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Comment by icehawk | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand what you mean by that?

When your energy mix is biased towards wind and solar, the market price for energy fluctuates with the weather, basically. So when there's a lot of wind in an area, then energy is cheap (and the wind farms lose money.) When there's no wind, energy becomes expensive and the wind farms lose money.

This means that base power generation from nuclear also loses money when there's a lot of wind, and that coal power is needed when there isn't any [wind.] So we all pay more _and_ destroy the environment more.

When there's no wind in Germany, they buy from the energy market, driving up prices all the way up to what Coal and Oil power generation costs (which is expensive and terrible), since that is the competition. And since everyone pays market prices, we all suffer from Germany's lack of nuclear. (And ours.)

In a sense: Germany has socialised their energy production.

If I was conspiratorical, I would say that Russia played Germany like a fiddle in this regard. Cancel your nuclear so that you have to buy gas for energy production. And here we are.

Thank you Sweden and Germany.

Actually it has been revealed that Gazprom supported financially anti-nuclear and pro-renewable NGOs in Germany for many, many years. That's not conspirational, just a fact.

Actually Russia sells nuclear fuel into Europe & the US.

https://www.voanews.com/a/putin-profits-off-us-and-european-...

Akschully, these are not mutually exclusive.

I think you might be right in the short term or considering the past, but it doesn't explain why a lot of money is pouring into renewables nevertheless and that there just isn't any other path forward than building another magnitude more in renewables (as TFA says: Germany is aiming to triple(!) solar by 2030). This will change massively change the markets.

It won't work. What needs to happen for that to work is extreme progress in accumulation technology. It's a pipe dream.

You cannot run any industry that requires power or energy on: oh, I wonder what the weather is like tomorrow. And if we want to replace coal and other really bad parts of reality, we have to come up with alternatives that work and actually exist.

Solar and wind now is not that. Doing more of this will lead to even greater non-linear effects on prices, which will bankrupt normal citizen. And industry won't want to be here. They need stability and _lots_ of energy.

Industry can definitely adapt to electricity prices. This is the power of free markets, they can optimize production and demand. Fluctuating prices cause by renewables will cause investments in storage and demand-side flexibility.

Only to an extent. But sure: let's hope for better storage technology. But this also immediately eats away at cycle efficiency.

There's a reason nuclear remains, despite cost and apparent risks. It's because it is still less bad than the alternatives.

In contrast nuclear, storage gets cheaper and better. Nuclear does not remain in Germany and is largely irrelevant almost everywhere else. My prediction is that it will increasingly become completely irrelevant, because it does not really help: We need storage, demand shaping, and peaker plants. Nuclear does not have any useful role in this world because it need to run all the time to be able to be profitable, so it can not be used to cover the missing gaps where there is no wind. So it does not make economic sense to today, and this will get even worse.

> When there's no wind in Germany, they buy from the energy market, driving up prices all the way up to what Coal and Oil power generation costs (which is expensive and terrible)

Neat! Can you show me graphs where that happens? Who makes that power from coal and oil?

> And since everyone pays market prices, we all suffer from Germany's lack of nuclear.

We? We who?

I don't think I pay market prices for it, since I don't live in Europe.

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