Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine the price of gas and electric power in the European Union has gone up enormously.
https://jacquesmattheij.com/drastically-reducing-our-powerbi...
We still use too much gas to heat our homes, but I believe if we had had the capacity expected we could have reduced that substantially by having people use electric heaters without raising everyone’s electricity bill hugely .. but alas not enough plants online have lead to France feeling the pain like everyone else.
You can actually smell a difference. I live in non-industrial North of the country basically in the country side. Nearest town has 5k people and even here when temperatures dropped I could smell shitty coal being burned when I went to town. I know the smell because I have a hobby forge and I use (good) coal sometimes. I have to say this is the first time in my life I could actually smell it in the air used by other people here. This is a heavily forested region and most people used wood as fuel. However with current prices and availability, coal (and shitty one too) is back.
As for prices I can assure you it could've been much worse if not for the state subsidies that were put in place very quickly and the state bringing in coal on massive ships from abroad. I heat my house with wood pellets and a "smart" furnace that has very high efficiency. Also I have a benefit of good insulation. In previous years I would pay about $500 for a year's supply of fuel (this is just house heating, water for bathrooms is heated with electricity). This year I bought before the majority of the price increases hit and I paid $1200 (this is for 2.5 tons of the "premium" version of the stuff). Then I got $800 back from the state as heating subsidy. So overall it cost me less than in an usual year.
Then there is the state sanctioned freeze on the price of gas for private people (not businesses) and same for electricity until you use up 2MWh.Imagine how bad it would be without it. Still this cost is well worth it.
IMO what's bad is some people's expectations. One of the countries within the power grid is at war. Some people expect that to have no impact on the grid.
The problem, at least for the sorry state of electricity prices, isn't that Ukraine was at war... it was/is that the French did an absurdly large bet on nuclear power while at the same time tying at least 40% of heating to resistive heating, but failed to have a backup plan other than "hope the rest of Europe has excess capacity" once it became clear that Flamanville was under massive delays, and on top of that they massively neglected maintenance of their aging nuclear fleet even before Covid hit and prevented maintenance. They also did not plan ahead for climate change-induced massive droughts that led to an almost complete lack of cooling water for the plants.
They were essentially closing their eyes to the pile-up of delays at Flamanville and as a result they had a "perfect storm" event in the summer.
And which is my main issue with nuclear power: it isn't distributed, but centralized and heavily dependent on governments and extreme long-term-planning. Which is a recipe for disaster. The chance that Flamaville would be delivered late is about 100%. Reacting to rapid changes like a war (spiking fuel prices or making NG unattainable) always slow, and always late if possible at all.
So, aside from all the other arguments against nuclear power, it is slow, expensive, centralized and heavily dependent on governments; it's the closest you'll get to a government-ran electricity production. All of which make me wonder every time why the European left (pro- government) are against it, but the right (market liberalism) love it. It should be the exact opposite.
The entire opposite is solar: heavily distributed, privately owned and immensely fast. Wind is somewhere in-between, cheaper and faster to build than a CHP, but obviously more centralized than solar.
That one is actually easy to answer: Most of the European left does not like nuclear because of cost externalization - let's be real: it's not today's rate payers that are going to fund the decades worth of work needed to dismantle the plants (e.g. the AKW Greifswald in Germany has already been taking 30 years with at least 15 more years planned [1]) or to safely store all that nuclear waste for likely hundreds if not thousands of years, it's the tax payers of the future. On top of that come the enormous and un-insurable financial risks of disasters: Chernobyl happened 35 years ago and still you can't eat game or shrooms in Bavaria without running them in front of a Geiger counter (not to mention that Chernobyl is in an active war zone with radiation-releasing disruptions having happened as a part of the war, as are about a dozen other plants that are, to make it worse, even being actively shot at), the cost of the Fukushima cleanup is estimated to run into 200 billion dollars.
In contrast, the European right wing loves nuclear precisely because it is so "cheap" on paper with ~13 ct/kWh... it's their usual playbook of conveniently ignoring the above-mentioned externalities.
[1] https://www.zeit.de/2021/42/rueckbau-kernkraftwerke-atomauss...
It took decades of massive government subsidies for solar panel production to scale up and advance enough to make solar as affordable as it is today. The same could be achieved with nuclear, with the additional benefits of not having the additional costs of storage and transmission infrastructure, which push up the real cost of solar to "$472 per MWH":
https://web.archive.org/web/20220916003958/https://files.ame...
They are opposites on "centralisation" vs "decentralisation". With solar, I, a private citizen, can generate electricity, store it, sell it, expand it, mine bitcoin with it, and so fort. With Nuclear, I'm completely at the whims of a government and a semi-private monopolist. "Free-market-nuts" should therefore hate Nuclear and love solar. Yet the opposite is true. And I find that remarkable.
Said like that it sounds like rolling blackout and the state enforcing energy consumption at gun point.
There was a lot of noise because the government planned some of these things. But in practice it meant reducing the temperature of public swimming pools a bit, reducing/shutting down public lighting deep in the night, reducing temperatures in office building by one or two degrees.
I would even say this "stressor" will be beneficial, at least at a local level.
The real downside is the increased energy bill for people.
Finally, a large part of this issue is self-inflicted as a failure to plan power plants maintenance.