A solution to current high power prices | Hacker News Reader

A solution to current high power prices

jeromeaparis.substack.com

32 pointsguerby89 comments

Uranium is a renewable resource from seawater (see, e.g., https://spectrum.ieee.org/uranium-from-seawater). It is, by far, the highest power density, cleanest, and safest source of power.

The total waste generated (waste which France routinely recycles) from all nuclear power in the U.S. since commercial inception could fit into a volume of a football field with a height of about 10 yards (see https://www.nei.org/fundamentals/nuclear-waste)

Small modular reactors are even safer and more economical and are ready to go.

Only environmentalist irrationality has suppressed development of nuclear energy, and it's up to anyone who wants reliable electrical power to dismiss their propaganda and promote greatly increased adoption worldwide.

The paranoiac in me would easily lead me to believe that big oil propped up the anti-nuclear environmentalism of the 80's in order to eke out an additional 40-60 years of energy supremacy.

I don't always listen to that kind of my own thinking, but it is plausible enough to me.

how is Uranium renewable?

Because there's an essentially unlimited amount that's recoverable from seawater and more is always being added into solution from rocks. I gave a link already to one article on extraction from seawater, it's easy to find much more about that.

Why do we need the stupid market mechanisms at all? Government owned gas and electric monopolies, generation to the meter (heck, even extraction if the relevant reserves exist within the country), and a sizeable fuel fund to smooth out short term spikes. If the spikes are serious enough, you can run it at a loss for a while to keep people from freezing to death.

All that and you get the benefit of oversight and democratic control of natural monopolies that deliver commodities that are necessary for day-to-day life in Europe. And nobody gets to make a profit from owning shares in the gas company. Sounds like a win-win.

Good luck with that - it often quickly devolves into politicians using subsidies to curry votes and pointing fingers at the opposition for the inevitable brownouts and grid collapses.

At least with a market folks will go bankrupt for suitably bad decisions, with gov’t nationalization, ‘the people’ end up getting both ends.

The market may allow a "folk" to go bankrupt, but will not allow companies to go bankrupt. Cue re-nationalization of EDF the moment things hint at becoming tight for EDF. I'm quite sure the EC will eventually "force" France to re-privatize EDF again, but only as soon as there's profits to be made...

That’s because these aren’t real markets, they’re barely disguised monopolies with captured regulators putting on a show.

Which is basically gov’t run power, albeit with less accountability since you can’t figure out who to vote out.

Pretty convenient for those running it though!

The reason things were becoming tight for EDF in the first place was mainly that the French government made them sell electricity at below-market prices for political reasons though.

Interesting! I'm not familiar with how French electric and gas is set up, but in the US we don't really sell electricity or gas to the end user in a market, so there are no market prices. In what way was EDF made to sell below "market" electricity?

EDF electricity is 80% nuclear so fixed initial cost.

When Europe pushed for opening the electricity market to private actors France reacted by forcing EDF to sell some amount of GWh of its nuclear electricity to third party at a price fixed by law, called "ARENH" (1).

Now the french nuclear industry was put between a rock and a hard place.

It has said for a long time that nuclear was ultra ultra cheap and unbeatable and ultra reliable so it could not really ask for a high price relative to historical prices.

So we ended up with 42 EUR/MWh nuclear electricity price (which was the minimum price asked by EDF at the time) fixed by law for electricity provided by nuclear.

Some years other sources were cheaper (most recent years BTW), some years nuclear was cheaper.

Main issue this year is that french nuclear plants have potential safety issues plus various other issue and less than 50% capacity factor (bye bye nuclear = reliable baseload idea BTW) and other sources other than renewable have high price while EDF still has to provide amount of MWh at the now very low relative to market prices ARENH price to competitors.

(1) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/March%C3%A9_de_l%27%C3%A9lectr...

There are huge swathes of the US in more or less the situation I describe: federal, state, or local government owned, vertically integrated monopoly. Same as in Canada, and indeed much of Europe up until not so long ago. Where are all the grid collapses in these places?

Meanwhile in California we had rolling brownouts after deregulation so that Enron could make bank. Seems like the situation is exactly the opposite as you describe.

See my reply down thread - there is an even worse third option, which is what you’re referring to!

So your issue with California deregulation was that the generation market wasn't deregulated enough? Interesting idea I guess. Doesn't do much to support your claim of brownouts or grid collapse under publicly-owned monopolies though.

The California de-regulation enabled Enron while preventing everyone else from defending themselves from Enron.

