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Comment by frafra | Hacker News Reader

The cost of energy does not only depend on the cost of production: Denmark has a lot of cheap wind energy, but it costs almost three times more than in France. And the higher share of intermittent sources you have, the less valuable the production of energy can be, because it is sometimes produced when not needed, so you need to build up infrastructure, accumulators, etc.

Nuclear is insurable, and in some countries is mandatory: https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and...

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The difference in electricity costs between France and Denmark (and pretty much any other such simplistic comparison you see) is often highly influenced by taxation policy.

You can tax energy use to encourage conservation or you can subsidize it via general taxes.

https://energy.ec.europa.eu/data-and-analysis/energy-prices-...

The wholesale electricity prices in Denmark and France are both directly in line with the EU average. Switch to consumer prices and Denmark becomes the maximum, and France drops below the average.

You can see a similar pattern with gas (both natural gas and gasoline) prices, they're roughly the same wholesale but Denmark's consumer prices are higher.

Is it Denmark really putting taxes on electricity so high that a kWh costs 2 times more than in France? Just to reduce consumption?

The interesting data you linked clearly shows the problem with high mix of renewables: even if the average wholesale price is the similar, the final cost can be way higher because people need electricity at 6 PM and not so much at 4 AM, and the costs of a more unstable system are higher (such as delivery costs). Similar production price, totally different value. That is the difference between LCOE and the costs estimates which include other factors, such as the firming intermittency price estimations published in Lazard 2023.

The similar patter you see in oil and gas could be because of taxes, but the difference is below 10 %, not 200 %.

The biggest difference is that Denmark built its wind farms a lot more recently than France built its nuclear power plants. The cheapest power plant is the one that is already built.

Nonetheless, I would expect France's electricity prices to rise significantly in the coming years as their 1970s plants all age out and decommissioning costs + the cost of brand new plants kicks in.

They have also publicly announced that they won't be replacing all of the nuke plants that will age out (presumably because of cost). So, the % of nuclear power on France's grid will decline with solar or wind or carbon producing fuels having to make up the difference.

France's total electricity production from nuclear is expected to rise, actually: the government, after abandoning the plan to have nuclear covering just 50 % of its electricity mix, removed the cap on the total nuclear power installed. In addition to that, almost all the existing reactors got their life extended (so up to 50 years of operating life), and the final aim is to reach 60 years. 6 new reactors have been approved, and another 8 could get approved. Basically, the whole President Holland's plan from 2014 on reducing nuclear has been dismantled.

Denmark's renewables are highly subsidized, construction is quick (which means short-term loans), so it should not impact so much on energy prices. Finland has built the first-of-a-kind highly delayed EPR 3 reactor Olkiluoto 3, and the electricity prices felt sharply nonetheless.

I do not see the reason why decommissioning costs should make electricity more expensive in the future, because the owner has to pay and prove that the decommissioning will be done even if the company goes bankrupt (by allocating funds in advance or by providing an insurance).

This is not to say that a solution is better than the other: it is always a matter of finding a good energy mix for a network. France is investing in energy efficiency and renewables as well.

France went from choosing between new nukes and renewables (renewables were the obviously cheaper choice) to choosing between extending the life of the nukes it already has and renewables (no surprises, old nukes were cheaper). This doesn't contradict the suggestion that the high cost of new nukes is prohibitive when set against renewables.

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