Europe is in danger of rolling electricity shortages
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They are planning for the worst case so they don't get caught with their pants down. This includes:
- Currently trying to fill as many reservoirs as possible
- Securing gas in foreign reservoirs.
- Plan for emergency gas plants that can be operational by January/February, the time Switzerland has the least electricity available.
- Legal framework to deal with energy shortage such as deciding which industry is considered essential and what kind of compensation would be provided for those that get shut off if it gets to this.
- The SBB is calculating how much electricity they can save by reducing trains and also piping power into homes instead of trains. From what I heard, current calculations show reducing service by 30% only saves around 10% electricity.
They also put out a plan which starts with asking people to use less electricity to worst case which would be planned 4 hour rolling blackouts.
Peoples' homes not getting electricity will be the last resort and unlikely as large industries will be asked first to stop producing and take the government money.
Switzerland produces more electricity per year than it needs. The issue is that the amounts don't line up so they export excess and import when they don't have enough.
Secondly, I think “essential” will depend on the duration of the blackout. For a blackout of a few hours, keeping WiFi running so that work from home can continue probably is more essential than heating a water boiler. If the blackout takes a few days, that may change.
We already have interconnect devices for A/C and water heating and car charging in some locations.
This makes ZERO sense..
I live in a cold climate.. Our furnace is "essential" to prevent my family and i from freezing to death. Under your plan we should pay more for this?
And those who cant afford it? Let me guess, government rebates, making a complex program even more complex?
Any time your solution requires "rebates".. it is flawed from the start.
If seen that way, you wouldn’t pay more; you would have to he choice to get cheaper electricity.
I foresee high demand for electronics that seamlessly switch from the lower quality of service feed to the ‘essential’ one when that cheaper feed stops working, though.
The alternative as presented was some sort of compliance program hoping people wouldn't just run everything off the 'essential' feed regardless of need, or rolling blackouts as currently practiced.
It seems you agree that 'essential' loads have much more value to you and others, but you're not willing to pay the value?
In a similar sense that I'm not willing to pay more for "essential" food than for luxury food; or in the same sense that it seems unfair to have to pay for life-saving medical treatments.
It is both unethical and pointless to exploit inelastic demand — the whole meaning of the word "inelastic" being that changing the price of it won't incentivize people to use any more/less of it.
Inelastic demand should, at the very least, be subsidized. This is why public healthcare exists; why food stamps exist; etc. But better yet, inelastic demand — because it is so predictable — should be optimized heavily for by suppliers (for power plants, this is "building out base-load capacity") such that economies of scale enable the supply for inelastic demand to be satisfied with lower cost than the supply for elastic demand.
WELL PUT.. the logic on this debate is astonishly bad..
"Charge more for essential services" just sounds terrible and you are correct, inelastic demand needs to be affordable, and subsidized if it is NOT affordable.
i dont understand how someone would advocate that "essential services has higher value to me and should cost more".
Essential services like heating my home does not have a higher value, it is an absolutely essential service to prevent death from cold temperatures..
This person should try living in -24C without heat and see if it changes their views.
As it is, I live in a climate that does dip below 0C from time to time, and having access to heat is important, so I have a backup generator for the house, and another for the well, because water is important too. When I use them, just the energy cost is much higher than utility power, so I don't use them when utility power is available. There's capital cost and operational costs to pay too. Many people who live around me don't have generators, so they have to hope outages won't be too long, or that they can make it to a warming center --- but outages are often coincident with locally heavy snowfall and our roads are always steep, so that makes it difficult to travel even short distances to get to warmth.
In my area, the issue isn't rolling blackouts, it's usually lines broken due to falling trees. Paying more for uninterupted utilities wouldn't fix that, but if it were rolling blackouts, I would certainly prefer to pay more for utility power for essential loads rather than paying more for local generation for essential loads.
With food, it's possible to manage supply through stockpiling. With electricity, storage is tricky, so when there's a change to supply, demand has to be changed to match. You can do that with blackouts or economics. Many large customers have contracts where they pay a lower rate in exchange for disconnecting their load when needed to reduce demand. Anything essential would be on another meter that has a higher rate.
Why is it a problem to apply the same principle to residential connections?
Of course, in my area, most of my utility outages are a result of interrupted lines and not supply issues, both essential and non-essential would be equally disrupted. And, it's not feasible to switch a significant number of residences to a two-meter system in any reasonable amount of time, so this is firmly in the thought expirement category.
what does taking what i wrote, then reworking the sentence to suit your purpose serve?
I did not agree that essential loads have more "value"... you did.
If you think that heating your home is not essential, come by in the winter and i can put a tent in the back yard for you. It reaches as low as -24C, but i'm sure you will be fine.
If you think that people should be forced to pay more to heat their homes.. you are mistaken. No one should have to choose between food and heat and any program structured such that "essential costs more" will NEVER work.
I said that it is UNFAIR to charge more for essential loads, and that if a program depends on "rebates" it is flawed.
There are many other alternative solutions, such as what we have here via "time of use" billing that is also seasonally adjusted.
this "pay more for essential services" logic is severely flawed, much as you twisting my words to suit your purpose was.
the persons below really made the point when they wrote "It is both unethical and pointless to exploit inelastic demand "
what you are proposing is unethical...
Richer people likely also would counter this with battery or diesel powered backup power (already happens a lot in countries that have irregular blackouts). If they use batteries, their power usage would even go up dues to losses in the charge/discharge cycle.
The complicated one is daily tiers - when power is more or less expensive at different times.
The solution is power storage either at a grid level or at a home level where the information is available to the smart batteries. And/or so much excess solar and wind that we just don’t care.
I'm also planning to add one or two small 800Wp PV systems "Balkonsolar" to our flat (we have plenty of space on the south facing side) this will also involves pre planning for energy intensive stuff including a planned AC in the summer... let's see how this works out :)
During the Texas winter crisis, virtually no residential customers saw a financial incentive to wind down power usage. Only those crazies on Griddy, et. al. were impacted.
https://www.yahoo.com/video/senior-asian-couple-california-g....
But most Texas utility customers now pay a surcharge every month to pay off the accumulated debt of that crisis.
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2022/02/11/how-much...
That's only a valid strategy if your customers can be more responsive, but in a freak cold snap where most customers are running heaters at 100% to keep their homes habitable, there's little they can go to reduce demand.
Many people have purchased generators after that crisis, but telling (and maybe subsidizing) millions of people to buy a generator and stockpile fuel because the grid can't handle cold weather is not good energy policy.
It'd be better if regulators required demand-response automation that would let them intelligently scale back demand of high-energy appliances before the grid reaches critical levels without heavy-handed rolling blackouts.
Great for reducing electricity consumption; not great for reducing total energy usage.
- Make it for all energy use, not just electricity
- Give an extra allowance for electric car owners
You’d have to do it on a day to day basis or hourly. That could actually work - use too much power in an hour or day and it shuts off for awhile.
This would require some additional infrastructure, but might be worth it if the blackouts are going to be too frequent.
Of course there's already a hard cap (usually ~9kW over here), but I suspect most people never reach it.
There are plans in Belgium to charged based on peak power (something silly like "max power used in any 15 minute period"), which would drive up the cost for the average consumer without reducing demand (as people tend not to have much choice in when they use their most power hungry appliances).
200*220*sqrt(3)=76210 watts
High power US home is 200 amp times 240 volts. More typical homes are 100 amp or 150 amp.
Houses in north America are fed with two 120V "legs" and so the 100A is actually at 240V.
That is actually not a bad idea. Would only decrease power though, not energy consumption.
(Assuming the freezer is built to read the power meter and decide when to not run the compressor).
If the light was on, people paid significantly more. It was very very effective at reducing peak consumption.
Consumer awareness of what appliances use the most power should really be a lot higher. It's actually pretty simple too - devices that generate a lot of heat are the ones consuming a lot of energy. That includes devices whose purpose may be to keep things cool - your fridge and A/C still generate significant waste heat even in the latter case it's vented externally. A rare exception would be a car-battery charger, which can obviously draw significant power but the heat is generated later when the power is drawn from the battery and in a dissipated fashion that's hard to detect directly but is still significant.
Have houses automatically heat up earlier in the morning before people start waking up and consuming more power
Prior to "Time of use" billing (and having to upgrade all our meters in like 2016) i dont see how this was possible.
The old meters simply measured how much power was used, they had no idea of WHEN it was used.
The electric company would go house to house and "read the meter" once a month and report this back to billing. Based on your usage a bill would be produced and sent to you.
How/when would a "high usage light" come into play?
I grew up in a house which was over 40 years old, there was no "high-usage" lights near the waster/dryer. Mostly because homes built back then had the waster/dryer in the basement and any "usage lights" would be ineffective.
I wasn't debating if these meters exist or not, it was that they were never used in Ontario.
Continuing your logic, did Canada ever use these "multiple-tariff" meters? If they did, what was the point of the light the OP mentioned?
But since it's been around since the late 70s, clearly you can do this without needing too much advanced tech - which is what I interpreted as being the perceived problem. (Perhaps incorrectly, but it looks like I wasn't the only one...)
The idea is to move "load" from peaks to avoid shortages by charging more to use power during peaks.
The idea of "priority customers" has a long standing principle. "High usage" customers often agree to be the first to be cut in return for discounts.
Targeting "residential customers" in this way is NOT effective as it takes a LOT of houses to equal the amount of power "commercial/industrial" users consume.
Time of use billing is probably the better option.
I lived in Switzerland and of course they are doing great, but Swiss people won't be the ones freezing to death in winter.
Also the amount of LPG redirected from India and Pakistan to Europe will have a huge effect on those countries.
In Hungary the country is trying to get back to wood burning and lignite (the worst type of coal), which will increase air pollution enourmously, but I believe it will the worst winter there since I was born (40 years ago).
Not just energy, but food, vaccines, medical supplies, consumer products, etc. This has always been the case but now it's at the point where third world countries will probably have major civil unrest and emigration due to the shortages of food and energy they will face from being outbid by Europe and other rich countries during this shortage.
Europeans can resort to going on fewer and less expensive vacations to compensate for the increased prices of energy, food, game consoles and GPUs, but I doubt anyone here will actually starve or freeze to death, while that may be an actual reality for some people in some developing nations.
In Eastern Europe, not so much.
edit: I'm glad that you mention Eastern Europe, which is where I come from. Paradoxically, more people die from cold in the West, because their milder climates don't force them to invest in insulation.
edit2: the previous claim may be based on flawed methology, see https://academic.oup.com/jpubhealth/article/38/4/806/2966950
I am sure that living from $70/month would be hard for any of us, but some people have to keep their whole family alive from that money, and definately depend on the government this winter. If they freeze, nobody will know about them and they will be just deleted from the statistics.
Heres a video of how the poorest part of Hungary looked like a few years ago, and I am sure their life has just gotten much worse since a few years ago: https://youtu.be/FvoTaqutfVk
I am from Eastern Europe (Latvia) and this does mostly hold true for the countryside: wood burning stoves are common.
However, it is likely that inflation and other cost increases will also affect the prices of firewood from here on out, as well as getting it delivered (unless you decided to secure your own, though depending on where/how you do that, the legality might be dubious).
From what I know of, most people are noticeably hit by the increase of prices in the stores (as well as a somewhat decreased selection of what's available), in addition to greatly increased electricity prices, which has been a topic that gets brought up often in the news.
