Energy Prices in Europe Hit Records After Wind Stops Blowing
wsj.com
wsj.com
Alternative article : https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/expensive-winter-ahe...
This stops being a problem once the transition is complete.
But that’s to a great extent the definition of a transition.
We are never going to rely purely on wind, since it is uncontrollable.
I did the calculation for France a few years ago: if you wanted to run on wind + battery, on a typical year you'd need two weeks of storage! Nobody considers this realistic, and gas is expected to cover this part in the end.
Edit: I forgot the link to my model: https://bourrasque.info/images/20180116-moulins-%C3%A0-vent/...
For your specific questions:
- Solar energy: sort of, I did three variants (100% solar, 100% wind, an the current Wind/solar ration)
- energy import: I kept the same energy import profile as of today. It would have made the model much bigger (I would have needed to simulate the entire European grid instead of just the French one, making me deal with tons of different data sources, which I didn't want to). By the way, the power connection between countries are currently pretty tiny compared to the consumption of a big country (granted, that could probably be changed if needed, but I don't know by which margin).
- demand shaping not at all, and it would definitely have an impact for short periods. But for the longer wind-deprived periods (in weeks) which I was trying to measure, I don't think it would make a significant difference.
Making such electricity transfer possible would require a huge overhaul of the European links.
It's nothing money can't buy, but it's a hell lot of money: extrapolating from existing submarine HVDC project in Europe[1], connecting great Britain to mainland Europe alone would cost a few dozen billions. Want to connect the whole Europe like this, you'd have to pay a few hundred billions.
[1]: http://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/JR...
The first two seem pointless and the third I dont really get (it'll be much higher for both).
>I kept the same energy import profile as of today.
Also a weird assumption. It should be much higher in the future. Grid interconnects are a whole lot cheaper than batteries.
Switzerland is likely to import more excess power when theres a lot of wind/sun, use less of its own hydropower and release that pent up hydropower back across the border later, for instance.
>demand shaping not at all, and it would definitely have an impact for short periods
This is probably where the biggest bang for the buck will come as the demand side reacts to electricity prices that vary a lot over the day with smarter consumption. It's already happening in the UK and Germany.
This may explain why, for instance, in Europe, a Czech fossil-energy magnate buys[1] important shares of western european media (such as the liberal-left leaning Le Monde in France, for instance) while investing[2] in coal and gas.
[1] https://www.lesechos.fr/tech-medias/medias/daniel-kretinsky-... [2] https://www.bfmtv.com/economie/entreprises/energie/pourquoi-...
I was wondering if you were referencing data from a particular day in winter 2020 or if it was a guess.
France didn't embrace nuclear out of the goodness of their hearts - they wanted to become a nuclear power, and needed the infrastructure and specialists and so on to become one (establish study paths, and give those students the prospect of jobs so that they actually choose the new paths etc.).
Now that this isn't of strategic importance anymore, France lost interest in nuclear plants (just look at what gets built in recent decades in France). Because nuclear power by itself isn't that interesting, mostly because it is so hugely expensive and inflexible.
Germany was never allowed to get nuclear infrastructure because they started two world wars, and at the time no one was interested in Germany having nukes for the third attempt. Even research alone wasn't allowed for decades after the end of WW2. That's also the reason why Germany has no capacity for processing used fuel rods and does this in France to this day - its dual use tech.
Half of the problem in France are the green activists & the public to build more and the other half is that the EU is extremely against nuclear and does all of what they can to sabotage the funding.
That's maybe how they are trying to spin it yeah.
The above makes sense though, nuclear power plants are a bit too expensive to build compared to other alternatives. You get more bang for your buck by investing it elsewhere. I wonder what their definition of green is, it's clearly not CO2-based. Nuclear energy is not renewable so maybe that's their angle?
Nucler just works.
Some (but not all) countries in Europe also have high energy taxes that can be lowered to mitigate the impact of high prices on mid and lower-income citizens. Definitely not a long term solution, but hopefully it has the intended effect. However, lowering taxes could also end up pushing market prices even higher as demand is high and supply limited.
