> French day-ahead power fell to -€5.76 a megawatt-hour, the lowest in four years, in an auction on Epex Spot. Germany’s equivalent contract dropped to €7.64.
If true - how fast could a new transmission line from France to Germany pay for itself?
Germany already buys electricity from France. The cost mentioned above are the subsidized charges by the EDF to the french government.
Germans would get the full cost which is much higher than the quoted price here. Besides nuclear power is not flexible enough to amp it up and down according to demand (unlike coal or petrocarbon industries).
French reactors are built to load follow [1]. It is harder on the valves, but they do it ("maneuvering capabilities"). Regardless, it would be better if they could run flat out to push out fossil generation in adjacent grids (Germany, the UK, and Northern Italy) with sufficient interconnector capacity. France also still has a bit of coal and fossil gas generation to retire [2] [3].
TLDR More interconnector capacity, battery storage, and renewables needed (my analysis).
Nuclear reactors are already very cost ineffective when used as baseload. Theyre ridiculously cost ineffective when used for load following since it's basically curtailment.
This is why most countries tend to use gas or hydro/pumped storage for load following (or, increasingly, batteries as theyve been plummeting in price).
It's untrue, it is used everyday on all our Gen3/Gen3+ reactors (our Gen2 are able to do it too, but it does cost a lot as core monitoring is more costly for them)
Ontario's ultra-low-overnight time of use rates are 2.8c / kWh. Keeping the nuclear plants running overnight means they're losing 7 cents/kWh overnight. Better to shut those plants down overnight, but of course approximately all the nuclear costs are incurred whether the plants are running overnight or not, so shutting down overnight would just double the daytime costs.
> Ontario's ultra-low-overnight time of use rates are 2.8c / kWh.
And if you sign up for those ULO rates you also get 28.6¢ on-peak rates. The average over the entire day stays at 11.1¢ (see Table ES-2).
I guess they want to flatten the demand curve and reduce its cyclic nature: there's a cost to dealing with the traditional peaks times as well in various types of capacity.
It is likely that the times where French renewables flood the market roughly coincide with the times where German renewables flood the market, which where 60% of the supply even in the winter. The few remaining times where that isn't the case are probably not relevant. I mean every bit helps of equalizing over a larger area can help, but we likely need interconnects with places that are a bit farther away than France like Spain and Norway so the gaps are more likely to fall into different times. Besides, coal plants are almost as bad in spinning up and down quickly as nuclear plants. In both cases they can probably do somewhat it to escape the penalty of negative prices, but likely they don't safe much if anything in terms of operational costs and fuel.
Spain is awash in clean energy from renewables [1] and has large interconnect capabilities with Portugal (~5GW). Between both countries [2] [3], they operate very close to ~90% low carbon most of the time. Spain's last coal fired generator retires in August 2024 [4]. We must push east with low carbon power, as that is where the dirty grids are (see live ElectricityMaps app map scoped to Europe for context).
Spain is adjacent to France, just like Germany; not sure it's farther away :P
But the way these networks work, you can often build up the interconnects where there's a pricing/availability disparity, and pretty soon you have a vast interconnect. Because if Germany's grid pricing benefits from relatively unconstrained interconnection with France, there's going to be a pricing disparity at Germany's other borders. Of course, grid borders don't necessarily reflect national borders, and national interconnection projects have to happen too.
That said, the top 5 countries by peak load in wikipedia are France, Germany, UK, Italy, and Spain, which are all either France or neighbors of France.
Please re-read my comment. France's relatively small renewable fleet flooding their home market is a solution in search of a problem. If the goal is to decarbonize Germany in times of low renewable production inside Germany then we need interconnects between Germany and places high in renewables as well that are farther away from Germany than France. This is why Norway and Spain are good candidates.
France will have enough trouble rebuilding its declining nuclear fleet in the coming decades for their own energy needs, so any infrastructure that bets on France being able to supply neighbors as well will have a quick expiration. France is actually importing a lot of renewables in winter, because they heat homes with old electric heating (i.e. no heat pumps) and bad insulation that looses much more heat than homes in other countries and their nuclear supply can't cope with that.
In all likelyhood what will do the electricity decarbonization trick in Germany is threefold: more electricity transmission inside the country and with other renewable-heavy countries, continued quick buildout of renewables in Germany and a bit of battery storage, outlawing of coal and lignite in <10 years. The renewable gaps in the medium term will be fewer and shorter and will be filled with natural gas plants which are easy and cheap to build, even when they are just kept in standby most of the time. In the long term they will be made obsolete by even more lines and battery storage. Imported nuclear will likely play no relevant role at any stage. Like anything every bit helps a bit, but it won't change anything in the grand scale.
We already have a non-negligable amount of battery storage in German homes, but currently the incentives are laid out so that they will power these homes at night only. I believe we are loosing out on a bit of efficiency by not using it yet to feed back into the grid when needed. This could be enabled by smart meters and dynamic pricing in the future. It would also allow better to move household electricity demand into the times when renewables are most abundant.
The line can't just go a few metres across the border. Let's say it connects Dortmund, in the German industrial heartland on the French side of the country, with Chooz, the site of a nuclear plant near the German border. French nuclear plants are evenly distributed around the country [0], so that should be a reasonable choice. That's 250 km.
High voltage transmission costs around €2m/km to build [1] and carries around 2 GW of power [2].
So your line costs €500m to build and makes €13 x 2000 = €26,000 an hour and pays for itself after 20,000 hours or three years.
You might reasonably say you wouldn't expect to capture all of the €13 per MWh in arbitrage profits, and perhaps this disparity was a short-lived aberration. But actually it's not: electricity futures in France are priced €25 cheaper than their equivalent contracts in Germany [3], so you could reasonably expect to capture a good portion of that - if you split the surplus between you, the consumer and the producer you can still get €9.
Of course, one problem with this free money is that your competitors are already doing it. The gap is expected to narrow over time thanks to interconnectors like this, increased generation in Germany, and French nuclear plants going out of service [3]. Still, with increasing electrification of the energy market, this kind of power transmission seems like a good business to be in and a good investment for national governments and grid operators.
In general if the incentives are already aligned to solve a problem I don't worry about the problem. It is likely to solve itself without any intervention.
Indeed. I am on the island of Bornholm, just South of Sweden. There is only one cable connecting Bornholm, and it comes from Sweden (and once every couple of year a ship is sailing with its anchor out and tears the sea cable, so powercuts are longer and more frequent here than I'd prefer, but that's a story for another time).
This was very surprising and positive. I had expected pain for the electricity market in France since EDF "lost" the uranium mines in Niger and replaced it by shipping uranium from canada/australia.
So it looks like solar and wind have more than compensated for the nuclear power shortages.
The olympic games will put this news to test and I guess we will find out soon if this news is indeed true.
There's two years of uranium ready to use in reserve plus five years more in reserve to enrich plus all the other producers. There's never been any issue with uranium, not even remotely. I'm not even sure the Niger coup will last that long.
This is NOT positive. Not at all. This means that the grid is filled with useless generating capacity.
As a result, nuclear power becomes less competitive. However, renewables work poorly during the winter time. In Europe, they can go down for multiple _weeks_ at a time, far beyond any storage capabilities. And the only power plants that can fill the gap are fossil fuels.
"..the grid operator to request that Electricite de France SA take several nuclear plants offline."
Could you read the article please?
The lumbering beasts, which actually do hate changing output at all, turned off before the renewables.
Secondly, another below comment already explains that no, there's not a shortage.
Thirdly, please for f*ks sake, engage your brain and think what the impact of 700 euros a month (high in 2022) to negative prices now has on industry. What the everloving ** do I charge my customers?
Isolated this is a zero sum game in favor of buyers (someone has ti take the electricity), but longer term, this shows there needs to be better greater electricity storage solutions available, i.e batteries or similar.
And de-incentivizes supply. A real solution need to be available to balance the supply and demand of power such that the rates on both ends are predictable.
A market where a good fluctuates between profitable and not is not one very attractive to investment.
Playing the video game Victoria 3 has taught me a lot about healthy markets. You have to play both sides of supply and demand to get to the prices you need
Negative prices do incentivize storage, because storage will alliw sellers to sell at a time with higher prices (i.e. when demand is greater relative to supply).
I could see this then pushing more consumers to have their own batteries to store energy when it's inexpensive. Interesting market playing out with energy storage :-)
> A market where a good fluctuates between profitable and not is not one very attractive to investment.
This is the most wild thing I've ever read on this website. Pick just about any security and you'll see that buying and selling it over time fluctuates between profitable and not profitable. If something was always profitable everyone would do it and get infinitely rich. Arbitrage wouldn't exist. Economies would shut down.
Unfortunately you've got a massive term mismatch. You have negative prices today, but a lot of reason to believe that by the time you could bring your storage online the problem will already have resolved itself.
Oil briefly went negative a few years ago. If you decided to build a storage business dependent on negative oil prices for profit, you might just be coming online around now, and very much poorer than you were before. (Of course you would in fact have stopped a long time ago.)
OP is correct. Negative prices stokes battery storage deployment. See California and their ~52GW storage target (currently @ ~10GW), because of negative prices and the duck curve. California utility scale storage soaks up solar during the day (when spot prices approach zero or go negative), and discharges most profitably right after sunset for ~4 hr (but occasionally, right before sunrise when demand is ramping before the sun is up). If spot prices rise during daylight hours, you add more solar generation to push them back down.