It simultaneously capped the price electricity could be sold at within the state, while requiring consuming utilities to pay spot price for electricity when they needed it.

Enron took advantage of this to buy up all available generation capacity during specific (short) times, fraudulently export it, then resell it back to the state as non-domestic capacity (and hence not covered by the price caps) at insane markups to the consuming utilities when the time came.

Because the regulator (CPUC) forbid utilities from taking out futures contracts, the utilities had no choice but to pay these insane markups, or go dark.

While this was happening, the regulator also was tarpitting new electrical generation approvals.

This crisis was only possible because the regulator literally:

1) turned a blind eye to reports that Enron was playing games until it threatened the Govenors position and had been causing massive brownouts and blackouts across the state. The Govenor did end up getting recalled, largely because of this crisis.

2) Set market prices through caps and quotas.

3) Mandated risky 'at the moment' purchases of capacity instead of what every other sane commodity market does, which is futures.

4) Blocked creation of new supply for a long period of time, while demand was increasing.

And that was AFTER 'deregulation'. Which really just loosened the rules enough to make it hard to point the finger at anyone without a LOT of digging. To quote wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000%E2%80%9301_California_ele...]

"According to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the crisis was possible because of legislation instituted in 1996 by the California Legislature (AB 1890) and Governor Pete Wilson that deregulated some aspects of the energy industry. Enron took advantage of this partial deregulation and was involved in economic withholding and inflated price bidding in California's spot markets.[9]"

So yes, they basically lined up the states utilities and begged for them to be shot - and then when the utilities tried to do something to stop it, handcuffed them. Then acted surprised they got shot.

Yes just because US government is failing doesn't invalidate government.

The fault in the US lies with the voters who think they can have low taxes and good infrastructure. Tax cut after tax cut.

There’s no natural monopoly on electricity generation. Distribution, yes, but not generation.

The CfD strike prices actually bring us closer to that. After the "stupid market mechanism" runs its course the operator is left with a fairly predictable budget. Which is exactly what you would want in a state run monopoly. By using the market we can set a budget based on competition and encourage cost reduction.

What makes this even more absurd is that Germany currently has to produce electricity using gas in order to sell it to France, where nuclear power plants needed to be shut down because of low water levels in rivers. Without that, Germany wouldn't need very expensive gas for electricity at all at the moment and could rely on renewables and coal, which would lead to lower prices.

If only it were the case that we hadn't caused massive climate change by burning fossil fuels, causing a severe drought across Europe, so that there were a shortage of simple cooling fluid for the nuclear power plants. If only we could've done see it coming and something...

Frankly this has more to do with the fetish of building overly large nuclear power plants. They are usually far bigger than coal plants but they get connected to rivers of similar size.

I can't comment on detailed economics, but but given this phrase "In France and the UK, this is providing a natural hedge to power prices and helps keep retail prices down" the rest of the article seems dubious to me, given how high prices are in the UK.

The solution is to increase supply and reduce demand. You can use CFD to spread the risk but that just hides the actual problem, when demand is greater than supply, demand will be squashed with higher prices, and supply will be encouraged by higher prices.

We need to be cutting supply of gas even more than Russia has forced due to climate change, that means increasing supply of non fossil fuels, rapidly and drastically (given that reducing demand by a significant amount isn't going to happen without major changes to lifestyle, which the left love, but people won't actually do)

The problem is that the extra payments to renewable energy providers under the non-CfD model are a pure windfall for them that doesn't help to incentivise increased supply, since they're not likely to be there in a few years - consumers can't afford those energy prices and they go away once we have either a sufficiently big recession or sufficiently large amounts of renewable energy. Also, governments needed to subsidise the current renewable suppliers that are benefiting from the high prices in order to get them to build in the first place, so it made sense to structure that subsidy as a two-way CfD since letting them keep the extra has no real economic benefits and a whole bunch of extra potential cost for energy users and the rest of the economy.

There is some effect on incentivising more supply to be built, but it's limited. Current higher prices are encouraging renewables developers to seek a smaller portion of generation to be covered by long-term PPAs/CfDs than they previously would have done. They are also making it easier to finance on that basis.

The quantity of commercial PPAs available is limited by how much appetite there is for power from companies which are in a position to sign PPAs and how much downside power price risk they are willing to take. So this means that the limited "resource" of PPA counterparties can be used to cover more generation being built. This is relevant for projects which would not otherwise expect to secure CfDs.

