Energy Prices in Europe Hit Records After Wind Stops Blowing

https://www.wsj.com/articles/energy-prices-in-europe-hit-records-after-wind-stops-blowing-11631528258

by melling • 5 years ago

77 131 5 years ago

wsj.com

28511524• 5 years ago

“Options include reserve thermal power plants, battery storage or cables for importing electricity from other markets.”

Or nuclear. Sad that this isn’t seen as an option any longer.

JumpCrisscross• 5 years ago

Or nuclear. Sad that this isn’t seen as an option any longer

Is anti-nuclear sentiment consistent across Europe?

capableweb• 5 years ago

Nothing, especially sentiments, are consistent across the entirety of Europe.

alexott• 5 years ago

mostly in Germany...

junon3• 5 years ago

It is here in Germany. Nobody here likes nuclear. My ex is a PhD in bioinformatics and argues against nuclear using quite outdated information, even.

Nuclear is a non-starter for many. Too many people afraid of another Chernobyl or nuclear waste handling without understanding what caused the former or not being informed about how we deal with the latter, today.

Cycl0ps• 5 years ago

I think it generally depends on whether or not you're downwind of Pripyat.

olau• 5 years ago

I think Fukushima killed much of the remaining enthusiasm, but really it's the high cost of building new nuclear plants across Europe that's keeping it from being an option. If building a new plant was cheap, I'm sure you'd see a lot more happening.

joshuaheard• 5 years ago

France gets 70% of its power from safe nuclear energy.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/462535/nuclear-share-ele....

krab• 5 years ago

In Czech republic, there is an ongoing project to extend one of the two nuclear power plants. Although there is some debate whether to do it at all, it focuses most on the high costs.

The bigger issue in the public debate are the national safety and strategic concerns. At the moment, it seems Russian and Chinese companies will be banned from bidding.

So, the sentiment is definitely not consistent. CZ is much more favorable towards nuclear than DE or AT, but it's still a complicated topic.

PeterisP8• 5 years ago

Increasing nuclear capacity is a long-term task, it's not possible to do it quickly in response - all the major nuke plants would be already running at capacity most of the time, there's no option for them to just generate more.

cure• 5 years ago

Or nuclear. Sad that this isn’t seen as an option any longer.

Maybe this statement is just a reflection of what can be done in a reasonable amount of time (a few years)? Planning and building nuclear plants takes an order of magnitude longer, it seems.

tehsauce2• 5 years ago

realistically building batteries or thermal storage at that scale will probably take as long as nuclear plants

giarc• 5 years ago

The best time to plant a tree is 30 years ago, the second best time is now.

guerrilla• 5 years ago

We do hydro and biomass[1] in Sweden. I'm not sure why Germany, France and Italy, given the topographies, would have a problem with that. Have they not diverisifed as much?

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Sweden

riboflavin123• 5 years ago

Hydro is still vulnerable to downturns, though they need to be more prolonged to equal what's happening with the wind in this report. (California's 2021 drought is a good example of how hydro power can fall short.)

I mentally think of power generation reliability as: Uncontrollably variable from hour-to-hour: wind, solar, tidal motion Uncontrollably variable on month-to-year spans: hydro Pretty controllable: nuclear (and fossil fuels)

Kankuro• 5 years ago

In France, most of the places where dams could be placed are already taken. It also means that pumped hydroelectric energy storage can only be set up marginally.

phtrivier• 5 years ago

Hydro already accounts for 10/15% of electricity production in France (thanks FSM for the Pyrennes chains and the rivers) - and it does not seem like we have much more capacity (there are some small dams from the early XXth century that are being reused.)

Nuclear and wind suffer from NIMYBism and are now nothing more than political totems. PV is going this road now that people are realizing installing solar farms means cutting on forest or actual food farms.

Coal is already pretty much extinct.

Whereas gas is "painless" from a political point of view, private interest in the field (total, engine) have a strong history of political influence, and "gas" wins if RE are installed but the sun does not shine nor the wind blows... So gas is the energy of the future for Europe until there is a breakthrough in fusion or safer modular fission.