There aren't that many great solutions for that, to be honest - both diesel generators and solar panels are too expensive for most people, even though there are programs to aid families with purchasing and setting up their own, if they're capable of partaking in those: https://www.altum.lv/en/services/individuals/energy-efficien... (the Latvian translation has more information https://www-altum-lv.translate.goog/pakalpojumi/iedzivotajie...)
That said, it's probably difficult to undertake something like that, when you're living from paycheck to paycheck.
Should've bought local, but as someone from a poor country neighbouring the EU - fuck that, learn to make quality or you deserve to go under. I'm not paying 2.5x the price for local atrocious quality.
And farmers saying lack of rain will ruin them can Google "artificial irrigation" on their gigabit fiber and unlimited 4G. But hey, I guess those new BMWs were worth it.
India's buying the excess gas from Russia though, so they have access to a seller that Europe won't touch.
Although the troubles with Nord Stream 1 are well known, the termination of the other pipelines is less well understood. Poland for example closed the Jamal pipeline due to the war in Ukraine:
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/poland-terminates-yamal-gas-...
We also have to remember that Europe seized Russian euros and broke contracts in other ways, so at this point even if the pipelines were re-opened and the equipment properly repaired, it's not really obvious if Russia would even want to go back to selling to Europe. Unreliable partner after all compared to China, India and elsewhere. Europe is buying their gas anyway due to arbitrage so it looks like a winner for Russia unfortunately.
It's well known that this is not true. You are perpetuating russian propaganda.
Well known? Is it? Could you please give some reference then?
No one would be surprised to see a "work-to-rule" action, but how is it "russian propaganda" that Europe had sanctioned Russian energy industry and it "somehow" had consequences?
> Russian state energy giant Gazprom cut all deliveries through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline on Wednesday in what it said was a planned shutdown until Saturday for maintenance work.
> In recent months, Gazprom has slashed flows through Nord Stream 1 to just 20% of capacity, citing maintenance issues and blaming Western sanctions on exports of technology imposed in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
> Russia has also cut off supplies to several “unfriendly” European countries and energy companies over their refusal to pay for gas in rubles, as the Kremlin insists, rather than the euros or dollars stated in contracts. European leaders say Russia is trying to blackmail countries over their support for Ukraine.
> France’s Engie (EGIEY) is the latest casualty. On Tuesday, Gazprom said it would completely suspend deliveries to Engie (EGIEY) from Thursday, claiming that it had not received full payment from the company for the gas it supplied in July.
Someone can probably look up Gazprom's own PR response and see how it matches up (or doesn't) with the statement by Engie, as well as what differs. Most of the time it's good to look up what various sources say, if you're interested in it, and come to your own conclusions.
From my perspective, reliance on another country, the relations with which have historically been troubled (and are now further strained, given the geopolitical events), does not seem like the best of ideas - alternative means of securing the resources that are needed for providing electricity/heat are more than welcome.
Add to that the NS2 pipeline, that could have been started, but never was. And Yamal-Europe pipeline that was shutdown by due to sanctions.
Diversification of supply is a good thing, sure, but how would it affect the competitiveness of European industry is a curious matter.
The desire for punishing Europe certainly stems from Europe's similarly uncompromising economic warfare against Russia, but let's at least try to focus on the ground truths and not get caught up in a bunch of transparent lies.
I don't need peer-reviewed double-blinded study. I need something that has at least a bit more substance than "well known", "obvious" or other argumentum ad populum
> The desire for punishing Europe certainly stems from Europe's similarly uncompromising economic warfare against Russia, but let's at least try to focus on the ground truths and not get caught up in a bunch of transparent lies.
The ground truth is that the US and Europe (for however justified reason) had declared an economic war against Russia (sanctions), which has no means or strength to wage a real economic war of its own. And another ground truth is that they were not properly thought through as 2/4 pipelines are sanctioned and cannot be used, financial operations are sanctioned and cannot normally be performed, technology export and maintenance is sanctioned. All this to disrupt Russia's operations, while Europe STILL depends on it.
Replace Russia with any random variable and you would still get the same effect if you don't mind where you shoot and nuke half your own energy market. It doesn't even have any real means to "punish poor Europeans with all it's economic might", otherwise there wouldn't be ANY gas flowing to Europe for months now. Instead Russia simply does absolutely nothing to mitigate Europe's own risks of continuing running operations restricted and sanctioned all around by itself, while still profiting from it.
Please stop defending incompetence and labeling every uncomfortable piece of reality as "Russian propaganda".
But to no-one's big surprise, Russia has declined. So the conclusion is obvious.
It would of course be interesting to do a 40 page research essay in the style of WaitButWhy every time Russia makes a statement that fails to pass the smell test -- reeeeeeally document in detail why the statement is lower probability than a lie. The problem is, Russian authorities routinely lie, so often that following this strategy would lead to spending all one's time authoring (and then communicating) these explanations. Such a course of action is nothing but playing right along with the intentions of the propaganda.
If Russia one day wakes up and makes a true but surprising statement and no one believes them, they will only have themselves to thank for it.
That German energy politics since March 11 2011 has been a shitshow of incompetence is something we can both agree on, but Russia's present-day capitalization on this mistake is anything but.
What "problems" are you referring to specifically? It would be nice to read some source, cuz to my knowledge there are quite a lot of warranty nuances - it would be curious to see something substiantial on the matter, coming from official sources, that are not Russian, even if confirmed by Siemens engineers on-site.
Anyway it doesn't matter. NS2 is there ready and waiting to go, but Germany won't switch it on ... due to sanctions.
There are another two gas pipelines that are available to Russia (bypassing Poland), which they have also used a bit during the first NS1 shutdown, but they reduced/stopped deliveries via them too - NS2 wouldn't change anything about that either. At this point it's obvious what Russia is trying to do. They went all-in with stopping of the gas deliveries to try to get the West to stop supporting Ukraine. But it looks like they might have played that card too late.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-sanction-exemption-f...
And nobody, not the Canadian government, not the British government nor Siemens is disputing that the equipment needed maintenance.
Now that's changed and Siemens is claiming it's safe to run a high pressure gas pipeline when the machinery is broken and leaking. That is absurd - if there's one place safety is critical it's right next to a pipeline full of explosive gas. We can safely assume Siemens is under tremendous pressure to support this Ruskies-doing-it-to-us narrative as a consequence.
Yes, all the pipelines were closed due to sanctions. Russia was still pumping gas at full speed through one of the pipelines that passed through Ukraine as recently as August:
https://www.ft.com/content/8ed4ccdb-522a-4003-8010-1a786af18...
It got shut down because Ukraine could not receive transit fees from Russia due to EU banking sanctions. EU was "looking into it". Their sanctions turn out to block things they didn't intend all the time.
If our governments really thought Russia was lying about the equipment they could just authorize NS2 and then say - see? - when no gas flows. They aren't doing that. Instead they blocked all the other pipelines via sanctions and then let the last one break, again due to sanctions. Then having successfully blocked Russian gas they blamed Russia for it, knowing full well after COVID that people will happily swallow almost anything no matter how contradictory it is.
It's very much in Russia's interest to shift blame away from themselves to sow dissent (which you are totally falling for) and also perhaps for later court cases about breaches of contracts (not sure how relevant that continues to be).
The FT article is talking about oil and not gas. It also explicitly states that oil and gas payments were exempt from sanctions. I think that (plus your other replies with similar factual errors) is more than enough evidence for me to conclude that you are arguing in bad faith.
"It's very much in Russia's interest to shift blame away from themselves to sow dissent"
The argument you're making here about Putin playing 4D chess is totally illogical. It only sounds right to you because of years of nonsense from certain political quarters about social media bots, "sowing dissent" etc as a way to explain their domestic woes, not because it makes sense.
Russia's actual interest here is to trade gas for money + ending of general sanctions against them and maybe ending of support for Ukrainian forces. That's it, that's what they want. Pretending very specific pieces of equipment are broken in very specific ways is the exact opposite of what's in their interests because it means saying "ending narrow sanctions on one sector is sufficient to get gas moving again", instead of delivering ultimatums about general geopolitical goals.
If the gas was being stopped to try and force Europe out of the Ukrainian war then it would all have stopped overnight in one go, and Russia would have stated very clearly "the gas is stopped because we want you to change tactics, and we will resume it the moment you do so". They haven't done this. Conclusion: they do actually want to sell gas to Europe.
"The FT article is talking about oil and not gas. It also explicitly states that oil and gas payments were exempt from sanctions"
What it states is that nobody is denying that the payments couldn't be made.
Western governments have all sorts of intentions they routinely screw up and the whole sanctions regime is very decentralized. It works by punishing anyone retroactively found to have been violating sanctions, where "violation" is sometimes in the eye of the beholder. It's very easy for high level bureaucrats in Brussels to say "everything is sanctioned, you got to prison if you violate these vague rules, but stuff we want isn't sanctioned" and assume everyone will just do what they intend (both in the civil service and in industry). But the cost of getting it wrong for finance workers is prison time so it's obvious they're going to be hyper-conservative, hence the constant blockages and problems. This is a normal factor of sanctions regimes, they always whack all kinds of random innocent third parties that weren't intended to be sanctioned at all due to stuff like name collisions or bureaucratic cockups, and we aren't even talking about mistaken identities here.
"also perhaps for later court cases about breaches of contracts"
The EU seized - as in stole - all the Euros Russia had earned by selling gas but hadn't already converted into rubles and then prevented payments to Russia in euros, even though the gas contracts were denominated in that currency! This was an utterly unprecedented move given Russia and EU countries aren't at war. Contracts are thus irrelevant at this point, the EU tore them up right at the start. If anyone would sue anyone in courts of law it'd be Russia suing the EU (not that they'd be able to).
"Re: spare turbines, leaks etc"
Do you think it's reasonable to expect Gazprom employees to work with equipment after being cut off from all support by the manufacturers? Think about how allergic big companies are to even running software that isn't under a support contract, and that's in way lower stakes situations. Also, Siemens is a manufacturer that can remotely monitor and even control those turbines - one of Gazprom's concerns is that Siemens will remotely disable the turbines (again due to sanctions) and they want written legal assurance it won't happen. That's a very mild response all things considered. If I were a gas engineer I wouldn't consider such an assurance as worth the paper it was printed on.
Fundamentally, the west built and to some extent still runs that NS1 pipeline. The NS2 pipeline was built with Russian equipment and Russia has been clear that they could have turned it on at any point Germany wanted .. right up until both NS2 and NS1 appear to have been blown up this morning. Whichever country did that very obviously believes Russia will sell gas through both pipelines given a chance.
You are underestimating the complexity of this issue. There are long term delivery contracts that force Gazprom/Russia to deliver. All the things you are seeing are thinly veiled attempts to create a "force majeure" exception as a superficial narrative to shift blame and still cause damage.
Don't be naive.
Nope, it just broke.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/sep/26/nord-stream...
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-germany-berlin-swe...
First point is true, but the second ist not. Germany went out its way to ensure all contracts are fulfilled to avoid this claim.
> it's not really obvious if Russia would even want to go back to selling to Europe.
Russia very much wants to go back to selling gas and oil to europe, they have after all no other relevant industries and pipelines to China/India don't have the capacity to replace european delivery.
> Europe is buying their gas anyway due to arbitrage so it looks like a winner for Russia unfortunately.