There's not really any similar constraint on government-backed CfDs though. I guess theoretically the quantity available could be limited by how much government appetite there is for taking downside power price risk but in reality CfDs are artificially constrained in each auction round to ensure that there is price competition.

This seems unrealistic. The suggestion is to switch to 25 year contracts for a commodity?

With current inflation uncertain and future inflation a pure guess and the consumption rate of these resources unknown in the future, I have no idea who would sign this statement.

Europe literally just shut down LNG derivatives market and gave an emergency loan to the counterparties doing what is suggested because they are going bankrupt and can't fulfill their obligations. This doesnt make sense.

The UK's CfDs are adjusted for inflation each year, so that's not an issue, and the cost of specific renewable energy installations is much more predictable than natural gas - most of the cost is paid up front to construct them in the first place. The difficult part is that there isn't really any market-based way to set the price after the fact; the way the UK does it is via a reverse auction where anyone whose bid is too high doesn't get to build their wind farm, and that obviously doesn't work if it's already built.

This 'solution' to high energy prices is already in place in France and the UK, but energy prices in both of those countries are very high.

I don't know if it's still the case in the UK with Brexit, but in France and, I think, the whole of EU, electricity prices are pegged to gas prices [0].

They're looking to change this.

[0] https://www.politico.eu/article/pressure-for-eu-level-interv...

In particular:

Part of the problem is that the price of electricity is pegged to the price of the most expensive fuel required to meet demand for each day, called the merit order, which recently has been natural gas. And with Russia’s Gazprom curbing flows — paired with other global supply chain difficulties — the price of gas has risen to eye-watering levels, sending power prices soaring.

I don't disagree, in fact I think that this is a natural consequence of free market pricing, but my point was that the OP says that in France the profits made from the high energy prices are flowing to the state entity and that this should solve the problem of high prices, but it doesn't seem to be doing that.

The thing in France is that the "state entity" (EDF) doesn't handle everything. It's not even fully "state" anymore. There has been a "liberalization" of the energy market for the end clients, and some have opted for "market pricing" from third-party companies. They're likely feeling the burn.

In my case, my electric bill hasn't moved (my usage is fairly constant). I opted for the "state entity" and for the "regulated price".

It's not entirely clear what will happen next year, though. Although there's talk about renationalizing the state entity, which would, probably, allow more lee-way to the state to control the prices.

There's also talk about hurrying up the service of the stopped nuclear reactors. That could also help lower demand for gas, at least from the gas power stations that have to fill in the baseline, which should lower gas prices, hence electricity prices (via the peg). I'm unable to estimate the proportion of gas that has to fill in for nuclear compared to other uses.

I admit I'm not very well versed in all this, so I may be missing something.

Do you happen to know why the price of electricity is pegged to gas?

Electricity demands can't be met without gas power plants. As there is sufficient demand (able to absorb the price at the moment, however high it may be), electricity prices converge on gas prices + generation costs (and some profits, probably).

The only way to unpeg it from the price of gas (without changing the market itself) would be for demand of electricity to drop below levels that necessitate gas power plants, or for supply of gas to increase to surplus levels.

What's bothered me is the opposite, why is electricity approx. 4x the cost of gas per kWh? It can't be that inefficient to generate electricity from gas, surely?

That’s not a problem, nor an invention or the EU. It’s how all perfectly competitive markets work: price equals marginal cost.

I always get a slight headache when I think of electricity prices and how one could improve the pricing mechanism. The marginal cost of production mechanism is resonable, it's basically how it works for any other market. Except that all electricity in a grid is basically infinitely fungible with zero transaction cost so all goods cost the same.

But at the same time, it's something fundamentally different about hydro or nuclear compared to solar or wind. It will "always" work (except for maintenance etc).

At least in Sweden it's not that uncommon for it to be dark (cold) and calm winds all over the country at the same time. The EU grid is somewhat connected, but the transfer lines doesn't have infinite capacity.

Wouldn't it kinda make sense to have different markets, or some kind of derivate mechanism, that makes it profitable to either have base load power sources, or seldomly used fossil based power plant "backups"?.

But a supply demand market already benefits baseload. When intermittent generators like wind are low output, prices increase, and nuclear makes more money

Sure. But as consumers, I'm guessing we only accept intermittent generators given that baseload providers exist.

It seems "unfair" that I can build a wind turbine and profit when the wind blows 80-90% of the time, causing me to be the marginal producer and heavily outcompete nuclear. And then during the critical hour/day/week when neither I, nor any other windmill can produce power, the expensive nuclear power plant has to come and save the day. Sure they'll get paid, but not enough to finance it the rest of the year.

