That being said, people are dying because of cheap power and gas. I know it's easy for me to say halfway across the world from behind a keyboard, but I really hope you guys elect to have your power shut off (If that's what it takes) to help the people of the Ukraine. Russia knows Europe is energy dependent on it, and it's the one area we haven't totally cut them off on. It's a small sacrifice that would save a hundred thousand lives.
In the midwest, the grid operators had a plan to divert available power to critical places first like hospitals, traffic lights, etc. It was freezing hold and I had power for 45m every 2 hours for a few days. I survived, there were places I could go, life went on.
Notice that it was only Texas utilities that experienced the most major issues.
There were plenty of issues with the electrical system, but the Texas Nat Gas infrastructure was also culpable. They had wells that froze up. Wells also often produce water that can freeze in cold conditions and block a well. There are mitigations for this that were often not in place in TX.
They had also failed to submit paperwork indicating their electrically pumping stations were critical infrastructure and should not be shut off as many of them were.
Situation in West Europe is also based in energy politics, a lack of energy security planning, and no impact studies from shutting down nuclear power plants.
There are parallels in my mind in that both are a product of short sighted ideological thinking.
A poorly regulated electrical market doesn't make a poor user experience. In fact, it was government meddling that created the crisis: Forced closure of coal plants before suitable replacements that could withstand 100 weather year events were available. The free market in Texas has and was leaps and bounds ahead of other markets in green energy production. Texas has also wanted to build countless nuclear projects that are stonewalled by the NRC and other green energy projects that die due to EPA or other local agencies. Believe it or not, green energy companies play dirty too and leverage government bureaucracy to stifle competition and expansion of green energy.
Secondly, it was not Only Texas. I live in Kansas and travel to Missouri weekly and we certainly had outages. The reason is all of these areas are covered by the "Southwest Power Pool" which is a generation pool which agree to sell energy to each other and help out during extreme events (an oversipmlication, but good enough for a HN comment). Texas operators trade energy in multiple markets so nearby locations were affected. My home state, produces nearly 2/3 of its energy from green sources: wind and nuclear and the excess is sold to the SPP and can be consumed in Texas.
Texas is in fact the _ideal_ energy market, as new ideas can compete immediately and directly and operate on small scales. We'd be doing ourselves a huge favor to operate more grids like this as it lower the entry bar for clean energy startups.
ERCOT was down easily 30-35GW (40-50%) of generation and cut power for days across large swaths of the state. SPP had outages, but not nearly as extensive in terms of MW shortfall, number of customers impacted, or duration of the impact.
> My home state, produces nearly 2/3 of its energy from green sources: wind and nuclear and the excess is sold to the SPP and can be consumed in Texas.
The only part of Texas it can really be consumed in are the parts of Texas served by SPP in the extreme NOrth (that are interconnected with the rest of the Eastern Interconnection). There are a couple small (<1GW) DC tie lines into ERCOT, but not nearly enough to do the sort of bulk power transport that would've been helpful during last February.)
> The reason is all of these areas are covered by the "Southwest Power Pool" which is a generation pool which agree to sell energy to each other and help out during extreme events (an oversipmlication, but good enough for a HN comment). Texas operators trade energy in multiple markets so nearby locations were affected.
SPP and ERCOT both have 'generation pools' and markets that enable them to serve load across their service areas. What SPP has that ERCOT does not are extensive connections to neighboring pools (MISO, PJM, etc.) and more adequately winterized generation and fuel supply infrastructure. The CEO of SPP gave an interview on an energy podcast last spring where she directly credits the ability bring in power from PJM and MISO as helping SPP serve its load. That sort of option wasn't even available to ERCOT.
Notably, the other option unavailable to ERCOT is exporting/selling wind power to neighboring ISO's.... The Texas focus on avoiding federal energy regulation is costing them the ability to sell one of their strong suits into a broader market.
Cheap power raises living standards. How do people die from voluntarily choosing less expensive energy?
I live near a turbine that runs on gas in the summer, and oil in the winter when demand for gas is high.
I also suspect that prices will rise, encouraging people to turn their thermostats down and limit travel.
Time to get started.
Countries only need to export to the extent that they can get imports. Anything beyond that is a waste - and clearly so now that foreign reserves are being frozen and defaulted on.
