Day ahead electricity prices for EU
euenergy.live
euenergy.live
https://www.skandiaenergi.no/dagens-spotpriser/
Electricity Maps has an excellent visualization showing breakdowns of each electricity zone, with imports/export to each neighbor zone etc:
An efficient, large scale global economy is only possible with incredibly high energy density (and easy to transport and convert into usage energy) energy sources.
And, to your point, even global food supply is ultimately an issue of transporting energy from the sun to human bodies largely in the form of plant based carbohydrates. Human's ability to expand around the globe is predicated on the ability to transport the caloric requirements efficiently.
Solar energy isn't the panacea that people make it out to be. Where it is abundant, it makes sense. A lot of places do not have that luxury, yet countries like Germany made foolish investments in solar power which is 10% efficient compared to its full potential in Southwestern USA.
You say that they would be 10x as efficient in Southwestern USA. But how would you transport the electricity from the USA to Germany? Isn't that exactly the problem that the previous commenter is pointing out? I.e. production is not the problem, transportation is.
Cost of energy has multitude of secondary effects on GDP and food security; the importance of which cannot be understated.
WTF does that mean?
Fundamental is core to the problem, incidental is stuff we add because of our imperfect solutions.
Don't make us tap the sign.
Such a simple design, can be used for at least heating water for 3-6 months. But nah.
Same for which the roofs. You don't have a white/silver roof on your house? Fuck you.
On that note, you like cruise ships? Also fuck you.
I am one of your fuckees. The house I bought was expensive enough as it was. I am not changing a brand new dark roof for a different one for an exorbitant price right now, because budget. A perfectly new roof going down (isn't that actually waste?) for saving, say, 10 of 30 days when the AC is really needed?
(I am also not even sure if roof colors are regulated by the local authorities or not. There are over thirty houses in the same project, with the same roofs. Maybe I wouldn't even be allowed to.)
Circumstances might not be as simple as you you think they are.
Why?
If I want to go fully autonomous I have to spend in batteries like the same price of a Lamborghini, for zero re-sale value, to be demolished in 10 years in theory, in practice more likely 7-8 years if I use them with significant daily important DOD. I also doubt we are even able to produce enough battery and panels to everyone. And I'm not alone: https://www.economie.gouv.fr/files/files/directions_services... essentially the governmental, non-interested report state: we can't run on renewable. That's is.
What I'm curious is another thing: why some on a technically sound community like HN with certain topics became totally partisan of this or that topic at fanatic levels. It's not you, it's a trend I see in the last months at least, for various topics: anytime there is a post with a neoliberal agenda hot topic such behaviors appear.
My honest review:
- I spent a very big amount of money to build a new home, witch will not pay back ever in monetary terms, only pay back in comfort terms;
- I spent more for renewables NOT because they are ecological (they are pollutant) but as a protection against future disruption I imaging we will suffer, again in economical terms money dumped to the bin;
- I'll spend more in the near future for an BEV because I expect diesel/gasoline supply issues and artificially skyrocketed prices.
The synthesis? Well: those who have done such investments will be far less wealthy then before. Those who have not done that or can't will be far poorer. Those who gain are ONLY those who push such evolution for almost pure financial reasons, not "green" at all in ecological terms, green just in dollar and stereotypical toxic waist terms. Since it's clearly NOT sustainable nor extendable on scale the obvious results will be a very big disaster and another global war.
Anytime you mention energy transmision issues - you get total backlash.
We wasted EU money on pointless stuff while we could have upgraded our transit cables etc.
An EV bought today will only get cleaner as the grid gets cleaner. A new fossil-fuel vehicle today will always be dependent on fossil fuels, and will always pollute at least as much as the day it was purchased.
As we can all boil a kettle (3kW), or have a shower (10kW), or cook a sunday roast (5kW), and indeed do those at the same time, it's not a problem.
We should be thinking long term, but we can't forget about the present and the path to the glorious future. I think in hindsight we'll soon admit that we botched the transition to a greener world and caused needless suffering by putting ideologies before engineering.
By reducing Europe’s dependence on imported fossil fuels, renewables are part of the solution to energy security.
Far better to just send the power via grid to an EV @95% then toss 60% or more of it to make a gallon of gas
If you call people fanatics, they won’t believe you’re making a good faith argument.
Yet it was pushed so heavily in lieu of nuclear power. Absurd.
Sure it would be better if it was a sunnier place, still...