This will not make the geopol situation any simpler in the east, and is of course a disaster climate-wise - except maybe for coal-heavy countries like Poland and Chez Republic

ddevault• 5 years ago

Maybe someone can correct me, but I don't see how we're going to get out of climate change (generally, but also specifically) without nuclear power. We need something which can produce a reliable base load and I don't think there are any other widely available options which don't produce heaps of emissions.

Scoundreller2• 5 years ago

Or better reactive demand. Could my fridge/freezer run at deep chill when energy is cheap? Could an a/c build a block of ice for later? Could tank-based water heater recover more slowly when energy is cheap? Could a parked EV schedule its recharge better? Could a washing machine defer or go into “slow-mode” when cost is high? Same with dishwashers? Could lights dim a bit? Could hvac go into slow mode?

In a way, my utility can do things that force this (voltage reductions), but it’s only really effective for resistive loads, and could increase resistive losses on the transmission/distribution network.

https://www.ieso.ca/en/Sector-Participants/IESO-News/2021/01...

One big problem is that transmission/distribution costs aren’t variable based on time-of-day, but they could be too.

Factorium2• 5 years ago

The major issue is regulation, which is not designed for things like Small Modular Nuclear Reactors:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor

We could be building hundreds of these across Europe, placing them close to small cities and using the waste heat for district heating.

seanmcdirmid2• 5 years ago

Nuclear isn’t on demand, you still need a place to bank energy when you don’t need it since the plant is going to produce a constant load that (given high capital and operating costs of the plant itself) you’ll want to use productively.

Natural gas instead would really shine as a backup power source.

derefr• 5 years ago

An array of small modular [nuclear] reactors (SMRs) could be set up to switch parts of the array on and off over the course of the day to scale with load. Small plants have shorter ramp-up and ramp-down times, as they move around smaller amounts of working fluid, and power lighter turbines which thus have proportionately higher friction/lower inertia.

Of course, this is a lot less efficient than having one big nuclear reactor pumping huge turbines; but it’s possibly more efficient than other forms of peak-load generation, which is the key issue.

Plus, any given individual SMR would produce a low-enough wattage to be able to reasonably divert/“dump” power from it into an practical-to-construct-anywhere sink or battery (e.g. building-sized pumped storage, rather than huge dam-sized pumped storage) for handling ramp-down discontinuities.

zbrozek• 5 years ago

There's lots of things to do with extra electricity, it's just a question of whether or not it's economical. Here in California, for example, I could imagine the excess being used to opportunistically desalinate water and refill reservoirs. If water and emissions were priced appropriately, it might be worthwhile? It's not exactly a battery, but it's a way to make overbuilding more palatable.

Alternatively if the grid is unreliable, end-use customers will install their own batteries and generating capacity. Voila, problem solved on someone else's dime!

littlestymaar5• 5 years ago

France is a nice counterexample to this. Nuclear is usually used as a buffer for needs and production variations.

In fact, modern Combined cycle natural gas plants are less controllable than nuclear ones.

(That being said, given that the cost of a nuclear plant is mostly independent from its energy output, why would you build wind farms if you already have nuclear plant? Except for political reasons of course)

randomdata2• 5 years ago

The prevailing nuclear designs are not an option. They are only suitable for base load production, whereas wind is only suitable for peak load production. They serve entirely different purposes on the grid and are not meaningfully interchangeable. When the wind stops blowing you need another technology that is suitable for peak load production (batteries, natural gas, etc.).

acidburnNSA3• 5 years ago

Current-design nuclear plants themselves are perfectly capable at ramping up and down on demand on the order of 10s of minutes. They usually just choose not to because fuel is a small fraction of their total cost and so the current (and adjustable) markets pressure them into selling as much electricity as possible by staying near 100%.

meragrin_• 5 years ago

Nuclear falls under thermal power plants. It would be redundant to simply add it to the list.

HereIGoAgain2• 5 years ago

Yup.. This HAS to be on the table if we want ANY hope of powering a society anywhere near 100% renewable!

neonate• 5 years ago

https://archive.md/xHaTY

marvin3• 5 years ago

It's weird that we have higher late-summer electricity prices that we did mid-winter this year. But all things considered, energy prices do in fact need to be high in order to support faster deployment of renewables and CO2-neutral energy.