(The devil is of course in the dynamic details. How big is the correlation between output of different intermittent producers, how much can consumption reduce etc).

I'm not sure I understand the lingo in TFA, but I think a similar (but probably worse) mechanism could be:

All providers much sell "baseload" power, regardless of how it's produced. You sell yearly contracts on MW capacity. If you are a nuclear plant, you can just sell rated capacity. If you are a wind turbine, you have to hedge the risk of it not blowing. Either by buying baseload capacity from nuclear or some other reserve, buying batter power, or by over provisioning the amount of installed capacity etc.

Since when do grids depend on nuclear power to save the day? They usually rely on gas. Nuclear power is generally used to displace coal over longer periods.

The most obvious solution is to produce even more stuff in China and kill all European industry. Problem solved

The most obvious solution to high power prices is a negotiated settlement in Ukraine and a lifting of sanctions on Russia - regardless of whether you like that or not for geopolitical or ideological reasons, that would bring power prices crashing down overnight.

The next in line would be central banks and government bonds doing the quantitative easing, aka printing money, and delivering that money not to the private banks, but to the power consumers. This wouldn't lower power prices, however. Based on past actions of central bankers, this is the opposite of what they'd do (i.e. they'd demand IMF-style austerity programs in exchange for funding regional governments).

Increasing shipments of fossil fuels to Europe from non-Russian sources as a means of reducing power costs is implausible, as global supplies aren't there - but I do notice that each LNG tanker being sent from the USA to Europe is immensely profitable for the suppliers, so maybe the plan is working out as intended? Fossil fuel profits on Wall Street have hit records lately, even surpassing those of the arms manufacturers supplying the ongoing war in Ukraine.

Europe's in a very poor position between the USA and Russia, the former wanting to continue the war indefinitely (and to maintain sanctions) and the latter clearly pushing for a permanent division of Ukraine. Some people saw how all this would play out six months ago, however, here's there Jan 2022 prognosis:

https://www.vortexa.com/insights/products/reality-check-on-r...

Outcome: This would rather sanction the importers than Russia, as importers would have to scramble for alternative supplies, while Russia would find alternative buyers elsewhere. Potential hiccups in this rearrangement would put more harm on Europe, with consumers immediately feeling any price increase and delay in supplies...

> and the latter clearly pushing for a permanent division of Ukraine

No, Russia is clearly pushing for the eradication of the Ukrainian nation and, as a longer term goal, the re-establishment of the Soviet Union in one form or the other (this means invading and destroying other countries).

> negotiated settlement in Ukraine and a lifting of sanctions on Russia

It's so easy to say that as somebody clearly not living in a country in the "sphere of Russian influence", isn't it? Let others die so you could enjoy your cheap energy. Sorry, I can't take this comment in good faith :(

> clearly

Source?

Speeches and foreign-policy by Putin. Asking for a source is clearly not acting in good faith to pursue a discussion.

> No, Russia is clearly pushing for the eradication of the Ukrainian nation and, as a longer term goal, the re-establishment of the Soviet Union in one form or the other (this means invading and destroying other countries).

This is pure speculation. And as far as I can tell, Russia, while obviously fighting a deplorable aggressive war, has not occupied territory outside of the fairly old parts of Russia, Novorossiya and Malorossyia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novorossiya

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Russia

Western parts of Ukraine have a quite different history, and is not historically nor population-wise as connected to Russia as the Malorossyia and Novorossiya.

Also nobody is dying for cheap energy. You want to stop people dying for dumb reasons, then stop the war and negotiate peace. I don't think the average citizen is going to experience much difference in quality of life, being ruled by a Russian oligarch or an Ukrainian oligarch.

> stop the war and negotiate peace

How? And where (at what line of control)? It takes both parties to reach a peace.

My understanding is that they are only occupying areas they managed to take.

Clearly. Though I don't think they have indicated any interest in annexing most of Ukraine.

Rather the original plan seems to have been to install a puppet government in Kiev. And when that failed, they decided to take the easternmost Ukraine + an area around Crimea.

Which makes total sense as their major naval base in the black sea has always been in Sevastopol, Crimea. And they'd want transport to there that doesn't go through a potential Nato country.

A negotiated "settlement" in Ukraine could only mean allowing Russia to annex the eastern and southern parts of the country. At least for now, until they come back a few years later and take the rest of Ukraine along with Moldova, part of Lithuania, and so on. Negotiating with the Putin regime is utterly pointless.