Winter is of course a different issue
At the same time, 49% of nuclear in France is being used today and 62% of nuclear in the UK
So, it's "bad" but not everything is used 100% all the time
I wouldn't call that necessarily incompetence. Corruption and cronyism, yes.
The previous government in Spain halted lots of funding for new power plants but as far as I know there is a lots of projects going on now. I expect to see a significant increment in the next years.
Also, in the Netherlands most of solar is installed in roofs, while in Spain is almost anecdotal. The previous government made difficult for individuals to install solar at home. Now that's gone but there is no subsidies, so individuals have to pay most of the installation from their own pockets, which are much more shallow than the dutch.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_European_Un... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_European_Uni...
The "Green new deal" however is a step in that direction. But IMO its theatrics. EU money to buy green German cars and green German infra with no plan on longevity or strategic change. Truth is, that if EU wanted energy independece, they could have it many years now. Be it nuclear or Mediterranean natural gas (the same gas now Israel is going to sell to EU).
Not that the respective governments are competent. They are not, thats a given. But the "competent" part of Europe is only so in a stupidly myopic level.
I don't know how much is from solar parks? About 20% of all houses in the Netherlands have solar panels according to some sources so that adds up.
But it failed in securing energy resilience. I hope it has learned its lesson.
There was a project to pay down cable to import reliable, cheap 24/7 power from Iceland and hobernment said 'nah'. They also cancelled a 340 MW tidal project
The amount of sunlight your receive, however, will always be the same.
Even not doing well it's better then Germany's wind and solar - it's rare to see Germany electricity polluting going below 4x France - not to mention coal whose transportation is also affected by low water levels
Fire related grid shutdowns are usually hyperlocal, meaning the few who need to charge during that time can just run a town over. (keep in mind that EVs can be charged just less than once a week for average use)
And I believe all high voltage transmission lines are above ground.
The difference is that California historically has fire prone conditions. It’s not like the rest of the country is doing something different and California has done something inherently wrong. It’s that California did what the rest of the country was doing, but without conditions to support it.
HVDC makes transmission from state to state trivial at almost no loss. We should have a national HVDC grid so that a breeze in Texas might power a toaster in Connecticut.
Instead we have another $XX Billion for Ukraine. Another $13B here for a new carrier we’ll never need etc etc. So much waste everywhere while fundamental problems go unsolved.
Any reason to think this? Did Soviet Union form by Russia invading and conquering another country? No, it was a result of fall of the Russian empire and the Russian civil war.
The conditions now are very different. Fall of Ukraine would mean political win for Putin and his acolytes, maybe another invasion later on. But Soviet Union? More like stronger Russia, a revert to the Russian Empire.
Maybe that will come down over time?
But now that the price has gone up by such an enormous amount in the south, connecting north and south will not reduce the price in the other zones, it will likely just cause NO4 to go up to the same level as in the rest of Norway. This is mainly due to the NO4 being basically not connected to the the synchronous grid of Continental Europe, while the other regions are to a much larger extent due to underwater cables going to the UK, Denmark and Germany. This means that the price of power in Europe directly influences the price of electricity in NO1-3, but not NO4. At least not to the same extent, although Sweden makes a killing buying cheap power from NO4 and selling it to mainland Europe, or even straight back to southern Norway. As such, connecting NO4 to the rest of Norway and by extention the European grid, would not be very popular in the north, but to be fair, the price increase has not exactly been popular in the south either.
The industry in Norway is highly electrified and some sectors are very energy intensive, such as aluminium production, which due to using electrolysis, runs almost entirely off the grid. Manufacturing used almost 37% of all power consumed in Norway in 2017, with power-intensive manufacturing accounting for over 80% of total energy use in the manufacturing sector that year.[0] This is also an issue which will need to be considered when talking about increasing transfer capacity between the two zones.
I hope this gives some insight, even if I rambled a bit and touched on a lot of different aspects. I'm by no means an expert, but have become interested in the subject as so many other Norwegians have lately. I'd love to answer more questions if you have any!
[0] https://energifaktanorge.no/en/norsk-energibruk/energibruken... (Source in English and published by the Norwegian Ministry of Petroleum and Energy)
Ouch! Is this not enough to push for interconnect? Or will the electricity price increases prevent such a change?
Alternatively, why hasn't more heavy industry been built in NO4 zone? Or is it not possible due to winter weather?
I also heard that in Norway, a high percentage of electricty is generated from gravity (water dams). That would make aluminium production ideal. I have heard this is one reason why Iceland, with excelent geothermal energy sources, is also a major aluminium producer.