Oil prices went negative due to an exogenous, rare event shocking demand. No one expected that would recur. (And indeed, many people did try to figure out how to store oil in one-off vessels, short term leases for storage, etc., though I don't know if anyone succeeded.)
Solar panel production on the other hand is exponential and growing much faster than overall power consumption. It can be very, very favorable to build batteries and that's why grid scale battery production is taking off. There is in fact a storage business dependent on energy arbitrage over time, it's lucrative, and all indications suggest it will continue to be lucrative for many years to come.
The oil situation is not analogous. It's not like solar prices going negative are something that is difficult to predict, or the result of things like "black swan" geopolitical events. Once we build out enough solar we should be having negative prices literally every sunny day - of course, the hope is that enough storage comes online then to mop up that excess generation so prices don't go negative.
The reason why the prices are negative is that renewables have become cheap to install, but don't come with an off switch.
There is good news though. With electric car sales slowing down (at least in the west) there is a surplus of batteries on the market, which makes grid storage projects more affordable. The incentives are currently pushing us towards decarbonizing our electric infrastructure faster and that is wonderful. As long as the politicians don't do anything dumb like slap huge tariffs on solar cells or something we should be making some real progress towards a green future.
Negative prices usually happen because of laws requiring minimum utilization, or subsides, or because they are so small and rare that it is not worth having someone on place to turn the switch.
If you want to be pedantic yes. But its not like grid operators back in the control rooms are disconnecting solar farms because the grid is oversaturated. They instead tell the fossil fuel plants to reduce their burn rate. They have to work around the instability from the renewables. That's why grid scale storage is such a key component of the future energy economy.
> its not like grid operators back in the control rooms are disconnecting solar farms because the grid is oversaturated
You are correct that they are not.
But this is due to policy, not physics. It's obvious to shut-down the fossil fuel plants first, but after then, there's no physical reason why they can't keep shutting power plants down.
Anyway, agreed, adding storage is a much better solution than focusing on the management of renewables.
> But its not like grid operators back in the control rooms are disconnecting solar farms because the grid is oversaturated. They instead tell the fossil fuel plants to reduce their burn rate.
Since we're being pedantic, as I understand it, the grid operators don't usually tell plants what to do (outside of system stress response, curtailment, etc), the grid operator shares the forecast, and when the price forecast is low, fossil fuel plants are likely tell the grid operator they'd rather shutdown than produce power at low/negative prices. For solar plants, there's no fuel cost, and there might be subsidies, so producing at a negative market price might still be positive for the generator and there's no reason to turn it off. For nuclear, fueling schedules don't really change based on use, so there's no reason to not provide optimum power outage other than for grid stability.
Grid scale storage should reduce price swings, since storage plants will tend to show up on the demand side when prices are low and the supply side when prices are high; although perhaps price swings will become bigger when prediction fails --- if storage fills up by noon you'll have a lot of excess supply until sunset; if storage empties by midnight, you may have a lot of excess demand until sunrise.
> But its not like grid operators back in the control rooms are disconnecting solar farms because the grid is oversaturated.
In Australia, this has been happening for some time - plants are literally having their output dialled back (or even being disconnected entirely) during peak times by the market operator.
Just to add to that: Any fluctuation in prices works to incentivise storage, negative prices are not so special in that regard.
Negative prices allow for some weird actions to become profitable - like starting an empty washing machine, turning in the light in an empty room or needlessly heating some water tank. Basically everything we are used to think of as waste. It sounds absurd, but it's not really a big deal.
And even better, the incentive to expand the grid. The market is easy to control, because the money flows via the internet. But how to transport the energy?
Without a proper grid not possible. The various countries block the expansion for political reasons. They would loose their power.
Sure, or more precisely they need to be able to draw a box around the power intensive step where they can cheaply store a buffer of the inputs and outputs, and have excess capacity for that step.
Like I'm not an expert on fertilizer production, but it seems pretty likely to me that you could draw that box around ammonia production and build out capacity that relatively cheaply, while leaving what I imagine to be the more operationally complex and capital intensive steps of extracting phosphates (via sulphiric and phosphoric acid) and potassium (which has nitric and sulphiric acid as biproducts), and combining that nitric acid with the ammonia (into ammonium nitrate) alone.
In some cases if you have excess production capacity (because you have unpredictable or seasonal load and you aren't currently at a peak) you don't necessarily even need more production capacity at all, just the ability to store a bit more of the inputs and outputs in a buffer.
I argue that the number of such industries is and will be low.
Usually clients want consistency in the output. (they depend on the product/service)
Business owner usually wants consistency in employee/machinery output. (They cost money)
To me it seems that only low priority computation (incl. con-coins) is such industry.
(Investment kind of reused, and relatively few employees)
There will be some shift to adjust to intermitency (e.g. Worker hours might be shifted to the time when solar generates the most energy to take advantage of the price)
"French electricity prices turned negative as a drop in demand and surging renewables output prompted some nuclear reactors to power down."
This is an issue with nuclear in a net zero scenario. Nuclear starts out at 90%+ capacity factor, like in California today. But as fossil fuels become a low percentage of the grid, you inevitably get a low capacity factor which increases LCOE. Even if you don't want any renewables and you only build nuclear, the problem is demand isn't static so you have to overbuild nuclear by a lot and run at a low capacity factor, or you build storage, either of these increases LCOE.
The sensible thing will be to use renewables on top of nuclear rather than overbuild nuclear, like what France is doing. But that will also eat into capacity factor when it's more windy and sunny like what France experiences.
Just something to keep in mind when you hear people talk about nuclear costs. Multiply it by at least 1/0.7 if they haven't taken this into account.
High level planning is important for efficiency. It'd be great to have some resources which either store power in bulk cheaply (even if not efficiently) and/or inexpensive to idle operations that can achieve public benefit for spare power.
The levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) is the rate of the total energy output of the energy system to build and operate it over its lifetime to the average total cost of the system over that lifetime.
Not enough interconnect
High loses in transmission
No one needs the energy in the times it goes negative, unless you’re a 1/4 planet away
Unfortunately electric cars only make the peaks and valleys more pronounced. What we need is electric cars to be required to charge the grid during high demand and only charge during very low demand. The chargers need to be smart and integrated with the grid operator
The explanation is lack of interconnect, not losses in transmission. If you have enough capacity to transfer electricity the prices will be equal in two neighboring electricity markets.
What I never understood was how France gets 70-75% of their electricity from Nuclear, yet their energy prices aren't "too cheap to meter", and while cheaper than their neighbors, don't really raise any eyebrows. Wouldn't this be a major example of why Nuclear is NOT the future?
I've heard for years that if we just had "tons" of Nuclear plants, our energy costs would essentially be too cheap to meter. Yet France is not experiencing this even at 75% Nuclear.
It was a common BS claim in the Reagan years, as to why we didn't need to invest in renewables back then. "Why bother, soon all this nuclear energy will basically be free".
This has nothing to do with what anyone actually said. Just ask any 60-something, mild conservative. The meme exists, even though the actual quote was slightly more mealy mouthed.
It was always nonsense anyway. Electricity generation is mostly a deregulated market in most places, so nobody would spend billions on a Nuclear plant that wasn't guaranteed to make back it's money. It was always a thought terminating cliche.
> Most reactors began construction by 1974; following the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 and changing economics, many planned projects were canceled. More than 100 orders for nuclear power reactors, many already under construction, were canceled in the 1970s and 1980s, bankrupting some companies.
How does that square with your recollection? Or were lots of nuclear power plants being constructed in the 1980s, and the article is very wrong?
You're remembering a (mis-)quote of a speech given in 1954[0].
And even if it weren't a misquote, "Living up to a quote from 1954" is not how we judge whether a power source is still worth investing in for the future.
As far as I know and even learned as a (since failed) physicist, a country needs a good mixture of energy sources. Mind you I went to a university that's nuclear energy focused and even they didn't advocate for full on only nuclear.
In my opinion, if someone says we should just have all nuclear, it means they are dealing in absolutes, maybe God in politics and debate, but they ignore that reality is much more complicated, as technology meets economics and politics (and much more).
(Again, AFAIK) nuclear energy is great when it comes to meeting the "baseline" requirements, roughly the level below which energy consumption of a region never drops. It is because nuclear energy cannot be scaled up and down quickly, so it's not adequate for peaks.
To balance the peaks and keep the network stable, you need energy sources that can increase their output in seconds (or less?).
That's also one of the issues with wind and solar, you can't choose when it is available and when it isn't, so coal etc is still needed to make sure that energy production and consumption is practically equal at all times.
Nuclear is very poor for baseline requirements. Baseline requirements should be met by the cheapest source and more expensive sources should only be added as required to follow demand.
The words of a human shouldn't necessarily represent reality, especially when the human in question is a politician and not a scientist. Your argument doesn't make much sense.
Furthermore, no one could have predicted the mass protests, scandals, and fears that nuclear energy has sparked over the decades. These factors have significantly reduced the hype and investment in the sector.
The determinant factor in this article is the renewable electricity sudden flow.
Nuclear fission reactors have problems in other domains like being a huge liability during a military conflict, and dependance on uranium supply from the Sahel.
Indeed. The op ex of nuclear is surprisingly high (esp when compared to wind solar), then on top of that is the cost of financing the very long build.
Also, nuclear plants in France are starting to suffer from water shortages; since an overheating plant is a problem it means that they take water at the expense of other uses, which is an externality they currently don't pay for because the economics of these plants is so terrible already.