Even chinese and indian experts see russia as the loser of this conflict and to be relegated to a possible chinese puppet state in the future.
how is the ruble doing on international currency exchange?
> "Repeated case of interference of the Bank of Russia into implementation of the budget rule in terms of foreign currency purchases means that the floating currency rate regime existed from the end of 2014 until early 2018 is ‘only on paper now’ and is actually substituted by regulation of the currency market by the Bank for Russia for the purpose of eliminating threats for financial stability, jeopardized by the budget rule effect,"
https://tass.com/economy/1026029
This was 4 years ago, and is even more so true now. The ruble at the moment is NOT free floating.
Russia is the definite loser out of this, and indeed everyone is, the decision to invade was a catastrophe for everyone on multiple levels.
I always find it strange when people post comments like this. It is a clear indicator you don't understand financial markets.
If you were to look at the data yourself, you would see in Oct 2017 it was 58.11 and in Oct 2022 it is 57.88 (vs USD)
In your opinion, what does this indicate? FX is always "Currency vs currency", so has the Ruble weakened? Perhaps the US dollar strengthened? What caused the change? Is the change even meaningful?
Is the change "market driven" or has the state intervened?
It looks like the state has been actively defending it, so what is your actual point?
It is assumed that Russia sent a warning message to EU countries not to interfere. Fortunately, most EU countries recognized that Russia was no longer a reliable supplier. And imposed sanctions, delivered weapons anyhow.
Russia thought they could threaten their most important customers. The problem Russia now has, it that there is hardly any capacity to sell gas to other countries. Building pipelines will take many years and will have to happen without western technology (I'm sure Russia would like China to own their pipelines). Or Russia has to build more LNG terminals, but that is also not ideal. And ship from western countries probably won't go there.
Of course, the downside of relying to much on Russian gas is that EU countries now have to deal with an enormous energy shortage.
The Russians are selling more to China and India since the war. The higher price of gas means in the short run they are making more money.
Yes, some sanctions might be annoying, in the way a mosquito is annoying to you, but basically nothing europe has done has really had an impact. (Most weapons have come from the US).
So while parts of what you say is true, frankly the situation is terrible for Europe, quite bad for Russia, and pretty awesome for the US
Yes, Russia makes a lot more money at the moment because the small amount of gas they still sell to EU countries is expensive enough that it nets more money.
Anybody who has been following the war a bit will notice that Russia is now seriously running out of modern weapons. By the time tanks from the early 60s show up at the front line, you can be sure something is wrong. At the moment, and due sanctions, Russia has a bit of a production problem.
Since the 2014 sanctions, Russia has a bit a problem with obtaining micro-electronics. The effects of that are also quite noticeable.
In any case. Over the summer, EU countries managed to fill their gas storage while producing enough electricity to keep most stuff running. So yes, the situation is bad for the economy and EU countries have to figure how to help people pay their energy bill, etc. But if the current situation is 'terrible' then I wonder what word has to be used for a real disaster.
I have no interest in discussing this with you as you're not here with good intentions, but I would let others know that Western countries were very accommodating with the spare parts, which in practice called the Russian bluff. I doubt Germany will go back to Russian gas after they pulled this one.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/nord-stream-turbine-...
Time to buy some powerbanks
A starter battery is about 1kWh.
Or just keep a lead acid battery around charged up and connect a ciggarette lighter socket to it.
Remember to dress well so you won't freeze
But politicians say it’s going to be ok. So you know, we’re probably screwed.
Interesting. Here in Finland the plan is to target domestic use first if the push comes to shove, to keep the industry up and running.
Having been a fan of this for so long this is just sad and pathetic that we now have to consider things like rolling blackouts.
That this is a thing in Europe in general is sad.
The "anti-nuclear" camp has won, but based on what sort of logical argument? Fear? what about Chernobyl?
It is one thing to be "anti-nuclear" but they failed to provide alternatives. "WIND" or "Solar" is not going to replace 3,500 MW of nuclear power without damaging a LOT of land.
Now millions face rolling blackouts and energy shortages when nuclear could have been providing clean energy. I live within 8KM of a nuclear plant which has been running accident free 24x7 since 1971.
Boring but sensible answer:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/P-9-2022-00127...
> Russia is one of the world’s biggest producers of oil, gas and coal. Continuous reliance on fossil fuels and delays to clean energy transition benefit Russia.
> Following on from this the Commission has put forward an additional proposal to speed up transition to clean energy sources by amending the directives on the Energy Performance of Buildings, Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy[3].
Now nuclear costs 3-5x more compared to renewables and is simply not relevant.
> "WIND" or "Solar" is not going to replace 3,500 MW of nuclear power without damaging a LOT of land.
If land use is what you measure impact based on a much better target is the beef industry.
what does "beef" have to do with converting land to wind farms?
perhaps you could respond back with how solar panels are not actually very environmentally friendly? They produce a lot of toxic chemicals to manufacture.
Tell us, to replace 3,500 MW of nuclear power, how many acres of land must be converted to wind/solar? what is the environmental/social impact of doing this?
How much power is produced in a cold / dark winter via solar/wind vs nuclear.
Compared to what ? Energy prices have jumped 2-3x in some places so far, and it's not even winter yet. Comparing renewable prices as averages or whatever is fine if you like blackouts ?
As an example, in my zone, if someone provided 1x energy at 7pm, and I repaid that by providing 3x of that energy at 3am, I would still earn a profit of about 25%.
The price prognosis for tonight is even lower, so I could trade 1x for 6x and still make a nice profit from the price difference.
People throw out whatever nonsense they like to support their position.
"Nuclear costs 3-5x" and as you point out, compared to what?
The cost of sitting around for 20 years debating this and not taking any action at all has lead to much worse problems - power shortages.
These "anti-nuclear" types fail to apply logic to their debate.
I asked how much power is produced by solar during the long winter months, i suspect they will not respond as it is against their view - solar is NOT viable in cold-weather climates. You need a reliable "base" system and nuclear is very well suited for this. Our plants (CANDU) can be refuelled while producing near-full power greatly reducing the need to shut them down.
The reason the temperatures fall below zero during the winter where i live is obvious.. The energy we receive from the sun has been greatly reduced.
How would solar power address the reduction in available solar energy, and the increased demand for energy for heating?
For the cost see for example:
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
I agree with a lot of what you say, but also don't fall into the trap of what you are accusing others of doing.
In places like Germany, Wind and solar actually counter-balance each other very well. [0]
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Seasonal-cycle-of-the-ca...
I sold solar panel for 10 years. Both solar thermal and PV. This is simply not true. You need to greatly oversize your panels (≥6x) and also have a passive house with a huge storage buffer (>5000 liters). In the summer you end up having to pump the waste heat into a pool. There are also maintenance costs. For PV you need huge amounts of battery storage. It's simply not economical above the 40° parallel to use solar for heating. For DHW or charging your EV it's okay, but in the winter you'll get at most 1/6 the amount of heat or electricity that you get in the summer provided that the panels are not covered in snow.
10 years ago I was assured that coal was dead, killed by wind and solar, which were already cheaper than coal at $60/T, and falling. How is it possible then that 10 years on with all the vastly expanded and even cheaper and better renewables, that people are paying $430/T for coal? And it's not the remaining few legacy assets winding down as they compete for a dwindling supply of fuel, global coal production is rising, new coal power plants are being built.
I've never heard any of these people go back and reflect on what they got wrong about their predictions about coal, what they missed and where their logic was flawed. What I do hear frequently though is "nuclear is dead, renewables are already cheaper"... I'm a little less open minded this time around.
For the rest of the world that is not the case. It's very easy and fast to build a coal plant and pretty much every country has access to the raw material (independency). For the most part you don't need a specialized workforce either, which you do need for nuclear. It's also not intermittent like solar and wind and the supply chains for solar and wind wouldn't have been able to keep up anyway.
Coal extraction in the western world is making huge amounts of money and scaling up production, exactly the opposite of what the naysayers were incessantly parroting.
Coal is no different than wind and solar in terms of accessibility of plant or product. Actually renewables are significantly easier to acquire and scale and deploy in many cases -- millions of people have solar panels on their houses for example. Private, as well as municipal or county level installations are common. As are much larger ones.
> For the most part you don't need a specialized workforce either, which you do need for nuclear.
You certainly do. You can't just throw a bunch of people from the street together and tell them to run a coal mine, supply line, and power plant.
> It's also not intermittent like solar and wind and the supply chains for solar and wind wouldn't have been able to keep up anyway.
Might be zeroing in on some of the problems...
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/united-states/coal-pro...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/184333/coal-energy-consu...
https://www.worldometers.info/coal/australia-coal/ Australia has consumption going down but production going up, they're selling to China and India.
I hope this clears up your confusion.
> Actually renewables are significantly easier to acquire and scale and deploy in many cases -- millions of people have solar panels on their houses for example. Private, as well as municipal or county level installations are common. As are much larger ones.
You missed my point. You need a lot less materials for the same amount of power in a coal plant and digging for coal is easier to scale up.
Here is the IEA World Energy Outlook from 2010. The presentation is simplified, check out page 11 in [0] for example. As you can see the OECD numbers go down, but the China, India and other developing market numbers go up. Giving us a total increase. You can check out the more in depth IEA report here [1].
[0] https://www.oecd.org/berlin/46389140.pdf [1] https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/1b090169-1c58-4f5d-...
Why the intellectual dishonesty? Why do you try to discredit what I say, backed by sources, when you rely on nothing but your own fallible memory to back up your claims? Just back up your claims with sources, it's really not that hard.
> Your claim that it was just in the west doesn't make sense because mines in western countries export to China and India etc.
If you check the previous links that I posted, you will see that coal production in the west has reduced as well.
> If you check the previous links that I posted, you will see that coal production in the west has reduced as well.
You keep blathering about things that don't address anything I wrote. Go back and actually read what I wrote and have a think about what you're actually trying to say about it before you try again.
Coal production in (at least some) western countries, e.g., USA has actually started to increase in the past year or so in response to demand.
That's what I claimed, I'm happy you agree. This claim did not extend towards the rest of the world (so not like you claimed), the consensus among experts was that they would be increasing their coal consumption. This is also what happened.
> Coal production in (at least some) western countries, e.g., USA has actually started to increase in the past year or so in response to demand.
I don't think anyone missed the gas crisis.
It did ,because western countries export coal to the rest of the world.
Look if you can't admit you were parroting that coal was killed by renewables without any understanding of commodity boom/bust cycles or energy demand trajectory the world that's quite understandable it's difficult to face reality, but you don't have to keep at it.
As I said, coal production and consumption in the west has gone down. Coal plants and mines have closed. The trend is downwards. Do you really refuse to accept this when it's what the data says? This is quite worrying I must say, is there some ideological bias at play here?
> Look if you can't admit you were parroting that coal was killed by renewables without any understanding of commodity boom/bust cycles or energy demand trajectory the world that's quite understandable it's difficult to face reality, but you don't have to keep at it.
Coal is being killed by renewables, nuclear, hydro, gas, ... in the west. Whatever is cheaper tends to win out in the end. All you have to do is look at the data, I even linked it for you. Although it's experiencing a hiccup right now due to the gas crisis. It will obviously take a bit longer for the rest of the world to catch up, even without the current crisis.
