneck to the engineers.
3. The government's incompetence has caused rampant inflation which, affects these industries too. Suddenly you have to deal with the labour shortage, there being no raw inputs (the year supply of anything from pipe to mud was sold out in most markets by Q1 of '22), and you have no idea what great ideas government will pass by next quarter so you have to price high to build a buffer. All of this leads to huge uncertainty.
The worst part in my eyes, is that we're only really seeing the beginning of this. Governments are still on their ESG-above-reality stance. Approval from their UN SDG and WEF cronies is still more important than their constituents well-being.
I honestly feel for the Europeans that saw this coming and voted accordingly - but more for the Africans and Asians who will be bid out by Europe and be faced with starvation of freezing. They had no say in this and they will pay the steepest price for Europe's ESG hubris.
You may not be aware, but there's a war going on that is sort of impacting things on top of existing inflation.
I realize picking a scape goat feels easy but it's poor form and leads to not fixing the actual problem.
And natural gas, which usually covers the more elastic power demands is dramatically more expensive.
Germany should be a super exporter of energy to the EU/Eurozone (they are a big electricity exporter, they should and could be considerably more so). They land border nine other nations (and are of course very close to Italy). They have the technical and financial ability to do it.
The current problem is that in europe a lot of the electricity is made by gas plants and those plants are seeing their costs rise. They therefore increase the price at which they are willing to inject capacity, and that means the market price moves up because that power is needed to satisfy demand. Gas plant operators are not making a lot of profit.
Because every party injecting power at market rates (some of it is actually locked up in long term contracts) is paid the market rate, those not using gas to produce power are actually the ones making record profits. Wind is literally making windfall profits. There are talks of having an excess profit tax because right now governments are going into debt to finance energy subsidies that line the pockets of wind and nuclear operators (and of vladimir putin).
Well. I don't know where you live, but I'm not paying more than last year.
I read about soaring prices being an issue in the UK. Prices, here, in France are fixed twice a year by the energy commission. Right now, residential electricity increased by 4% last February and remained unchanged at the start of August. So it means that whatever is happening in the market, is not affecting us. Actually, I will probably have 2-3 months of cash back at the end of the year.
Not really a crisis, to be honest.
However I would be very interested to know what is the situation like for my fellow European citizens !
You very seriously need to check out news or Twitter from any other Western European country
If what was happening in UK happened in France, Paris would have been burnt to the ground months ago
https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/eu-natural-gas
I call this “the Greta curve”.
EDF is. Which will end up as deficits in France's budget.
It wouldn't have been so devastating if we took Greta seriously and switched to fossil-free energy sources.
Let’s blame advocates for renewable energy.
That’ll make people see reason and solve the issue /s
I didn’t realize their electricity was so much cheaper than ours to start with.
[1, german sadly] https://strom-report.de/strompreise/strompreis-zusammensetzu...
The electricity companies in the south also follow well the business strategy of privatising the benefits and socialising the losses. The water level in the lakes in the south are too low especially considering the difficult winter to come, yet they sometimes empty them to export to Scotland to make money now.
It’s a bit annoying but at least I get push notifications when the price is very high or very low.
https://electricitymaps.com/
Poland has an interesting story behind the price: the government passed legislation which switched from net-metering to net-billing with the start of April, so people rushed to build as many home PV installations as possible to get grandfathered into the previous scheme.
A whopping 4-5GW estimated was added to the grid in this period, almost doubling the installed capacity, creating a unique mix of coal and solar in the summer.
Now during the day it's what's keeping prices below €250/MWh because even with net-metering the price of this electricity is closer to €175/MWh.
In 2019 that would have been horribly expensive, but it's safe to say those times are gone for good.
Of course, now Germany is scrambling to turn coal plants back online.
This is not related to Russia.
So I think short term we are pretty screwed. But I think if you can produce electricity at 1/10 or even 1/20 of the price, wouldn't you be adding new capacity now? The only fast option are renewables, so my wild guess is that there will be so much new capacity added in the next years, the bottleneck will not be production, but skilled labor to install it. That's the way a real market economy should react.
Theoretically, long term, this could all work out nicely and steer more people and governments towards renewables and decentralized generation, but the short term consequences are starting to look brutal.
But we can't change that anymore. What we can do is build more capacity.
Not necessarily. The same thing (forced closures of factories) was handled gracefully without job losses during the pandemic through various unemployment schemes. I see no reason why the same can't happen again.
And yes, the delayed spending and the some extra money will result in inflation, of course. But the impact from the prices of all sorts of crucial raw materials is probably much higher.