I really want to like niclear but I have never been able to see the math work (and I've been paying intermittent attention for 40 years).
The “just” word is doing a lot of work here and masking multiple billion euro investments, decades long planning and build projects, risk and opportunity cost.
How about instead we “just” invest in grid scale and distributed battery storage and double down on wind and solar?
Their grid was still constructed on a capitalistic model. Investment in electricity generation stations in return for payments from electricity consuming users over time. Build too much nuclear (or any other power generation) and you lower the returns of the previous investors.
The easy answer is that financiers don't want it, so it won't happen.
> Wouldn't this be a major example of why Nuclear is NOT the future?
Not at all. Nobody has really put forth "too cheap to meter" as a rationale for nuclear for 50 years or more.
The issue is that nuclear is currently the only reliable base load generation technology that doesn't produce carbon (except perhaps hydro for reasonable definitions of "reliable"). The other top technologies either produce carbon (natural gas and coal) or are unreliable (solar and wind).
I actually don't believe nuclear is "the future" because I think renewables + battery storage will be more economical going forward and less politically dicey. But France is currently the envy of the world for their energy generation save for some countries with unique environments that allow for a lot of carbon-free generation (e.g. Norway with hydro and Iceland with geothermal).
Why isn’t wind and solar politically dicey? Nuclear is only politically dicey due to ignorance. I’d rather one nuclear plant than having the landscape covered with huge windmills — windmills made out of materials that aren’t recyclable. Solar is even worse. Nuclear doesn’t affect wildlife like wind and solar.
I agree that the safety fears and waste disposal issues around nuclear are overwrought, but still: I would much prefer solar and wind farms (even with the downsides you mention) over the possibility of a nuclear catastrophe. Even if the probability of something like that is 0.0000000001% or whatever, the consequences are so severe that it just doesn't seem worth it when there's a good-enough alternative. Also consider that nuclear is expensive (both in capex and opex)! The whole "too cheap to meter" nonsense from the 1950s never came to fruition.
I get that opinions differ on this (clearly you have a different take), but that's fine; reasonable people can disagree.
(To be clear, I don't believe solar/wind is the be-all, end-all. Base load generation is still a problem there, and neither source is reliable or consistent in the way that something like nuclear is.)
> It's been true for 50 years, assuming it will be true for another decade or two is not wishful thinking.
Well it's one thing though to use the storage for a cell phones and some cars, another to keep all the industries and homes going on.
Do you have any data about what you claim?
For example in italy of hydro, nothing has been built for decades, everything that could be used has been used. If we want to go further, it's necessary to destroy valleys.
Your arguments do not go beyond whishful thinking... At least you need some data.
> Well it's one thing though to use the storage for a cell phones and some cars, another to keep all the industries and homes going on.
Not really. If all vehicles on the road where 100% PEV’s your looking at ~250 TWh in batteries. 1/5 of that would be ~50TWh.
Global electricity demand is about 70 TWh per day. You don’t need 70 TWh worth of storage if daily production is > daily demand. It all comes down to which is cheaper, extra storage or extra generating capacity. However ~25 TWh of storage is likely sufficient for a grid equally stable as what we have today. (100% EV’s would increase that 70TWh/day but that’s offset by charging them when power is cheap.)
I quite believe in it with the fact that it is feasible in the coming decades a way to redistirbute peak energy through daily storage. The problems in my opinion is assuming too much that everything will go as planned according to current trends (cheaper renewable, cheaper battery, enough production, 100+% penetration, etc). Because we're talking about several independent variables, and there's a chance (in my opinion quite large) that not everything will go as predicted.
If we find out in a few decades that the price of solar, batteries or renewables is no longer going down (and the reasons could be many, like a war, or a plateau in penetration), it could be enough to ruin those expectations. And discover that putting all our hopes in a single event could be our downfall.
Besides, even if daily storage is feasible, with current trends, we're still a long way from seasonal storage...
That's my opinion, which is why I think it's necessary to invest and believe in all technologies, without looking for the one we like the most or looks the most promising, since it leads to big bias and overestimation.
There are enough innovations in the pipeline that it's very safe to predict continuing battery price drops for the next decade, another 80% reduction or so. It's possible it stops after a decade. At that point nuclear would need a 100x price reduction to compete.
Sorry but where do you see this 80% drop? When the price of storage seems close to reaching a plateau (which by the way is also what I assumed in previous comments).
I understand being optimistic, but you claim to know the future while also denying the present... It's ironic.
People predict falling prices because that’s what fits the trends not because it’s necessary for a ‘green’ future.
We don’t need the price of solar or batteries to keep falling, or for large exponential growth to occur. Simply maintaining the current rate of solar energy installs over the next 25 years would result in a renewable heavy grid.
China is currently on pace to install ~300 GW of solar power in 2024 assuming they continue that for 25 years and give a minimal 15% capacity factor that’s already at 100% of their current electricity consumption before those panels hit end of life. Granted, demand would increase over that time period but keeping up with demand doesn’t require crazy exponential growth here.
Grid batteries are in a similar situation, companies aren’t installing them at scale because they don’t need to but there’s plenty of excess battery manufacturing capacity right now to fill the need as it shows up. Basically at current rate of renewable installs there becomes an economic incentive to slowly ramp up grid batteries.
Storage prices have been dropping precipitously for the past decade. Even more exciting is that the excitement over electric vehicles that has constrained battery supply for the past 2-3 years has started to slacken allowing battery prices to start falling again as EV manufacturers cut back on production. I'm excited to see what the next couple of years brings in the realm of grid and home storage.
There are other storage technologies being fielded...they haven't been popular because their energy densities are low...but if you have a 2000 lb hunk of Iron Aire battery next to your house, who cares? (https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a42532492/ir...)
I don't have my eye on these technologies (there were at least two that I've run across that were REALLY HEAVY), so I can't tell you how close they are to production. But every bit helps and the amazing pouch batteries in your laptop weren't developed overnight... 18650 batteries are astounding compared to the Eveready Alkalines of my youth, and available for $3 a piece in quantity.
If there is a good enough economic impetus, it will enter commercial use quickly. Also, things like iron air batteries are relatively extremely simple - it's not like there is complicated chemistry to figure out.
When it comes to grid scale storage, I think there will be rapid advancements because the constraints for what what makes a good grid battery is so different from what makes a good laptop or EV battery, and we've really only recently been investigated batteries with those constraints. I.e. for decades battery tech has been concerned about things like weight-to-capacity ratios, recharge times, etc. Most of that hardly even matters for fixed, installed batteries at power plants.
> Isn't it a bit whishful thinking to think that storage will come down in price and nuclear won't?
My understanding is that the costs around nuclear aren't due to the technology being expensive (something that yes, we would expect to get cheaper over time), but because of the -- IMO necessary -- regulatory and safety regime surrounding nuclear power. Costs that I wouldn't expect to change all that much (and maybe even increase with time).
With storage, the cost is mainly the technology. As the tech improves, the cost decreases.
However, I don't think the decline in battery prices is primarily due to the technologies used. Instead, it's more about economies of scale and demand, which help optimize prices.
From my perspective, nuclear energy is on a similar path but with significantly less investment. A major portion of nuclear costs stems from the lack of economies of scale.
In my opinion, the arguments against nuclear energy contribute to the perception of its economic inefficiency. If people don't believe in it or don't want it, there will never be an opportunity to achieve economies of scale.
> Not at all. Nobody has really put forth "too cheap to meter" as a rationale for nuclear for 50 years or more.
A history of the phrase, which was originally said in 1954 (seventy years ago):
> Only a few days later, Strauss was a guest on Meet the Press. When the reporters asked him about the quotation and the viability of "commercial power from atomic piles," Strauss replied that he expected his children and grandchildren would have power "too cheap to be metered, just as we have water today that's too cheap to be metered."[4]
For a long time water was paid for in a flat rate, and one could certainly envisage where electricity was the same: the power company would pick some kind of median/average to charge folks.. Of course most folks have metered water/sewage nowadays, and so metered electricity is less strange.
The nice thing about nuclear is that you can plan how much electricity you're going to generate. (Well, not counting project delays and stuff...)
Ergo, if you're using nuclear and energy became "too cheap to meter" then someone was not doing their job properly. If Tesla overestimated market demand and has to give away cars for free, would you say it means Tesla is the car of the future?
France is its own unique thing because of how the government paid for so many things out of pocket they ended up losing money selling at wholesale rates. Safe Nuclear ended up being a lot more expensive than earlier predictions.
It’s not some design issue that you can fix with small modular reactors or whatever. Every time anything significant goes wrong people kept adding systems to prevent it happening again. Sometimes that’s something physical like a wall or redundant system, and other times it’s longer procedures and more paperwork. This has been great for avoiding another SL-1, 3 mile island etc, but mitigating every possible risks isn’t cheap. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1
For example there was once an expensive issue where foreign material fell into the spent fuel pool where fixing it significantly extended an outage at a single reactor so now everyone working on anything at any reactor takes significant steps to mitigate that risk. Great things working as intended except now something that might have cost 100k now costs significantly more because of that mitigation effort.
Extend that to any significant issue across hundreds of reactors and 50+ years and suddenly triple checking to avoid every fuck up means doing anything is really expensive. Worse very little of it is wasted effort, there’s just far more ways to fuck up in practice than in theory.
PS: I do believe it’s possible to have safe and cheap nuclear power, it’s just going to look very different than what we’re doing today.