Why? Negotiation and letting Russia keep some of its influence seems to have been one of the few paths which actually haven't been seriously tried.

This is a well-argued classic explaining why this war was predictable and avoidable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4

And while that happened, some old well-known american peace-mongers, were running around in Ukraine spreading the peace: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmaakY-PIAc

You seem to have a short memory. That was tried last time Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. Look where we are now.

At the point we have to be realistic. The best path forward is just to grind down the Russian will to fight in an endless war of attrition. Keep killing.

Neither Ukraine (or at least the Azov batallion) nor Russia adhered to the Minsk agreement.

There was low-intensity fighting from both sides, going on since 2014. And honestly, in this fight, one of the parties, the main attackers on the Ukrainian side, were actual Nazis.

Here is Zelensky while still a comedian cracking a joke about the Nazis on the Ukrainian side: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uToQqIZ_3Go

So what. None of that is relevant to the current situation. No one is under any illusions that the Ukrainians are all angels. But as long as they're willing to do the hard work of killing Russian soldiers, it's best to continue supporting them as that protects the rest of us in the long run.

It's very relevant, as I can believe a bunch of Nazis didn't adhere to the Minsk agreement.

And no, this war doesn't protect anyone.

And indiscriminately killing young Russian and Ukrainian men serves no sensible purpose.

A war of this magnitude is just a complete waste of life and wealth. The only effect it will have in the long-term is to make everyone of us worse off.

No, it protects other countries on Russia's borders (including some of our close allies) from further aggression. If the Ukrainians manage to kill off enough Russians then that will take Russia off the board as a global player for years to come. They already had a declining birth rate and a weak manufacturing economy so it's difficult for them to make up losses. It's unfortunate that things have to be that way, but that's reality.

We could try the path where Ukraine gets Crimea back and Russia loses access to the Baltic and the Black Sea and see how that works out.

Putin today, his followup tomorrow. Because if they see this policy works, why stop?

That solution might be obvious, but it is also obvious that negotiating settlement with terrorists is not a good idea in a long run.

current politics 101: name the people you don't agree with terrorists

Current politics 102: Pretend that a genocidal war of aggression waged by a terrorist state and involving several war crimes -- among which mass rape -- amounts to a minor disagreement over policy details.

Politics 101: Claim that your enemy is a genocidal aggressor madman and is devoid of all humanity.

Real war 101: All sides commit horrible atrocities. Just stop it.

Ah yes, all sides. Obviously. Is this satire?

It doesn't matter that one side is waging aggressive war, doesn't it?

It doesn't matter that only one side is murdering civilians and raping women doesn't it?

How awfully convenient.

This seems naive or even infantile.

When USA invaded Iraq, ought we then also to have supported the Iraqi rebels? US soldiers committed some nasty war crimes, didn't they? Ukrainian soldiers have no doubt, committed nasty war crimes too.

Modern war is horrible. When your friends are one second standing beside you, the next randomly blown up into a pool of flesh and blood, you can be certain there will be war crimes, because people break in that environment. It's not a Russian or American or Ukrainian thing.

> When USA invaded Iraq, ought we then also to have supported the Iraqi rebels

We ought and we did... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War

(Even apart from the fact that you are trying to equate invading Ukraine, a free democracy, with invading Iraq, a bloody dictatorship...)

Few more rounds and people in the streets will begin to understand spitting in the face of your primary sustenance supplier is not very smart. Were they thinking stealing (freezing assets and confiscating private property) and sanctioning trade would be taken by Russia as a reward, or what ? Well, choose your friends wisely, choose your enemies wiser yet. Not that the option of refusing Ukraine into NATO was off the table.

  The most obvious solution to high power prices is a 
  negotiated settlement in Ukraine and a lifting of sanctions
  on Russia - regardless of whether you like that or not for
  geopolitical or ideological reasons, that would bring power
  prices crashing down overnight.

This would be a "solution" only in the short-term, as those geopolitical and ideological reasons include not giving Russia a strategic stranglehold over European politics via its control of the energy markets. Giving Russia the ability to control energy prices (via supply restrictions) is not a medium- or long-term solution to the problem.

edit: formatting

"The right way to design tariffs is already used in the UK and France: real two-way “contracts for differences” where the generators get money from the public entity when prices are low, and pay back the difference between spot prices and their agreed price, when spot prices are high, like today. In France and the UK, this is providing a natural hedge to power prices and helps keep retail prices down. "

On CfD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_for_difference#Electr...