You were wrong if you were reciting the popular prayer "coal is dead, killed by renewables" a few years ago. Hopefully you come to understand that and reflect on what that means for the credibility of the kind of sources you get your information from, and what that means for your ideas about nuclear and other things too.
Did you not claim:
>"coal is dead, killed by renewables." was said by people around 10 years ago and that this referred to the entire world?
I'm assuming people aren't just random Twitter users but actual reputable people.
I have provided a reputable source from 2010 that said that total coal consumption would rise and that this increase is due to an increased usage in the developing world. This is true today, see [0] so the prediction was on point. All you have to do is show us that a reputable source has claimed that coal was dead and that this referred to the entire world. Somewhere around 2010. This would settle the debate.
> You were wrong if you were reciting the popular prayer "coal is dead, killed by renewables" a few years ago. Hopefully you come to understand that and reflect on what that means for the credibility of the kind of sources you get your information from, and what that means for your ideas about nuclear and other things too.
Don't you think it would be really weird if I was supposedly reciting something that I say wasn't claimed in the first place? The claim you mention refers to the west and no real energy expert worth his or her salt would have claimed that this would be the case for the entire world. It's simply not possible for the developing world to do that. It wasn't possible in 2010, when the costs for renewables were much higher than they are now, and it isn't possible now.
I think the International Energy Agency is quite a reputable source? They do research and advice policy makers all around the world.
Also I'm a bit confused... My ideas about nuclear and other things? I'm not following here, what do you mean? And what does it have to do with the topic at hand?
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
They were just led astray by misinformation from special interests, and they were wrong.
The same people have also been claiming that nuclear is dead, killed by renewbales. Their credibility speaks for itself.
No need to reply with apologetics, or arguments about something I didn't say.
Renewables are more reliable. $10 will get you one watt of nuclear which will be off 10-40% of the time. $10 of solar + wind + storage will get you at least 1 watt every hour of the year in and at least 1W of variable power even in Germany or Canada at any scale from micro generation to 100s of MW.
Of course, they have cows, for milk, for the cheese industry that they do have. But raising dairy cattle has only a fraction of the impact that beef cattle do (as you're not constantly slaughtering them and feeding up new ones.)
We're seeing the hidden cost of renewable energy now, aren't we? Cheap because it's supplemented with natural gas to provide base load. If the politicians actually cared about the climate, they would be adamant about supplementing with nuclear, which is far far more energy dense.
We should definitely spend our money on a system that will provide 1W of baseload 60-80% of the time and require gas for the rest, rather than a wind+solar+storage system that will provide at least 1 watt 100% of the year and average 2-5W depending on location.
Well, let's see. Wind uses negligible land if incorporated onto farms, so I'll assume it's all solar.
Nuclear capacity factor (fraction of the time it's operating): 0.9, call it 100%.
PV capacity factor 0.2
PV nameplate panel production per square metre 200W
PV land coverage fraction (access paths beside PV panels take up space) 0.5
Total land needed for PV to deliver equivalent power:
3 500 000 000 / (200 * 0.2 * 0.5) = 175 000 000 m^2 = 175 km^2.
Switzerland's population is 8.5M. Assuming it is 80% urbanised and 20 m^2 per person in cities (less than in Dhaka, 8.9M / 306 km^2): then Switzerland's cities take up 136 km^2. In reality, probably several times this figure.
So the land area is probably less than Switzerland's cities.
If Switzerland wished to accelerate the development of two-layer PV cells, increasing production per area by 50%, then the bulk of the 3.5GW could be provided by rooftop solar in cities.
In reality a mix of wind and PV would be used. Wind is highly compatible with pastoral farming, leaving 90% or more of the land area it "occupies" free for grazing.
The real challenge at present would be sourcing enough storage for the daily usage cycle.
Now, damage. Covering land with inert PV panels does indeed change the soil ecology, but not irremediably. Remove the panels, and the soil would be back to normal inside a decade. Contrast with coal mines and ash piles, and uranium mines. And, as above, the PV could all be on rooftops, which have already damaged the land. Get rid of the buildings!
TLDR: the "LOT of land" is not much, really, and the damage is minimal.
Like you say, wind can be co-located on farms or other areas that are not otherwise economically useful, with minimal environmental obstruction. Something on the order of 99.99% of the acreage occupied by windmills can continue to be used for other purposes. Solar panels can also be efficiently and thoughtfully located.
Of course, they can also be located poorly as well but it's not something that's like definitionally baked into the technology, it's a matter of having good policy about siting.
For the build price of 1 watt of nuclear plant which will be at best 90% available (but more likely 60-80) you can get a solar/wind mix at retail micro generation prices further from the equator than 90% of the population with zero hours of producing less than 1 watt (much of which is dispatchable too) and 1 additional net watt of variable energy. Allow for the same availability as a nuclear reactor and the price is a fraction. Then for just the running costs of an already built nuclear you can pay the whole thing off before the reactor even opens. Give it five years and the LCOE of solar will be less than the fuel costs.
The solution was to stop wasting billions on nuclear and subsidizing fossil fuels and actually invest in renewable tech half a century ago.
Solar energy density is such that just covering structures and open paved areas in any region with less than 10k people per km^2 can cover average primary energy (not just electricity). It's far less than cattle grazing land or land used for fuel ethanol to greenwash the auto industry. The land use is a complete non-issue.
It's quite well researched, and for someone who was also wondering why there is European aversion towards nuclear power, it showed me that it's not that simple. Nuclear power is quite inconvenient and not as magical "free energy" as it seems.
If even a fraction of this installed capacity would run in times of shortages, this should further reduce demand without causing disruption on industrial production or even having to schedule rolling blackouts.
[0] (German) https://www.srf.ch/news/wirtschaft/drohende-energiekrise-str...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_services_(electric_p...
The link to the article in question: https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2022/09/23/en-s...
With a copy of the text (in French) as it's behind a paywall. Deepl should do a decent enough job to translate it to English.
INTERNATIONAL
En Suisse, l’angoisse énergétique tourne à la crise de nerfs Dépendant de ses voisins allemand et français pour assurer une partie de son approvisionnement électrique en hiver, le petit pays alpin découvre, mais un peu tard, qu’il n’a pas assez investi dans les énergies renouvelables. Par Serge Enderlin (Genève, correspondance)
LETTRE DE GENÈVE
Felix Suhner est le patron de l’hôtel-restaurant Bad Bubendorf dans la localité homonyme, un village à une vingtaine de kilomètres au sud de Bâle. De lui, on peut dire qu’il a à la fois la tête sur les épaules et pas froid aux yeux. Depuis la semaine dernière, il n’ajoute rien moins que 5 % à toutes les additions. Le motif ? Une « contribution aux frais d’énergie », en forte augmentation dans la Confédération suisse comme partout ailleurs en Europe.
Dans un pays où il n’est pas rare qu’un simple café coûte près de 5 euros dans des endroits parfaitement anodins, cette hausse inédite n’est pas passée inaperçue. Conscient de la moue de ses clients, Felix Suhner plaide la transparence : « J’indique clairement et systématiquement cette charge séparément sur chaque quittance. Sans cela, je ne pourrais pas rester rentable. » L’association suisse des restaurateurs, GastroSuisse, a pris une position très helvétique : elle n’encourage pas la démarche, mais ne la condamne pas non plus. L’anecdote est en tout cas révélatrice du climat délétère qui s’est installé en Suisse depuis deux mois, où la peur de manquer d’énergie tourne à l’obsession.
Lenteurs helvétiques Le pays alpin pourrait en effet vivre cet hiver ses premières coupures de courant depuis la seconde guerre mondiale. Une perspective qui crispe la classe politique et le gouvernement fédéral, contraint d’affronter une seconde crise majeure après celle liée au Covid-19 au cours de laquelle il n’avait guère brillé. « Quand la pandémie a surgi, l’Office fédéral de la santé [le ministère] fut d’abord incapable d’estimer le nombre de cas : les données, tardives et incomplètes, étaient parfois communiquées… par fax. Rebelote avec la crise électrique annoncée : le gestionnaire du réseau, Swissgrid, publie les chiffres de consommation globale avec plusieurs mois de décalage ! », dénonce un éditorialiste.
De fait, il est impossible pour les ménages et les entreprises suisses de connaître avec précision leur consommation de courant en temps réel. Pour cela, il aurait fallu pouvoir compter sur des compteurs intelligents, type Linky, mais « la Suisse, véritable tiers-monde numérique, ne les a pas installés ». La Confédération ne connaît donc pas la consommation d’électricité en juin dernier en Suisse ; elle ne dispose de données fiables que jusqu’en mai. Or, ce n’est que sur la base de chiffres actuels que l’on peut décider si les efforts d’économies entrepris sont suffisants ou si des restrictions, des interdictions ou, dans le pire des cas, des contingentements sont nécessaires. La situation est encore pire pour la consommation de gaz : Berne ne reçoit les données qu’une fois par an.
« S’il fait froid cet hiver, ce sera très serré », a confirmé, mercredi 21 septembre, Bastian Schwark dans le Neue Zürcher Zeitung. L’homme a été nommé manageur de la crise énergétique par la Confédération. Et que fait le gouvernement pour anticiper la pénurie annoncée ? Comme durant la pandémie, il met sur pied une task force, dont le rôle consistera d’abord à consulter les cantons, fédéralisme oblige. Ce mécanisme hautement démocratique, qui est l’une des forces de la Suisse (où citoyens et collectivités publiques sont écoutés en permanence), devient un lourd handicap quand les nuages s’amoncellent et qu’il faut réagir vite. La Suisse, dit le proverbe, n’est pas taillée pour le gros temps.
Comment en est-on arrivé là dans un pays dont les deux tiers du territoire sont recouverts de montagnes, qui abritent plusieurs dizaines de gros barrages et des réseaux d’adduction d’eau vertigineux pour alimenter les lacs de retenue en altitude ?
D’abord, l’hydroélectricité ne couvre que la moitié des besoins. Ensuite, la Suisse ne compte plus qu’une poignée de réacteurs nucléaires depuis qu’elle a décidé de quitter l’atome au lendemain de l’accident de Fukushima, en 2011 – même s’il est désormais question, comme en Allemagne, de « sortir de la sortie du nucléaire ». Enfin, elle n’a jamais su, ou pu, prendre le virage des énergies renouvelables, notamment en raison du droit d’opposition des citoyens, favorisé par la démocratie directe. A titre de comparaison, on ne dénombre qu’une quarantaine d’éoliennes sur le territoire suisse contre près de 3 000 en Autriche, pays à la topographie et à la population presque identiques.
Pour pallier ces déficiences, Berne avait toujours pu compter sur ses voisins français et allemand en important de l’électricité pendant la saison froide et les pics de consommation. Les centrales nucléaires de l’Hexagone, les dizaines de milliers d’éoliennes et les centrales à gaz allemandes fournissaient en courant excédentaire ce qui faisait défaut dans la production suisse. Mais, pour la première fois, il n’est pas certain que la France et l’Allemagne disposent d’excédents ces prochains mois. Côté français, le parc nucléaire est en difficulté. Et côté allemand, l’incertitude sur les livraisons du russe Gazprom annonce une saison froide, où toutes les capacités disponibles seront réservées en priorité à la consommation nationale.
