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Comment by Tade0 | Hacker News Reader

I found this map very helpful in internet disputes about electricity sources in my country(Poland), because it shows some lesser known facts like:

- We import electricity at an average rate of 1.2GW - mostly from Germany and Sweden - and this number keeps growing.

- Not 95% of our electricity comes from coal(as it's often assumed here), but 75% at most.

- Wholesale electricity prices in Poland are actually higher than in e.g. Germany.

- Solar reached a point where it registers in the mix - single digit percentages so far, but capacity is growing sharply.

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As your neighbour (Lithuania), I'd also like to point out your air pollution affects us a lot. Our air quality is a lot worse on days when there is a south west wind blowing.

Now of course not all of that is from burning coal for electricity (Poland had a lot of manufacturing and heavy industry), but if you were to decarbonise in general it would make a big difference to us :-)

From next year, all new homes here are required to generate most of their electricity from renewable sources, so we should start to see a big uptake in solar. I think this comes from EU regulations to decarbonise housing, so maybe there is something similar in Poland?

Oh, I'm painfully aware of that having recently invested in an air purifier - it's a necessity around here.

Unfortunately this pollution comes mostly from heating and trust me - I wish it was coal these people were burning.

To put this into perspective: last year I was celebrating new year's eve in eastern Poland and met a shopkeeper who was complaining that he can't take wood from a local national reserve.

So yeah - sorry about that. A large part of our society is focused mostly on their own convenience.

It seems like you’re saying that people are burning wood. It’s worth pointing out that wood burning stoves are not all the same. Here in America our environmental agency (EPA) has mandated that all new wood burning stoves meet their new standards for emissions. The result is that a new wood burning stove can produce as little as 1/15th the emissions of what a traditional wood fireplace would emit. For the 2020 models, a wood burning stove should release less particulate than a car without a catalytic converter, while a regular fireplace is roughly as bad as an old diesel truck.

It’s still nowhere as clean as even natural gas, but even without switching fuel sources you can do a lot to make wood burn cleaner.

It seems like you’re saying that people are burning wood.

I wish they were. Wood was probably just a part of that gentleman's own "energy mix", consisting mostly of culm(coal dust), trash, coal and wood.

Recently coal dust for heating purposes was outlawed, along with stoves not meeting a certain standard of emissions, but that didn't stop retailers from offering products which were not up to those standards.

Anyway the main issue still appears to be awareness, as many people who could easily afford to use gas for heating still choose to pollute, because it's cheap and convenient.

Yikes. That is a frightening mix of fuel, I’d rather that everyone ran diesel generators, and that’s saying a lot.

> - Wholesale electricity prices in Poland are actually higher than in e.g. Germany.

Wholesale prices in Germany are anything but stable. We have often times where the price is negative and on the other hand sometimes exceeds hundreds of Euros per MWh.

Germany has allegedly 50% renewables in their electricity mix, yet they have one of the highest specific CO2 emissions per kWh in Europe, plus the highest prices.

If you want a positive example, you have to use France.

For comparison:

- France: 17 Cents per kWh, 50 grams CO2 per kWh on average

- Germany: 31 Cents per kWh, 401 grams per kWh on average

Also, the wholesale electricity price is irrelevant to the customer, especially in Germany where renewables receive a guaranteed price per kWh, _independent_ of the current wholesale price which is why our electricity bills are so high.

Germany is currently planning and building 16 gas plants and even two coal plants, so you shouldn’t take Germany as a positive example for decarbonizing the electricity sector. We aren’t.

I’m very glad Poland and the Netherlands are actually planning to build nuclear power plants.

Some providers (I'm thinking of Octopus in the UK) offer tariffs which are closely linked to wholesale costs.

Their "Agile Octopus" tariff has 30-minute pricing windows, estimated the previous day. Electricity is cheap in the early hours where there's a surplus, and expensive at dinner time. Idea being you can charge your EV and do your tumble-drying at the cheapest possible time. There has been negative unit pricing in the past, when generation has far exceeded demand (i.e. early hours of the morning on a windy day).

More info here: https://octopus.energy/agile/

> estimated the previous day

Real time pricing sounds great, but all the supply and demand effects economists love go away when you delay pricing effects by a day... Why do that?

I don't disagree that it has downsides, but for your average consumer, having that advance notice is probably quite useful/reassuring when it comes to scheduling car charges and other essentials.

Wholesale prices in Poland fluctuate as well, but they're still higher at any given point in time.

And wholesale prices matter to investors - recently we had a large coal project shut down because with the added cost of CO2 credits the LCoE was simply too high, so nobody was willing to finance it.

you shouldn’t take Germany as a positive example for decarbonizing the electricity sector. We aren’t.

I'm not, because the UK with its shift from coal to gas+wind and increases in energy efficiency is a much better one. And also a great example how nowadays nuclear means mostly cost and time overruns.

Meanwhile France is operating on a aging fleet of nuclear reactors(35 years old on average), which hasn't increased in capacity for 20 years now. I'm not sure what's their plan when they will be forced to phase out some of the older units.

I’m very glad Poland and the Netherlands are actually planning to build nuclear power plants.

Well it's not going to happen here because these plans were a vessel for corruption from the get go.

On the other hand solar is growing because it's cheap and with two-way metering coupled with incentives homeowners have all the incentive they need to set up their own installations.

How well does solar work in Poland? I mean given that the country is so far north. I would expect wind power generation to be more suitable, especially close to the sea shore.

Wind was growing sharply before the current administration axed it. It's still the leading renewable energy source here though - both in capacity and GWh delivered.

Recently various cronies came out of the woodwork, so there's a chance we will have some weirdly expensive (even for this source) offshore farms.

But it's likely that some of our national parks will be turned into biomass for coal plants sooner - that's something currently in the works at least.

Importing almost enough to do time-travel.

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