Operating costs for a coal-fired power plant, a nuclear reactor power plant, and a solar-battery power plant (requirement: steady power output 24-7) are all pretty comparable these days. Upfront constuction costs on nuclear are higher than others, so nuclear comes out near the top of the cost envelope. A lot also depends on variable costs of uranium ore and the fuel rod production process.
While a 1 GW coal plant might burn as much as 4 million tons of coal a year, a comparable nuclear power plant only consumes some 30 tons of fuels rods per year - but depending on ore quality and U-235 enrichment level, that might translate to 300,000 tons of uranium ore that needs to be mined and converted into fuel rods through an expensive multi-step process. Coal is much dirtier in terms of average daily emissions (though there's always the catastrophic failure risk with nuclear).
Solar / wind / storage operating costs are limited to maintenance and battery replacement, which can still be considerable.
Because the price of electricity is (unfairly) based on gas price by EU regulations, imposed by Germany. One of the propositions of one party running for the next election is to renegotiate this so we can use our cheap electricity as the competitive advantage it is.
That's because it's a state run system and it really isn't that cheap. The nuclear operators are shielded from market rates by the government. The way that works is that they get a guaranteed price per kwh in long multi year deals, regardless of what the market does. That's actually true in most countries that operate nuclear plants. Without those guarantees, it's to risky of a thing to do financially for investors.
What they charge customers in France is also controlled by the government (and not the same thing). The difference is simply made up by tax payer money. Of course being connected to the rest of the European market and also having a lot of their own renewables, this just means that bill is getting larger and larger for the French government whenever there is a surplus of wind and solar. Which is probably happening quite often now.
It's indeed a great example why commercial nuclear plants without extensive state support is not really a thing. Most places that have nuclear plants, also feature heavy government involvement and state funding. That plant that Bill Gates is involved with that recently started construction work, only still exists because of extensive state involvement.
Why would any commercial energy producer, of any variety (nuclear, coal, solar, wind, etc), put money into building excess capacity to the point that the marginal profit of extra production is zero?
In countries using only intermittent renewable, we get news articles in the exceptional event that the grid did not need much fossil fuel generation for a day.
In France, we get those in the exceptional event that we need more than a little fossil generation for a day.
It's expensive, but seems to actually work at removing fossil generation from the grid almost completely.
Negative prices meant the grid is inefficient to me; that's not a good thing. When you build a factory you want it operating as much as possible, otherwise ROI falls. That's worth more than a few plants.
Consumers don't pay the market rate, because that'd expose them to price shocks (see: the griddy fiasco in texas a few years ago). They get a fixed rate from their utility.
In France consumers with below 36kVA grid connection can choose to pay state fixed prices, or they can choose various market offers, here is the official list of electricity providers:
This happens frequently in the UK too, if you have a compatible supplier you can set it up to charge your EV or some batteries during negative spikes. Ultimately if enough people were set up that way then prices would not get negative I suppose.
That's pretty much the whole dilemma now with decarbonization. We know how to generate electricity very cheaply with solar and wind. We just don't know how to do it at the right time.
It will take a lot of investment in storage tech (beyond lots of people using their EV car batteries as time-shifting storage, though that's certainly a good use!) in order to get prices smoothed out so that electricity generated at 1PM can be used at 11PM.
> We know how to generate electricity very cheaply with solar and wind. We just don't know how to do it at the right time
I’m not sure this needs to be a goal to be honest.
It’s more practical for us to become accustomed to agile tariffs and have our own batteries + charging the car when prices drop than to hope for large scale storage solutions. In the UK the average solar install now includes batteries as prices come down on them.
We can already do this today fairly easily, and with open tariff APIs plus more integrated devices it will become easier.
It is complex, wholesale prices generally do not reflect in retail directly. even when suppliers have flexible pricing and support V2G /buying from users solar etc, there is only only some correlation not 100% pass through of rates.
There are also technical and economic reasons this may not work beyond just inelastic vendor pricing, there is cost to transmission(loss) and all the step down that has to happen before electricity is at your door, that cost will be always positive so it may not actually be net positive.
At steep enough negative pricing this could be profitable, however at that point power plants with the highest costs and easiest scale down/ shut down procedures will start acting.
Projects like the one at Dinorwig (pumped hydro-storage) are more viable solution for excess capacity.
> Projects like the one at Dinorwig (pumped hydro-storage) are more viable solution for excess capacity.
I think this is a little simplistic. Pumped hydro is very reliant on finding suitable geography which ultimately limits the potential capacity. I think it's more likely that grids of the future will rely on a variety of storage solutions (pumped hydro, consumer EVs, grid scale batteries etc.) and smarter load-shedding rather than any single solution being dominant.
This is a bit misleading. Pumped hydro needs vertical relieve, but in places where vertical relief exists the potential is very large. It does not need to be on or even near any existing watercourse (although it can be piggybacked onto a reservoir that is, by adding another reservoir at higher elevation.)
Load scheduling driven by price incentives (namely hot water) is already the largest flexibility source in France iirc. I’m not sure that there is much difference between price-driven flexibility and smart grids though (in that most of the benefit is captured by communicating prices ahead of time rather than dynamic load modulation)
I meant to imply grid scale solutions not just pumped hydro only. The point was end customers based storage is not cost effective option for negative pricing, which will be be almost always marginally negative just shy of the cost of plants to scale down their generation.
Pumped hydro has been the cheapest by far and proven at scale far beyond any other solution including grid scale batteries, but only works in specific geographies and up to a fixed scale.
Grid scale batteries, pumped hydro, molten salts or other grid scale storage are all viable options provided TCO is cheaper than arbitrage that comes from price fluctuations.
This is no different than arbitrage in say commodity markets by taking delivery of the goods like say how U.S. government is using its strategic oil reserves these days.
Octopus and OVO also offer EV tariffs where you get a cheaper kWh price if you let them control when your EV is charged. You can always override the smart charging but you pay the standard rate.
All the analysis I can find talk only about the spot price being negative.
But what matters for economics is the volume exchanged at this negative price, that is if you are a buyer with infinite capacity to absorb kWh how much money you'll make yearly?
No URL, but if demand were there to take all that in, the demand would obviously go up. But there is not enough demand, so the capacity is far from infinite.
The best fix for negative prices is negative prices, the demand will come.
I'm still curious about the actual MWh's traded for negative prices as well
Afaik most of the energy is traded otc, spot markets are a tiny fraction of what gets delivered.
But that fraction is still interesting: since p=c must be respected, and there is always some small delta that is hard to predict and has to be covered. The spot price is not relevant to consumer prices, but it is relevant to the cost for energy providers to fine-tune their supply.
AFAIK this happens fairly regularly in some northern european countries (NL and DE come to mind) due to wind over-production. The sooner we get cheap grid storage, the better.
It's very frequent indeed. I noticed that it's mostly during sunny days in late spring / summer / early fall (solar). Much more rare is randomly at night (stormy days).
Solar is still pretty small in national grid charts, but I suspect that residential solar just reduces demand from the grid and doesn't show up as production.
Econ 101: with a marginal cost equal to zero, a competitive electricity market (with a price driven to marginal cost because of competition) cannot be sustainable because electricity price it cannot pay for the fixed costs.
Solution: we must stop electricity pricing based on energy produced (which made sense when using fossil fuel) and switch to a pricing mechanism where you pay for available power because that's where the marginal cost is increasing.
Many markets already do this: for example California pays generators a mixed rate per kWh and kW.
But just pricing per kWh can work. If the limit is available capacity at 6PM, then those kWh are the most profitable and capacity will be built to meet demand at 6PM.
I'm intrigued. But with an electrical grid that requires a constant match between electricity generation and consumption, how would you ensure the stability of a thing when its controlling mechanism (pricing) is its own derivative?
I had a friend recently tell me about how his excess power is put back into the grid and how he hopes our area sees negative rates eventually like this.
My cynical side was quick to point out that I would fire up my crypto miners if electricity was free for a few hours a day.
After talking to him more I realized we both had different take aways from the story of "the tragedy of the commons"
I lightened the conversation up by informing him he could do folding from home for a few hours to make sure his excess power went to a noble cause & thwart my zero sum approach.
My aging mind can't remember the actual facts but it was determined that when someone has significantly more power than they had a need for (say, full batteries and a whole lot of solar) that it opened up interesting behaviors. We try hard to be as efficient as possible, but when you don't have to, it leads to interesting stuff. (like leave the lights on, leave the windows open with a space heater next to you, etc.)
But in the case of the solar pwer generation and storage, the added use didn't have a negative effect...There's no penalty for using more, so they use more.
I was told that in Russia nat gas is so cheap that they keep the heating on 24/7 and will often just open windows to regulate temperature. No idea how true this is and whether it just applies to offices / apartment complexes but this is what I was told.
That's true. Proper ventilation with heat exchangers and all that is a very recent thing and not very widespread. Almost the entire housing stock, offices and other buildings were built without modern ventilation. Instead, buildings got windows with small separately openable sections (1/6 of the opening) known as fortochkas [1] for ventilation. They were a standard element of mass-built commieblocks [2] and it was common to overheat buildings so much that ventilation windows were left open all the time even in the winter. In modern times, when energy has a cost, they are often replaced with the latest well-insulated windows and kept shut to save money, which leads to molding issues due to insufficient ventilation.
It's true! Old apartment buildings and offices were designed with district heating in mind.
The heating is provided via hot water radiators that are not at all adjustable, there are no thermostats in individual apartments! So if the weather is not very cold, your apartment can become too hot. While it's still sub-freezing outside.
