Europe’s energy crisis hits science
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I don't think they've stopped this campaign even after it ended in catastrophe either. It's certainly still going on in the UK - for example just yesterday I saw a BBC article telling people that building more natural gas production here is pointless because wind and solar are cheaper, presumably based on the raw per-MWh number with no storage to fill in the gaps when it doesn't produce. That is not a useful replacement for natural gas at all.
Spoils the landscape image view is apparently a valid argument to block their construction, so you just need enough signatures every time a new construction site gets announced.
So I think we can 100% blame “renewables”.
> I don't think they've stopped this campaign even after it ended in catastrophe either. It's certainly still going on in the UK - for example just yesterday I saw a BBC article telling people that building more natural gas production here is pointless because wind and solar are cheaper, presumably based on the raw per-MWh number with no storage to fill in the gaps when it doesn't produce. That is not a useful replacement for natural gas at all.
To find out why we didn't roll out cheaper renewables, insulate our homes better and use less imported fossil fuels after the last gas price crisis.
And you can go back in time, to the first Ukraine gas crisis, and back through all the other crisis and find the same kind of response from certain people, who basically had their opinions created for them with fossil fuel dollars.
2014 : "Germany’s energy policy is expensive, harmful and short-sighted"
> 2014-03-17 Germany is a showcase for how-not-to in green energy. It is pumping hundreds of billions of euros into subsidies for ineffective and unreliable solar panels and wind turbines that leave poor people struggling to pay their electricity bills and do almost nothing for the climate.
President Carter told people they'd need to insulate their homes and drive more efficient cars in 1977 for example, which was a poor political move in a country run by fossil fuel interests.
https://www.nytimes.com/1977/04/19/archives/transcript-of-ca...
> One choice, of course, is to continue doing what we have been doing before. We can drift along for a few more years.
> Our consumption of oil would keep going up every year. Our cars would continue to be too large and inefficient. Three‐quarters of them would continue to carry only one person—the driver—while our public transportation system continues to decline. We can delay insulating our homes, and they will continue to lose about 50 percent of their heat in waste.
> We can continue using scarce oil and natural gas to generate electricity, and continue wasting two‐thirds of their fuel value in the process.
Except in France where they went all in on nuclear and ended up exactly as screwed as they are in Germany.
(Yes I know they have the fancy new EPR reactor under construction in Flamanville but that is not ready yet)
If France had kept the rate up of getting a new reactor up and running every 1 to 3 years like they did during the peak I don't think they would have this issue now. Also both France and Germany are at this moment heavily being propped up by Swedish nuclear power (and hydro).
> (Yes I know they have the fancy new EPR reactor under construction in Flamanville but that is not ready yet)
Wikipedia says: In December 2007, construction of the unit itself began. This was expected to last 54 months, with commissioning planned for 2012
They've been building that specific reactor for nearly 2 decades, so it's not for lack of trying and rather puts a different spin on their lack of nuclear at the moment.
If they were instead building some known/built before reactor at the same time the risk would not be so great. As with solar or wind you don't just build one single wind mill or panel but instead multiple (and hopefully at multiple different sites/projects) to minimize the risk of one of the projects going bad. (this is pretty basic risk management stuff)
Basically it all boils down to the "France is not really building much nuclear anymore" category. If you are only going to get one reactor to build every decade or two you want to make sure it is the biggest most advanced one you can get a permit for to maximize production but at the same time you maximize the risks.
Even now France are spending a fortune on new reactors and it still will not be enough to make up for the ones that will age out.
They're officially hoping wind and solar will make up the difference.
Im pretty sure the green lobby in Germany is due an apology from the nuke fans. This all-in on nuclear approach wouldnt have worked any better for Germany than it did for France it would just have soaked up cash.
> They're officially hoping wind and solar will make up the difference.
You better if you don't build anything else. If I was only building X I for sure would hope that would be the solution. Hoping that the solution would be Y would be kind of self defeating.
edit: Looking into this more looks like most Swedish nuclear plants are also owned by the state (though Vattenfall). Is Finland the only country with actual privately owned nuclear power plants in EU?
Nuclear power simply cant exist without lavish subsidies.
