Germany € 0.29/kWh € 0.45/kWh
Finland € 0.12/kWh € 0.22/kWh
I doubt Germans have twice the purchasing power as Finns.
Germany € 0.29/kWh € 0.45/kWh
Finland € 0.12/kWh € 0.22/kWh
I doubt Germans have twice the purchasing power as Finns.
District heating is quite often coal or oil for now but quickly changing to non carbon forms.
Here is a real time view of the electricity market in Finland https://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market/power-system/
Germany on the other hand bet heavily into gas (and mostly as pipelines to Russia without building any LNG terminals of their own for redundancy) while trying to change over to renewables. Now gas is very expensive and the change over is not finished yet so they have to burn expensive gas and keep their old coal plants running (very expensive in terms of co2 credits)
edit: Electricity is really expensive now in Europe in general due to sanctions on Russia (and their retaliation cuts). Hopefully the new Olkiluoto 3 reactor goes into full production mode before winter to help a bit (it is running at partial power during testing at the moment)
I heard that in Austria it is under discussion that this method is not well suited for price fixation. I also heard the first tones here in Germany.
"In Deutschland zum Beispiel geht etwa die Hälfte des gesamten Wasserverbrauchs für das Kühlen der Atom-, Kohle- und Gaskraftwerke drauf [...]"
https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Krisenstab-eingesetzt-Atomd...
https://www.hubertus-zdebel.de/atommuell-kommt-teuer-offizie...
Because as we do not have a final deposit for nuclear waste there are no costs for it. There are only models with suggested costs. But all of this is not priced into it.
A German paper produced by the independent "Wissenschaftlicher Dienst des Bundestages": https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/887090/1867659c1d4edc...
For example the total lifetime costs of Onkalo (Finlands spent nuclear fuel storage site) is estimated to be 3.5 billion.
Lets take the new OL3 reactor as a example. It produces at 1600MW which comes to around 14 million MWh in a year so 14 billion kWh per of electricity produced yearly (slightly less in reality with downtimes for refueling and maintenance). That would mean that if storing the spent fuel would actually cost 38c/kWh just OL3 would generate ~5.3 billion euros worth of fuel storage costs per year which is more then Onkalo lifetime total costs. And OL3 has a planned operational life of 60 years.
And Onkalo is supposed to store all of Finlands already produced spent nuclear fuel and the fuel produced in the next 100 years.
Even if you add dismantling costs of the plants at the end of their lifetime there is no way to get to such crazy numbers even if it costs 2 or 3 billion euros per reactor to rid of. Lets say with 60 year lifetime of OL3 you get around 840 billion kWh produced and decomissions costs 5 billion it would be ~0,6c/kWh of cost. Yes it costs but not tens of cents. For the older plants that produce less it would be around 1c/kWh.
In Finland they started to collect money into a fund for decomissioning and spent fuel storage in the 80s and it currently has a bit over 20 billion euros in assets (the fund invests the money on markets so it fluctuates obviously). So basically they try to do their best to estimate how much money they need to save and collect it during the lifetime. For now it looks like the amount has been roughly correct. And still the for profit companies keep investing into new nuclear plants with this cost already in the price so it doesn't seem to be too much.
The facility (Onkalo) does not need any maintenance once it has been filled up and closed as you just fill the whole thing making access to it very very hard as it is 520m under ground so a couple kilometers of tunnel to dig through to get to it. (clay sediment at the bottom where the vessels are and concrete for the pathway up)
As I said the 3.5 billion is the projected total lifetime costs of the permanent storage site Onkalo. So that is the total cost (to the best of our ability to estimate for it)
And there’s a bit of unused space in Finland :)
One of the most used metrics is the so called Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE). The LCOE includes investment, maintenance and operation, fuel and "carbon" costs, as well as waste costs. However, the waste costs are only calculated for the years of operation, so it's not really a great number to look at in terms of actual total cost.
Regardless, the LCOE the German federal government uses is 4-8 cents/kWh for onshore wind, 2-6 for photovoltaic, 14-19 for nuclear.
The (former) nuclear plant operators in Germany are required to pay into a fund that is meant to be used for covering the costs of decommissioning and disposal of the plants, as well as long term storage (except not everything is covered[0]). This is not included in the LCOE. Anyway, operators are required to pay a total of 47 billion EUR into that fund[1].