Pour préparer la population suisse à l’hiver de tous les dangers, le Conseil fédéral s’en remettra, comme souvent, au bon sens de ses citoyens. Qui devront économiser l’énergie, quitte à être infantilisés. Fin août, le gouvernement a lancé une grande campagne de communication à 10 millions de francs suisses (10,5 millions d’euros). Pleines pages d’annonces dans la presse nationale, affiches dans les rues, numéro vert et un site, Stop-gaspillage, sur le thème « L’énergie est limitée. Ne la gaspillons pas. »
Parmi les perles : « Le fait de s’habiller chaudement plutôt que de monter le chauffage est recommandé. » Ou encore : « Toute lumière allumée dans une pièce vide gaspille inutilement de l’énergie : il faut toujours penser à éteindre les lampes lorsqu’on quitte une pièce. » Lapalissades ridicules ? Sans doute, mais c’est aussi un moyen pour l’Etat de se dédouaner par avance des reproches qu’on ne manquera pas de lui adresser quand les factures des consommateurs exploseront. Fidèle au dogme libéral du pays, il n’interviendra pas pour les aider.
I agree about one thing, and that it really is a perfect storm of issues, and that the winter will be very rough. I hope it brings a needed change in a lot of ways.
The part about renewables requiring trillions in investment to replace nuclear I didn't get at all - they're the cheapest possible solution. New nuclear that is needed would be even worse. If he thinks they're expensive, don't know what else is there. My guess is that renewables will continue to be a huge winner, especially in this crisis. Even Macron came out a couple days ago and said France needs to build more renewable capacity and ease regulations and remove road blocks. That was a huge shock for me.
This an exceedingly intellectually lazy argument which shows that you're either horribly biased (and never engaged with the reading material properly) or didn't even spend a minute thinking through what you're asking. It's somewhere on the level of "well, why is there snow in New York if global warming is happening HUUUUH?!".
(Not to mention that the French nukes are in process of being started already.)
The point is (and I think it’s a scandal) that EDF is forced, by law, to resell its nuclear electricity to its competitors at an under the market price.
EDF is also required to offer an electricity plan with a law fixed price. Which is a good thing because historically, it allowed end users not to suffer from market price fluctuations.
Now what is happening is that all those fake competitors that did resell EDF electricity cheaper than EDF offerings, took their margin for more than a decade and are now asking their customer to unsubscribe and to go back to the EDF fixed-by-law offer.
* [0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jul/19/france-to-p...
If almost 40% of french nuclear is offline right now[0][1] then I think it's reasonable to ask questions about reliability.
Could you explain how the position is lazy?
(Note: I'm in favour of nuclear power)
[0] https://twitter.com/BurggrabenH/status/1567971418255532035
[1] Our forecast is for 59% utilisation or 315TWh based on EDF's guidance.
This is like... highschool level stuff. (Which is also the reason why I have very little will to refute your points, because they seem to be done from either dishonesty or ignorance. Anyone on HN is old enough to understand why anecdotal single sample evidence is not a way to refute statistical phenomena).
That is to say - even if EDF massively, critically fscked up this time, it has little effect to the reliability of nuclear power as a whole. Just like a single exploding windmill in Denmark doesn't change much about reliability of wind power.
> Just like a single exploding windmill in Denmark doesn't change much about reliability of wind power
First off, you realise France has 56 nuclear power stations? I'm wondering where you're getting "single sample" and "single windmill" from
If, over a year, 40% of windmills in Denmark weren't producing power, it would make a hell of a lot of sense to question the reliability of Danish windmills.
I don't know why you pulled out the straw man of saying the person was questioning all of nuclear power, but they had a very reasonable fact-based question.
I'd be very happy to listen to any data or explanations you could bring, but frankly you don't seem to be discussing things in good faith right now.
The argument is lazy because it's false equivalence. A power plant failing suddenly is not the same thing as a power plant being taken offline to fix a known issue.
edit: EDF has announced that they will be restarting their nuclear plants by winter. How this plays into the Russian gas shortage is that France also generates a lot of electricity off natural gas. By working to get the nuclear plants running by winter they won't need to run their natural gas generation plants, leaving more gas to be used for industrial purposes & home heating.
That is a lie. A total of 12 reactors are down for unscheduled repairs because of corrosion damage that was found during inspections in October 2021.
Some of the others are down unscheduled because they used river water for cooling, which due to the hot and dry summer threatened the rivers' ecosystem.
Here's a source: https://www.reuters.com/world/france-braces-uncertain-winter...
And Wikipedia has something of a timeline, with sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Crisis...
Reactors are hugely expensive to build - but not really all that expensive to run. A power company has loan payments to make regardless if the reactor is running or not, and they're going to want to minimize any downtime.
That's a year ago, would you say they scheduled them for this year?
These are fairly big, disconcerting issues that are taking a long time to fix, not minor repairs that are part of routine maintenance: https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/fixing-edfs-reac...
It's important to note that the river/lake water does not get sent through the reactor. The distilled water used inside the reactor is closely monitored for it's quality to prevent corrosion. There are heat exchangers between the two systems. The corrosion repair was probably in one or more of the heat exchangers (you don't want leaks between the two systems) or in the outer loop cooling pumps & piping.
Reactors need a reliable source of water for cooling. The ones near me use man-made lakes where they control the water level to assure a good supply of water. Recreational boating and lake-home real estate is a side benefit. If we had a California-level drought where the lake levels could not be maintained, then yes the reactors would have to be shut down. But dropping water levels are something that can be estimated and graphed on a chart. A shutdown in this case is unexpected and yes probably would be considered to be unscheduled.
I'm not sure in France's case where water consumption by the reactor would threaten the ecosystem due to a hot and dry summer. Likely the reverse since the water supply wouldn't be reliable any more. So far as water consumption by the reactors - the majority of the water gets returned to the river. It's warmer when it returns and that can cause algae growth, but it can also make for some good fishing (bass, bluegill, etc). Some reactors have cooling towers that work by evaporation, and that water gets returned to nature as rain.
Of fucking course it does! Otherwise your definition of that "score" is stupid and useless.
Equipment is reliable if it is available when you need it. A technology that has half your reactor fleet down for many months, just as you most need them, is by no stretch of imagination reliable. Claiming otherwise is either delusional or dishonest.
Wow 40% offline, that's amazingly useless quality, never heard about sth like that.
Sibling comment says "unscheduled repairs because of corrosion damage".
> Those hours don't count against reliability metrics
Says who? If they need maintenance that often, they're unreliable sources.
That "doesn't count" idea sounds like excuses the owners/responsible could come up with, to get away with their incompetence (or what's going on).
It'd been nice if they had worked (apparently better than burning coal and causing climate change)
Reliability is a word and it has a meaning. With that in mind nothing beats renewables because the tech just works and they're so decentralized that a glitch of huge proportions would be needed to make them not work as designed. On the other hand a huge power plant can go out unexpectedly and take a massive part of the grid offline just as unexpectedly. That's unreliable and it's in fact what has happened this year.
Of course they are, that's how they work. 6 of them came online in last two weeks. But that's not what you were honestly implying there, is it?
> Reliability is a word and it has a meaning. With that in mind nothing beats renewables because the tech just works and they're so decentralized that a glitch of huge proportions would be needed to make them not work as designed. On the other hand a huge power plant can go out unexpectedly and take a massive part of the grid offline just as unexpectedly. That's unreliable and it's in fact what has happened this year.
Whatever meaning "reliability" has (especially in practical terms of you getting your power), it's really not what you wrote in the other sentences. Especially it's not a word that means "ignoring drawbacks of whichever option I like."
> To deliver 315TWh, EDF needs to bring back significant capacity, i.e. solve some of its corrosion issues. Can it?
> We will see. EDF has a way to over-promise and under-deliver over the years. So this "major, not minor" - make no mistake.
> 32/n
The tweet also contains a list of 8 reactors that were supposed to be back earlier but got "delayed". So we can pretend that there's no problem or danger of further delays, but that's just wishful thinking. The market certainly doesn't buy it, the futures prices for France were 2x any other country in Europe for early next year last time I checked.
Reliability is in fact a word that has nothing to do with drawbacks of something else. The only thing that matters is, is it delivering on what it said it would do. The issue is you're interpreting what I said based on your assumptions. The word you are maybe thinking of for renewables output is not reliability, but predictability. But even here you'd be wrong since their output can be predicted pretty accurately based on weather forecasts. So they are both reliable and predictable. Nuclear is neither as it was made quite clear this year (and clear in other ways in decades before). You could call renewables variable, since their output, well, varies. But it does so in a predictable and reliable way.
That speaks nothing to the 'reliability of keeping plants online' that you are referring to. even if the reliability referred to by the author was claiming they are easy to keep online, that doesn't except France from the need of keeping good maintenance of the plants.
Now the 2nd part on your claim about renewables. most claims in output and gains in renewables include hydro electric (which is kind of weird since the super green crowd villainised hydro electric ), which is a great solution but unfortunately most of the best opportunities for hydro electric have already been exploited. wind and solar makes sense in certain situations, but in most it doesnt.
renewables should be part of the planning as much as possible, but they are not in a position to help Europe in its current situation. Germany's decision to shut down nuclear power plants just after fukushima because it was the social media hip thing to do at the time, has been a disastrous decision.
The problem with renewable energies in Germany is that we do not have (or can't get?) enough water power plants. Solar energy doesn't really work at all, because energy is also needed at night and wind energy is also not very reliable. To compensate for this you need even more wind turbines. The assumption here seems to be that these are really better for the climate, but I don't see that either if you have to use that much resources to build these to compensate for miniscule amounts of basic electricity load.
> My guess is that renewables will continue to be a huge winner, especially in this crisis.
Winner of what? In Germany we have thousands of thousands of wind turbines and still we are sliding into an energy crisis. Sure, some days they probably could produce 100% of the electricity demand, but some days they barely produce any electricity. The idea was to compensate with gas power plants ...
We'd have a lot more cheaper power and a lot less Government subsidies.
I do not know what the intersection is with the set of reactors that had to be shut down. One must understand that EDF is under immense pressure as an underfunded public provider, as it is forced to comply with price regulations (out of its own pockets as the government owes it a lot of money that curiously fails to be paid back), provides electricity at a discount to other European countries - someone has to compensate for Germany's plant closures - and private providers - which do not produce anyhting, they buy power at a discount from EDF then resell it to French people at a markup et voilà. EDF is also bound by law to buy solar energy produced by homes for a higher price than they end up selling it later on.
Basically my argument is that this might have less to do with the reliability of nuclear energy and more with how the EU, the govt and private parties rip EDF off while leaving it with no option as to what to do with its aging nuclear park.
Quite unfortunate that the writeup is on twitter though. To fix their broken UX you need threadreader and that in turn is broken too: "The table below"...nope no table. Videos broken too. So now you get to cross reference two broken platforms just to figure out what someone is trying to say. sigh...
This is precisely what I had been jumping up and down about for years, especially at the beginning of this year. The irony that Germany doesn't want nuclear power internally, yet buys their direct neighbour's nuclear power instead.
> France is looking like they might get their fleet back on track by beginning 2023 after they sorted out their corrosion issues
Apparently. I doubt it. Too little too late for this winter.
> UK just fasttracked fracking (sigh) and sizewell C nuclear plant seems to have gotten the go ahead.
I'll take fracking over freezing to death. The alternative is people will burn whatever is not nailed down, and you can bet that would be worse. Sizewell C is too little too late. None of this will make a difference this winter.
> Quite unfortunate that the writeup is on twitter though.