Which one? Even Olkiluoto (OL3 with its decade+ delays included) is doing just fine financially.
> Nuclear power simply cant exist without lavish subsidies.
Point me to these subsidies in Finland.
It is the wind and solar that is getting lavish subsidies here (well used to they are now finally going away slowly bringing actual market economy back into the picutre)
edit:
> One is Soviet in origin
How does this matter? VVER-440 is actually a solid design and has been in use for decades without any issues in Finland (and many other countries). These days all the parts and upgrades are sourced from the west. Also a western standard safety vessel and all other safety features were upgraded when it was built as we Finns did not really trust Soviet safety design (as in it was never turned on with standard Soviet safety systems installed as is)
Areva (the French state) took a 5.5 billion euro loss building Olkiluotu.
>How does this matter?
Pretty much all nuclear power is an offshoot of the military, but the Soviet Union's civilian nuclear power industry was a little more obviously an offshoot of its military.
With Vattenfall the same is true but is less obvious. Sweden essentially took out an option on having nuclear weapons while still adhering to the terms of the NPT.
That is Arevas problem not the buyer/operator of the reactor (TVO). If you sell something at fixed cost then you sell something at fixed cost. Sometimes contracts go bad (and TVO has come to the help of Areva to the tune of extra ~2.5 billion euros)
It was Areva who bid really low to win the contract. So low that Atomstroyexport, Siemens, Westinghouse, Framatome and GE never bothered to put their final bid in (Areva was the only one to put a bid on in the final round). If you intentionally underbid then be ready to eat some losses. And TVO made sure during the bidding process that there were enough insurances to ensure that the project would be finished even if it went overbudged/got delayed. Basically TVO made a really good deal.
If I made solar panels and sold a project to build a solar park at 100 million and it ended up costing 200 million to build due to MY (the builder/contractor) fuck ups how actually is it the fault of the buyer? You eat the loss as the builder and try to learn something from it.
> Pretty much all nuclear power is an offshoot of the military, but the Soviet Union's civilian nuclear power industry was a little more obviously an offshoot of its military.
And microchips are an offshoot of military weapon projects (getting small/light enough computers to fit fighter planes). Just because something started with military use/funding/backing does not mean we should not use it.
before macron and europe (and the european electricity market) our policies made us a nuclear powerhouse. we re not anymore
Can someone translate this narrative into actual numbers? It sounds like a political soundbite but to those not following the problem there’s gotta be more to “exactly”
So it is easy to look in the middle of summer and say "Look, half of France's reactors are offline! It is obviously not working out! They should have been green like us and use lignite and Russian gas!!!"
France also messed up when they decided to postpone some maintenance due to COVID (not sure how that was a valid reason) and they have a lot to do this time, so it is taking longer than usual.
France has nuclear and hydro, while Germany as is much discussed, has coal and renewables.
Coal is of course bad (they even imported some from Russia), but renewables seem to have been the smart choice and what everyone, France included, will be moving to.
(Germany probably uses more gas for manufacturing things too)
Hardly a smart choice and one that has been generating huge emissions, especially compared to France.
Germany really only kicked off Energiewende in the early 2000s.
Germany is still a massive emitter because of this, in addition to being cornered because of its reliance on Russia and decision to cut it off without alternative in place.
> for completely different reasons.
Main reason being strategic energy independence. Something Germany is suddenly being reminded is important. Low emissions have come as an added benefit.
Choices were made...
Because it's a lie and it's always been a lie. The nuclear power stations that were turned off contributed a relatively small amount compared to solar and wind added to the mix. And they cost more.
It's just that turning them off made certain groups (Vattenfall, American government) furious. This was nothing to do with environmentalism or energy independence but led to a lot of propaganda about both.
The supposed environmentalists who spat venom at the German greens for "not turning off coal plants fast enough" were not in the slightest bit bothered by Poland next door not turning off their coal plants at all.
>Main reason being strategic energy independence. Something Germany is suddenly being reminded is important.
And because France was unwilling to shoulder the eye watering costs of maintaining and replacing their aging nuclear plants they're in exactly the same position. Instead of $3 billion wind farms with a 65% load factor theyve got $15 billion nuclear plants with a 75% load factor. What a win for nuclear power.
