http://www.economist.com/news/business/21711087-electricit-d...
http://www.powermag.com/frances-nuclear-storm-many-power-pla...
> The discovery of widespread carbon segregation problems in critical nuclear plant components has crippled the French power industry—20 of the country’s 58 reactors are currently offline and under heavy scrutiny. France’s nuclear safety chairman said more anomalies “will likely be found,” as the extent of the contagion is still being uncovered.
Electricity price in France:
http://www.reuters.com/article/europe-electricity-idUSL5N1CD...
> EUROPE POWER-French spot power prices jump to four-year high on nuclear outage worries
Generally the prices in France are kept low, because the tax payer pays for the expensive nuclear industry monopoly.
And also because the decommissioning costs are not factored in at all. Currently EDF is pushing to extend the operating life of old reactors to 60 years, and to postpone their decommissioning to 2100. They want to just leave them there in the meanwhile. The trouble is that they simply don't know how to do the decommissioning, and it proves incredibly more expensive than thought. The fund that was set up to pay for it is undersized by a large factor.
Generally: The political system in France makes it impossible to demand market prices for electricity. It's all centralized and monopolistic. EDF is the large state owned electricity producer. It has around 80% market share.
Imagine now a steep electricity price rise. This would be highly unpopular and the french president would not be re-elected.
(Hint: Tethering)
Imagine if 'TWAT' had been ignored, and the same money had been spent on obesity, or poverty. In fact, the US could have given all 45 million Americans, who live below the poverty line, 20k each.
Actually, put that way, it makes 'TWAT' pretty cheap, especially when compared to the GFC.
If nuclear power plants have an accident like in Fukushima. then tens of thousands have lost their home for decades or forever and ten thousand workers will fight for three decades to clean up the mess under the worst possible circumstances with costs going into the hundred billion dollars.
In middle Europe easily a few million people can be affected.
Sure. But again, compare the area of land rendered uninhabitable - and the homes and lives lost - per megawatt generated. If you consider "renewables" as a whole then the area rendered uninhabitable by hydroelectric dams - even assuming they function perfectly - is much larger than for nuclear disasters. If you consider solar plus actually existing battery technology then you need to talk about the area blighted by rare earth mining etc. (Yes uranium mining is also pretty harmful, but again we need to talk about impact per megawatt). If you're considering solar on its own then you're never going to be able to provide reliable baseline power.
Nobody builds one where I live. But there are several nuclear power plants. But most of them are now history. They are not in some remote areas, but near populated areas with millions of people.
> If you're considering solar on its own then you're never going to be able to provide reliable baseline power.
Why would I 'consider solar on its own' as baseline power? These arguments were brought up twenty years ago and were boring then. Even though there are solar power plants which store heat.
The biggest achievement of the Energiewende is that it has broken up the big electricity monopolies of the nuclear- and fossil-based electricity companies. It has enabled two decades of exciting research into new technologies and enabled distributed energy production by much smaller players. It's a paradigm shift like it was from few Mainframe computers to the distributed nature of the modern Internet.
This is a failure of planning (or possibly of international diplomacy in the case of e.g. Japan). In terms of the engineering constraints, nuclear plants are a lot easier to build far away from people than any of the alternatives: they don't have to be built on particular parts of rivers, or in a sunny or windy area, or a gas pipeline or an endless supply of mile-long coal trains. (They probably do have to be on some kind of rail line just because fuel transport is excessively regulated).
> Why would I 'consider solar on its own' as baseline power? These arguments were brought up twenty years ago and were boring then.
It may be boring, but the issues are still real. Baseline power is a requirement, and the only proven ways to provide it are carbon-based, hydro, or nuclear.
> Even though there are solar power plants which store heat.
There was only ever one in full-scale production, and it's now closed, AIUI. There are various experimental efforts.
[1] http://torresolenergy.com/TORRESOL/valles.html?swlang=en
[2] http://torresolenergy.com/TORRESOL/gemasolar.html?swlang=en
What about the 1 million residential solar installations done in 2016? Is that "experimental"? When you add 20 100MW plants, you reach the scale of a nuclear plant. That is precisely the beauty of solar. That it can grow incrementally without high capital costs (unlike borrowing $4bn and a huge insurance at once with nuclear).
It has to do with costs, lack of space, various engineering and environmental constraints, business decisions, ...
> nuclear plants are a lot easier to build far away from people than any of the alternatives
There is no far away from people in Europe.
Even in Russia they have built their new dangerous breeder next to a large town. Keeps the engineers committed to the thing...
> Baseline power is a requirement
For what?
> carbon-based, hydro, or nuclear.
Biomass.
>There was only ever one in full-scale production, and it's now closed, AIUI. There are various experimental efforts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_thermal_power_st...
> For what?
Modern civilization.
> Biomass.
Still carbon-based. Burning x tonnes of hydrocarbons is still burning x tonnes of hydrocarbons even if the carbon was only recently captured from the atmosphere - it's basically no different from burning coal and running a sequestration process in parallel. Carbon is fungible.
germany is exporting way more as they are importing http://phasenpruefer.info/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Handels...
http://phasenpruefer.info/deutschlands-stromexporte-bricht-r...
English title courtesy of Google Translate: "Germany's electricity exports are constantly growing (updated)".