Sucks for everyone who has marginal incomes, but I'm sure we can make some adjustments to the safety net policies to mitigate that.

throwaway0a5e• 5 years ago

But all things considered, energy prices do in fact need to be high in order to support faster deployment of renewables and CO2-neutral energy.
Sucks for everyone who has marginal incomes, but I'm sure we can make some adjustments to the safety net policies to mitigate that.

When people complain about policies that screw the middle class this is exactly the kind of stuff they are talking about. The poors scrape by with their vouchers. The middle class flounders until they're poor enough to qualify for the vouchers. Energy, education, healthcare, housing, etc. etc. etc. regardless of the sector the effect is the same.

People have a habit of voting against people who screw them once they figure it out.

Burning fossil fuels might be unsustainable on a 50yr timeline but squeezing people financially is unsustainable on a 5yr timeline that gets us the worst of both.

radicalbyte• 5 years ago

In Germany, consumers pay a significantly higher rate than industry.

marvin3• 5 years ago

While I agree in general, I'd argue that energy/climate gas emissions are in its own category, because they represent an unpriced externality that will have terrible consequences if the world doesn't get serious about sustainable solutions very soon.

Also keep in mind that my country has an annual national budget of $35,000 per capita, one third of which goes to welfare programs. We practically have a basic income program going already.

We're not totally insulated from the forces that besiege the middle class, but I'm pretty sure we're mitigating them as well as anyone. Would love to hear your suggestions on what policies would do better, assuming an intention to prevent catastrophic global climate change.

UglyToad• 5 years ago

I wonder if something like 'progressive' energy pricing might be a solution here. It's kind of a weird idea but effectively some baseline 'required for living' amount of energy is free and then scales some non-linear amount, e.g. exponentially but not really, as usage increases.

So some grandma with her 3 bar electric heater is paying some token amount for her usage over what is deemed 'baseline' but then crypto miners or industry is effectively subsidising everyone and also incentivised to reduce usage more heavily.

PeterisP8• 5 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised that if this trend increases and the push comes to shove, then the voters - especially those on marginal incomes - might decide that actually they much prefer lower energy prices instead of supporting renewables and CO2-neutral energy; and in democratic countries it's the general public who are entitled to make that choice for their country instead of accepting the decisions of elites/experts and waiting for safety net policies to compensate for the suck.

I agree that faster deployment of renewables and CO2-neutral energy does require high energy prices - however, it's not my decision to make whether that benefit is so desirable to justify the costs, it's up to the people in each specific country to decide - and taking into account the benefit to them specifically and the costs to them, not the global benefit and someone else's budget. And IMHO governments have not really asked them for a proper informed decision, it all has just-sort-of-happened without informed consent of the masses and they might just refuse that consent if the price rises sufficiently.

In some sense a clean environment and less dangerous future are "luxury goods" that societies and people want to buy if they can afford to, but should not be forced if they can't afford the expense.

bserge3• 5 years ago

it's the general public who are entitled to make that choice for their country instead of accepting the decisions of elites/experts and waiting for safety net policies to compensate for the suck.

Nah, people will do as they're told.

ip264• 5 years ago

In some sense a clean environment and less dangerous future are "luxury goods"

The people who can least afford to pay for clean energy etc are the ones who will also be most impacted by heat waves, declining air quality, and natural disasters.

So it's a similar "luxury good" as "functioning healthcare".

marvin3• 5 years ago

In some sense a clean environment and less dangerous future are "luxury goods" that societies and people want to buy if they can afford to, but should not be forced if they can't afford the expense.

While I sympathize with this view on a certain level, applying it to policy consistently and literally is a likely path towards chaos and immense death and suffering 70 years from now. That's a high cost to pay to consider climate policies an optional luxury good.

I'm increasingly convinced that bribing part of the voters with some sort of climate tax dividend is a sensible policy to keep society moving towards climate gas neutrality.

I certainly agree with the view that all climate policies are worthless if they don't take into account real-world considerations such as free will and what significant parts of society are able/willing to afford.

It's painful to watch this slow-motion tragedy play out. Certainly interested in hearing suggestions for improving it.

ben_w2• 5 years ago

Much as I support transition to green energy as fast as possible, doing so in ways that increase prices create a risk that businesses which care more about money than environment just move to where the energy is cheaper and then you lose both influence over them and employment for those very same marginal income people.

