Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid
Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid
French day-ahead power fell to -€5.76 a megawatt-hour, the lowest in four years, in an auction on Epex Spot.
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This is something that has been occasionally happening in Europe (at least in Germany, don't know about France) for well over 10 years now. Probably more like 15.
What's sorely needed at this point is much more storage to make this energy available when it is needed instead of when it isn't. Before that happens, you cannot really decommission any gas or coal power plants, because you still need them during times of much less renewable production.
this is why we still need nuclear, to replace the fossil fuel baseline.
The concept of baseline power is no longer needed. Scientists wrote about that for years now. Battery storage and smart grids are growing faster and cheaper than nuclear ever could.
Greenfield nuclear is (probably) not economically relevant.
Refurbishing existing NPPs has a LCOE on-par with renewables and gives breathing room for variability issues that will otherwise be absorbed by fossil fuels until that eventual transition to storage/smart grid.
Any discussion of nuclear's costs/profitability that does not distinguish between greenfield and existing/refurbished is agendaposting since most of the costs of a NPP are upfront.
Can storage technology reach 100% coverage by 2050? Because that's the target for net-0 afaik.
If not, we should invest in something else to help us reach that goal, and Nuclear seems the most promising medium-term solution.
If there was enough funding or political backing anything could get done by 2050. That's a huge amount of time. Any time someone mentions a climate goalpost like that they are pulling the cloth over your eyes
We needed to get this shit done 10 years ago. Any delay in removing all fossil fuel emissions now is just a matter of how bad we want climate change to get, rather than preventing it. Net zero by 2050 is a fucking eternity away and is a shit goal, and all the projections that get us on track to 1.5 °C of warming have us extensively using carbon capture which is entirely unrealistic.
Existing nuclear plants in France work, they can load follow to some degree, and renewables can make up the difference with minimal energy storage. But at a certain point you have to stop investing in renewables if you have minimal energy storage and your electricity solution is working.
I am going to emphasize that last part: IF you can't get enough energy storage, and IF your energy mix is fine, you must stop investment in renewable installations. Without enough storage, the baseload+peak paradigm works, you just have to regulate it.
France’s baseline is nuclear and has been for decades.
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France has plenty of nuclear power.
It doesn't help with renewable peaks in the slightest.What is needed are storage solutions and flexible usage that can utilize cheap power at peak times.
Amazing how you get downvoted with no reply even though your comment is the truth. People who claim to be environmentalists who are also against nuclear energy are seriously dumb.
Answering from a German perspective:
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Fuel isn't easy to source and will put us into a new dependency like gas did with russia. That's not desirable.
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Building a reactor takes a lot of time that we don't have right now. We need to build that capacity and we need to build it fast.
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Look at France and their shit show of new and old nuclear projects. The company building new reactors went insolvent because it's insanely expensive and last year they had to regularly power down the reactors because the rivers used for cooling got too hot
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There is still no valid strategy for securely containing the waste produced for the needed amount of time
The reason people don't answer to that bs anymore is because it has been discussed to death with no new arguments on either side.
it has been discussed to death with no new arguments on either side
And alas, we continue to put more CO2 into the air and the planet keeps warming.
And the solution to that will not be nuclear power. Not in the near future because it takes too long to build and we need to cut CO2 now. And I'm also not convinced it's a good long-term strategy based on the other points I've mentioned.
If we could magically build reactors in time with the needed capacity to replace coal and gas (which it doesn't really btw starting and stopping nuclear plants takes way longer than necessary to react to demand changes) this would be a different discussion. But as it stands now it's just a distraction from what we need to do: build renewable energy sources.
watch us be repeating the same excuse in another 50 years. yes, nuclear takes a long time to build but that doesn’t mean we should just not do it.
also at the bare minimum we should not be shutting down functional reactors which is happening in europe.
As I already said I do have a lot of concerns around nuclear power as a long term strategy that I do not see or at least see as less of a problem with renewable energy sources.
I don't know about Europe as a whole but in Germany we did not shut down functional reactors. We shut down reactors of which no one knows how functional they are because no one checked that because they were scheduled to be shut down anyways.
And I'll repeat again: discussing if this was a mistake is such a moot point it literally doesn't matter now. It's done. Discussing this again and again just takes up everyone's time and energy without any productive outcome.
I don’t know about Europe as a whole but in Germany we did not shut down functional reactors. We shut down reactors of which no one knows how functional they are because no one checked that because they were scheduled to be shut down anyways.
That's functionally the same thing. And it does matter to discuss. Even if you believe the ship has sailed in Germany, it hasn't elsewhere, and Germany's experience can be useful to learn from.
That’s functionally the same thing.
It's not. Not knowing if something works is far removed from knowing something does in fact still work. Discussing this again and again with the same arguments on both sides is not fruitful. And it doesn't help making any of the current decisions around our enery supply for the forseeable future.
Answering from a German perspective:
The german solution was to build more coal power and shutter nuclear power and then pretend that by using accounting sleight of hand you had a "net-zero" carbon solution. But that's bullshit.