The old East German plants that got shut down right after the German reunification and are in the process of slowly being deconstructed and disposed of[2] are now estimated to cost 3-7 billion EUR a piece for full disposal (but not storage). If that's any indication, even when considering "lessons learned" will lower costs for future decommissioning and deconstruction, those 47 billion EUR is very unlikely to cover the eventual costs of deconstructing those 20-odd decommissioned German nuclear facilities and store spent fuel and contaminated materials for the first few decades. Some economists from the DIW (the private German Institute of Economic Research, not exactly tree huggers) calculated the eventual cost until 2100 will be closer to 169 billion EUR in 2019s money.
There are some eco lobbying organizations - obviously not without their own bias - that make claims such as "the true cost of nuclear is 42.2 cents/kWh while wind is 8.1 cents/kWH"[3]. I have previously looked through their numbers and argument in more detail, and it sounded mostly very sound to me, however I am a layperson.
Regardless, the fact is: we do not actually know yet the total cost of nuclear power.
[0] E.g. German tax payers have spent 1.5 billion EUR just on exploring potential long term storage sites so far. Just exploring.
[1] This is still litigated a bit, as the German legislature only really had the great idea to make a law about that in 2016. That's another reason nobody historically included it or now includes it in the LCOE.
[2] E.g. the old Greifswald plant. When it operated, it employed 10,000 people. Now 32 years after it officially ceased operation in 1990, it still employs around 1,000 people. Full deconstruction and disposal is now expected to happen by 2028 and will eventually have accumulated costs of a total of 6.5 billion EUR according to the company in charge of the disposal. Not including long term storage costs. Since the operator of those things used to the East Germany, it's now the Federal Republic of Germany's full responsibility to pay for that.
[3] https://www.bund-sh.de/energie/atomkraft/hintergrund/die-wah...
But there is more:
- They wanted to be super green so lets go with sun and wind
- But, hey sun and wind are not reliable (not talking about some problems that the grid is not very good prepared to handle the peaks), especially not in winter
- Let's use gas to cover that, Russia is so friendly country, and its all about business, what kind of maniac would stop natural gas, when we pay billions for it
- Hmm, well there is 'a country' that is using natural gas to do politics, but hey, they got Crimea now, what would they want more, when we are still paying that billions to them. Let's build another gas pipe, and pretend nothing can go wrong, while ignoring that negativistic east-european countries preparing for worst case scenario
- And, what about shutting down that completely functional nuclear power plants ? We want to be green, lets do that.
- Oops, our lovely natural gas supplier attacked another country
- Oops, our natural gas power plants are somehow costly to run now, lets burn some coal
- Oops, coal is also getting a bit expensive
- Oops, our not very friendly natural gas supplier, occasionally stops natural gas now
- Ooops, our natural gas reservoirs will be not full before winter
- Oooops, winter is coming...
This is a complete mischaracterization of why Germany invested so much into renewables. Like... 20 years ago? Germany saw the writing on the wall when it comes to how they were getting their energy which at the time was mostly coming from coal. They didn't want to go Nuclear for whatever reason so that left renewables and natural gas which wasn't preferred but it was still significantly better.
They didn't do it just to "be super green". They did it because coal is all around bad and wasn't the future that Germany wanted--and they were right. They absolutely made the right decision back then and investments by the German government are a big reason why solar is the cheapest form of energy right now (thanks Germany!).
If anything they didn't invest enough in renewables. They obviously didn't expect the effects of global warming to come this quickly. A big reason why electricity is so expensive is because the rivers in France that supply water to their nuclear reactors dried up. I mean, how do you predict something like that happening even 10 years ago? Even if that was a possibility included in some climate change report how seriously would politicians take such a prediction?
They basically left the door open to abusive trade partners by not building any redundancy on such a critical resource. And it is not just electricity Germany needs gas for as it is also a very important resource for lots of industrial processes (and used for heating a lot but that should be replaced by heat air pumps)
Obviously such redundancy would have pushed up the price of gas in the short term at least. Easy to say this stuff in hindsight.
If there is a problem, it's either on the share of the generation that they decided to let for those "stabilizing" sources (it is much larger than the short term instabilities on their grid) or on the lack of diversity of their supply.