Newer apartment buildings have adjustable radiators with thermostatic valves, but it's far from common.
> I would fire up my crypto miners if electricity was free for a few hours a day
I dunno, if electricity was free only for a few hours, I would use it to charge batteries, and then use that stored electricity later in the day when it's not free.
If electricity was free most or all of the time, and/or if I could store more than I could use, then sure, I'd probably use it for unnecessary things that some might consider wasteful (not crypto mining; I'm allergic).
If the price swings were frequent and steep enough, you could probably have your batteries send power back to the grid when the price gets high.
I doubt the economics work, but I'd love to live in a world where a lot of the grid's battery storage is based on backup batteries people have at their houses with the added bonus of reducing their billing costs.
This is reality, att least in Sweden. You can invest in battery storage att your house and give control of it to the power company. They will then use the locally available power storage to either feed back to the grid or store excess of capacity and needed.
It can be quite profitable from what i heard, in relation to installing solar cells.
A utility offers (relatively) flat rates to domestic consumers, while purchasing some kilowatt-hours at higher or lower order of magnitude. When utility compensates a domestic consumer, its at the high order of magnitude.
Is excess renewable energy being used anywhere for direct air capture of carbon? My hope is that as more countries produce surplus energy, we will massively scale up direct air capture to help address our climate emergency.
Day ahead prices turning negative does not mean the wind and solar generators make a loss for every kWh they sell; they still receive country specific subsidies (production tax credits, feed-in-tariffs, contract for difference, renewables obligations ... and let's not forget about investment subsidies which helped to get the plant built) which make it worth their while to keep the blades spinning and the solar inverters humming. Otherwise what is the argument for subject your equipment to wear-and-tear and then paying for someone to take your product?
In addition there are more general system costs (the need for capacity payments to ensure electricity can be generated at peak times, as well as maintaining plants in reserve in case the weather isn't what was forecast the day ahead).
By this line of argument, negative prices on sunny/windy days increase the price of electricity to the consumer, since all of these subsidies need to be recouped (either by the tax or energy systems).
It's hard to draw a link between negative prices and increased subsidies in most cases. The subsidies can be recouped during the no-negative periods. In addition, subsidies are not needed anymore to make wind and solar cost competitive. And with increased use of electric cars (and battery storage in general) we will see increased usage of this negative pricing to charge them so the negative price will diminish or go away.
Don't forget that we still produce most of our energy from coal, oil and gas. Most of that needs and will be replaced by electricity so there is a huge need for more electricity.
I google translated section 2.2 (paragraph 9) of the ruling document
> ... As such, the French authorities consider that there are “positive external effects” linked to the development of renewable electrical energies, in particular the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector and the benefits in terms of robustness of the electricity sector. electricity supply linked to a more diversified electricity mix. These external effects are positive for the community but cannot be “monetized” by the investor. The French authorities consider that public support is necessary to have an investment in renewable energies that meets the expected collective benefits.
I would have expected inflation and interest rate changes to have negatively affected the viability of renewables. That is certainly the case for offshore wind in the UK (AR5 failed to produce any bids, AR6 has 66% higher maximum bid).
> I would have expected inflation and interest rate changes to have negatively affected the viability of renewables. That is certainly the case for offshore wind in the UK
UK interest rates went significantly higher than ECB ones.
bell-cot | 1 year, 5 months ago
If true - how fast could a new transmission line from France to Germany pay for itself?
toomuchtodo | 1 year, 5 months ago
https://montelnews.com/news/1525872/france-to-miss-2030-inte...
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL5N0KW3WE/
ganeshkrishnan | 1 year, 5 months ago
Germans would get the full cost which is much higher than the quoted price here. Besides nuclear power is not flexible enough to amp it up and down according to demand (unlike coal or petrocarbon industries).
toomuchtodo | 1 year, 5 months ago
TLDR More interconnector capacity, battery storage, and renewables needed (my analysis).
[1] https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...
[2] https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FR?wind=false&solar=fal...
[3] https://www.euractiv.com/section/coal/news/france-extends-li...
pydry | 1 year, 5 months ago
Nuclear reactors are already very cost ineffective when used as baseload. Theyre ridiculously cost ineffective when used for load following since it's basically curtailment.
This is why most countries tend to use gas or hydro/pumped storage for load following (or, increasingly, batteries as theyve been plummeting in price).
orwin | 1 year, 5 months ago
I've found this https://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/aen-infos-suivi-... even if it isn't really clear, you have a graph that show you a typical year on a french reactor, and load followinf the german reactors used to do over a day.
throw0101c | 1 year, 5 months ago
Ontario, Canada would disagree with you: nuclear is 10.1¢/kWh, hydro is 6.2¢, (methane/natural) gas is 11.4¢; see Table 2:
* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2023...
Of course hydro-electric dams typically flood many hectares of land for the reservoir. The current ones are getting refurbished:
* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/niagara-ontario-power...
Ontario's nuclear fleet are also in the middle of a bunch of refurbs:
* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-nuclear-power...
Some of which are finished:
* https://www.opg.com/releases/opg-celebrates-the-early-comple...
Live data on Ontario's grid:
* https://ieso.ca/power-data § "Supply" tab
bryanlarsen | 1 year, 5 months ago
throw0101c | 1 year, 5 months ago
And if you sign up for those ULO rates you also get 28.6¢ on-peak rates. The average over the entire day stays at 11.1¢ (see Table ES-2).
I guess they want to flatten the demand curve and reduce its cyclic nature: there's a cost to dealing with the traditional peaks times as well in various types of capacity.
bryanlarsen | 1 year, 5 months ago
stkdump | 1 year, 5 months ago
toomuchtodo | 1 year, 5 months ago
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czkkgnp1d2xo
[2] https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/ES?wind=false&solar=fal...
[3] https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/PT?wind=false&solar=fal...
[4] https://www.gem.wiki/As_Pontes_power_station
stkdump | 1 year, 5 months ago
toast0 | 1 year, 5 months ago
But the way these networks work, you can often build up the interconnects where there's a pricing/availability disparity, and pretty soon you have a vast interconnect. Because if Germany's grid pricing benefits from relatively unconstrained interconnection with France, there's going to be a pricing disparity at Germany's other borders. Of course, grid borders don't necessarily reflect national borders, and national interconnection projects have to happen too.
That said, the top 5 countries by peak load in wikipedia are France, Germany, UK, Italy, and Spain, which are all either France or neighbors of France.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta...
stkdump | 1 year, 5 months ago
France will have enough trouble rebuilding its declining nuclear fleet in the coming decades for their own energy needs, so any infrastructure that bets on France being able to supply neighbors as well will have a quick expiration. France is actually importing a lot of renewables in winter, because they heat homes with old electric heating (i.e. no heat pumps) and bad insulation that looses much more heat than homes in other countries and their nuclear supply can't cope with that.
In all likelyhood what will do the electricity decarbonization trick in Germany is threefold: more electricity transmission inside the country and with other renewable-heavy countries, continued quick buildout of renewables in Germany and a bit of battery storage, outlawing of coal and lignite in <10 years. The renewable gaps in the medium term will be fewer and shorter and will be filled with natural gas plants which are easy and cheap to build, even when they are just kept in standby most of the time. In the long term they will be made obsolete by even more lines and battery storage. Imported nuclear will likely play no relevant role at any stage. Like anything every bit helps a bit, but it won't change anything in the grand scale.
We already have a non-negligable amount of battery storage in German homes, but currently the incentives are laid out so that they will power these homes at night only. I believe we are loosing out on a bit of efficiency by not using it yet to feed back into the grid when needed. This could be enabled by smart meters and dynamic pricing in the future. It would also allow better to move household electricity demand into the times when renewables are most abundant.
dmurray | 1 year, 5 months ago
The line can't just go a few metres across the border. Let's say it connects Dortmund, in the German industrial heartland on the French side of the country, with Chooz, the site of a nuclear plant near the German border. French nuclear plants are evenly distributed around the country [0], so that should be a reasonable choice. That's 250 km.
High voltage transmission costs around €2m/km to build [1] and carries around 2 GW of power [2].
So your line costs €500m to build and makes €13 x 2000 = €26,000 an hour and pays for itself after 20,000 hours or three years.
You might reasonably say you wouldn't expect to capture all of the €13 per MWh in arbitrage profits, and perhaps this disparity was a short-lived aberration. But actually it's not: electricity futures in France are priced €25 cheaper than their equivalent contracts in Germany [3], so you could reasonably expect to capture a good portion of that - if you split the surplus between you, the consumer and the producer you can still get €9.
Of course, one problem with this free money is that your competitors are already doing it. The gap is expected to narrow over time thanks to interconnectors like this, increased generation in Germany, and French nuclear plants going out of service [3]. Still, with increasing electrification of the energy market, this kind of power transmission seems like a good business to be in and a good investment for national governments and grid operators.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Map-of-French-nuclear-po...
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358793859_Cost_of_e...
[2] https://web.ecs.baylor.edu/faculty/grady/_13_EE392J_2_Spring...
[3] https://montelnews.com/news/e15ef79e-2905-41ca-9124-165d7469...
jandrese | 1 year, 5 months ago
dmurray | 1 year, 5 months ago
kseistrup | 1 year, 5 months ago
Y_Y | 1 year, 5 months ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta...
(There are several HVDC links between those grids, but as I understand it that adds capacitance for the purpose of pricing.)
kseistrup | 1 year, 5 months ago
leobg | 1 year, 5 months ago
ganeshkrishnan | 1 year, 5 months ago
So it looks like solar and wind have more than compensated for the nuclear power shortages.