I agree the selling of power to ourselves via Sweden seems weird, but I suppose it's better to do just that instead of having to drain the dam without producing electricity at all, and it's a solution which works at this moment instead of waiting for an interconnect to be built. I would hazard a guess that it does slightly reduce the cost of power in other regions whenever we do sell to Sweden from NO4, but I have no data. I haven't really heard much about this exact issue being discussed though, so I don't have much information regarding that. But the issue with prices jumping to European levels would be relevant here too.
There is a lot of heavy industry in the north, such as petroleum, mining, refining and others. Norway does have a large aluminium industry which does rely more or less exclusively on hydro power, and seems to be in the top ten of aluminium producing countries, just above Iceland.
The reason the southern areas have high prices is because they are connected to other markets.
Connect the northern stuff better and it'll equalise the price but not substantially. High cost low gain compared with cheap new wind generation.
Load up a truck with several tons of batteries, charge them, and ship the electricity south.
A ballpark calculation - ignoring any infrastructure and time for charging/offloading, assuming you get the batteries and the electricity for free, using Tesla batteries as an example, a MWh of them would weigh more than 6 tons; so freight truck can carry at most 2-3 MWh worth of batteries (density is likely to be an issue) and the sale price of that truck full of electricity even at the current outrageous prices is just 1000 eur, perhaps 2000 if you drive all the way across Europe. Shipping cargo on such trucks costs something like 1.5 eur/km nowadays (we don't have cheap self-driving electric trucks yet..) so if you'd have to drive more than a few hundred km (and you have to drive the batteries back!), you'd be better off using these trucks to ship something else than electricity.
The current problem is that in europe a lot of the electricity is made by gas plants and those plants are seeing their costs rise. They therefore increase the price at which they are willing to inject capacity, and that means the market price moves up because that power is needed to satisfy demand. Gas plant operators are not making a lot of profit.
Because every party injecting power at market rates (some of it is actually locked up in long term contracts) is paid the market rate, those not using gas to produce power are actually the ones making record profits. Wind is literally making windfall profits. There are talks of having an excess profit tax because right now governments are going into debt to finance energy subsidies that line the pockets of wind and nuclear operators (and of vladimir putin).
A lot of generation in Europe is using gas, so it very much has. It's more or less a normal market experiencing a jump in price on inputs.
If you can produce cheaper than the market price then you make lots of money. That's normal.
The market is telling buyers to use less electricity and sellers to produce more. It's how markets work.
Price is a function of supply and demand. Supply was massively reduced by sanctions and war, so price goes up, simple as that.
>This is price gouging.
If electricity producers had enough pricing power to set the price to whatever they wanted without competition they'd already have done so years ago. Again, price is a function of supply and demand, cost of production is only one component.
Back in the real world, we can look at hard data. Margins for energy producers and retailers have increased massively in the latest quarter. Also, we know that markets don't react directly (and exclusively) to fundamentals. They react to panics, they react to extremely complex interactions of manual and automatic trading algorithms. Reality is far from the simple "supply and demand" that economics 101 textbooks portray.
2. That does not apply here since we are talking cost/profit and not share price
> The efficient market hypothesis (EMH), alternatively known as the efficient market theory, is a hypothesis that states that share prices reflect all information and consistent alpha generation is impossible.
Nothing you say is about EMH. Nor does EMH predict that markets react only to "fundamentals", only in that shares reflect the whole set of information.
And natural gas, which usually covers the more elastic power demands is dramatically more expensive.
Germany should be a super exporter of energy to the EU/Eurozone (they are a big electricity exporter, they should and could be considerably more so). They land border nine other nations (and are of course very close to Italy). They have the technical and financial ability to do it.
Production cannot be scaled up and down infinitely and immediately.
The price is a market signal.
The fact that production cannot be immediately scaled to serve the customer demand and bring prices (and therefore profits) back down to a "normal" level is not a market failure either; it's simply a physical reality.
1. The Western governments have spent a decade demonizing fossil and nuclear energy. For that whole time, big funds have divested, and investors punished. No major fund is going to touch this sector, especially not if the intent is a capital project. Nuclear is just seeing a turnaround as some governments regain their rationality (e.g. Japan), but others seem to be utterly hopeless (Canada, Germany).
2. The above means that schools stopped offering the programs necessary to train the workers for the industry. There is an entire generational gap now in oil and gas trades, from the roughneck to the engineers.