The german solution was to build more coal power
No, that wasn't the solution and it's not what happened, coal is in decline in Germany since the 90s with a rather steep decline since 2018.
That is true but that isn't a constructive way of arguing about what we should be doing now to benefit the future. You can have the right of saying "told you so" if you need it so badly. I don't really care. We need to solve this problem though and arguing about the chances nuclear could have had in the past is just distracting.
There is still no valid strategy for securely containing the waste produced for the needed amount of time
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository
Sure but if we succeed at mitigating cimate change effects to a reasonable degree, civilization will survive for centuries, during which a reactor that uses itmight become available. It's a minor problem blown out of proportion, as opposed to CO₂ emissions, which are the opposite.
Even if this were true this doesn't help with the very real issue that we can't build the nuclear capacity fast enough whereas renewable energy can be built fast, is already being built, and doesn't have that problem that needs wishful thinking for it's solution.
Why do you not include city-scale energy storage as wishful thinking? Unlike nuclear reactors, that amount of storage doesn't exist.
Because batteries aren't as dangerous as reactors, are still making massive improvements on energy density and seem feasible to me. Doing anything useful with nuclear waste has been discussed for decades and no-one has come forward with any really promising results. The waste has been around for long enough if anyone could have done something productive with it it likely would have happened already.
Yeah I'm not convinced that just burying the stuff deep in a hole will do what I think is responsible. That shit stays dangerous for multiple thousands of years. That's such a long timeframe that we cannot predict what's going to happen to our society. It is very realistic that we lose the knowledge of the location or even the dangerousness of that stuff. Imagine future people stumbling into this and actually getting something like a curse from an old pharao by weird invisible forces that make you sick.
Another thing about this is that locations that are "good" candidates for this kind of storage are extremely rare. Germany has been looking for a suitable place for the last few decades and didn't find any yet afaik. And the few places we might have are booked to be filled with all the old waste still sitting in intermediary storage.
Unless we have a reliable way of finding suitable storage places before we start producing more waste it will put us in the same situation we are in now, just worse.
Fuel isn’t easy to source and will put us into a new dependency like gas did with russia. That’s not desirable.
Sure, but it's very little fuel when compared to coal, gas or oil. Raw Uranium is just 14% of the total energy price for nuclear energy, which means that doubling the price of uranium would add about 10% to the cost of electricity produced in existing nuclear plants, and about half that much to the cost of electricity in future power plants. For Coal/Gas plants, the fuel cost is the main cost by far.
Btw, Russia is not the main producer of Uranium. First is Kazakhstan, then Namibia, Canada, Australia and Uzbekistan
Building a reactor takes a lot of time that we don’t have right now. We need to build that capacity and we need to build it fast.
For sure, and likely they won't help or help marginally to reach 2035 goals, but they can definitely help to reach "net-0 by 2050". Modern nuclear power plants are planned for construction in five years or less (42 months for Canada Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) ACR-1000, 60 months from order to operation for an AP1000, 48 months from first concrete to operation for a European Pressurized Reactor (EPR) and 45 months for an ESBWR)[47] as opposed to over a decade for some previous plants.
Look at France and their shit show of new and old nuclear projects. The company building new reactors went insolvent because it’s insanely expensive and last year they had to regularly power down the reactors because the rivers used for cooling got too hot
The cost of building new power plants is mostly impacted by delays and overruns, which are often caused by policy changes. For instance, Canada has cost overruns for the Darlington Nuclear Generating Station, largely due to delays and policy changes, that are often cited by opponents of new reactors. Construction started in 1981 at an estimated cost of $7.4 Billion 1993-adjusted CAD, and finished in 1993 at a cost of $14.5 billion. 70% of the price increase was due to interest charges incurred due to delays imposed to postpone units 3 and 4, 46% inflation over a 4-year period and other changes in financial policy.
The costs of decommission are included by law in the price of the energy, and the Nuclear Power Plant owners are required to set aside that money in order to smoothly decommission the plant with no extra costs.
There is still no valid strategy for securely containing the waste produced for the needed amount of time
There are secure enough strategies to contain the, honestly small, amount of spent fuel we produce today. It's just that it's scary and no one wants a nuclear deposit in their backyard, but in reality it's still orders of magnitude safer than dumping millions of tons of pollutants in the air with coal power plants.
How many people do you think will die in 2025 due to Nuclear Energy? How many per MW/h? And I remind you that Germany closed all Nuclear Plants before closing all Coal Powered Plants.
I'm not sure why you are spending so much time comparing nuclear to coal based plants. If you wanted to make a compelling argument there you'd need to compare it to renewable energy sources. I totally agree that we need to phase our coal based plants as fast as possible.
The price for the fuel isn't so much the issue but availability or rather dependency on outside powers. I didn't say that we would depend on Russia directly. But the way the world is changing right now you never know which nation goes haywire next. I'd much prefer the option with less reliance on other states for our power sources.
The delay and cost is definitely subject to policy and policy changes. But today no-one can guarantee that we wont do those and in effect have a delayed and very expensive project on our hands. I'll remind you of Stuttgart 21 or the BER or any other bigger projects Germany has been dealing with as long as I can remember. I have no faith that a reactor would magically be built without any of the issues those projects have.