Something as important as this should be on a news outlet's website. People most definitely need to see it and read it.
French have been using the last few years to do maintenance on their nuclear plants.
Going into this winter, Germany will suffer far far more than France.
In any case, this winter is very special. It‘s not a good example to make an argument for one technology or another. Long-term I think Germany is better prepared. A lot of work has been going into heat pumps, properly isolating houses, renewables and so on.
If renewables cannot handle WINTER then that's pretty telling of what quality of a solution it is.
France is in a much better situation. Better isolation, heat pumps are technology independent, you just need reliable electricity.
On the other side, if you have a central heating system, you can replace the burner with a heat pump and leave the rest mostly unchanged. I say mostly, as you want to optimize the whole system towards lower water temperatures to get higher efficiencies of the heat pumps. But this can be done, and if you have in-the-floor heating already, this can be skipped as that works with low water temperatures anyway.
I'm not sure if there is a major difference in insulation. Old houses are in Germany are not great, new houses usually are, and it's probably the same in France.
And the only reason nuclear plants in France have been down this year, is because as always in the last 30 years, the French Left attempted to kill nuclear and starting in 2015 started de-prioritizing it.
And those plans will soon be online when the maintenance is done and then continue to provide green energy for decades.
The failure in France was to try to get away from nuclear and stop building new plants. Instead starting to use more and more gas.
France had amazingly advanced nuclear plants ready for to be built in large numbers to secure the future. But guess what happen, the French Left (with Greens) killed these programs.
French nuclear works fine, and has been for 40 years. Had other countries acted like France we would be in a much better situation now.
And I for one would prefer some temporarily offline plants rather then breathing lots and lots of coal dust.
I consider evangelical Christians to have fucked up 200% with their response to gay marriage, instead of fighting it they should have made it mandatory, much better for the current spread of untold sexual diseases, not only the ones you've heard of, but thousands of new ones. All because they couldn't form the only bubble (group of sex partners) that actually works, a bubble of two. Marriage.
When was this last true? Is this net export, or is this just some of France using German electricity?
Germany has been actively shutting down nuclear power stations without replacing their capacity for quite a few years.
If Germany is self sufficient for this winter, why are they beginning to impose energy restrictions on government buildings? Why are they having so much issue sourcing cheap energy? To me it sounds like a net import situation.
> In fact many of the nuclear plants in France don‘t work, especially this year.
As the thread suggested, this is because they are addressing a corrosion issue. These will at best not be ready till early 2023.
https://www.renewable-ei.org/en/activities/column/20180302.h...
> If Germany is self sufficient for this winter, why are they beginning to impose energy restrictions on government buildings? Why are they having so much issue sourcing cheap energy? To me it sounds like a net import situation.
It is more complicated than that. If Germany runs out of gas this winter, then the lights in Italy will go out, because Germany, despite of all the issues, is a net exporter of electricity.
... or at least we "want" to do that, but it turns out that some operators of nuclear power plants have delayed some much-needed maintenance in light of the upcoming shutdown, so at least Isar 2 doesn't seem to be ready to operate longer.
And all the Bavarian politicians have "accidentally" failed to disclose this until far too late (in Bavaria, CSU is the dominant political party, and they aren't in power at the federal level right now, so don't feel compelled to play nice).
They put _two_ reactor shutdowns on hold in case OIL powered floating generators wont suffice. Third one is being shut down permanently just like russian friends requested. https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/berlin-eyes-oil...
>But despite warnings of multi-hour blackouts, Economy and Climate Action Minister Robert Habeck confirmed the country’s planned nuclear power phase-out by the end of 2022.
>Germany’s nuclear exit will only be forestalled by a temporary cold reserve of two power plants, which could be reactivated if needed to ensure grid stability in the country’s South
>On Monday, Berlin decided to mothball two of its nuclear reactors for months despite a host of experts insisting they continue running, while the third will be shut down completely, to be replaced by swimming oil-fired power plants.
This is, at least, from my experience living in India (in a part where it does get cold). Heating was whatever since the blackouts Werner long, and since blackouts are normal, we had backup generators and UPSs for things like WiFi routers and elevators.
Given that you are paying in Euros, how do you expect to get enough solar energy over winter?
Same in Spain when I lived there.
If you can get solar for yourself, get it while still being connected to the electric grid. You will have a much more reliable energy system than just relying on the grid.
According to https://uk.renogy.com/blog/what-is-the-average-payback-perio... the payback time is now around 12-18 years, which is worse than here in Germany (I did a calculation for a small 600W installation in my area, and it came back with 8 years), but still better than the expected life time (20-25 years). This data is from 2021, maybe rising energy prices will lower the amortization time.
In general, smaller installations have lower amortization times, because the higher percentage of power produced that you consume yourself (and you pay more for a kWh than you get for selling one).
It wouldn’t help in the case of these energy shortages though, unless you’re fully off-grid, as by law grid-tied inverters must shut off in the case of a black out, in order to prevent feedback to the grid.
The cabinet member in charge of energy is literally a former Greenpeace executive who doubled down on closing the three remaining plants in Germany THIS YEAR.
German is insane.
And please refrain from calling a whole country as insane, especially based on wrong information.
- the summer droughts caused nuclear reactors to stop due to the lack of water
- russia provides ~40% of ALL nuclear fuel
- even France is getting their from Kazahstan
So in light of these: more solar and wind, combined with possibly metan generation to store it as per https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/07/22/were-going-to-...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium...
That very much depends on specific technology and is not inherent in all nuclear. If and how much water is needed depends very much on what and where you are building.
If we were not stuck with technology from 1960 this wouldn't have been an issue for decades, but instead of innovating the last 40 years nuclear industry had to fight a battle for survival and with very little research.
> - russia provides ~40% of ALL nuclear fuel
This is because Russia had a explicit policy of underbidding nuclear everybody in nuclear fuel providing.
This is not inevitable, there is plenty of nuclear material in lots of places and many places that can make fuel.
Nuclear fuel is far easier to transport then gas.
The average heat rate for natural gas is something like 7732BTU/kWh, or 44% efficient[2]. The cost of natural gas around Sep 2019, before this whole mess, was $2.56/MMBtu[3]. That comes out to $0.02/kWh, 2.5x per kWh than nuclear.
At current price levels of $8.81/MMBtu, that comes to $0.068/kWh, or 8.8x per kWh than nuclear.
Not even considering how nuclear fuel can be stored and stockpiled much more effectively than gas, the benefit to Russia of using gas is much much higher than using nuclear.
[1]: http://www.energybc.ca/cache/nuclear/nuclear2/www.world-nucl... [2]: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=667&t=3 [3]: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/rngwhhdm.htm
Even if they were good arguments, Nuclear isn't just slightly better than solar/wind, so some problems don't change the conclusion.
From what I read, it wasn't "lack of water" but rather the rivers were so warm that the reactors dumping more warm water in the rivers would be a danger to the wildlife ecosystem of the river. If it was an emergency we could probably say "let the fish die, we need power". Reactors that had evaporation towers instead of dumping hot water in the river could keep running. If we want to prepare for inevitable global warming, we should invest in adding evaporation towers to the remaining reactors (good luck convincing anyone to pay for that though).
They're 5x more expensive than wind and solar and about 2x more expensive than a wind+solar+pumped storage combo.
In France their capacity factor has declined to ~72% which is only about 5% above the best wind farms.
What's the up side? I dont see it any more. It's an overpriced means of generating electricity that is slightly less variable that has a lead time of 19.5 years more than a solar farm.
> wind+solar+pumped storage combo
Pumped storage is available in most places. And there is literally no alternative.
Its insane to build a society on a technology that if something goes wrong, society only has 1-2 days of electricity storage.
> In France their capacity factor has declined to ~72% which is only about 5% above the best wind farms.
The best windfarms that only exist in a few places and is certainty not generally that high.
An France this year had some issues that happened because nuclear was neglected for years as their leadership jumped on the all renewables trend.
France had advanced reactors in the 90s and guess what, instead of building them they were killed in the endless attempted by some forces (usually greens and left) to prevent nuclear from happening.
Had France simply build 3-5 of those plants they had ready in the late 90s they would be amazing by now.
> slightly less variable
Is actually much less variable if you look at it in totality.
> lead time of 19.5 years
Again this is just generalizing from the worst possible example. If a country actually commits to building a significant amount of plants rather then a single project that constantly on the verge of being canceled things look quite different.
Had Germany in 2000 simply started to build as many reactors as possible they would be finishing them at many a year now and building them at a rate of 4-5 years a pop. They would be far more green and far more reliably then what they have actually managed with their green revolution (and huge investment in gas).
Sadly it doesnt surprise me that youre surprised. You ought to check lazard for a full LCOE comparison. I didnt just make it up.
>France had advanced reactors in the 90s and guess what, instead of building them they were killed in the endless attempted by some forces (usually greens and left) to prevent nuclear from happening.
The greens never had enough political power to do that. Cost was the only reason France's nuclear industry struggled. It's the same reason it was just nationalized.
The nuclear lobby does share the oil industry's utter disdain both for the environment and environmentalists though, something it has apparently passed on to some of its more enthusiastic supporters.
It is so very, very obvious how much they hate the Germans with a for proving nuclear power doesnt need to be part of any green transition, for instance. This why certain groups will never shut up about the "environmental damage" done by Germany shutting down just two nuclear plants and never even mention Poland being 80% coal fired.
>Had Germany in 2000 simply started to build as many reactors as possible
Then theyd have run out of money. It's a good thing they didnt choose the 5x more expensive, slightly more dangerous and slower option. Unlike the nuclear industry they gave half a damn about global warming.
Maybe if Poland did the same thing they wouldnt be 80% coal powered.
These 'fake private' industries don't make much sense anyway. The energy grid in these countries is centrally planned and was built as such.
> The nuclear lobby does share the oil industry's utter disdain both for the environment and environmentalists though
They certainty don't hate smart enviornmentalists who have for 50 years tried to move to green energy.
Of course they hate the kind of Greenpeace environmentalists who have for 50 years demonized the industry with absurd claims.
> The greens never had enough political power to do that.
Go and learn your history. The Greens in coalition with the left made it a explicit point to kill Superphénix.
> It is so very, very obvious how much they hate the Germans with a for proving nuclear power doesnt need to be part of any green transition, for instance.
And yet every single time in the last 5 years I have gone to electricity map I see France in a green color and Germany in a brown color. Amazing how France has been able to have a green grid when Germany was literally just coal.
CO2 saved in the past is far more important then CO2 saved now. What France did in the 70-90s is what everybody could have done and we would have non of the problems we have now.
Not to mention the 100000s of people who suffering from health defects and early deaths because of the greens implicit protected coal.
> Then theyd have run out of money. It's a good thing they didnt choose the 5x more expensive, slightly more dangerous and slower option. Unlike the nuclear industry they gave half a damn about global warming.
Carbon intensity in Germany right now: 316g (we are literally talking middle of the day with massive solar)
Carbon intensity in France right now: 65g
Oh btw, France right now is exporting green power to Germany.
Its amazing how ignorant people can be. Look at France transformation in the 70-90s and how much nuclear they built how quickly. That was with 1960 technology. Germany from 2000-2020 could have been significantly faster with newer technology.
Its absolutly absurd to suggest that Germany from 2000-2020 couldn't have built 40 nuclear reactors. Had they been serious they could have built double that. You can even just built them at current location of coal plants and then turn of those coal plants once the reactor is done, minimal disruption of the overall grid.