3. The government's incompetence has caused rampant inflation which, affects these industries too. Suddenly you have to deal with the labour shortage, there being no raw inputs (the year supply of anything from pipe to mud was sold out in most markets by Q1 of '22), and you have no idea what great ideas government will pass by next quarter so you have to price high to build a buffer. All of this leads to huge uncertainty.
The worst part in my eyes, is that we're only really seeing the beginning of this. Governments are still on their ESG-above-reality stance. Approval from their UN SDG and WEF cronies is still more important than their constituents well-being.
I honestly feel for the Europeans that saw this coming and voted accordingly - but more for the Africans and Asians who will be bid out by Europe and be faced with starvation of freezing. They had no say in this and they will pay the steepest price for Europe's ESG hubris.
I don't think anyone is meaningfully wasting electricity in Europe currently. Demand can't go to zero. Supply dropped significantly.
Everybody blames the war, but AFAIK UK imports 1% of its gas from Russia, and its electricity is generated locally, so why are prices increasing? I would expect grain and wheat to increase 500%, not power.
Just like oil. The US has cheap oil but it's a global market, so everyone pays the (more or less) the same price regardless of how close they are to the oil.
Because demand side has no upper price limit the whole market price can raise to very high.
Ofc, this ignores cases of own production, futures and so on.
It is very efficient at creating a transparent market and finding the "natural" market price. The same price that a free and transparent market would converge to.
The alternative are price caps. Which could be considered. But it's a choice between free and non-free markets.
Blaming merit-order is shooting the messenger.
That's wrong. The price is determined by demand and supply, which in turn is determined by what prices producers are willing to sell at and consumers are willing to buy at, plus other traders in the market.
This is why we originally stopped mining coal - because Russian gas was so cheap at the time that it was a no-brainer.
What could possibly go wrong?
Europe is now at a critical point where choosing not to burn coal is going to have a high economic cost that many people are not going to be able or willing to pay.
If you think miners should not be fairly compensated for their work you're free to go work as one for one of those foreign producers that less "dysfunctional" and more "reliable"
Maybe we were also importing cheaper coal from elsewhere?
> The United Kingdom has the second-largest LNG regasification capacity in Europe (4.7 Bcf/d), and it can export up to 2.5 Bcf/d of natural gas to the European Union via the Interconnector pipeline into Belgium and the BBL pipeline into the Netherlands. Regasified LNG volumes in the United Kingdom averaged 2.9 Bcf/d from January through May 2022, and regasification facilities ran at a 63% utilization rate, up from 30% last year. Exports from the United Kingdom via interconnecting pipelines to the European Union have run at close to maximum rates since March 2022.
I would assume because of this.
Same thing for gas, uk is competing with their neighbors for a resource that just got a whole lot more scarce (locally), causing prices to rise
See https://doomberg.substack.com/p/have-fun-staying-cold
From last November
You still haven’t addressed WHY the fundamental price setting mechanism of nat gas would be any different from any other commodity.
Well. I don't know where you live, but I'm not paying more than last year.
I read about soaring prices being an issue in the UK. Prices, here, in France are fixed twice a year by the energy commission. Right now, residential electricity increased by 4% last February and remained unchanged at the start of August. So it means that whatever is happening in the market, is not affecting us. Actually, I will probably have 2-3 months of cash back at the end of the year.
Not really a crisis, to be honest.
However I would be very interested to know what is the situation like for my fellow European citizens !
You very seriously need to check out news or Twitter from any other Western European country
If what was happening in UK happened in France, Paris would have been burnt to the ground months ago
You may not be aware, but there's a war going on that is sort of impacting things on top of existing inflation.
I realize picking a scape goat feels easy but it's poor form and leads to not fixing the actual problem.
This gives them a lot of leeway to control prices without actually costing them anything.
Poland has an interesting story behind the price: the government passed legislation which switched from net-metering to net-billing with the start of April, so people rushed to build as many home PV installations as possible to get grandfathered into the previous scheme.
A whopping 4-5GW estimated was added to the grid in this period, almost doubling the installed capacity, creating a unique mix of coal and solar in the summer.
Now during the day it's what's keeping prices below €250/MWh because even with net-metering the price of this electricity is closer to €175/MWh.
In 2019 that would have been horribly expensive, but it's safe to say those times are gone for good.
Of course, now Germany is scrambling to turn coal plants back online.
This is not related to Russia.