The olympic games will put this news to test and I guess we will find out soon if this news is indeed true.
realusername | 1 year, 5 months ago
cyberax | 1 year, 5 months ago
As a result, nuclear power becomes less competitive. However, renewables work poorly during the winter time. In Europe, they can go down for multiple _weeks_ at a time, far beyond any storage capabilities. And the only power plants that can fill the gap are fossil fuels.
End result: more fossil generation.
yodelshady | 1 year, 5 months ago
Could you read the article please?
The lumbering beasts, which actually do hate changing output at all, turned off before the renewables.
Secondly, another below comment already explains that no, there's not a shortage.
Thirdly, please for f*ks sake, engage your brain and think what the impact of 700 euros a month (high in 2022) to negative prices now has on industry. What the everloving ** do I charge my customers?
Maybe this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40679507
topper-123 | 1 year, 5 months ago
paulsutter | 1 year, 5 months ago
andrewxdiamond | 1 year, 5 months ago
A market where a good fluctuates between profitable and not is not one very attractive to investment.
Playing the video game Victoria 3 has taught me a lot about healthy markets. You have to play both sides of supply and demand to get to the prices you need
topper-123 | 1 year, 5 months ago
thecosas | 1 year, 5 months ago
bryanlarsen | 1 year, 5 months ago
Gare | 1 year, 5 months ago
nawitus | 1 year, 5 months ago
bastawhiz | 1 year, 5 months ago
This is the most wild thing I've ever read on this website. Pick just about any security and you'll see that buying and selling it over time fluctuates between profitable and not profitable. If something was always profitable everyone would do it and get infinitely rich. Arbitrage wouldn't exist. Economies would shut down.
jerf | 1 year, 5 months ago
Oil briefly went negative a few years ago. If you decided to build a storage business dependent on negative oil prices for profit, you might just be coming online around now, and very much poorer than you were before. (Of course you would in fact have stopped a long time ago.)
toomuchtodo | 1 year, 5 months ago
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/04/25/california-achieves-major-...
https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
https://cleantechnica.com/2024/06/02/solar-passes-100-of-pow...
https://futurism.com/the-byte/california-solar-electricity-p...
https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-CAL-CISO?wind=false&...
AaronFriel | 1 year, 5 months ago
Solar panel production on the other hand is exponential and growing much faster than overall power consumption. It can be very, very favorable to build batteries and that's why grid scale battery production is taking off. There is in fact a storage business dependent on energy arbitrage over time, it's lucrative, and all indications suggest it will continue to be lucrative for many years to come.
hn_throwaway_99 | 1 year, 5 months ago
hamandcheese | 1 year, 5 months ago
jandrese | 1 year, 5 months ago
There is good news though. With electric car sales slowing down (at least in the west) there is a surplus of batteries on the market, which makes grid storage projects more affordable. The incentives are currently pushing us towards decarbonizing our electric infrastructure faster and that is wonderful. As long as the politicians don't do anything dumb like slap huge tariffs on solar cells or something we should be making some real progress towards a green future.
marcosdumay | 1 year, 5 months ago
But they do. Often literally.
Negative prices usually happen because of laws requiring minimum utilization, or subsides, or because they are so small and rare that it is not worth having someone on place to turn the switch.
jandrese | 1 year, 5 months ago
marcosdumay | 1 year, 5 months ago
You are correct that they are not.
But this is due to policy, not physics. It's obvious to shut-down the fossil fuel plants first, but after then, there's no physical reason why they can't keep shutting power plants down.
Anyway, agreed, adding storage is a much better solution than focusing on the management of renewables.
toast0 | 1 year, 5 months ago
Since we're being pedantic, as I understand it, the grid operators don't usually tell plants what to do (outside of system stress response, curtailment, etc), the grid operator shares the forecast, and when the price forecast is low, fossil fuel plants are likely tell the grid operator they'd rather shutdown than produce power at low/negative prices. For solar plants, there's no fuel cost, and there might be subsidies, so producing at a negative market price might still be positive for the generator and there's no reason to turn it off. For nuclear, fueling schedules don't really change based on use, so there's no reason to not provide optimum power outage other than for grid stability.
Grid scale storage should reduce price swings, since storage plants will tend to show up on the demand side when prices are low and the supply side when prices are high; although perhaps price swings will become bigger when prediction fails --- if storage fills up by noon you'll have a lot of excess supply until sunset; if storage empties by midnight, you may have a lot of excess demand until sunrise.
jonatron | 1 year, 5 months ago
dfex | 1 year, 5 months ago
In Australia, this has been happening for some time - plants are literally having their output dialled back (or even being disconnected entirely) during peak times by the market operator.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-23/solar-farm-overload-h... [2] https://reneweconomy.com.au/aemo-slashes-output-of-five-big-...
bastawhiz | 1 year, 5 months ago
netrus | 1 year, 5 months ago
Negative prices allow for some weird actions to become profitable - like starting an empty washing machine, turning in the light in an empty room or needlessly heating some water tank. Basically everything we are used to think of as waste. It sounds absurd, but it's not really a big deal.
rurban | 1 year, 5 months ago
Without a proper grid not possible. The various countries block the expansion for political reasons. They would loose their power.
gpm | 1 year, 5 months ago
* Long term I have to imagine this is just "cheap" because there's got to be tons of industries that can use intermittent free energy.
olejorgenb | 1 year, 5 months ago
gpm | 1 year, 5 months ago
Like I'm not an expert on fertilizer production, but it seems pretty likely to me that you could draw that box around ammonia production and build out capacity that relatively cheaply, while leaving what I imagine to be the more operationally complex and capital intensive steps of extracting phosphates (via sulphiric and phosphoric acid) and potassium (which has nitric and sulphiric acid as biproducts), and combining that nitric acid with the ammonia (into ammonium nitrate) alone.
In some cases if you have excess production capacity (because you have unpredictable or seasonal load and you aren't currently at a peak) you don't necessarily even need more production capacity at all, just the ability to store a bit more of the inputs and outputs in a buffer.
stoperaticless | 1 year, 5 months ago
Usually clients want consistency in the output. (they depend on the product/service)
Business owner usually wants consistency in employee/machinery output. (They cost money)
To me it seems that only low priority computation (incl. con-coins) is such industry. (Investment kind of reused, and relatively few employees)
There will be some shift to adjust to intermitency (e.g. Worker hours might be shifted to the time when solar generates the most energy to take advantage of the price)
hackerlight | 1 year, 5 months ago
The sensible thing will be to use renewables on top of nuclear rather than overbuild nuclear, like what France is doing. But that will also eat into capacity factor when it's more windy and sunny like what France experiences.
Just something to keep in mind when you hear people talk about nuclear costs. Multiply it by at least 1/0.7 if they haven't taken this into account.
mjevans | 1 year, 5 months ago
bytesandbots | 1 year, 5 months ago
cft | 1 year, 5 months ago
D-Coder | 1 year, 5 months ago
Aeolun | 1 year, 5 months ago
jasoncartwright | 1 year, 5 months ago
philipkglass | 1 year, 5 months ago
486sx33 | 1 year, 5 months ago
nawitus | 1 year, 5 months ago
EcommerceFlow | 1 year, 5 months ago
robertlagrant | 1 year, 5 months ago
EcommerceFlow | 1 year, 5 months ago
WheatMillington | 1 year, 5 months ago
mrguyorama | 1 year, 5 months ago
This has nothing to do with what anyone actually said. Just ask any 60-something, mild conservative. The meme exists, even though the actual quote was slightly more mealy mouthed.
It was always nonsense anyway. Electricity generation is mostly a deregulated market in most places, so nobody would spend billions on a Nuclear plant that wasn't guaranteed to make back it's money. It was always a thought terminating cliche.
robertlagrant | 1 year, 5 months ago
> Most reactors began construction by 1974; following the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 and changing economics, many planned projects were canceled. More than 100 orders for nuclear power reactors, many already under construction, were canceled in the 1970s and 1980s, bankrupting some companies.
How does that square with your recollection? Or were lots of nuclear power plants being constructed in the 1980s, and the article is very wrong?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...
robertlagrant | 1 year, 5 months ago
And even if it weren't a misquote, "Living up to a quote from 1954" is not how we judge whether a power source is still worth investing in for the future.
[0] https://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2015/09/too-cheap-to-meter-t...
serial_dev | 1 year, 5 months ago
In my opinion, if someone says we should just have all nuclear, it means they are dealing in absolutes, maybe God in politics and debate, but they ignore that reality is much more complicated, as technology meets economics and politics (and much more).
(Again, AFAIK) nuclear energy is great when it comes to meeting the "baseline" requirements, roughly the level below which energy consumption of a region never drops. It is because nuclear energy cannot be scaled up and down quickly, so it's not adequate for peaks.
To balance the peaks and keep the network stable, you need energy sources that can increase their output in seconds (or less?).
That's also one of the issues with wind and solar, you can't choose when it is available and when it isn't, so coal etc is still needed to make sure that energy production and consumption is practically equal at all times.
bryanlarsen | 1 year, 5 months ago
robertlagrant | 1 year, 5 months ago
bryanlarsen | 1 year, 5 months ago
pfdietz | 1 year, 5 months ago
moffkalast | 1 year, 5 months ago
Besides, you still have to pay back for the construction and the fuel, it's never gonna be free.