I’d rather governments use general taxation to subsidise deployment of PV (or research into superconductors and storage) than encourage higher prices — the rewards form research can bring benefits that make the cost worthwhile.

ajsnigrutin4• 5 years ago

How about go nuclear, that works even during windless nights?

tomp• 5 years ago

energy prices do in fact need to be high in order to support faster deployment of renewables and CO2-neutral energy.

In this case, energy prices are (partially) high because of deployment of renewables (and not nuclear)

Mrdarknezz• 5 years ago

It's time for a nuclear expansion so we can transition out of our fossil dependency.

croisillon• 5 years ago

I read "nuclear explosion" and it took me a few seconds to parse what you were saying

Arrath• 5 years ago

Well, it should result in a net decrease in electricity demand, if nothing else..

ajsnigrutin4• 5 years ago

Yep... solar and wind are fine... until there is a windless night, and you need power.

Nucler just works.

runako• 5 years ago

Subhead: "...coupled with a shortage of natural gas..."

otherme1232• 5 years ago

And "...record high rights of CO2 emissions..."

I hate that the headline, which they know is the only thing a lot of people read, implies "high prices due to eolic/renewables", when the true underlying cause is that gas and coal cost a lot more than 5 years ago.

And they left the "abundant wind power has at times led to periods of cheap electricity" to the bottom of the article, where nobody would read it. I guess some people would rather pay $100 every month of the year than $150 one month and $30 the other 12.

HonestOp001• 5 years ago

Haves and have nots once again. The elites can make proclamations for what they want to do regarding energy generation, they will never have to live it as they will have back up generators on their compounds to deal with it.

Us serfs will be at the mercy of feel good proclamations and energy programs that are not ready for prime time.

xwdv• 5 years ago

Still better than the serfs of olden days though, no?

dimitrios1• 5 years ago

Maybe, maybe not. At least back then, the threat of violent revolution was real and actualized. I don't think any group of revolters could defeat any of the modern western armies.

kohlerm• 5 years ago

hmm not sure I can follow the logic. Germany does have quite a lot of wind power doesn't it? Also AFAIK prices in Germany went up because of higher demand for Gas. And then somehow it is expected, as soon as there is a big enough crisis energy prices will go up exponentially.

lm284692• 5 years ago

Germany always had bad prices, it's been twice the French's price for as long as I can remember

https://strom-report.de/electricity-prices-europe/

otherme1232• 5 years ago

Germany messed up, because instead of phasing out coal before anything else (like they did in UK or Spain), they phased out nuclear plants. Spain or UK, both at only 20% nuclear but without coal, have the same prices than France, thanks to the renewables keeping it low.

hackeraccount• 5 years ago

I've always thought Germany's energy prices were by design - I think it's a round about way of engaging in financial repression. Germany is an exporting country and reducing domestic consumption helps with that strategy.

tjansen2• 5 years ago

Germany does have quite a lot of wind power doesn't it? Yes, but just not every week. The amount of energy produced per year by wind power is fine. But you'd need the capability to store it for weeks or even months to use it as a reliable energy source.

hourislate• 5 years ago

The articles title is misleading (more hysteria from the media). In Germany the price for a megawatt hour is 129 euro and in the UK it jumped to 330 euro.

So it seems that Energy Prices in the UK hit records. Not surprising since they put all their eggs in one basket. The rest of Europe seems fine.

lm284692• 5 years ago

I wonder how climate change will play with wind energy in the longer term. We might kill stable/recurring winds and end up with a bunch of windmills in the middle of a no wind zone.

bserge3• 5 years ago

Just use half of them in fan mode.

Scoundreller2• 5 years ago

Finally a use case for these electricity highways I’ve been hearing about.

We can move wind from where there’s too much to where there isn’t enough.

em3rgent0rdr• 5 years ago

ElectricityMap is a nice live view of current energy generation and consumption by type of energy. Unfortunately right now https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/DE shows Germany is generating most energy from Coal. It is sad that they didn't embrace nuclear like neighboring France.

realusername5• 5 years ago

That's always what people should have in mind when they see those headlines "100% renewable today!", yeah but there's some days where it reaches 3%.

pydry5• 5 years ago

Which days? It's currently 43%.

bildung2• 5 years ago

Decisions like these seldomly are about engineering alone.