I have yet to see a convincing strategy to explain humans in a few thousand years what we buried in these tombs. It just doesn't seem plausible. And even if we find a few suitable places are we sure we will find more when those have filled up?
I’m not sure why you are spending so much time comparing nuclear to coal based plants. If you wanted to make a compelling argument there you’d need to compare it to renewable energy sources. I totally agree that we need to phase our coal based plants as fast as possible.
Because Germany decommissioned their Nuclear plants before they did so with coal plants (or gas plants, which they keep building)
The price for the fuel isn’t so much the issue but availability or rather dependency on outside powers.
Sure, but price is a function of availability and demand. The price is low because it's pretty available and the demand is nothing like that of oil, LNG or coal. Plus Canada and Australia have some of the biggest reserves in the world (3rd, 4th) and they are western democracies we can rely on. Also, Uranium isn't bought JIT, but it's bought years in advanced so that it can be enriched and stockpiled, this means that it doesn't feel the price fluctuations that much.
I’d much prefer the option with less reliance on other states for our power sources.
As for renewables, I don't know if you've noticed, but most solar cells right now come from China, if they were to stop selling tomorrow (for one reason or another) we'd be kind of screwed anyway. Maybe a good mix and diversification is the best answer here. And yes, I know that you don't need China to keep operating your solar cells, but they are kind of needed right now to make the transition, new cells will be needed to replace old ones, and we also need batteries, which they are now leading production of. Unless we move manufacturing back (which we should do, but that's a decades long process we can't possibly rely upon) we are still reliant on an external state to undergo the ecological transition.
I have yet to see a convincing strategy to explain humans in a few thousand years what we buried in these tombs. It just doesn’t seem plausible. And even if we find a few suitable places are we sure we will find more when those have filled up?
Maybe it won't really be necessary, some 4th gen nuclear reactors promise to be able to use spent fuel for their reaction (also Thorium, which is extremely more abundant than Uranium). These are now like fusion reactors, which are permanently 20 years away, but we are building them right now. Some of these plants will go online this decade afaik, and if they deliver, many more will surely follow next decade.
Using spent fuel should shorten the estimated containment time from tens of thousands of years to 300 years, which should be enough to just say, bury them and leave.
The delay and cost is definitely subject to policy and policy changes. But today no-one can guarantee that we wont do those and in effect have a delayed and very expensive project on our hands. I’ll remind you of Stuttgart 21 or the BER or any other bigger projects Germany has been dealing with as long as I can remember. I have no faith that a reactor would magically be built without any of the issues those projects have.
This is an issue we might be able to fix without hoping for magical technology. Also because it doesn't touch only this argument, but pretty much everything happening in the country. We can't just say "Germany can't make any big project" and leave.
Because Germany decommissioned their Nuclear plants before they did so with coal plants (or gas plants, which they keep building)
Yeah but that is done. There is no way to reverse that. The thing we need to talk about now are options to coal based plants which are nuclear and renewables. So if anything we need to discuss the pros and cons of those two. Noone here is saying that the coal plants are a good thing.
Unless we move manufacturing back (which we should do, but that’s a decades long process we can’t possibly rely upon) we are still reliant on an external state to undergo the ecological transition.
Germany had one of the biggest sectors for photovoltaic cells. They are closing and I agree we should be moving production back to europe. Right now there might be enough knowhow left so it does not take decades to do so.
Using spent fuel should shorten the estimated containment time from tens of thousands of years to 300 years, which should be enough to just say, bury them and leave.
If we can actually use spent fuel. That's a big if I don't want to gamble on. Also 300 years is still a very long time. 300 years eralier society was so much different than now, we can't possibly predict what's going to happen in the next ~10 Generations of humans.
This is an issue we might be able to fix without hoping for magical technology. Also because it doesn’t touch only this argument, but pretty much everything happening in the country. We can’t just say “Germany can’t make any big project” and leave.
My point isn't "do nothing instead of nuclear power" though. My point is that many smaller projects seem way more likely to succeed in the bigger picture even if some of them fail or are delayed, which is what reneweable energies are suited to. The success of the transition is also about people being able to trust into the success of the project. And I don't think many people have a lot of trust into germanies ability to bring big projects to a successful end. I'd like that to be different, I do, but that's just not what I have experienced in my lifetime.
Kazakhstan isn't exactly any better than Russia. They're Russia's little puppet.
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You can absolutely reduce coal and gas without batteries. Hydro is a thing, nuclear also exists. Maybe it's cheaper and more environmentally-friendly to disconnect some solar and some wind from the grid during excess peak production and keep the nuclear running, than having huge storage? Also you're forgetting about the possibility for instant demand response, imagine things like AC units in summer or heaters in winter, where they could be turned on automatically during peak production to keep your house comfier for no cost.
Happens in Norway occasionally. Even hits the headlines sometimes. Then you go into the price graph to see and the price is negative for an hour or so. Rest of the day it's more expensive than it was 2 years ago before we sold our power to central Europe.