Zone 1: 14,25 cents/kWh
Zone 2: 14,25 cents/kWh
Zone 3: 108,64 cents/kWh
Zone 4: 201,63 cents/kWh
1 Swedish krona is 0,094 USD. So between 1,3 and 20 American cents per kWh.
Most people live in Zone 3 followed by Zone 4. Facebook's datacenter is in Zone 1.
[1]: https://elen.nu
So this means to charge it, at home, would cost between $0.75, $2.25, and $15.
A normal air conditioner uses about 3.5kw. So if it runs for 6 hours a day, so 21kwh/day. $0.21/day, $0.63/day, and $4.2/day.
small typo - air conditioner should be 3.5kw not kwh
[0]: https://www.svd.se/a/rE0R9R/elpriserna-nar-inte-industrin-ha... (paywall)
[1]: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/lagst-elpriser-till-indus...
It's already starting to bankrupt businesses in Zone 4, that are calling for immediate changes [0].
[0] https://www.di.se/live/efter-elprissmockan-skanska-foretag-v...
[0] https://www.sydsvenskan.se/2022-08-18/regeringen-kan-bana-va...
The electricity companies and the socialist state earn billions [1] (2021), they have no incentives to change how it currently works.
[1] https://www.tn.se/hallbarhet/kritiken-staten-tjanar-miljarde...
> I've read somewhere
Before wondering why someone, somewhere is not doing something, confirm that the thing is actually happening in the first place.
The "competition" are resellers that have not installed a single MW of production, essentially leading to starving what used to be the most talented and biggest energy producer in Europe, all under the pretense of the free market. The resellers are actively dropping clients so they do not have to not buy on the open market.
It is happening, and is happening with the blessing of our leaders just greasing billionaire pockets.
* I choose energy provider x
* Friend has bought a part of those remote solar plants and also connected to provider x
* Friend sells his surplus energy to provider x at low price
* Provider x can now sell the power to:
a) His customers (me), and make next to nothing
b) Sell it to the international grid and make bank, then proceed to buy energy for me at going rates making me foot the whole bill.
Guess what happens, and who gets rich. This is market liberalization at work. You reap what you have sown.
>Czechs produce electricity at 0.1EUR/MWh
so far so good. Now you have -0.1EUR and 1MWh of power.
>then sell it to an exchange in Germany
suppose the market price is 400EUR. after selling it to an exchange you have 399.9EUR and 0 MWh of power
>and buy it back for the "market" price.
so you buy it back at the market price. Now you have -0.1EUR and 1MWh of power. That leaves you off... in the same position as step 1? What's the point in selling it to the exchange and buying it back?
Moreover, I don't see anything interesting happening here. You can replace "electricity" with "oil" and you basically describe how petro states work (ie. pump oil out of the ground, sell it on the global market for far more than it costs for you to pump it out of the ground).
It is possible Czech producers sold energy to Germany for a very low price a few years ago on a let's say 5 year contract which is still valid. Now Czech Republic needs to buy at a high price the energy from Germany because it cannot meet its own demand. Again, this is speculation on how that could work.
EDIT: Just found out production costs from another source:
Dukovany Nuclear Power Plant - 20.31EUR/MWh
Temelin Nuclear Power Plant - 34.52EUR/MWh
What they don't say is: some of our hydro plants are being maintained and the rest are capable of generating a fraction of country's needs. Sure, some of the money goes to small privately owned plants, but the most goes to large state-owned plants, who are (ideally) using the money to upgrade their equipment and the rest goes to government as dividends, which will probably be spent to support heating expenses in winter..
If you're making electricity that cheaply right now you are indeed getting rich, and so you should.
The market is what is doing something about it. Prices will moderate over time as inefficient producers are pushed out and as consumers reduce their usage due to high prices.
For example, only gaz-based electricity producers « needs » to be paid such a high price. Nuclear or renewable would be perfectly fine with much lower price.
Or, if we had not one market, but one market per type of energy used to produce electricity, we would also have a « market driven » pricing, however the end-result would likely be much much different.
Electricity isn't optional. "The market" didn't make water, or housing, or waste, or healthcare, or telecoms, etc, cheaper once privatized. In fact, it didn't make energy cheaper in the countries that privatized it.
We have yet to even scratch the surface of the effects of this crisis
If they hadn't done so, someone else might be getting even-more rich (per kWhr) by charging higher prices across an even wider geography.