The only people who this hasnt dawned on yet is the people who lapped up the anti german nuclear propaganda. The hole currently filled with natural gas that France has dug for itself because of nuclear power's insane cost is something that they simply dont think about. Nuclear propaganda always avoids mentioning cost.
Had Germany had another 6-7 years to prepare theyd be in a better position to withstand the gas being cut off then France instead of roughly the same. Their dependence was going down, France's up.
Germany still uses a lot of coal and gas and has high emissions as a consequence. It prefers to use oil rather than keeping nuclear plants open. Its reliance on Russia and then decision to cut it off without alternative is hurting hard. I believe these are all facts, not lies.
That all sounds rather disastrous to me.
This is not Germany-bashing, either. I live in the UK so I know what a really disastrous energy policy looks like.
Which doesn't prove Putin was influencing these policy directions, but it sure makes you wonder.
[1] https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/putin-bl...
You genuinely think Putin tried to save the EU from this "mistake" of replacing fossil fuels with renewables?
These are people who don't know the difference between a watt and a joule.
So, another way of looking at it is - Germany is still producing most of its electricity from non-renewable sources. Adding nuclear, it's still ~40% from coal and gas [0]. So again, what surplus?
In contrast, France is producing ~70% of its electricity just from nuclear, with another ~19% from renewables.
Note that either way, the major energy expenditure that ties all of these countries to Russian gas is not electricity, it is heating.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/romania?country=DE...
The whole problem with renewables is the temporal variation and lack of large scale storage.
Producing hydrogen (and potentially converting that into more traditional gasses) is a perfectly viable solution, but of course such infrastructure can only be stood up over years and decades. It's not relevant for this winter.
> They found the former has a considerably lower Capex and a payback time of only two years. [compared with Lead Acid batteries]
I wouldn't thought that a Gravity Battery would've been more efficient than compressed air: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_battery
Also TIL about geothermal heat pump energy storage: https://techxplore.com/news/2022-09-geothermal-ideal-energy-... :
Germany is in the process to switch over to electricity for heating, too. There are a lot of incentitives to install new heatpumps for example.
Edit: Having a mostly renewable grid with backup coal/gas/nuclear is much much easier than having an entirely renewable grid.
Additionally in the winter we have complementary wind production from our windfarms.
For ~9 months of the year. For winter you need some other form of production that you can turn on at demand.
For example a panel in Helsinki produces less than 1% of its nominal output in the darkest months of winter.
edit: Just go and look at https://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market-information/sol... if you check December of 2021 you can see that the avg output was ~2MWh/h with solar 395MW of capacity installed at the end of 2021.
It has a much smaller molecule.
And sure, having about 3x renewable generation and consuming the excess generation when it's above the demand, into producing green hydrogen, is about what the longer-term plan for electricity production looks like. There will still be times when renewables will be insufficient, on calm winter days, but infrequently, and then electricity can be produced back from that green hydrogen, but overall there will be surplus, resulting in hydrogen replacing the one produced currently from fossil fuels, for steel production and other industrial uses.
Germany was about to build a backup gas pipeline (Abeit still to the same supplier), it took 10 years to just to get it to the viable stage before it was cancelled.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
"Production of primary energy in the EU was 17.7% lower in 2020 than it had been a decade earlier." [this includes renewables and nuclear, as well as fossil, gas, geothermal, etc]
"Indeed, more than half (57.5 %) of the EU’s gross available energy in 2020 came from imported sources."
--
"Invest in renewables!" Ok, but that means needing to restart coal plants and import natural gas when there's no wind or sun. Where are the massive battery investments in Europe for energy storage? Nowhere.
"Everyone, buy electric cars!" Ok, but there's be a permanent blackout if every car was actually electric. There's not enough electricity being generated to charge them.
Insane maniacs.
Switching to clean energy means transitioning from non-electric energy (gas, petrol) to electric. That means we must produce more electricity. Why aren't they obsessed with increasing electricity production, so electric cars won't lead to blackouts and import dependency?
Also, EVs help the grid and prevent petro states, like say Russia, from making as much money.
