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Comment by dm319 | Hacker News Reader

What are you people in France paying for electricity at the moment?

About 110€/MWh, and also the government is planning the nuclear reactors to produce around 70€/MWh from 2026 onwards.

Another painful reminder of how Californias are being screwed on electricity prices, with double the US national average, which itself is higher than 110€/MWh.

That's the wholesale price paid to producers. Consumers are paying around 23c/kWh, however that (as with most European countries) has been subsided by the government - the real price should be higher.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/france-raise-regulated-...

105 EUR / MWh [0]

Google tells me 1 MWH = 105.26 liters of gas [1]

Math that out and it's basically 1 EUR per Liter of Gas

Gas seems at least 1.75 EUR / Liter, so a pretty good savings? [2]

0. https://tradingeconomics.com/france/electricity-price

1. https://hextobinary.com/unit/energy/from/gasoline/to/megawat...

2. https://www.cargopedia.net/europe-fuel-prices

Converting between the electrical energy and the heat energy intrinsic to gas is the wrong way to do that calculation. You need to compare efficiency vs efficiency to get a proper price comparison, as the heat energy of gasoline is much higher than the actual energy used to move a vehicle. Most is wasted.

A decently efficient EV is about 250Wh/mi (it’s closer to 220, but 250 makes math easy), so 105 EU of power can travel approximately 4000mi.

By comparison a decently efficient ICE (in Europe) gets about 5L/100km, roughly. So, to travel 6430km (4k miles) you’d need about 320L of fuel. At 1.75EU/L that would cost 560 EU.

It’s a very substantial difference, assuming your pricing is correct on fuel and energy cost.

You forgot about the much lower maintenance costs.

Also, please don't mix units.

Shouldn't the comparison use distance as the denominator?

I believe that the rates you are BenoitP have quoted are the wholesale rates. They are the rates that a grid operator might pay to buy electricity from a producer or from another grid operator.

Consumers rates will be at least about twice that.

A good heuristic to tell you are looking at a rate is that is not a consumer rate is that if it is quoted in units that are per MWh it is probably not a consumer rate. Consumer rates are almost always quoted per kWh.

In France though EDF has become a monopoly recently. I'm pretty sure the government fully intends to sell it as produced to French industries and individuals. Why wouldn't it? It is financed by us, we should reap its rewards.

Some others folks in the EU have chosen others means with lesser or unknown EROEI. But hey, their sovereign choices, their consequences. It's not like France is preventing them from doing nuclear.

I guess we'll see in a few years; but CfDs going over decades and being backed by governments I think it's safe to plan around this price.

the short-term answer is "it's a bit expensive right now", the long-term answer is "we mastered nuclear power a long time ago, it's bound to become plentiful dirt cheap and plentiful again eventually"

Looks like it was 15-50 in 2020 https://www.statista.com/statistics/1267546/france-monthly-w...

What happened in 8/2021 that caused a huge spike?

From memory, we enjoyed a heatwave in Jul - August ‘21 in UK/France.

Beyond demand pressures on the interconnected European market due to secondary effects of the heat and the COVID rebound, it’s likely nuclear output was reduced as the cooling potential of water sources was reduced - I vaguely remember articles on this before the cracking issue stole ‘headlines’.

Reduced nuclear output in France results in increased demand for less cost efficient national or more-expensive-than-nuclear international (interconnected) generators.

Why would there be a sudden reduced cooling potential of water sources for the nuclear plants? I have never heard of such a thing anywhere.

They are misrepresenting reality. The cooling potential was fine, it is just that France has regulation for how hot the water is allowed to be at the release in order to not raise average stream temperature too much.

It is mostly to protect the ecological system, nothing to do with any technical problem. They calculated that after going through the cooling process the water would be too hot and thus, they didn't restart the reactors.

Because that is second important part, this alone wouldn't be news worthy because reactors could be running in other parts of France and electricity shifted around. But the thing is that after a lack of care/maintenance for its nuclear industry (due to political powers and belief that we could do without in the long term) after the lockdowns of COVID, France had a lot of reactors that needed repairs/inspections/maintenance; all kind of compliance for regulatory approval. So, the heatwave problem was doubling down on an already reduced capacity but most of the time it shouldn't be a problem at all...

It was all over the news at the time, e.g. [0]

0: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/frances-edf-takes-13...

My provider is Engie, my cost per KWh was 0.248322148 Euros in October.

This is when I thought I was paying 1/3 that then see the rates increased to 1/2 and I have new fees that appeared or increased.

USA average shows $0.23/kWh

https://www.energysage.com/local-data/electricity-cost/

Electricity rates in the U.S. average 12 cents KWh according to the Energy Information Administration. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/

2022 data.

The real cost is difficult to assess because taxpayers' money is massively used in order to support 'EDF', the local (now de facto) monopoly.

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