Best not to believe everything you read :)
No, that's entirely unrealistic. 0.1EUR per KWh is realistic, so my guess is that you misremembered the units. The price per MWh would then be 100 EUR. But not even that is realistic anymore for the Czech Republic, given they produce most energy from fossil fuels[1], and the prices recently have skyrocketed.
Now you may ask why they'd be selling to an exchange and buying it back for more (if that actually happens to a degree that matters). One reason is of course profit. Although one must not confuse the production price with the final consumer price or even the exchange price. Production is one thing, getting the power to where it's needed is another thing, accounting, taxes and so on.
Another reason for putting it into exchanges, is that they might at times produce more than needed, so selling off excess production seems somewhat reasonable as the kind of plants they are running cannot be started and stopped at will. At other times, they might not be producing enough, and then need to buy at exchanges.
It's not as easy as assuming somebody is just grabbing a lot of money. Although some money grabbing is most likely part of the answer as well.
Germany is selling energy as well, by the way. Germany has thus far net exported around 20 TWh this year[2]. The entire energy need of Germany is around 540 TWh per annum. That would suggest Germany (thus far) has exported a little over 5% of it's energy production to other European nations in this crisis year. It may have something to do with France currently having temporarily shut down 32 of its 56 nuclear reactors[3], with a net 10 TWh being exported from Germany in the direction of France. And it probably has something to do with Germany producing a lot more energy than it needs when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing nicely.
The Czech Republic on the other hand exported 6 TWh net to Slovakia and another 4 TWh to Austria. But in turn Slovakia exported almost 9 TWh to Hungary[4].
That is to say... it's complicated.
[1] https://www.iea.org/countries/czech-republic
[2] https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&...
[3] https://www.france24.com/en/france/20220825-france-prolongs-...
[4] https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/import_export/chart.ht... (might be lagging behind a little)
I don't like it but if that's the system we need to accept the pros and cons.
Let's be real though, the society will fall apart before energy costs become a big problem for people working in tech.
It's great that your small urban household can take the hit. It's becoming a real problem for single parents in the south.
> It's great that your small urban household can take the hit. It's becoming a real problem for single parents in the south.
Meh, no bank wanted to give me a mortgage so I bought a cheap rural house. I am already subsidising the leveraged people's interest rates in my massive taxes, so excuse me if my sympathies do not extend very far.
Granted, it does not solve the problem that the energy I'll spend in the fall/winter has to come from somewhere but financially it is at the very least closer to being balanced out.
Also, this is in a country, where the net metering system is favorable to households (one can spend the full amount that has been fed to grid).
I'm not looking forward to it, but I may end up having to install (ground source) heat pump myself (assuming it will be delivered this season at all- quote delivery date was June).
So, even in winter you'd be able to squeeze some kilowatt hours out of a few solar panels. Just install more of them until you have enough to charge up your batteries during the darkest part of the winter and you are good to go. Maybe add some wind to diversify.
For heating there are thermal storage solutions that use cheap materials like sand or basalt. Charge in the summer, heat in the winter. All you need is some pipes, mass, insulation and a way to dump energy in the system. There are various prototype systems operational already and they work as advertised. You might wonder about the cost of a silo of locally sourced sand. I'd say it's probably going to be dirt cheap.
EV batteries are going to be great for balancing the grid. Vehicle to grid charge connectors are already being standardized and multiple vehicles that support that are being produced already. Millions on the road in the next few years. Twh of power. A very tempting target for would be virtual power plant companies. Like Tesla.
The main challenge with wind and solar is bridging the few weeks a year where production of both may drop dramatically in the winter for more than a day. The combination of no wind, low sun and little amount of sun hours, and overcast skies is kind of deadly. In northern Europe that might last as long as a month. The rest of the year there is going to be either or both enough solar and wind.
Mostly the real challenge the rest of the time is actually what to do with the growing amounts of excess power. Plenty of answers to that but it's not a fully resolved issue. Mostly current wind operators seem to regularly disable their wind mills by weather-vaning them instead. They're not broken, they've been turned off because they are producing more than needed.
We're going to end up with way more power than what we need. People are installing solar panels on their roof that generate much more power than they need, even when aggregated over time. The current crisis is actually going to result in even more people doing that. This poses a serious challenge for energy produces still dumb enough to depend on burning fossil fuels. Most of the time they'll be selling at a loss or completely shutting down operations. And a few weeks a year they suddenly have to deliver a little bit of power. Not a great business to be in.
The compensation adds 243.57eur/MWh to the final price for Spain.
https://www.omie.es/es/market-results/daily/average-final-pr...