At the scale of counties and continents, this either means some statutory duty has been breached, or some political decision has been taken that favours the current arrangement over one with more availability of backup supplies - in exchange for other downsides (e.g. cost).
Realistically it's the latter. And this means that different politicians and political movements can now propose more plans for energy stability—maybe additional funding for renewables, expanding nuclear provision or so on—and hopefully this will affect political and regulatory decisions in the future. At this scale—and for all its flaws—the ballot box is the only real tool for accountability.
The UK is in a slightly odd place on this. The media have as usual been horrendous (running all the anti-wind-farm scare stories), while the renewables expansion and coal phaseout has proceeded pretty well. We do even have some idle coal capacity in case of emergencies. What we don't have is quite enough gas. See previously 2021: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/sep/24/how-uk-ener...
"In 2013, the then energy minister Michael Fallon said the decision to allow Rough to close would save the UK £750m over 10 years."
.. at the cost of up to $100bn being proposed to subsidize emergency supplies. Absolutely classic "just in time" supply chain economics.
I would also say a lot of people in the UK share the blame for not taking Russia seriously enough as a threat after the terrorist attack in Salisbury and the shooting down of an airliner.
Pretty much across the board, the media has been pushing anything the government didn't do as the solution to the crisis which we missed out on because our government is incompetent regardless of its actual usefulness, including stuff like onshore wind and solar which is just plain worse as a way of keeping the country reliably supplied with electricity during winter than the offshore wind the government went with instead.
Then, the nomination of the Comission and individual comissioners are validated or not by the European Parliament, whose members are again chosen democratically in every member state.
So, while it is quite indirect, our vote does influence the membership of the comission.
Of course, as in any such system, the more direct way of gaining some kind of influence is to try to organize others to vote a certain way, to participate yourself, or to organize others to campaign together to directly convince/shame the members of the Comission or Parliament or Council to take particular policies.
> Then, the nomination of the Comission and individual comissioners are validated or not by the European Parliament, whose members are again chosen democratically in every member state.
No, each member state votes about their own portion of seats. So Germany and France decides for everyone. That's shit. Germans go crazy anti-science and everybody pays - except the Germans who get the EU to find solution out of the money it takes from all states.
Seats in the European Parliament are apportioned based on population (with some rounding to allow a maximum of 751 MEPs), so it is about as close to democratic as possible. Also, France and Germany have ~24% of the total seats, how exactly are they deciding for everyone?
> how exactly are they deciding for everyone?
That's easy - by building the largest cohesive blocs. The rest is divided to small bickering parties with just a few seats each (often just one each), and easy to conquer.
In fact, having allocated seats for each country is bending pure democracy towards giving more power to small countries than they would otherwise have. In a purely democratic system, a small country would often not even get 1 seat, unless it was extraordinarily well organized (assume every person in the EU had a chance to vote for each of the 751 MEPs - then, even if your country was voting 100% with the same politician for every seat, they would affect 2% of each vote).
> That's easy - by building the largest cohesive blocs. The rest is divided to small bickering parties with just a few seats each (often just one each), and easy to conquer.
Nothing stops politicians from the smaller countries to also form a bloc. The fact that our politicians (I'm also a national of a smaller / less powerful EU country, Romania) are prone to bickering and not much else is a different problem entirely.
If you have a better idea what it means to be "held responsible" I'm happy to hear it.
Time to create a Common Energy Policy.
(Apologies if you weren't being sarcastic, wasn't sure)
edit: and of course the elected people bear their share of the blame, I don't mean to exclude them, but voters hired them to do what they say they're going to do in face of the ongoing climate catastrophe situation. Marketplace of ideas, etc. They're proxies.
The rut that Europe is now in is the direct result of the following:
- Until very recently[0], energy demands could only be met with a significant amount of fossil fuels. Europe is notoriously poor in fossil fuel reserves[1] and must import them.
- Fossil fuels are fungible in substance but not in location. A barrel of oil is a barrel of oil, but oil in Saudi Arabia is not oil in Germany. Transport adds cost, and the cheapest and safest way to transport oil is with a pipeline.
- Out of all of Europe's close neighbors, Russia has the biggest fossil fuel reserve. There really isn't a suitable "backup supplier" that could bring fuel in cheaply.