People are acting like this is a natural crisis. It's not, it's an artificial one created by political choices. This will lead to political extremism as voters realize they are freezing or bankrupted because politicians like "standing with Ukraine" more than they like their own citizens. Not every politician will be like that. Some will say, we send weapons and it's not our war anyway. Citizens first, foreigners second. And suddenly that will be mainstream politics.
I'm afraid Europe bought a one-way ticket. Dependence on Russian energy is no longer a hypothetical issue, but a demonstrated concern. Freezing is not great, but giving the thermostat back to Putin is worse.
What I think is more likely is that coal is back on the menu.
The real problem will be industry having to shut down or minimize operations. They'll be the ones bearing the real cost. This winter will be brutal in terms of its economical impact on industry. The next one, countries will be better prepared. It's Russia that will be suffering the consequences long term. I doubt any country in Europe wants to ever be dependent on them again to the extent that they have in the past.
One of the two Tory lunatics^Hhopeful candidates for PM confirmed there's not much they can do to ease the energy price crisis without creating a massive hole in the British budget. But that's what countries will have to do, and it's not going to be pretty.
The Western world just went on a massive printing spree two years ago because of COVID, a further temporary injection of capital and 2008 will pale in comparison to the next recession.
The moment you stop fertilizer plants you stop supplies of CO2 and NO2 industry gases and that stops dairy plants, meat factories, breweries etc... Basically you stop food production and distribution. And after cows get culled and you have 2-3 years before production can come back to initial levels.
It is going to be rather tough decade for Europe.... And not just Europe...
Europe’s Energy Crisis Threatens Glass Production
https://www.wsj.com/articles/europes-energy-crisis-threatens...
There’s a Carbon Dioxide Shortage, and Food and Drink Makers are Scrambling
https://www.wsj.com/articles/food-beverage-companies-race-to...
The EU is the biggest exporter of food next to the US. Much of the world is going to be affected.
* Baseload from nov22 to feb23 above 2000€/MWh
* Peak Load nov22 to dec22 at 3000€/MWh
* Peak Load Q1/23 at 2970€/MWh
But the prices for other nations also went up steeply.
[1] https://www.eex.com/en/market-data/power/futures#%7B%22snipp...
Many of them are the same model, with parts from the same factory. That factory made some bad parts. They need to be exchanged. It takes a lot of time, many months.
Nukes reliant on Loire valley water are currently curtailing production.
That's old information, the Loire is back up to normal levels after the last two weeks of rain, so nuclear power plants should be operating as before.
At least that's my understanding of the situation.
My district heat comes from a giant heat pump that extracts energy from waste water etc. Some other typical district heat sources are biomass and coal. If it's typical to rely on gas, perhaps check that they have a plan to convert to some other energy sources if needed.
The price (last time I checked) is the same as last year.
Last year, already 20% of the district heat by the utility was from renewables, and in 2030 it should be all carbon neutral. https://www.helen.fi/en/news/2022/helen-and-elisa-to-heat-ho...
> Russia’s “beautiful women, cheap gas, and traditional values” await you, according to a bizarre new video shared by a Russian embassy.
> The 53 second clip urges foreigners to “move to Russia” by listing the country’s supposed virtues.
https://www.euronews.com/travel/2022/08/01/beautiful-women-a...
- Planning permissions take too long
- Solar panels and especially inverters are hard to get
- Labour to install is scarce. Electricians give you appointments next year.
For instance in France more than half of the national NPP are offline due to needed maintenance the private owners postpone at maximum to maximize their profit. Arrange the result take time. Jail the aforementioned owners telling anyone in the private sector that if they committed criminal business they can choose to be silent and cooperative of face an equal fate will suffice.
Private sector is THE SOLE responsible of the current prices, they do not came from war or natural scarcity. Telling them that "good times are passed" for them not for the Citizens at a whole as they want instead suffice for a quick U-turn since they know they are unarmed.
Renewables can't be nor fast nor an option simply because the sole that can live on them at unbearably high prices in the actual market are single private NEW homes in places where p.v. is effective enough and climate is not that cold. In a city, a dense European one, there is no room for renewables to really produce energy, you can only make some show for commercial purposes. Oh, I say that as one who actually have built a new home five years ago, with p.v. and small lithium backup, so to speak.
The quickest way is one: telling those who profit that revenge sentiments start to be in the air and they will FAIL to ride them to push a new hoax this time. However since people are not in that mood, actually many have thirst for blood but not for positive actions energy giants and their public friends are not startled at all. That's is.