For nearly every country worldwide, that is gas turbines most of the time. Even if 90% of power generation is coming from solar, it's the 10% gas that sets the price (since the marginal cost of installed solar is near zero).
Gas prices in Europe vary by region, but are pretty much determined by gas transport capacities to Germany. Ie. Germany has the highest prices because of government mandates to fill storage. Any place with good gas transport links also has high prices. Places with few/no pipelines to Germany and an independent supply have low prices.
And that is why Germany is twice Finland (Finland gets gas from Norway, and neither has big pipelines to Germany).
Not really. Finland used to get gas from Russia but now it is mostly from a pipeline through Estonia to Latvia where it arrives in ships from wherever happens to be the cheapest (we are in process of building the first LNG terminal in Finland). Could be Norway but can also be USA, middle east, etc
Finland just doesn't use much gas for electricity. What we use mostly goes into industrial processes. We do have a couple gas peaker plants but those are only used in the winter if needed. Actual load balancing happens through hydro (and imports from Norway/Sweden but that is also mostly hydro)
https://www.helen.fi/en/news/2022/helen-to-break-away-from-r... with similar moves by the other gas buyers in Finland.
Only pipeline connection from Russia to the Baltics is this pipeline (Balticconnector) as it connects to the Finnish gas grid that has its own pipeline to Russia and through the national grids and the pipeline between Lithuania and Poland that I guess allows access to the Russian pipeline in Poland.
So no clue where Estonia would get that Russian gas from.
>Only pipeline connection from Russia to the Baltics is this pipeline
No. Latvia has a direct connection to Russia at Korneti which is where the majority of natural gas consumed in the Baltic states is imported at. So even if Finland buys any gas from the terminal in Lithuania that only means that more Russian gas is consumed in the rest of the Baltics (so effectively pretty to close to being the same as just buying it directly from Russia)
In north Norway the electricity costs: 0.75 c/kWh In south Norway the electricity costs: 307.00 c/kWh In Latvia it costs: 1,240.00 c/kWh
It is like that every day everywhere in Europe. In Finland the transfer line to Estonia means a lot to our local prices. If we cannot get that line fully utilised (in normal non-windy day, and I bet producers want it to stay around 99%), it means that prices are fixed to Estonia (which you can see in that picture). If we get the line fully loaded, Finland divides to its own market and prices drop considerably.
In Norway and Sweden you can see multiple prices inside a country. It is because their internal lines are not sturdy enough to transfer enough electricity to south (in nordics it is common that electricity is made at north (e.g. a lot of rivers), but needed at south). The random energy (wind) has made this quite crazy. On windy days, the electricity price can even be negative. But wind energy is not reliable at all. But nobody builds or wants to run anything else as wind is easily the cheapest on windy days, and it is not that easy to always start and stop other facilities, which operate with losses on windy days. In general Germany jumped to a dwell, and everyone followed, and now we are where we are.
But the part about capacity internally is true, so the average price in northern Norway today is 0.00061 EUR/kWh(yes, you read that correctly) while it's 0.35 EUR/kWh in the south. That's 574 times as expensive!
Norway is making a ton of money on energy export now.
Note that this is particular price point today (11.08.2022) at 12 - 13. Record was some other day for 2100 c/kWh.
However at particular moment, you can get 27 c/kWh fixed price contract. (last year it was 6 c/kWh)
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromsteuergesetz_(Deutschland...
I don't know if Finland has something equivalent or not.
Finland invested in nuclear and is bringing their latest plant online this fall.
It doesn't take a genius to see which one would be hit harder by sanctions on Russian gas.
"Nuclear power in Germany accounted for 13.3% of German electricity supply in 2021, generated by six power plants, of which three were switched off at the end of 2021, the other three due to cease operation at the end of 2022 according to the complete nuclear phase-out plan of 2011." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany
How exactly has a not yet operating reactor that is vastly over budget and time any influence on the current price though?
Also there are the 4 existing reactors that are running just fine at the moment. (at this moment production is over 25% nuclear)
2. Supply and demand
That said, there are debates right now to prolong their operation until another few years. But that has other constraints.
This is also why both Sweden and Norway want to invest into new transfer lines to northern Finland as the national grid of Finland is actually in good enough shape that any electricity you get to any part of it can actually be sold to a customer anywhere in the country. This is why Finland is a single price zone when both Sweden and Norway are split into multiple zones (4 and 5)