- People and politicians in 1997 assumed economic ties with Russia would put their military on a leash in the same way that the ECSC, EEC, and EU had put West Germany's military on a leash.
That last consideration might seem quaint given that Russia invaded Ukraine, but globalization was something that had already worked in Europe and people thought it was exportable.
Even then, it might still work out. The economic problems Europe is looking at are nothing compared to the damage that the current slate of broad sanctions have done and are doing to Russia. Europe is looking at one particularly cold winter, but Russia is seeing a slow-motion economic collapse on the same scale as the collapse of the Soviet Union. The real mistake was not that we built Nord Stream, but that we waited until 2022 to actually punish Putin for invading Russia's neighbors.
[0] Specifically, cheap solar and wind did not exist in 1997 and nuclear was and still is expensive to build.
[1] This is also why the US is obsessed with oil. Running out of it was one of the deciding factors in the fall of Nazi Germany.
Until we start jailing the war criminals and undoing the actions they've taken, we're headed into the abyss.
Interesting. Is there a book that truthfully describes this event? (Not an American)
It also fails to take into account all the countries who have tried selling oil not priced in USD and received no blowback from the US for it, such as Venezuela, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. (This is not an exhaustive list, I believe.)
That's not to say that oil doesn't play a role in US foreign policy--US-Middle Eastern policy for much of the 20th century can be pretty fairly summarized as "keep the oil flowing"--but the idea that pricing energy in USD is a central plank of US foreign policy is one without identifiable foundation.
Lol...
There's been sanctions (and coups, for the first two) against those.
Sure, the parent was strictly talking about "bombing", but just because an US bomber didn't physically drop bombs on their land, it doesn't mean that there was no blowback
Not for moving away from USD, or merely talking about it.
Indeed, of those examples you cited, trying to move oil sales away from USD happened after the US imposed sanctions (and, it can be reasonably referred, in part because of the sanctions).
In both cases, those are acts contrary to US interests, and trying to argue that we shouldn't consider the US reactions as part of the same pattern is sophistry
Sure in the last 70 years oil was important to US in foreign policy but its far from the only or dominate factor in most of it.
At the same time the US invaded Vietnam, Iraq, Lybia, Syria and helped fight wars in places like Yemen. Some that don't have oil.
Are you seriously suggesting if France and Saudi Arabia traded in $ the US would invade either country?
At the same time the US is heavily involved with Israel/Palestine neither have oil.
So the idea that its all about oil is incredibly reductionist and a totally false understanding of US policy making.
In fact if you go threw most of the supposed 'its all about oil' foreign policy issues in more details and you look at the decision makes, oil usually isn't actually the driving force.
We've also fucked with Cuba, Iran, Venezuela.
Iraq did have oil and the Saudis were using directional drilling to tap it, which initiated the first Gulf War. Palestine is a proxy war.
Until the US is critically weakened, France will not trade in Francs or Rubles or etc... And Europe is dependent on the US for continued geopolitical stability.
The US$ is the reserve currency and has been for quite a while and this is for a number of reasons but the idea that its all because of oil is simple not the case.
The US fucked with countries for lots of reasons, oil is an issue but not the dominant one.
Some people simply overestimate the impact of oil on policy choices.
Its is incredibly short sited and wrong when people attempt to make everything about oil when there are lots and lots of other reason that actually influence policy makers.
This year geopolitics struck back and made the rational economic choice a poor one in retrospect.
You could've simply read the official Russian doctrine. "oil is for profits, gas is for political control" - they even published it on the web FFS.
It was the choice businesses made, because they believed it was the best way to make profit in the energy market. The EU agreed on emission quotas and set up the emission trade system, in order to let the market choose how to reduce emissions. The market chose natural gas, and the politicians allowed that, because they believed in the wisdom of the market.
And BTW this isn't just about the market - our state wanted to support nuclear but the EU sued it for unfair competition. Oh no, the German electricity producers might make less profit from their Russian gas, what would we do?!?!?
I'm not sure that's true. The EU (25%) as a whole has more nuclear energy than the US (19%). About half of EU countries use nuclear power, keeping in mind almost half of EU countries have less people than Massachusetts.