BTW spain's prices are more "real" in the sense that they better reflect the cost of generation. It's the EU market's prices that are fake.
Where 90% of the electricity producers make profits out of nowhere, just because some inefficient folks had to provide the 10% of missing energy.
Like Saudi Aramco and Chevron, they will post record profits, without lifting a finger.
How did Apple allow their app in the App Store? It can easily be a website (no phone specific frameworks are used). There was a post that explained the difficulty they had for Apple to approve their application (music festivals).
So I think short term we are pretty screwed. But I think if you can produce electricity at 1/10 or even 1/20 of the price, wouldn't you be adding new capacity now? The only fast option are renewables, so my wild guess is that there will be so much new capacity added in the next years, the bottleneck will not be production, but skilled labor to install it. That's the way a real market economy should react.
High prices for electricity and no production cost for renewables basically means whomever produces using that is making a lot of money right now. More than 5x of what they could reasonably expect normally. Probably closer to 10x. That's great news because that will be invested in even more renewable power. Solar and wind are the closest thing to a perpetuum mobile that you can get right now.
Electricity prices are high because all the gas and coal production is being kept at a minimum rate because of the high cost of fuel. Companies still in the business of burning that have to pay such high prices for fuel that it's cheaper for them to shut down operations. Unless they are absolutely needed in which case they'll charge for the fuel cost of course.
However, most of Europe is relying on renewables and topping up gas supplies for the winter instead. E.g. Germany hit their 80% reserves target ahead of schedule a few days ago, So, any gas plant that doesn't absolutely have to be on right now has probably been idling for months. No reason to turn those on.
The reason France has a tough few quarters ahead is that quite a few of their aging nuclear power plants are down for maintenance right now. They'll be importing power from abroad and probably at high rates. A perfect little storm of overdue maintenance and an international gas/oil market that suddenly shifted. They'll be fine. But it will cost them.
Are you sure? Is Europe technically capable of importing enough gas to offset what is no longer coming from Russia? Our abilities to import natural gal from outside UE (LNG terminals and pipelines) have limited throughput - not to mention, someone needs to be willing and able to fill them with gas first.
Theoretically, long term, this could all work out nicely and steer more people and governments towards renewables and decentralized generation, but the short term consequences are starting to look brutal.
The real problem will be industry having to shut down or minimize operations. They'll be the ones bearing the real cost. This winter will be brutal in terms of its economical impact on industry. The next one, countries will be better prepared. It's Russia that will be suffering the consequences long term. I doubt any country in Europe wants to ever be dependent on them again to the extent that they have in the past.
But we can't change that anymore. What we can do is build more capacity.
* Baseload from nov22 to feb23 above 2000€/MWh
* Peak Load nov22 to dec22 at 3000€/MWh
* Peak Load Q1/23 at 2970€/MWh
But the prices for other nations also went up steeply.
[1] https://www.eex.com/en/market-data/power/futures#%7B%22snipp...
- Planning permissions take too long
- Solar panels and especially inverters are hard to get
- Labour to install is scarce. Electricians give you appointments next year.
> Russia’s “beautiful women, cheap gas, and traditional values” await you, according to a bizarre new video shared by a Russian embassy.
> The 53 second clip urges foreigners to “move to Russia” by listing the country’s supposed virtues.
https://www.euronews.com/travel/2022/08/01/beautiful-women-a...
For instance in France more than half of the national NPP are offline due to needed maintenance the private owners postpone at maximum to maximize their profit. Arrange the result take time. Jail the aforementioned owners telling anyone in the private sector that if they committed criminal business they can choose to be silent and cooperative of face an equal fate will suffice.
Private sector is THE SOLE responsible of the current prices, they do not came from war or natural scarcity. Telling them that "good times are passed" for them not for the Citizens at a whole as they want instead suffice for a quick U-turn since they know they are unarmed.
Renewables can't be nor fast nor an option simply because the sole that can live on them at unbearably high prices in the actual market are single private NEW homes in places where p.v. is effective enough and climate is not that cold. In a city, a dense European one, there is no room for renewables to really produce energy, you can only make some show for commercial purposes. Oh, I say that as one who actually have built a new home five years ago, with p.v. and small lithium backup, so to speak.
The quickest way is one: telling those who profit that revenge sentiments start to be in the air and they will FAIL to ride them to push a new hoax this time. However since people are not in that mood, actually many have thirst for blood but not for positive actions energy giants and their public friends are not startled at all. That's is.