Russia is keeping the gas on to keep the EU out of the war.
And China uses Yuan, not Euros.
In very international trade the buyer uses the currency they have and the seller gets the currency they want. The finance system is there to make the match.
We don’t trade using pebbles. We trade using promises that are created on demand.
See the LCOE graphs in this article for the trends: https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth
We need a model that is cheap and safe everywhere, in every country, not just in china and russia.
Also, I wouldn’t put too much faith into Russian numbers for their nuclear projects. They’ve pretty much got the patent on propaganda.
Russia is not needed though, China is very cost effective and their popular model is in fact American based. Their other popular model is a french derivative. Their secret sauce is to build refined second generation models with added safety instead of building 4th generation economic ineptia because of absurdly high safety bloat. The answer to how to make nuclear reactors costs effective is simple: 1) Do not fire all competent and trained nuclear engineers 2) Make nuclear reactors maximally secure, not absurdly secure.
There are many possiblities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_storage
Then there is wind power and other sources such as geothermal energy and Bio-gas Plants, which is are independant of day time. And let's not forget the lower energy demand at night, the possibilities for supply based energy consumption, (green) gas imports from somewhere else.
> France will also increase its solar power capacity tenfold by 2050 to more than 100 gigawatts (GW) and target building 50 offshore wind farms with a combined capacity of at least 40 GW.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/macron-bets-nuclear-...
So they are adding ~10 GW nuclear (6 * 1.6 GW) and at least 140 GW of renewables. Use any capacity factor you want but the numbers speak for themselves.
The real reason for this is likely continue have an industrial base for their naval submarine reactors by subsidizing a complementary civilian industry.
Interesting, I've never read about that angle. Nuclear is a great complement to Wind/Solar as it provides a steady base load.
Due to the extremely high fixed costs and lower marginal costs of nuclear plants they then have to make the money back in fewer hours, driving cost even higher.
The other issue is the costly steam turbine side. The reason gas won over coal is the efficiency and tiny footprint of gas turbines. Tack on a tiny steam side for the last percent of efficiency and you have a CCGT plant. Coal and nuclear share the same steam side, both have been dead ends since the 80s.
The problem is most renewables fall off before peak load subsides. That's why cheap energy storage would be a huge boon for transient renewables as they could keep providing energy after the sun is down and the wind has subsided.
Take a look here: https://nuclear-power.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Base-Lo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load#/media/File:Renewabl...
So, this means that nuclear is crowded out of the market during the sun hours, and later all windy hours. Take a low-ball nuclear cost of ~$130 per MWh. [1] Say that wind + solar can fulfill 12 hours per day, this is a low estimation. Current estimates is that ~80% is easily feasible without storage.
That means the nuclear plant has to make do with the 12 hours left. The nuclear plant has now, based on napkin math, entered a LCOE of $260 per MWh. It was already hilariously uncompetitive at $130 per MWh, now try $260. Now you can do power 2 gas and then burn it or any other extremely inefficient energy storage and still come out ahead.
> While historically large power grids used unvarying power plants to meet the base load, there is no specific technical requirement for this to be so. The base load can equally well be met by the appropriate quantity of intermittent power sources and dispatchable generation.
> Grid operators solicit bids to find the cheapest sources of electricity over short and long term buying periods.
> Nuclear and coal plants have very high fixed costs, high plant load factor but very low marginal costs, though not as low as solar, wind, and hydroelectric. On the other hand, peak load generators, such as natural gas, have low fixed costs, low plant load factor and high marginal costs.
> According to National Grid plc chief executive officer Steve Holliday and others, baseload is "outdated".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load
[1]: https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
Is this not a major project? The article is very lacking in details, so it is hard to tell what it amounts to in terms of impact.
Betting on Russia needing the income more than we need the resources.
Power will go out completely around here and partially in many other regions, but we can live through that.
Having solar (plus wind and batteries) is a major boon, and this would undoubtedly drive demand through the roof once people have no choice. Sadly, there isn't enough supply for everyone, especially power hungry industrial sites, and trucks/cars still run on fuel.
Solar concentrators would be easy to start producing locally, but they don't run well in cold temperatures and cloudy weather, plus they still need batteries of some sort.