France didn't embrace nuclear out of the goodness of their hearts - they wanted to become a nuclear power, and needed the infrastructure and specialists and so on to become one (establish study paths, and give those students the prospect of jobs so that they actually choose the new paths etc.).

Now that this isn't of strategic importance anymore, France lost interest in nuclear plants (just look at what gets built in recent decades in France). Because nuclear power by itself isn't that interesting, mostly because it is so hugely expensive and inflexible.

Germany was never allowed to get nuclear infrastructure because they started two world wars, and at the time no one was interested in Germany having nukes for the third attempt. Even research alone wasn't allowed for decades after the end of WW2. That's also the reason why Germany has no capacity for processing used fuel rods and does this in France to this day - its dual use tech.

realusername5• 5 years ago

Now that this isn't of strategic importance anymore, France lost interest in nuclear plants (just look at what gets built in recent decades in France). Because nuclear power by itself isn't that interesting, mostly because it is so hugely expensive and inflexible.

Half of the problem in France are the green activists & the public to build more and the other half is that the EU is extremely against nuclear and does all of what they can to sabotage the funding.

fomine33• 5 years ago

Japan is also loser for WW2 but their lab/company do nuclear development from 1950s, thanks to relationship to US.

ojosilva• 5 years ago

In Spain, the government chose to, temporarily, lower taxes on electric energy from +27% to a (not yet there) target of around 10%.

Some (but not all) countries in Europe also have high energy taxes that can be lowered to mitigate the impact of high prices on mid and lower-income citizens. Definitely not a long term solution, but hopefully it has the intended effect. However, lowering taxes could also end up pushing market prices even higher as demand is high and supply limited.

Finding a long term solution will be very tricky as the energy market is a bad mix of free and regulated markets and political ambitions that skid across the full spectrum.

Dma54rhs• 5 years ago

If we want the greener future the prices have to reflect the reality. We want people to use less energy, doesn't make sense lowering the prices like that. Obviously going green means paying more.

pydry5• 5 years ago

This article seems to be trying to turn a story about unprecedented highs in natural gas prices (mirroring surging post-covid commodity prices all over) into a story about the wind sometimes not blowing.

Alternative article : https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/expensive-winter-ahe...

StreamBright2• 5 years ago

Yeah the two things are related. You need a battery or a gas turbine if you have windmills in the energy mix. This is why ultimately wind (or any other uncontrollable energy source) is tough to integrate into any energy grid.

addicted• 5 years ago

Or rather, as is the case in any transition, as you move to the new you still continue to rely on the old, so the entire system continues to fail if the old fails.

This stops being a problem once the transition is complete.

But that’s to a great extent the definition of a transition.

bjourne3• 5 years ago

Yeah, lots of spin in that WSJ article. Better article about the price surge: https://www.bruegel.org/2021/09/is-europes-gas-and-electrici... Money quote: "In our view, however, there are more fundamental reasons for high volatility and excessive price spikes. The industry knows the energy system is undergoing a profound and fast transformation. Investments in fossil assets aren’t sustainable long-term. But governments have not yet committed clearly enough to a low-carbon future. So, the energy supply-demand balance in the EU will be volatile depending on how quickly fossil fuels are phased out and green energy is phased in. Clearer commitments from governments to introduce low-carbon energy sources, for example by financing the necessary infrastructure and committing to substantial carbon prices in all sectors, could help move away from this precarious balance. As moving to net-zero will imply ever-growing electricity demand, investors will not have to worry about overinvesting in low-carbon power systems."

Kretinsky• 5 years ago

Since most major wind electricity project needs a complementary natural gas power plant to secure profitable long-term supply contracts, the smart move for the natural gas industry is to lobby hard for renewable.

This may explain why, for instance, in Europe, a Czech fossil-energy magnate buys[1] important shares of western european media (such as the liberal-left leaning Le Monde in France, for instance) while investing[2] in coal and gas.

[1] https://www.lesechos.fr/tech-medias/medias/daniel-kretinsky-... [2] https://www.bfmtv.com/economie/entreprises/energie/pourquoi-...

HereIGoAgain2• 5 years ago

And people want us to put all our eggs in this basket without ability to go back, even in emergency.. This type of ideology is more like one big death cult.

Energy Prices in Europe Hit Records After Wind Stops Blowing

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