Herz | 1 year, 5 months ago
Furthermore, no one could have predicted the mass protests, scandals, and fears that nuclear energy has sparked over the decades. These factors have significantly reduced the hype and investment in the sector.
henearkr | 1 year, 5 months ago
Nuclear fission reactors have problems in other domains like being a huge liability during a military conflict, and dependance on uranium supply from the Sahel.
gumby | 1 year, 5 months ago
Also, nuclear plants in France are starting to suffer from water shortages; since an overheating plant is a problem it means that they take water at the expense of other uses, which is an externality they currently don't pay for because the economics of these plants is so terrible already.
I really want to like niclear but I have never been able to see the math work (and I've been paying intermittent attention for 40 years).
givemeethekeys | 1 year, 5 months ago
Then, there's everything else - you'd have to look at their budget to see if the proceeds from electricity are funding other programs.
johnzim | 1 year, 5 months ago
Functionally they could get there by just building a few more reactors.
more_corn | 1 year, 5 months ago
digdugdirk | 1 year, 5 months ago
The easy answer is that financiers don't want it, so it won't happen.
hn_throwaway_99 | 1 year, 5 months ago
Not at all. Nobody has really put forth "too cheap to meter" as a rationale for nuclear for 50 years or more.
The issue is that nuclear is currently the only reliable base load generation technology that doesn't produce carbon (except perhaps hydro for reasonable definitions of "reliable"). The other top technologies either produce carbon (natural gas and coal) or are unreliable (solar and wind).
I actually don't believe nuclear is "the future" because I think renewables + battery storage will be more economical going forward and less politically dicey. But France is currently the envy of the world for their energy generation save for some countries with unique environments that allow for a lot of carbon-free generation (e.g. Norway with hydro and Iceland with geothermal).
briandear | 1 year, 5 months ago
bryanlarsen | 1 year, 5 months ago
dmoo | 1 year, 5 months ago
pfdietz | 1 year, 5 months ago
kelnos | 1 year, 5 months ago
I get that opinions differ on this (clearly you have a different take), but that's fine; reasonable people can disagree.
(To be clear, I don't believe solar/wind is the be-all, end-all. Base load generation is still a problem there, and neither source is reliable or consistent in the way that something like nuclear is.)
Herz | 1 year, 5 months ago
Beyond that, leaving out storage costs, what are the technologies that can cover the world's storage? And in what quantities?
Because if I think of lithium, wouldn't it be an environmental disaster to extract and recycle all the materials involved?
In general, I don't understand why basically nuclear is to be replaced.
bryanlarsen | 1 year, 5 months ago
It's been true for 50 years, assuming it will be true for another decade or two is not wishful thinking.
> Beyond that, leaving out storage costs, what are the technologies that can cover the world's storage? And in what quantities?
Batteries for short term storage and pumped hydro for long term storage.
> Because if I think of lithium, wouldn't it be an environmental disaster to extract and recycle all the materials involved?
No.
> In general, I don't understand why basically nuclear is to be replaced.
It's inevitable that the cheapest solution will win. Not the best, but the cheapest.
Herz | 1 year, 5 months ago
Well it's one thing though to use the storage for a cell phones and some cars, another to keep all the industries and homes going on.
Do you have any data about what you claim?
For example in italy of hydro, nothing has been built for decades, everything that could be used has been used. If we want to go further, it's necessary to destroy valleys.
Your arguments do not go beyond whishful thinking... At least you need some data.
Retric | 1 year, 5 months ago
Not really. If all vehicles on the road where 100% PEV’s your looking at ~250 TWh in batteries. 1/5 of that would be ~50TWh.
Global electricity demand is about 70 TWh per day. You don’t need 70 TWh worth of storage if daily production is > daily demand. It all comes down to which is cheaper, extra storage or extra generating capacity. However ~25 TWh of storage is likely sufficient for a grid equally stable as what we have today. (100% EV’s would increase that 70TWh/day but that’s offset by charging them when power is cheap.)
Herz | 1 year, 5 months ago
If we find out in a few decades that the price of solar, batteries or renewables is no longer going down (and the reasons could be many, like a war, or a plateau in penetration), it could be enough to ruin those expectations. And discover that putting all our hopes in a single event could be our downfall.
Besides, even if daily storage is feasible, with current trends, we're still a long way from seasonal storage...
That's my opinion, which is why I think it's necessary to invest and believe in all technologies, without looking for the one we like the most or looks the most promising, since it leads to big bias and overestimation.
bryanlarsen | 1 year, 5 months ago
Herz | 1 year, 5 months ago
Sorry but where do you see this 80% drop? When the price of storage seems close to reaching a plateau (which by the way is also what I assumed in previous comments).
I understand being optimistic, but you claim to know the future while also denying the present... It's ironic.
bryanlarsen | 1 year, 5 months ago
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/03/07/battery-prices-collap...
Retric | 1 year, 5 months ago
We don’t need the price of solar or batteries to keep falling, or for large exponential growth to occur. Simply maintaining the current rate of solar energy installs over the next 25 years would result in a renewable heavy grid.
China is currently on pace to install ~300 GW of solar power in 2024 assuming they continue that for 25 years and give a minimal 15% capacity factor that’s already at 100% of their current electricity consumption before those panels hit end of life. Granted, demand would increase over that time period but keeping up with demand doesn’t require crazy exponential growth here.
Grid batteries are in a similar situation, companies aren’t installing them at scale because they don’t need to but there’s plenty of excess battery manufacturing capacity right now to fill the need as it shows up. Basically at current rate of renewable installs there becomes an economic incentive to slowly ramp up grid batteries.
jandrese | 1 year, 5 months ago
Damogran6 | 1 year, 5 months ago
Herz | 1 year, 5 months ago
Damogran6 | 1 year, 5 months ago
hn_throwaway_99 | 1 year, 5 months ago
When it comes to grid scale storage, I think there will be rapid advancements because the constraints for what what makes a good grid battery is so different from what makes a good laptop or EV battery, and we've really only recently been investigated batteries with those constraints. I.e. for decades battery tech has been concerned about things like weight-to-capacity ratios, recharge times, etc. Most of that hardly even matters for fixed, installed batteries at power plants.
kelnos | 1 year, 5 months ago
My understanding is that the costs around nuclear aren't due to the technology being expensive (something that yes, we would expect to get cheaper over time), but because of the -- IMO necessary -- regulatory and safety regime surrounding nuclear power. Costs that I wouldn't expect to change all that much (and maybe even increase with time).
With storage, the cost is mainly the technology. As the tech improves, the cost decreases.
Herz | 1 year, 5 months ago
However, I don't think the decline in battery prices is primarily due to the technologies used. Instead, it's more about economies of scale and demand, which help optimize prices.
From my perspective, nuclear energy is on a similar path but with significantly less investment. A major portion of nuclear costs stems from the lack of economies of scale.
In my opinion, the arguments against nuclear energy contribute to the perception of its economic inefficiency. If people don't believe in it or don't want it, there will never be an opportunity to achieve economies of scale.
Here its quite well documented: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power...
guerby | 1 year, 5 months ago
throw0101c | 1 year, 5 months ago
A history of the phrase, which was originally said in 1954 (seventy years ago):
> Only a few days later, Strauss was a guest on Meet the Press. When the reporters asked him about the quotation and the viability of "commercial power from atomic piles," Strauss replied that he expected his children and grandchildren would have power "too cheap to be metered, just as we have water today that's too cheap to be metered."[4]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_cheap_to_meter
It was never meant to be taken as $0:
For a long time water was paid for in a flat rate, and one could certainly envisage where electricity was the same: the power company would pick some kind of median/average to charge folks.. Of course most folks have metered water/sewage nowadays, and so metered electricity is less strange.
Georgelemental | 1 year, 5 months ago
And geothermal, as you mention below. But, like hydro, it only works in certain geographic areas
yongjik | 1 year, 5 months ago
Ergo, if you're using nuclear and energy became "too cheap to meter" then someone was not doing their job properly. If Tesla overestimated market demand and has to give away cars for free, would you say it means Tesla is the car of the future?
helsinkiandrew | 1 year, 5 months ago
French nuclear power is run by EDF, which although 85% owned by the French government has “a mandate to make a profit for its shareholders”
guerby | 1 year, 5 months ago
https://presse.economie.gouv.fr/08062023-letat-redevient-lac...
helsinkiandrew | 1 year, 5 months ago
Retric | 1 year, 5 months ago
It’s not some design issue that you can fix with small modular reactors or whatever. Every time anything significant goes wrong people kept adding systems to prevent it happening again. Sometimes that’s something physical like a wall or redundant system, and other times it’s longer procedures and more paperwork. This has been great for avoiding another SL-1, 3 mile island etc, but mitigating every possible risks isn’t cheap. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1
For example there was once an expensive issue where foreign material fell into the spent fuel pool where fixing it significantly extended an outage at a single reactor so now everyone working on anything at any reactor takes significant steps to mitigate that risk. Great things working as intended except now something that might have cost 100k now costs significantly more because of that mitigation effort.
Extend that to any significant issue across hundreds of reactors and 50+ years and suddenly triple checking to avoid every fuck up means doing anything is really expensive. Worse very little of it is wasted effort, there’s just far more ways to fuck up in practice than in theory.