Remember, the EU doesn't generally run energy policy. The individual countries do. If anything, it was a lack of commitment to green energy that led to this.
In fact, looking at the figures, the only countries worldwide that get more energy from nuclear than the EU _and_ aren't part of the EU are Ukraine (55%), South Korea (28%), Switzerland (29%), and Armenia (25%). And both Switzerland and Ukraine are synchronised with the greater European grid!
This happened because we removed base load generation from coal and nuclear and replaced it with gas. The only thing which can turn on fast enough to match clouds movements. Then went and bought that gas from geopolitical adversaries.
You might not be able to turn nuclear on/off very fast but adjusting from ~5% to 100% and back is really fast. Actually faster then most gas peaker plants in W/min change rate.
This is not really done much outside of France as the running cost of a nuclear plants are roughly the same at 5% and 100% of output (actual fuel costs are very small part of the total cost of running a nuclear power plant)
These paper companies own all this production because electricity is a massive part of their operational costs and by owning the production if the market goes bad they can just use it themselves at cost of production instead of selling the electricity on the open market basically capping the cost of electricity in their costs.
(edit: Actually now that I think about it this is very similar to how most big cloud platforms work. Basically you build infrastructure for your own use and then also sell the same infrastructure to anyone who is interested.)
> Producing 5% of 1MW can be costing you more than what you made selling 100% of that 1MW for most of the day.
The thing is that with nuclear the costs will be mostly the same when plant is off, at 5% or at 100% (probably most expensive is at off state as you can't use the electricity you made yourself to run all the cooling systems etc). Obviously if the market prices are negative you just run at plant at minimum power which is basically just enough to cover the plants own usage.
Not disputing this but can someone give a source on what power generators in the UK where shutdown during the pandemic and could not ramp back up ?
I've worked in a power plant and the gas combined cycle one I worked in could be shutdown and re-started in about 10 minutes (I know this as I actually shut one down by mistake).
The only power plants I think that work like this are nuclear which must continuously run once started albeit they can be run at a lower level if demand is low.
Edit: It's looks like for nuclear all I can find is Sizewell B was reduced to 50% for a few months but I can see it's back up to 100% now:
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...
https://www.edfenergy.com/energy/power-station/daily-statuse...
But the statement is probably a truthful-but-not-accurate one that is abstracting out concerns like re-hiring laid off staff, securing fuel, delayed maintenance that must be done, safety checks on disused kit, permitting, etc that must be organised before the generator can be restarted.
Before Ukraine, that and an economy rebound, particularly in the East was pointed to as the reason for the Gas prices going up.
Here's a Febuaray article on that:
https://theconversation.com/amp/energy-prices-how-covid-help...
That would indicate that there is a gas shortage in the UK right now which isn't true. In terms of staff the daily operations of a plant only requires a handful of people. There was I think only 2 control room operators on duty at the 1200 MW plant I was working in near Bristol (Seabank power station). So I suspect it's not that he's referring to.
Given that he was a scientist at Oxford he must have data to back this up but I'd like to see what plants shutdown.
Edit: Actually I'm wrong the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies looks like some thinktank that props up oil and gas. The board of directors tell you what you need to know about them. I think this whole article is garbage.
That's true, but if a plant has been mothballed for several months or even a few years, I could see there being extra staffing required to do a un-mothballing maintenance inspection prior to startup.
While not an actual shortage yet, from the info I've seen, UK is very much behind the rest of Europe on the plan to make winter reserves. https://agsi.gie.eu/ currently storing only slightly more than Belgium for example.
Do you think they could be "cautious" with distribution of what they have?
Your site is confusing and actually lists UK as 100% full (which it's not) which is the highest in the list.
https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=202207262...
The energy crisis will put pressure on scientists to optimize code? I've come across hideously unoptimized code in my career; where merely understanding general basics about the compiler / OS / database result in significant improvements. (And thus less energy consumption.)
There is a market for moving supercomputing to places with lower energy costs?
That is the cost of sanctions on Russian energy.
I am an American and I love Europe, I just eloped in Italy this year. I hate what EU leaders are doing to their people.