Finding a long term solution will be very tricky as the energy market is a bad mix of free and regulated markets and political ambitions that skid across the full spectrum.
I hate that the headline, which they know is the only thing a lot of people read, implies "high prices due to eolic/renewables", when the true underlying cause is that gas and coal cost a lot more than 5 years ago.
And they left the "abundant wind power has at times led to periods of cheap electricity" to the bottom of the article, where nobody would read it. I guess some people would rather pay $100 every month of the year than $150 one month and $30 the other 12.
Sucks for everyone who has marginal incomes, but I'm sure we can make some adjustments to the safety net policies to mitigate that.
>Sucks for everyone who has marginal incomes, but I'm sure we can make some adjustments to the safety net policies to mitigate that.
When people complain about policies that screw the middle class this is exactly the kind of stuff they are talking about. The poors scrape by with their vouchers. The middle class flounders until they're poor enough to qualify for the vouchers. Energy, education, healthcare, housing, etc. etc. etc. regardless of the sector the effect is the same.
People have a habit of voting against people who screw them once they figure it out.
Burning fossil fuels might be unsustainable on a 50yr timeline but squeezing people financially is unsustainable on a 5yr timeline that gets us the worst of both.
Also keep in mind that my country has an annual national budget of $35,000 per capita, one third of which goes to welfare programs. We practically have a basic income program going already.
We're not totally insulated from the forces that besiege the middle class, but I'm pretty sure we're mitigating them as well as anyone. Would love to hear your suggestions on what policies would do better, assuming an intention to prevent catastrophic global climate change.
So some grandma with her 3 bar electric heater is paying some token amount for her usage over what is deemed 'baseline' but then crypto miners or industry is effectively subsidising everyone and also incentivised to reduce usage more heavily.
I agree that faster deployment of renewables and CO2-neutral energy does require high energy prices - however, it's not my decision to make whether that benefit is so desirable to justify the costs, it's up to the people in each specific country to decide - and taking into account the benefit to them specifically and the costs to them, not the global benefit and someone else's budget. And IMHO governments have not really asked them for a proper informed decision, it all has just-sort-of-happened without informed consent of the masses and they might just refuse that consent if the price rises sufficiently.
In some sense a clean environment and less dangerous future are "luxury goods" that societies and people want to buy if they can afford to, but should not be forced if they can't afford the expense.
Nah, people will do as they're told.
1. This choice gets made in whatever way does get (at least passive) consent of the general public;
2. The leaders try to make a different choice and get promptly replaced in the next elections with whichever populists promise to ignore the elites and roll back these choices;
3. The leaders make a different choice and violently enforce them in an authoritarian manner despite dissent. And IMHO the lifestyle changes required to stop global warming would be sufficiently large to cause meaningful mass dissent if enforced.
I don't see any fourth option - do you?
I hate to bring it as example, but everyone but a minority followed Covid guidelines, locked themselves home, lost their jobs, lived on savings. For the greater good. Those protesting were seen as idiots.
So, yeah, people will do as they're told.
Covid is a relevant example, and IMHO it quite clearly showed the limits of how much people were willing to follow guidelines even in the presence of immediate threat with clear obvious results happening right now. If you would be asking something comparable to Covid restrictions so that in 30 years perhaps the impact would be lower... (the delay in time, the uncertainty of impact...) IMHO Covid experience shows that people simply won't accept that.
The people who can least afford to pay for clean energy etc are the ones who will also be most impacted by heat waves, declining air quality, and natural disasters.
So it's a similar "luxury good" as "functioning healthcare".
...and buy food to eat...
...global warming is something for future-you to care about.
But I don't think that qualifies "adequate dental care" or "maintaining a healthy weight" (two problems frequently prioritized below this month's rent) as luxuries. Not only are they something everyone should have, deferring attention to those things is a net cost for everyone in the end (sufferers are miserable, society pays). This is why health insurance has started subsidizing preventative care. Climate change is a similar can of worms.
If you have enough money, you can insulate your house, build geothermal heating, solar heating+power, and all that stuff. At that "richness level", a power bill increase is a negligable cost. If you're really poor, power bill increases mean choosing between freezing at home or eating. I pay ~45eur monthly for power (i get heat from elsewhere), and doubling that to 90eur would mean one less aliexpress toy for me. It would also mean around 10 days of cheap food for someone poor.