PS: I do believe it’s possible to have safe and cheap nuclear power, it’s just going to look very different than what we’re doing today.
photochemsyn | 1 year, 5 months ago
While a 1 GW coal plant might burn as much as 4 million tons of coal a year, a comparable nuclear power plant only consumes some 30 tons of fuels rods per year - but depending on ore quality and U-235 enrichment level, that might translate to 300,000 tons of uranium ore that needs to be mined and converted into fuel rods through an expensive multi-step process. Coal is much dirtier in terms of average daily emissions (though there's always the catastrophic failure risk with nuclear).
Solar / wind / storage operating costs are limited to maintenance and battery replacement, which can still be considerable.
gwervc | 1 year, 5 months ago
jillesvangurp | 1 year, 5 months ago
What they charge customers in France is also controlled by the government (and not the same thing). The difference is simply made up by tax payer money. Of course being connected to the rest of the European market and also having a lot of their own renewables, this just means that bill is getting larger and larger for the French government whenever there is a surplus of wind and solar. Which is probably happening quite often now.
Here are some details on a deal the French government struck with nuclear operator EDF recently: https://www.clearygottlieb.com/news-and-insights/publication...
It's indeed a great example why commercial nuclear plants without extensive state support is not really a thing. Most places that have nuclear plants, also feature heavy government involvement and state funding. That plant that Bill Gates is involved with that recently started construction work, only still exists because of extensive state involvement.
HarHarVeryFunny | 1 year, 5 months ago
Krssst | 1 year, 5 months ago
In France, we get those in the exceptional event that we need more than a little fossil generation for a day.
It's expensive, but seems to actually work at removing fossil generation from the grid almost completely.
Negative prices meant the grid is inefficient to me; that's not a good thing. When you build a factory you want it operating as much as possible, otherwise ROI falls. That's worth more than a few plants.
gwbas1c | 1 year, 5 months ago
jnsie | 1 year, 5 months ago
NullPrefix | 1 year, 5 months ago
gruez | 1 year, 5 months ago
guerby | 1 year, 5 months ago
https://www.enedis.fr/liste-des-fournisseurs-delectricite
pyrale | 1 year, 5 months ago
nawitus | 1 year, 5 months ago
Neil44 | 1 year, 5 months ago
* https://octopus.energy/smart/agile/
risyachka | 1 year, 5 months ago
Neil44 | 1 year, 5 months ago
hn_throwaway_99 | 1 year, 5 months ago
It will take a lot of investment in storage tech (beyond lots of people using their EV car batteries as time-shifting storage, though that's certainly a good use!) in order to get prices smoothed out so that electricity generated at 1PM can be used at 11PM.
jayflux | 1 year, 5 months ago
I’m not sure this needs to be a goal to be honest.
It’s more practical for us to become accustomed to agile tariffs and have our own batteries + charging the car when prices drop than to hope for large scale storage solutions. In the UK the average solar install now includes batteries as prices come down on them.
We can already do this today fairly easily, and with open tariff APIs plus more integrated devices it will become easier.
manquer | 1 year, 5 months ago
There are also technical and economic reasons this may not work beyond just inelastic vendor pricing, there is cost to transmission(loss) and all the step down that has to happen before electricity is at your door, that cost will be always positive so it may not actually be net positive.
At steep enough negative pricing this could be profitable, however at that point power plants with the highest costs and easiest scale down/ shut down procedures will start acting.
Projects like the one at Dinorwig (pumped hydro-storage) are more viable solution for excess capacity.
remus | 1 year, 5 months ago
I think this is a little simplistic. Pumped hydro is very reliant on finding suitable geography which ultimately limits the potential capacity. I think it's more likely that grids of the future will rely on a variety of storage solutions (pumped hydro, consumer EVs, grid scale batteries etc.) and smarter load-shedding rather than any single solution being dominant.
pfdietz | 1 year, 5 months ago
pyrale | 1 year, 5 months ago
manquer | 1 year, 5 months ago
Pumped hydro has been the cheapest by far and proven at scale far beyond any other solution including grid scale batteries, but only works in specific geographies and up to a fixed scale.
Grid scale batteries, pumped hydro, molten salts or other grid scale storage are all viable options provided TCO is cheaper than arbitrage that comes from price fluctuations.
This is no different than arbitrage in say commodity markets by taking delivery of the goods like say how U.S. government is using its strategic oil reserves these days.
kieranmaine | 1 year, 5 months ago
* https://octopus.energy/smart/intelligent-octopus-go/ - 7.5p per kWh
* https://www.ovoenergy.com/electric-cars/charge-anytime - 7p per kWh
guerby | 1 year, 5 months ago
But what matters for economics is the volume exchanged at this negative price, that is if you are a buyer with infinite capacity to absorb kWh how much money you'll make yearly?
Anyone with a good URL?
ragebol | 1 year, 5 months ago
I'm still curious about the actual MWh's traded for negative prices as well
baq | 1 year, 5 months ago
Or… the supply will go away shudders
pyrale | 1 year, 5 months ago
pyrale | 1 year, 5 months ago
But that fraction is still interesting: since p=c must be respected, and there is always some small delta that is hard to predict and has to be covered. The spot price is not relevant to consumer prices, but it is relevant to the cost for energy providers to fine-tune their supply.
riffraff | 1 year, 5 months ago
ragebol | 1 year, 5 months ago
MartienVisser on twitter has some great graphs about the energy market, but I'm on my phone and banned twitter from that.
jtwaleson | 1 year, 5 months ago
It's very frequent indeed. I noticed that it's mostly during sunny days in late spring / summer / early fall (solar). Much more rare is randomly at night (stormy days).
Solar is still pretty small in national grid charts, but I suspect that residential solar just reduces demand from the grid and doesn't show up as production.
littlestymaar | 1 year, 5 months ago
Solution: we must stop electricity pricing based on energy produced (which made sense when using fossil fuel) and switch to a pricing mechanism where you pay for available power because that's where the marginal cost is increasing.
bryanlarsen | 1 year, 5 months ago
But just pricing per kWh can work. If the limit is available capacity at 6PM, then those kWh are the most profitable and capacity will be built to meet demand at 6PM.
digdugdirk | 1 year, 5 months ago
pyrale | 1 year, 5 months ago
https://energy.ec.europa.eu/topics/markets-and-consumers/cap...
helsinkiandrew | 1 year, 5 months ago
https://data.nordpoolgroup.com/auction/day-ahead/prices?deli...
rig666 | 1 year, 5 months ago
My cynical side was quick to point out that I would fire up my crypto miners if electricity was free for a few hours a day. After talking to him more I realized we both had different take aways from the story of "the tragedy of the commons" I lightened the conversation up by informing him he could do folding from home for a few hours to make sure his excess power went to a noble cause & thwart my zero sum approach.
Damogran6 | 1 year, 5 months ago
SoftTalker | 1 year, 5 months ago
stoperaticless | 1 year, 5 months ago
Damogran6 | 1 year, 5 months ago
kypro | 1 year, 5 months ago
selimthegrim | 1 year, 5 months ago
heavenlyblue | 1 year, 5 months ago
mopsi | 1 year, 5 months ago
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortochka
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchevka
cyberax | 1 year, 5 months ago
The heating is provided via hot water radiators that are not at all adjustable, there are no thermostats in individual apartments! So if the weather is not very cold, your apartment can become too hot. While it's still sub-freezing outside.
Newer apartment buildings have adjustable radiators with thermostatic valves, but it's far from common.
djmips | 1 year, 5 months ago
kelnos | 1 year, 5 months ago
I dunno, if electricity was free only for a few hours, I would use it to charge batteries, and then use that stored electricity later in the day when it's not free.
If electricity was free most or all of the time, and/or if I could store more than I could use, then sure, I'd probably use it for unnecessary things that some might consider wasteful (not crypto mining; I'm allergic).
jimbobthrowawy | 1 year, 5 months ago
I doubt the economics work, but I'd love to live in a world where a lot of the grid's battery storage is based on backup batteries people have at their houses with the added bonus of reducing their billing costs.
purew | 1 year, 5 months ago
It can be quite profitable from what i heard, in relation to installing solar cells.
aitchnyu | 1 year, 5 months ago
countvonbalzac | 1 year, 5 months ago
gfarah | 1 year, 5 months ago
chickenbig | 1 year, 5 months ago
In addition there are more general system costs (the need for capacity payments to ensure electricity can be generated at peak times, as well as maintaining plants in reserve in case the weather isn't what was forecast the day ahead).
By this line of argument, negative prices on sunny/windy days increase the price of electricity to the consumer, since all of these subsidies need to be recouped (either by the tax or energy systems).
flakeoil | 1 year, 5 months ago
Don't forget that we still produce most of our energy from coal, oil and gas. Most of that needs and will be replaced by electricity so there is a huge need for more electricity.
chickenbig | 1 year, 5 months ago
See https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/api/files/docume... where the European Commission approved the plan for the French state to give aid to push renewable deployment in France.
I google translated section 2.2 (paragraph 9) of the ruling document
> ... As such, the French authorities consider that there are “positive external effects” linked to the development of renewable electrical energies, in particular the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector and the benefits in terms of robustness of the electricity sector. electricity supply linked to a more diversified electricity mix. These external effects are positive for the community but cannot be “monetized” by the investor. The French authorities consider that public support is necessary to have an investment in renewable energies that meets the expected collective benefits.
I would have expected inflation and interest rate changes to have negatively affected the viability of renewables. That is certainly the case for offshore wind in the UK (AR5 failed to produce any bids, AR6 has 66% higher maximum bid).
rsynnott | 1 year, 5 months ago
UK interest rates went significantly higher than ECB ones.
rsynnott | 1 year, 5 months ago