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Comment by yodsanklai | Hacker News Reader

France seems to be in a sweet spot: low electricity price and low CO2 emissions, thanks to nuclear power?

Household prices are meaningless in this context, because they are artificially kept low in France and sometimes are affected by taxes and fees elsewhere.

Here are spot marked prices: https://tradingeconomics.com/france/electricity-price https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/electricity-price

The true comparison require a lot of data and work. One would have to first calculate how much subsidies that each government spend on energy production, how much tax money is spent on grid stability, how much the taxes are, how high the fee is for grid connection, and how much easy producer take.

Spot market prices is just whatever the price is in EU, since all the grids are connected and every country in EU must trade if they have surplus energy. It represent the collective supply and demand within EU.

Interesting. In many states in the US, cost per Kw/H is lower for businesses, even very small ones, than for residences.

Kw/H -> kWh

It really is quite impressive to write a 3-letter unit with 4 errors.

And yet, you seem to have figured it out.

No, he's right. You want Joules. kW is Joules per second, dividing by hours gives Joules per second per second.

well aktchually…

Sweet spot of a mess I guess: half of the 56 nuclear plants were offline (and some still are) due to maintenance or too warm cooling water in Summer.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/03/edf-to-redu...

So even with half of the 56 nuclear plants offline, they're still ahead. Impressive.

Forgot to do maintenance in France so now all nuclear is bad?

Pushed back due to covid.

Thanks to that indeed, but the future doesn't look great, as little has been done in the last 20 years. So France will have to do a lot in the next decade, and that may change our prices.

Yes, France gets 70% of its electricity form nuclear power.

There's a important lesson about using nuclear power as an energy source in there. Contrast that with Germany which is shuttering their nuclear power plants in favor of renewables.

There is no such lesson. EDF is going bankrupt, France is spending billions trying to replace reactors aging out and about 20% or so of the ~70 billion decommissioning costs are funded.

The important lesson here should be that retail prices != prices.

I stand corrected!

See my comment to parent. There is an important lesson about not being misled by looking at the wrong data.

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