High prices for electricity and no production cost for renewables basically means whomever produces using that is making a lot of money right now. More than 5x of what they could reasonably expect normally. Probably closer to 10x. That's great news because that will be invested in even more renewable power. Solar and wind are the closest thing to a perpetuum mobile that you can get right now.
Electricity prices are high because all the gas and coal production is being kept at a minimum rate because of the high cost of fuel. Companies still in the business of burning that have to pay such high prices for fuel that it's cheaper for them to shut down operations. Unless they are absolutely needed in which case they'll charge for the fuel cost of course.
However, most of Europe is relying on renewables and topping up gas supplies for the winter instead. E.g. Germany hit their 80% reserves target ahead of schedule a few days ago, So, any gas plant that doesn't absolutely have to be on right now has probably been idling for months. No reason to turn those on.
The reason France has a tough few quarters ahead is that quite a few of their aging nuclear power plants are down for maintenance right now. They'll be importing power from abroad and probably at high rates. A perfect little storm of overdue maintenance and an international gas/oil market that suddenly shifted. They'll be fine. But it will cost them.
Are you sure? Is Europe technically capable of importing enough gas to offset what is no longer coming from Russia? Our abilities to import natural gal from outside UE (LNG terminals and pipelines) have limited throughput - not to mention, someone needs to be willing and able to fill them with gas first.
I'm not sure where you're expecting natural gas in gaseous state to come from. It's generally transported in LNG form unless there's a pipeline (like between Germany and Russia). There aren't a lot of those connecting Europe to gas producers outside Europe, which is one reason why we're in this mess.
LNG imports to Europe are up significantly compared to before the war. The link shows that. I feel like you don't really understand what's happening.
Everything else is something we should have done 5 or even 15 years ago so as to not end up in this position.
To an extent you can scare markets into providing cheaper prices in a variety of ways.
That goes for scaring Russia, which is still living in a fantasy bubble about the context. They do not believe the rest of Europe can or will become independent of their supply.
Ready in 10-20 years.
The smart move is to completely ignore nuclear and go straight to renewables. Proven technology that is being deployed orders of magnitude faster and at an orders of magnitude larger scale already.
Do you know who is in charge in Germany?
The greens, which don't even want to extend the usage of 3 of the 6 available nuclear plants (supposed to "slowly" shut down at the end of this year).
And now you come and say "hey sorry but we need more nuclear reactors"? Sure. Much better to go to countries which are barely respecting human rights, bow and buy their fuel and gas, because finally who cares, we don't see what they do in their countries.
... No ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundestag
One way or another, they are in charge and they can make things happen or not.
Clearly, my "in charge" is absolutely not the same as in dictatorships or similar, but always in a democratic context.
That is exactly what makes them a minority partner.
> and that's what actually matters
No, it does not in a democracy. It's still 16% of the legislative body.
> but always in a democratic context.
I would really like to know which democratic context translates 14% of the vote into "in charge of the country". They _may_ have more influence in the executive than the opposition parties, depending on the details of the coalition, but it is still a long stretch to claim "in charge" of the government much less of the country. A coalition is in charge of the executive branch, of which the greens are not the majority by any metric.
> If SPD and FDP tomorrow want to bring nuclear energy back
If a majority of the voters (or at least 50%+1 of the seats in the legislative body) want to bring nuclear energy back tomorrow, let me know how the greens are going to stop them.
Germany, which hasn't done much public spending in decades has just unlocked hundreds of billions for investment in military and energy. Other countries are doing similar things. That started happening within weeks of the invasion and it's just the beginning. This will soon add up to trillions in spending.
And of course there is the notion that Russia might eventually decide that they want to sell some gas again after all. Gas prices are high currently and that compensates for the loss in export volume for them. But those prices are inevitably going to come down eventually as other energy sources become more available and the world adjusts. Russia seems to have no good plan economically other than selling gas to Europe. This winter is going to suck a lot harder for them than for anyone else (well except for Ukraine) and it's debatable if their exports will ever recover to the pre-war level.
Where 90% of the electricity producers make profits out of nowhere, just because some inefficient folks had to provide the 10% of missing energy.
Like Saudi Aramco and Chevron, they will post record profits, without lifting a finger.
A functioning market will provide the motivation to search, find and finance solutions instead.
This is something where China has done a good job. The EU should plan who gets the energy available and how much to charge. Otherwise the EU will be dealt a blow to industry so large it might not ever recover.
Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE: https://energy-charts.info/index.html?l=en&c=DE
and European Energy Exchange AG: https://www.eex.com/en/