Complicated solution for a "simple" problem. It will probably not work.

Why not build more garbage incinerators instead? Proven, readily available technology, that can solve immediate danger of not having enough gas for heating.

Unfortunately, EU is biased against it (https://zerowasteeurope.eu/press-release/european-parliament...), maybe it is time to change that stance.

Burning garbage in a furnace is an obsolete technology with serious GHG emissions.

The page you yourself link has a case study in Madeira island where garbage burning uses up 20% of funds for waste management but only deals with 1.4% of waste.

With cheap and easy to roll out Solar and Wind these furnaces are an evolutionary dead end in energy policy.

Um, the article I went to from the OPs links complains that the incinerator has too much capacity and uses nearly all available garbage on Madeira, so Madeira is missing recycling targets. Electricity being more valuable would imply even better economics.

Solar and wind are great technologies that need impractical and eco-unfriendly batteries to become long term solutions. That doesn't mean that garbage burning cannot be augmented by wind and solar where there is opportunity for this.

The argument for waste burning is quite simple: you are left without gas and you substitute what you don't have with what you have, in this case garbage. That doesn't automatically exclude other alternatives, but rather together with them, makes them more viable.

The right way is to move away from gas and invest in renewables.

How will renewables power Europe when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing?

For renewables, read renewables+storage.

Europe is big enough that the wind is always blowing somewhere

That is not true. Wind output is highly correlated across the continent. Days in which wind output is very low happen regularly. In fact, every couple of years there is an entire week like that.

Relying on this seems to imply strongly overbuilding for the worst case. Meaning all regions should have enough wind power capacity to compensate for the occasional lack of wind everywhere else.

How will gas power Europe when the Russians shut off the gas?

If you want to go nuclear: OK, sure, so what do we use for power in the decade before the first plant comes online?

Well Europe is already invested in LNG. I imagine there will be more LNG terminals being built despite it not being great for the environment.

Ex: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/germany-announces-new-...

The advantage of nuclear is that it will work almost certainly, albeit possibly at a high cost. We should continue to invest into wind and solar where that makes economic sense. On the off chance that a magic energy storage technology comes along we can then phase out nuclear again. However, betting the future of an entire continent on the coming into existence of such a technology is wildly irresponsible.

None of the advantages of nuclear answer pjc50's question.

> coming into existence of such a technology

The tech already exists in multiple forms, the question is the logistics of expanding the deployment of that tech.

The conclusion remains valid, betting on that is irresponsible, but the energy storage isn't magic.

Germany built out their electrical grid with twice the Solar capacity it needs to power the country. Problem is it achieves that kind of sun a few days a year. Germany is not California. Sorry. Not smart. It's a disastrous policy that will kill people.

> Germany built out their electrical grid with twice the Solar capacity it needs to power the country.

Not so.

Germany used 568.8 TW⋅h of electricity in 2021[0], or 64.9 GW on average.

Even the nameplate capacity of PV is 58.7 GW, so less than use rather than double it, but the actual capacity factor — which is included in any reasonable definition of the capacity needed to power a country — brings it down to just under 10% of demand.

All renewables together are just under half of demand right now.

The problem for Europe right now is that wind turbines and solar panels don't product natural gas. In Germany for instance, only 25% of gas usage is accounted for by electricity production.

Europe isn’t moving from gas anytime soon with new investments in LNG.

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/germany-announces-new-...

Gas is a precondition for renewables. Without gas there's no reliable energy source, that can be turned on and off at will. That is renewables without gas can not keep the lights on, when the sun's out and there's no wind. (Oil, Coal and Nuclear takes longer to turn on and off, and so will not be able to respond to the sudden changes in electricity production, brought on by renewables.)

It's very likely that Russia has been supporting green parties across Europe for three major actions:

1. Protesting shale and fracking: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/19/russia-s... 2. Scaling up sun and wind power. 3. Shutting down nuclear power plants

I can't find sources for number 2. and 3 now. But do remember having seen support from Russia and Gazprom for parties promoting these actions.

Why can't nuclear not be turned on and off at will? I understand you can't just fire up and down a reactor, but you can control the steam flow to the generator, and let that redirect directly to the cooling tower at will?

The real problem appears to be buffer capacity.

Turning on and off quickly is difficult and/or expensive for all of CCGT/OCGT gas, coal and nuclear. Turning up/down is much less so however, and in reality that's often how it works.

A while back I read that the technology for small nuclear reactors exists. Seems like emergency production and distribution of these would work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com