Basically, rich can afford to be green, but forcing green policies impacts poor the most. Ban non-eco cars? Sure... someone rich already has a car with low exhausts to pass the bar, and they will replace the car for a new one, even cleaner in a few years... poor people have an old beater with a shitty engine, burning oil, and a new eco policy means, that they have no way to drive to work anymore.
If a person can't afford adequate dental care, they usually don't sacrifice their rent and food to get it, they generally do without, even knowing that it would cause their future self much suffering. The same applies for global warming. As you say, the people who can least afford to pay for clean energy etc are the ones who will also be most impacted by heat waves, declining air quality, and natural disasters - and that's it, they will choose not to pay for clean energy despite the potential of being impacted by heat waves, declining air quality, and natural disasters some decades later. That's the choice they are going to make because that's the reasonable choice in their situation, they can't afford to sacrifice today for the sake of tomorrow.
My presumption is that "leads us all to doom" is a slight exaggeration and rather we would seeing "merely very bad" consequences (i.e. they're something for which we should be willing to pay a lot but not something to be prevented at literally any cost) that are furthermore very unequally distributed.
And the result of this are populations who would suffer a lot but can't afford to fix the issue, and there are other populations who can afford to spend resources on a better tomorrow, but for those groups perhaps it might be more efficient to allocate that money to mitigating the local consequences (e.g. flooding protection, urban redesign, restructuring of agriculture and pest control) instead of slightly slowing down (since they can't prevent it) the global warming as such. And, crucially, there's no shared understanding of these choices and tradeoffs among the people who could/should/would allocate these resources.
What I read in your comment is that the people who can afford to fund the changes ("who aren't in those circumstances") have a moral imperative to fix this for everyone. That seems desirable, but IMHO unrealistic; both because those people are a minority and can't fix the global issues if the developing world continues to develop and grow emissions; and also because those people (on average) won't be willing to sacrifice their own welfare (e.g. reducing it to global median) in order to fix the global issues; we're far from a post-scarcity world and every country, including the richest, still has a multitude of local problems that scream for funding.
While I sympathize with this view on a certain level, applying it to policy consistently and literally is a likely path towards chaos and immense death and suffering 70 years from now. That's a high cost to pay to consider climate policies an optional luxury good.
I'm increasingly convinced that bribing part of the voters with some sort of climate tax dividend is a sensible policy to keep society moving towards climate gas neutrality.
I certainly agree with the view that all climate policies are worthless if they don't take into account real-world considerations such as free will and what significant parts of society are able/willing to afford.
It's painful to watch this slow-motion tragedy play out. Certainly interested in hearing suggestions for improving it.
It's not really a bribe. If running your leaf blower pollutes the air that others breathe, is a (tiny) payment from you to those people not simply compensation for (tiny) harm you've caused? A carbon tax dividend simply manifests this concept (though aimed at carbon instead of pm2.5)
It's always seemed like a really promising policy that drives many of the right incentives, but getting it passed seems impossible.
Countries often are willing to bribe part of the voters to make some universal policies tolerable, having internal transfer payments for the benefit of the country as a whole.
The world is (IMHO clearly) very, very limited in its willingness to bribe part of foreign voters to make some global policies tolerable, having international transfer payments for the benefit of the world as a whole. There are some examples, but they're very limited in scale compared to intra-country wealth transfers.
It's plausible to convince voters for some reallocation between themselves, even if many specific voters would not individually benefit - but it's a hard sell to convince voters to assign significant resources (as opposed to current international aid/charity) to primarily benefit people in another country, which IMHO seems to be necessary because there's so big country-to-country variation in the actions needed to reduce global warming, the ability to afford these actions, and the severity of local consequences of global warming.
I’d rather governments use general taxation to subsidise deployment of PV (or research into superconductors and storage) than encourage higher prices — the rewards form research can bring benefits that make the cost worthwhile.
For emphasis: this isn’t a “no” — I expect it to still be part of the solution despite all that because all options take time to scale up and diversity is good — just that it isn’t a slam-dunk.