And again, you constant claim of '5x' as expensive simply doesn't hold up if you are mass producing plants. Its just nonsense. You are concluding from individual projects that were built in isolation in countries that had lost experience.
Yeah. If westinghouse had started mass producing the same reactor over and over the price per unit would have plummetted and they wouldn't have gone bankrupt.
Oh wait...
If it's so wonderful, put up or shut up. The nuclear industry can start doing what the renewable industry did after a comparative pittance in public R&D money and self fund + self insure projects with no subsidy, no sweetheart loans, and no guaranteed tarriff.
While you're off doing that, solar LCOE will reach price parity with the fuel cost alone.
There's a non zero chance that, together with the inevitable far right government that will come out of today's elections, the country will collapse between this and the following winter. Italy is just too dependent from NG, it can't just survive a total loss of supplies from Russia sadly.
The truth is that the Italian people have been deeply disgruntled with politics for decades, and are only voting Meloni this time because they've been cyclically protest voting everyone that was in opposition to the last government for the last 30 years, since Berlusconi in 1994. People do not care a bit about her ideas, and I'd be damned if there's more than a single digit percent of her voters that do know a single policy she's pushing for. She simply wasn't in Draghi's government, so she's not the current establishment. If she fails to establish an authoritarian regime in the next few years, she'll be destroyed the next election in favour of someone else. That's how Italian politics work.
Italy needs access to credit with EU rates and a strong EU in general to survive - but replacing a widely respected figure (Draghi) with a previously unknown Fascist nostalgic nobody really likes is not really a great way to project your influence in Brussels - quite the opposite. For instance, it's pointless for Italy to push for less sanctions to Russia, because the main pipeline that goes from Russia to Italy passes through several other countries, including Ukraine itself. Italy needs a EU wide NG price cap, fast, or it seriously risks social and economic collapse in the following months.
About NIMBY: Italy rejected nuclear power due to widespread fears after Chernobyl that were capitalized by the corrupt political class of the time (a widespread sweep of that system happened in 1992 with the Mani Pulite process, but it was too late). Since then building ANYTHING in Italy immediately causes spontaneous committees of citizens to spring up to protest the realization of the aforementioned structure, infrastructure or public utility.
For instance, people have protested in recent years:
- against high speed trains, when Italy is a country where basically everything goes on polluting diesel trucks. This opposition delayed the project for years, but now finally Italy has a best in class high speed train service everyone loves. Go figure.
- against dumps, waste-to-energy plants, biogas plants, and so on. Nobody wants them close to their area, even though they have to be built somewhere and Italy has a very high population density. Result? Rome is swimming in trash, everywhere, with no solution in sight. Italy is paying foreign countries to take their rubbish, wasting huge amounts of money. Forcing such a project through would mean committing a political suicide for any Italian politician.
- against windmills. There are lots of offshore windmill farms that can't be built due to them being eyesores. It doesn't matter that Italy does need those mills desperately - it will still take them 4x the time to be built due to basically EVERYONE suing the state at every possible court up to the ECHR.
- against NG pipelines and terminals. The mayor of Piombino, who ironically is from Brothers of Italy, is ferociously opposing docking a FSRU in order to start regasify LNG shipped from the US and Qatar, in order to cover for the supply reduction of Russian gas. It does not matter that it of paramount importance, people are suing the state company and thus delaying the process until the courts clear up the matter.
The whole thing is worsened by the fact Italians have been the target of a deluge of fake news on social and conventional media for decades, way before it was a worldwide problem. That's how a media moghul such as Berlusconi got elected in the '90s/'00s in the first place.
This winter is going to be a very volatile time.
This winter is going to be a very hard time for Russia.
It's possible EU/NATO will collapse, it's not a while since we were tested like this. Well, maybe if we could endure covid lockdowns, then maybe a few rolling blackouts won't be the end of the EU.
If nothing else rolling blackouts would motivate massive investment.
Moreover, I doubt politicians will be able to see submission before Russia as a solution to rolling blackouts. The opposition will point out the obvious, Russia can just do it again.
Also, it would be pointless for Italy to go against Europe just to get more Russian gas - because in all likelihood it would never happen in the first place. Russia can tempt Germany to leave Ukraine in the dust and open North Stream 2, but Italy gets its Russian gas through a pipeline that goes through Ukraine, Austria and Slovenia - anyone but a fool would think that the Ukranians would let the Italians get away with that. Ukraine can cut Italy's supply in an instant if they want.
Italy needs LNG regasification capacity, and it needs it now. The only way to get it if FSRUs don't go online in the next few months is through the existing pipeline from the Netherlands.
As long as is a voluntary program, promoting "migration" of a percentage of people between Mediterranean and Northern European countries, in the worst months of winter could be part of the solution.
You still will need some heating, because houses designed for hot places typically lack isolation layers. But is raising the temperature of your home from 5 to 20C, not from -35 to 20. Many low places out of the touristic areas are too hot in summer, but warm in winter. High places and the inner part of the country can be very cold, of course but much best insulated.
Put 10Km or more between you and the sea. This will avoid the most touristic areas (more expensive, much more noisier, and filled with hormonally rabid adolescents). You will still have the benefit of the beach at a few minutes but none of the drunktards that feel the need to sing the Macarena at 4:AM.
Don't rent anything built in or near a dry riverbed. Ever. Today is forbidden to built in flooding areas, but in the past they were much more relaxed in that sense. Just because it floods only each ten years does not mean that is not just this year.
Elder people in small villages of Spain, Portugal France or Greece will not speak English. Younger may speak. More or less. Crime levels will be typically low and the places are safe, but expect a lot of crimes against the Anglish language and much head scratching, huhs and ohs if you speak it. Use google translate. Check if the internet connection is reasonable also.
I don’t remember this analysis being talked about. The problem was cast mostly as a domestic issue - that’s my take at least.
In hindsight I think it was only the left that had a solution that maybe would address this for Sweden at least. They wanted to have domestic and EU-pricing.
Then the prices for electricity in EU would become so high that Italy would be forced to act?
But would it be legal? That kind of protectionism would definitely run counter to the ideals if the EU common market.
It's hard to know what EU countries might do, but during covid the EU avoided protectionism when it came to vaccines.
Of course, it could be different this time.
There was A LOT of backstabbing in the beginning regarding medical supplies. Landlocked countries got screwed in transit. Even Red Cross aid was confiscated.
Thankfully the panic only lasted about one two weeks or something.
But in this case Sweden and Norway probably could do electricity without supplies from the European grid. But they might not want to be as unreliable partners as Russia turned out to be...
If you void contracts and begin backstabbing when things get hard, people won't trust you in the future.
If I remember correctly that was one of the main arguments against the left's solution. The counter argument was that other countries are already doing this or planning on doing it. I believe some parties in Italy has talked about putting a price cap on electricity and gas. But the same applies to them – is it legal?
It doesn't create good incentives when Sweden exports electricity to Italy (and others of course) that the Italian government would step in and put a price cap. I guess the Italian government will spot the difference – though lending from the EU?
Same would would apply for the left in Sweden I guess. Setting a domestic price cap and market price on exports.
What a mess.
That said, to some extend it might just be more expensive LNG that dictates the price -- maybe there is sufficient electricity at a high price point.
I guess some of your neighbours have years worth of coal ... and toilet paper, of course.
https://news.err.ee/1608726511/estonia-grid-connected-to-eur...
This winter Germany will suffer major shortages of power.
Gas storages will be almost completely full and the usage has already dropped a lot.
Maybe next winter. But by then we probably have a replacement.
My take-away: Green parties all over Europe were in dictatorship of the accepted moral public opinion, making fun of counter arguments and led Europe (just Germany?) into the missery they are in now.
If you give me a lump of coal you give me power. If I burn that coal I get power.
Renewable energy is cheap. Renewable power isn't.
Nuclear energy is expensive. Nuclear power isn't.
You can't run a modern economy on renewables because you can't turn off society when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow.
Europe is now learning this painful lesson.
Did you mean energy here?
Nobody is running on renewables. Well, there are some exceptions. Countries like Norway and Sweden have enough hydro that they do run on renewables. But ignoring those, nobody does.
Wind and solar pairs well with natural gas. Coming from a fossil fuel situation, wind and solar paired with gas have the big advantage that you get a reliable system, easy reduction of CO2 by adding more wind and solar. And it is cheap.
New nuclear is not cheap (compared to Russian gas).
Of course where this failed was in the gas part. Obviously, wind and solar need to be blamed for the lack of Russian gas. Same with Texas, when something goes wrong, blame renewables.
The obvious problem, for both renewables and for nuclear is cheap fossil fuel.
Expensive fossil fuel might make nuclear attractive.
Expensive fossil fuel will result in a focus on storage. But before that, most EU countries need a lot more wind and solar before they can focus on storage. There is no point in focusing on storage if output of renewables can't keep up with demand.
Maybe, a but if pumped hydro, some batteries, and power intensive industries running only when power is cheap?
(Not that nuclear wouldn't be nice, it's just never quick fix)
Sure. Hope you don't have anything important running on electricity, like say life support systems.
[0] https://www.politico.eu/article/chinese-wind-farm-investment...
So its not some conspiracy that they were supporting building wind in europe too. They now have the most experience with this cutting edge energy technology.
To quote a german article from 2020:
"If nuclear waste can actually be disposed at the new facility starting 2050, that would still put Germany in the international vanguard: 70 years after humankind began using nuclear energy, not a single permanent waste storage site has been officially opened anywhere in the world."
Source:https://dw.com/en/germany-launches-new-search-for-permanent-...
That aside, even in a worst case scenario, nuclear waste destroys local ecosystems. That cost would still be worthwhile if we can prevent the destruction of the global ecosystem.
We're at a stage of impeding global disaster that I'd rather have a 50km exclusion zone around Asse (or whatever other site) than not being carbon neutral or negative.
But then again, nuclear waste disposal is mostly an unsolved problem because it's expensive - and the resources aren't being allocated to it because it's not seen as a priority, not because it's impossible.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
Some figures for background are given in [2].
[1] http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph241/anderson-k2/
[2] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/WR-France_details_nuclear...
We in South Africa are used to that term for the past 8+years - phrase/term coined by Eskom!
I'm as pro-nuclear as you can be, since at least 2017 but especially since i've read about it, in 2019, but let's not blame nuclear failure on "green energy" when it's not. Nuclear tech have been abandonned by the general public and the politician since the 90s, and especailly after fuckushima, was faded by the society.
It has nothing to do with green energy. Maybe Greepeace is at fault, but this is probably one of the most corrupt environmentalist NGO anyway, so i doubt serious people listen to them.
We see how "well" it goes in France, where they kept nuclear going and now their reactors are rotting away under their butts and they have to import from Germany.
Life in Europe would be better if conservatives wouldn't have failed us and we actually had "green energy" by now...
Energy is a complex issue, probably the most complex societal, technical and social issue we have, and trying to put everything on one single actor (or movement) do not make the discussion constructive. I'm for a diverse mix and reducing gas, oil and coal, not in percentage but in actual quantity (we don't really do this in europe sadly).
Someone who can read Belgian news will need to explain why the license extension wasn't granted, and whether that makes sense.