Spain and portugal are the only countries which managed to get an exception to offset this mechanism months ago, by effectively capping the gas prices and not allowing it to go bonkers.
The rest of the EU should explain itself to its citizens. These levels of prices do not represent the cost of energy but the stupid continuation of a supposedly free market in time of war.
https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/europes-power...
> Listening to European Electricity Traders Is Very, Very Scary. Keeping the lights on in Europe this winter may prove more difficult than governments are currently admitting.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-08-26/europe...
I was able to get my sustained electricity consumption under ~800w (including central furnace blower) after some extreme compromises. Only had to pay about a thousand dollars for that incident. I know of people on Griddy who had 5 figure bills that month.
In retrospect, I think variable rates are the ultimate solution to these problems. I am not usually very price sensitive, but $9/KWh is a monster rate if you aren't paying attention. I was forced to adjust my behavior to accommodate the available supply.
For better or worse, we still can't store electricity at scale in most markets, so forcing the consumer behavior may be the next best option.
1: https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.eia.gov/state/analy...
UK energy bills are soaring to record highs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32617621 - Aug 2022 (164 comments)
What is relatively expensive may be the "retail delivery" to small-scale consumers, but that is excluded here as that price is not dependent on these daily fluctuations of generation; this is about the wholesale markets and the high-voltage networks.
Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE: https://energy-charts.info/index.html?l=en&c=DE
and European Energy Exchange AG: https://www.eex.com/en/
https://timesofmalta.com/articles/view/greens-want-fuel-subs...
"Electricity tariffs and fuel prices have remained frozen in Malta despite skyrocketing international prices, with the government spending hundreds of million to cover the difference and keep local prices stable.
Times of Malta reported on Friday that maintaining the subsidy in place next year is likely to cost taxpayers €400 million."
OTOH in the UK:
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/26/uk-energy-bills-to-rise-by-8...
https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/eu-natural-gas
I call this “the Greta curve”.
Let’s blame advocates for renewable energy.
That’ll make people see reason and solve the issue /s
It wouldn't have been so devastating if we took Greta seriously and switched to fossil-free energy sources.
The electricity companies in the south also follow well the business strategy of privatising the benefits and socialising the losses. The water level in the lakes in the south are too low especially considering the difficult winter to come, yet they sometimes empty them to export to Scotland to make money now.
It’s a bit annoying but at least I get push notifications when the price is very high or very low.
I didn’t realize their electricity was so much cheaper than ours to start with.
[1, german sadly] https://strom-report.de/strompreise/strompreis-zusammensetzu...
in this specific case 3 reason:
- Italy relies on natural gas, we had long standing relationships with Libya and Algeria for that, unfortunately France bombed Libya to kill Gheddafi (to claim control of the area mainly) and that destabilized the area [1]
- Italy relies on close countries to buy electricity, especially France. Now that they have switched off nuclear plants, electricity from France costs more.
- we are in electoral campaign, elections are next month, a good chunk of the right wing political landscape supports (or doesn't strongly oppose) Putin, they hope that by creating an energy crisis in Italy, people will vote for them. Which is probably what's really going to happen, for Putin's delight. [2]
[1] WikiLekas has a lot of documents on it, it's also one of the interventions that costed Hillary Clinton the elections.
[2] https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/08/10/italy-election-russia-u...
EDIT: I understand that on HN people don't like political opinions, but these are not my opinions. added notes.
https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/penge/danskernes-stroemforbrug-er-...
Why in Spain is the electricity so cheap?
A functioning market will provide the motivation to search, find and finance solutions instead.
That's an old classic we already see at the start of '900 where the level of rapacious businesses and corruption reach a break point. To save themselves in skin the failed profiteers choose to push nazi-fascism with success, apparently those dictatorship was a new and different beast but in reality they just makes the public actions needed to keep a country run, leaving profit to the private, for some time. The profit part makes the game last little time, a war was needed (see Ucraine and Taiwan next), and after the war a new start. It's a cycle who can last until or all the world became capitalist in the same way and so there is nothing left to steal or we simply have depleted enough resources to be unable to survive as a modern civilization or for some miracles people decide that enough is enough REALLY and act positively instead of destructively, something almost never happened reading the history.
AWS is in SE3, where the electricity is tens to a hundred times more expensive than for Facebook in SE1.
Gas as a transitionary energy source is something lots of countries have bet on. Meanwhile France is doing a great job showcasing the problems of Nuclear during heat waves (they will be the ones laughing in the Winter though)