In this case, energy prices are (partially) high because of deployment of renewables (and not nuclear)
Or nuclear. Sad that this isn’t seen as an option any longer.
Is anti-nuclear sentiment consistent across Europe?
Nuclear is a non-starter for many. Too many people afraid of another Chernobyl or nuclear waste handling without understanding what caused the former or not being informed about how we deal with the latter, today.
It's called deep borehole disposal[0]. Drill a hole all the way down to Earth's crust, put your waste there = it's not coming back on anything shorter than geological timescale. " It is estimated that only 800 boreholes would be sufficient to store the entire existing nuclear waste stockpile of the USA"[0]
From what I understand it isn't being done for two reasons:
1) cost
2) once stored this way it's almost impossible to retrieve. Spent nuclear fuel is kept around partially because we know we might be able to recycle it into fresh fuel in the future. If we dump it in a hole deep in the ground it's gone forever.
So no, not "tomorrow".
News and images like this https://www.thelocal.de/20141010/one-third-of-barrels-leak-a... (2014) don't exactly help restore confidence.
(If you can't get that to load, here's the same in German https://www.n-tv.de/politik/Loechrige-Atom-Faesser-entdeckt-...)
Edit to add, the infamous old picture of a loader dumping barrels into a pit in the Asse II salt mine: https://static.dw.com/image/16445664_303.jpg - while this happened decades ago, the mine is an ongoing problem that makes the news every year with new leaks or progress of the remediation effort, lack of progress, or predictions of collapse before the remediation can be completed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine).
> “The chambers are secure and there is no danger for the personnel or the local population,” Vattenfall said in a statement released on Thursday
I don't see how that has... anything to do with anything. Proper inspection revealed this problem and it's been rectified. Mission accomplished.
> the infamous old picture of a loader dumping barrels into a pit in the Asse II salt mine
> while this happened decades ago
Right, again, I don't see how this is relevant to modern nuclear handling. That's a cleanup effort from poor procedures from decades ago, and it's been pretty well contained. Compare that to the current cleanup efforts of decades of fossil fuel burning, and the effects that has had.
I don't see how any of this is an argument against nuclear.
People also tend to not believe "no danger" claims - such claims, especially when coming from the companies running those plants, provide very little information, as we have learned that we should expect to hear the same claims even if a reactor core is currently melting its way through the containment (both in Chernobyl and Fukushima, false reassurances were given long after the people in charge knew of the seriousness of the accident).
Likewise, officials claim that nothing is leaking from Asse and it is safe, yet there is an unexplained but very significant (p<0.01) increase in various cancers.
Even if this was just feelings (and I disagree with that - seeing partial failures that get caught by other layers of a multi-layered safety system does provide information about the risk that one day the "holes in the Swiss cheese" [1] will line up), it explains why people in Germany are so opposed to nuclear.
Fukushima was particularly devastating for public trust, because Japan is seen as a developed, industrialized, "orderly" nation, so if it can happen there, it can happen anywhere. Additionally, nuclear power plants in developed countries were portrayed as absolutely safe, so it's a "fool me once, fool me twice" situation. (Since this is usually countered by "they couldn't expect the Tsunami": that just means that when an unexpected event - e.g. a 300 year flood event, as has recently happened in Germany - comes, we should expect a similar outcome and similar attempts from the people in charge to weasel out of the blame. Again, not helpful for trust.)
In short, people - me included - don't believe that the plants will be operated to the claimed safety standards. The trust in the industry is gone, and people don't want to take the gamble, even if rationally, it may be the lesser evil than e.g. coal.
https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html
If markets valued the low-CO2 nature of nuclear, they’d be doing better
Not only that, but running it. No private company insures a nuclear power plant (at least in the densely populated Central Europe). We're talking about dozens of billions each year.
Currently the operator does a token insurance of a few hundred million but if things really go south it's essentially up to the society to absorb the costs of the aftermath.
If you can't socialize the risks and have to pay market price the "cheap" goes out of the window fast.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/462535/nuclear-share-ele....