Context matters, a lot.
But when France sends surplus nuclear electricity to its neighbors that's supposed to be a plus for nuclear technology. When Germany sends surplus renewable electricity to its neighbors that's supposed to be a minus for renewable technology. Both nuclear and renewable generation are rigid in their own ways; neither is as flexible as gas powered generation, but of course neither has the substantial fuel costs or emissions of gas powered generation either.
Oh, right, there are contracts for all of this stuff. Power companies freely negotiate how they sell power to each other. "Externalities", try again.
When they have their surpluses - they are actually paying their neighbors to take power from them. I.e. they are selling it at a negative rate.
When the renewables are offline - they are paying a premium for electricity from fossil fuels.
While Germany does indeed _produce_ stellar amounts of renewable energy. They are completely dependent on their own and neighbors fossil power production.
Thus they can claim that they are "exporting" renewables. The turth is that their renewables infrastructure and the retarded system of incentives they have set up - result in one of the most expensive electricity prices in the world: https://www.ovoenergy.com/guides/energy-guides/average-elect...
Notice how the more renewables a country has - more expensive the electricity is.
Why? Because renewables are really not all that ecological as the activists would like to claim.
Simply because renewables cause more problems than they solve. And the surplus resources spent (or rather wasted) on "green" energy are also a form of energy. Thus one can argue that "green" energy is actually a net contributor to pollution - due to the aforementioned externalities.
Until we get insane amounts of storage (which will also pose a significant potential for pollution) - green energy industry is actually contributing to problems.
And while you are sarcastic - current state of affairs is not due to common sense or economics. But due to politics.
I think your point has some merit if the net effect is higher power prices overall. Unfortunately I don't have this information...
Either way, the reality is that renewable technology is making the slow-ramping generators uneconomical. Even if you remove wind-farms from the supply side of the equation you still have roof-top solar eating into the demand side and creating a daily demand profile which requires gas/liquid fuel generators to match.
I've seen a recent example of a cool summer day (Australian) where the daily demand minimum actually occurred at mid-day due to coincidence of maximum roof-top solar generation and low air-conditioning use! Under this kind of scenario your nuclear/coal steam turbine will be running at a horrible financial loss...
France exports energy when German solar cells and wind are in a dip.
My point is that German exports are peak surpluses that cause problems for the grid and French exports are on-demand because steel mills need to work when wind doesn't blow and sun doesn't shine.
But thank you for proving my point. Although you tried to obfuscate away the context.
Are you a renewables activist?
French electricity trade with neighboring countries makes a exports make a jagged line. Fossils make a jagged line. Nuclear is the smoothest line of any of them: it does hardly anything on-demand. It does the same thing day after day. That is an advantage in certain ways (no worries about lost production on a windless night) but a disadvantage in others; you cannot save money/resources by stopping a reactor the way you can by stopping a gas turbine.
I am someone interested in post-fossil electricity. 15 years ago that meant I was primarily interested in nuclear power. Much to my surprise, the nuclear industry basically stalled and the renewable industry expanded scale and cut costs much faster than I thought possible. Following the change in the numbers, I am reading more about renewable technology than nuclear technology nowadays. That's where the most rapid improvements are coming from. I'll change my opinion again if the numbers change again and nuclear starts delivering aggressively on scale-up, costs-down. I'm interested only in numbers from real hardware, though. I've seen enough daydreams in the forms of PowerPoint and TED talks (from nuclear dreamers and renewable dreamers alike) to last me a lifetime.
Power demands fluctuate as do power generation capabilities. If your generation is inflexible, as nuclear and solar both are at this time (economically speaking right now in this year). You need quick reaction power (e.g. gas peakers) or e.g. pumped hydro.
The funny thing is a wholly nuclear grid needs storage as much as a full solar+wind grid does. Of course in a mixed grid both techs can play to their strengths.
For example in Lazard's 10.0 LCOE analysis solar plus battery is 92 USD per Mwh, while Nuclear starts at $97. That is smack in the middle of LCOE coal costs!
But the solar, will have a lot less of regulatory and construction uncertainty! And a much smaller financial risk. As 3 years from project start to completion is normal. With most projects being set up in independent financial contracts of about 100mw nameplate to allow cancellation if performance or market do not materialize.
Additionally we will see a lot of new ways to deal with surplus electricity. Surplus electricity in the North will grow over the next two decades. Power to gas, Power to Heat, etc. will be feasible then.
France has the same problem, but different. Demand varies + production varies. On many weekends they have surplus power from the nuclear plants. In summer and winter nuclear power may not be able to meet demand. In hot summer weeks, the nuclear power plants overheat the rivers. In cold winter weeks, the electrical heating of French consumers creates more demand than nuclear electricity is available. This problem may increase, since France has aging reactors, but new reactors are not coming online - maybe one EPR - but when? 2018? 2020? 2022?
I'm all for solar and improved storage solutions, but we have something we know works and works right now, without uncertainties regarding constant baseload.
Worst of all are green parties everywhere wanting to shut down nuclear, resulting in the building of gas, coal, or paying for importing either those or nuclear. In which universe is that the green solution?
Increases in atmospheric background radiation, on the other hand...
France has been succeeding for quite some time. The majority of their power comes from nuclear.