In 2012, small cracks were discovered in the pressure vessels of a number of reactors, introduced by hydrogen during the casting of the steel. That was grist on the mill of the anti-nuclear lobby. According to the expert reports, the vessels should be ok (there are some links to English reports on the nuclear safety agency website [2]), but it is easy to fear-monger when nuclear energy is involved. That seemed to have sealed the fate of the nuclear reactors.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out#Belgiu... [2] https://fanc.fgov.be/nl/dossiers/kerncentrales-belgie/actual...
In 2015 the government already extended the lifespan of 2 nuclear power plants. However, the power plant that was just shut down (Doel 3) did not get an extension of lifespan and so it has been shut down according to the initial law introduced in 2003.
It's an understatement to say it's unfortunate that it has been shut during an energy crisis.
Ideally, on the day after planned shutdown, your reactor would be in need of refueling, and all the other large maintenance items; and you wouldn't have the parts on hand to do it. 19 years is plenty of time to align the schedules.
One way or the other, the next time this plant shuts down after November, it stays down. So there is no big hope of this plant operating for much longer any way you turn it. Of course, new fuel rods could be ordered, but probably that would take over a year, as far as I know. Which means, it will not be part of the energy supply for the next 12 months and whether the investment into getting new fuel rods and keeping the plant ready for service for another year is worth it, is another question.
“The closing dates are determined by law and the licenses to operate the power plants end on those dates. That has been established for a long time and we have been preparing for that for a long time.”
The government did ask Engie in July to see whether both reactors could possibly continue for a few more months to bridge the difficult winter, but according to the French energy group, that is unfeasible both technically and in terms of safety.There is no technical reason they could not have extended their shutdown plans.
This is just an unfortunate combination of bureaucratic lethargy and anti-nuclear ideologues.
can you provide a link to that?
Is the timing unfortunate? Yes. But everything else is just exaggerated. This was a small reactor which was responsible for a tiny amount of production in a tiny country.
Should we replace it? Maybe. But then we should have started construction 20 years ago. Given that this didn't happen, the rest of the discussion is somewhat moot. We could probably start replacing it today, but not many nuclear power plants are being built in Europe, costs are insane, and timeframes are so long that no one is willing to invest.
There are (somewhat literally) crowd funded suppliers of renewable energy (cooperatives like Ecopower.be). Perhaps someone should start something similar for nukes.
This is really a tragedy.
Seriously, looks like a 14 year old wrote it. I'm not wasting even 5min to parse it.
(Even quebec, which is very used to extreme winters, lost electricity for nearly a month back in 1998. On the other hand, I can't think of anything similar to this train wreck situation europe managed to get itself into, not since the 70s at least. So it is a pretty unique fuck up due to very bad policy, and one that's been happening in slow motion)
It'd be great if you didn't lower yourself to name calling as well. (Note: I don't much like the comment you're responding to, but let's be civil here)
And the share of renewables in Texas was negligible when the frid broke down, that was due to failing gas power plants because of low temperatures.
The real problem with this situation is we are at a point at which deploying fixes to these problems take so long that even discussing it feels useless.
Also, because this is about peak demand, increasing base load generation is of limited help. There is a shortage of power plants that are cheap enough to keep idle most of the time but can be adjusted quickly. That means hydro and natural gas. Even coal is too expensive. Storage may be the long-term solution, but we are not there yet.
Of course, but in a system trying to avoid fossil fuel use, it smooths out the rough edges in significant ways: during non-peak times, by preventing blackouts or brownouts when there are medium to long term wind & solar outages (which no realistic storage can cover yet in places without pumped hydro), and during peak times by reducing the amount of additional energy required.
The real irony of your comment however is that you are actually looking to Texas now. The EU is now relying in large part on the US for LNG and much of the LNG is being shipped from the Gulf Coast in Texas. The majority of the US excess natural gas supply is now being shipped to Europe. As of April that was 74%. [3]. I'm guessing it's even more now.
[1] https://www.texastribune.org/2021/03/18/texas-winter-storm-b...
[2] https://www.texastribune.org/2022/02/15/texas-power-grid-win...
So the majority might be partially responsible. If you disagree hard, we'll be heading into "politeia" discussions, king-philosophers and what not.
In Sweden, the green and socialists have been running the show for the past 8 years and during this period shut down 4 nuclear reactors that had at least 20+ years left of steam.
...so no, I continue to have little sympathy to any issues Germany will have this winter.
Gas from the US or the middle east maybe?
Assigning someone with dumb ideas to run the country, not checking and correcting them, and then scapegoating them when it goes wrong... That's not democracy, that's laziness and cowardice.
But joining the war this year was crazy given the current situation, Europe is doomed.
But doing the short-term irrational thing and joining the economic (and in weapons support, kinetic) war against Russia is exactly what the fucked-up initial conditions require. When you've worked yourself into that kind of lose-lose situation, making the rational choice has a long-term game theoretic downside.
The next Putin that manages to maneuver a Western country into a bind can't count on them rolling onto their backs and crying for mercy, even if that seemed like the rational choice. We've seen it demonstrated, also disproving that Westerners are lazy, fat, spoiled and unable to handle significant pain for a greater cause.
This is certainly a lesson for the West, but it's also a lesson for the autocrats.
If we didn‘t join this war, the war would come to us. Most Europeans fortunately understand this.
There were SO SO many public warnings about this.
I can't distinguish this thread from one of those crazy-lists people sometimes put together. It is too disjointed and lacks citations or developed thoughts.
Ugh. I hate Twitter.
>The European electricity grid is a modern miracle. It is the largest synchronous electrical grid (by connected power) in the world. It interconnects 520 million end-customers in 32 countries, including non-European Union members such as Morocco or Turkey.
But then he makes a sharp turn to:
>Here is the thing. The grid builds on physics, not ideology.(...)
...So is the grid a feat of engineering, or ideology? Haven't the decision makers being in contact with the ones who built and maintain this "modern miracle"? Or was this modern miracle the product of pure luck?
To end up on:
>What am I trying to explain?
>Europe will NOT deliver on its climate targets.
>The energy transition is an order of mangnitude more complex than laws or ideology allow for. Accept.
Ok.
and since 2022, also Ukraine and Moldova
This may be another 'sound-bite', you named it so, but (another OT) i was asking myself, the 100% loss at the moscow-stock-exchange (on friday!?) wich about i read yesterday, where did the losses went... and maybe with another (there was a 'unuseful'-swinging within what you wrote) 'sound-bit' you may become a larger view (perception ? perspective...word-list...full-text...what ever, feel free to name it by yourself... and good luck to estimate what may be in your intention, and what...^^), which is commanded right for your (opened) eyes... (-:
hu well now for my own, i thought that was a bit 'offending' never mind...
PV and wind, using Chinese modules, outbid nuclear already in 2017 (?), being cheaper then Hinkley C. Never mind where we vet nuclear fuel rods from, right? Plus the fact that the summer heat wave and drought had negative effects on power plant output, not for the first time, due to limited cooling capacities. But hey, the current political climate is great to turn that into a "we are all gonna freeze in the darkness of winter" narrative, one thatt is easily highjacked by populist movements. Movements, I have to remind everyone, that are, and have been, manipulated by Russia.
It is the German greens that oush for more weapons for Ukraine and extensions for nuclear power plants. It doesn't get anymore real politik than that.
>Oh, so it is some politians fault that power plant operators screw up maintenance?
Firstly, EDF, the french operator for nuclear power plants belongs to 80+% to the state. So, first off: fucking yes it is, especially when said politicians have spent the last 20 years not investing in their plants, despite the insane work that EDF has done. Reminder that said politicians are forcing EDF to sell 120TWh worth of electricity to "alternative providers", who are currently kicking out their customers to just make money selling that electricity back on the market.. Secondly, maintenance was delayed by Covid, a once in a century event, and two years worth of delay is remarkably short. Thirdly, due to said politicians continuous non-maintenance of the nuclear sector, there are indeed very few people able to maintain said reactors. Surprising isn't it ? Spend 20 years saying nuclear is shit and should be abandoned (purely because of political plays to win alliances with the greens) and then play surprised when your only source of reliable power doesn't have anyone to maintain it, because what engineer would do the career suicide of going in an industry which is being abandoned ?
>PV and wind, using Chinese modules, outbid nuclear already in 2017 (?),
Ah yeah, the PV and wind that Germany has installed, that are currently pretty much all not working (https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE?utm_source=electrici..., 370gCO2/kWh, up to 510 yesterday, and hasn't gone underneath 300 for the past month) ? Sounds great. Both for people who get to sell their PV that only needs to run for half the year because it literally can't in winter and for the petrol groups that are selling gas to make up for the energy.
But sure, they cost less. Don't take into account the insane maintenance costs (have fun changing your turbines every 20 years, they're made of non recyclable material, it's all good), the insane land use (contrary to some beliefs, not every country has surface to waste like the US does), the inconsistency of the production (see: germany).
The german greens are, for once in their fucking lives, doing something sensible, both when it comes to Ukraine or nuclear power plants (and they're doing so because they are forced). Don't let that make you forget the past 30 years of decisions that set all of us back.
Operating a nuclear plant only in order to compete with oil and natural gas is simply too expensive, and wind and solar can always out compete nuclear when its windy and sunny. Everyone has acted economical rational to create the situation we are in.
Source? The plan was to reduce nuclear share to ~50%, not "go away from nuclear", which still required building a ton of new reactors to replace those close to their end of life. Furthermore, the nuclear reactors are owned and operated by EDF, which has always been majority state owned and is in the process of being renationalisated. Shareholders were never asked about anything.
So it's not reducing by 20%, it's "with projected growth it will only account for 50% instead of 70%, so capacity will stay roughly the same, only refreshed".
And again, shareholders don't matter, EDF has always been majority state owned.
So I don't understand what you don't understand there. There was barely any reduction to speak of, a full refresh was needed anyways due to age, and was planned for the future 50% of the grid, and private shareholders were never asked.
There's two big players, oil and renewable companies. Which are actually the same and both hate nuclear.
I thought this was obvious to everyone?
Its hilarious that a real button support for nuclear is claimed to be driven by a nuclear lobby.
The scary Nuclear lobby of Greenpeace imagination has never existed and was always tiny and almost totally incompetence.
But it just so happens that these dangerous underground force comes out of nowhere during this energy crisis to destroy renewables.
So they create horror stories where the lights go out when there is no wind in the middle of the night in winter. And then nuclear has to save the day.
Any kind of storage is immediately dismissed as infeasible or too expensive.
The make it extra scary, this article also introduces importing electricity as really bad. Without any kind of argument why just a single number of how much is imported shows how bad it is.
This way, shutting down a nuclear plant in Germany can be made extra scary because of a few neighboring countries that import electricity.
What a silly comment. The switch over to an electric cars is a multi year process that will take at least until 2030 just for new cars. The current problems won't last nearlt that long
Most EVs are charged over night, when grid usage is low. Doesn’t that maximise the use of a strained system?
Anyway that isn't an issue, because only a few elected ones can charge their Teslas on their private parkings.
And lots of people with a car don't actually park on the street. Its usually an outside parking spot or a parking garage. Both can add electricity rather easily.
And simply remaining on ICE is just about 100x dumber. I prefer walking, biking and trains to, but cars will not go away, and transitioning those to EV.
I have seen study that suggest its not as big an issue as you make it out to be. Please show me the study that has realistic assumptions that claims it will be a huge problem.