The bigger issue in the public debate are the national safety and strategic concerns. At the moment, it seems Russian and Chinese companies will be banned from bidding.
So, the sentiment is definitely not consistent. CZ is much more favorable towards nuclear than DE or AT, but it's still a complicated topic.
Maybe this statement is just a reflection of what can be done in a reasonable amount of time (a few years)? Planning and building nuclear plants takes an order of magnitude longer, it seems.
How I wish that where true. But looking at all current new Nuclear power plant projects in Europe and the US it's clear that we are incapable of that. Yes we can argue about why that is and how in theory it shouldn't take that long, but the truth is that best case scenario it will take you more than 5 years just to get a building permit to start buildings a new nuclear power plant.
If nuclear were the only option, it would be different. But the only pro-nuclear policies that make sense for achieving 1.5-2 degrees are keeping existing plants online and reactivating old ones (also policies with reasonable disagreements, but at least positive regarding climate change afaict). Building new ones simply takes too long to achieve climate goals while wind & PV are reasonably quick to do (if the political will is there).
I mentally think of power generation reliability as: Uncontrollably variable from hour-to-hour: wind, solar, tidal motion Uncontrollably variable on month-to-year spans: hydro Pretty controllable: nuclear (and fossil fuels)
Nuclear and wind suffer from NIMYBism and are now nothing more than political totems. PV is going this road now that people are realizing installing solar farms means cutting on forest or actual food farms.
Coal is already pretty much extinct.
Whereas gas is "painless" from a political point of view, private interest in the field (total, engine) have a strong history of political influence, and "gas" wins if RE are installed but the sun does not shine nor the wind blows... So gas is the energy of the future for Europe until there is a breakthrough in fusion or safer modular fission.
This will not make the geopol situation any simpler in the east, and is of course a disaster climate-wise - except maybe for coal-heavy countries like Poland and Chez Republic
In a way, my utility can do things that force this (voltage reductions), but it’s only really effective for resistive loads, and could increase resistive losses on the transmission/distribution network.
https://www.ieso.ca/en/Sector-Participants/IESO-News/2021/01...
One big problem is that transmission/distribution costs aren’t variable based on time-of-day, but they could be too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor
We could be building hundreds of these across Europe, placing them close to small cities and using the waste heat for district heating.
Natural gas instead would really shine as a backup power source.
Of course, this is a lot less efficient than having one big nuclear reactor pumping huge turbines; but it’s possibly more efficient than other forms of peak-load generation, which is the key issue.
Plus, any given individual SMR would produce a low-enough wattage to be able to reasonably divert/“dump” power from it into an practical-to-construct-anywhere sink or battery (e.g. building-sized pumped storage, rather than huge dam-sized pumped storage) for handling ramp-down discontinuities.
If liquid hydrogen fuel was ever useful, it could produce that with excess capacity also (but again, other issues).
Alternatively if the grid is unreliable, end-use customers will install their own batteries and generating capacity. Voila, problem solved on someone else's dime!
In fact, modern Combined cycle natural gas plants are less controllable than nuclear ones.
(That being said, given that the cost of a nuclear plant is mostly independent from its energy output, why would you build wind farms if you already have nuclear plant? Except for political reasons of course)
https://learn.pjm.com/three-priorities/buying-and-selling-en...
Specifically, if we had a whole continent's worth of electric cars charging during the day to soak up excess solar production (8am - 6pm);
And allowed them to offload the same energy back into the grid from 6pm - 8am.
To deal with the duck curve: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sam-Milshtein/publicati...
The simplest way to solve this is to mandate EV charging points at all workplaces and commuter parking lots, and require all new EVs include the UI and functionality necessary to upload to the grid interactively, and adjust regulations to actually allow and encourage that.
We could also build giant solar farms in Morocco and Western Sahara, a comparatively stable and friendly part of Northern Africa, where peak solar times conveniently align with the evening peak of Central Europe.
We can move wind from where there’s too much to where there isn’t enough.
Us serfs will be at the mercy of feel good proclamations and energy programs that are not ready for prime time.
So it seems that Energy Prices in the UK hit records. Not surprising since they put all their eggs in one basket. The rest of Europe seems fine.